Political limbo is challenging-the bar is set way low.
"One invisible difference between us is how Christians acknowledgment all souls are corrupt at birth, something the world does not see."
Huge assumption, in both directions.
"Gods design for the perfect city has already been engineered, and awaits to be recognized when Jesus comes again to claim his citizenry."
Is the city in the after life, or before it? Do you want to see this city?
"In the meantime, no government of man will reach God’s gold standard of perfection, therefore why would one be advocated?"
Because human beings do indeed have souls.
--
Maybe in net you’re saying the only wise ruler is God. But if what you’re talking about is the after life, it isn’t here today. So then God still should be in the imperfect city today to at least make it better. Of course this should negate your political limbo stance. You have to be somewhere to get somewhere. A perfect political party would therefore be (at least in the imperfect city), God’s Party.
John D-not assumptions-facts as detailed in God's Word.
"Because human beings do indeed have souls." Yes we do have souls. Souls being carried around in sinful bodies. Sinful bodies walking around in a sinful world, which is eventually going to be replaced. The main tenet of the Christians faith is that we are sinful creatures in need of Salvation which comes through the work of Jesus Christ.
John, you've heard all your life about sin, and the need for Salvation-it's pretty cut and dried:if you, John D, are not saved, you are in danger of dying in your sin and going to Hell. New Orleans is full of the bodies of people who thought that they could put off thinking about Jesus, accepting His Salvation. Those Christians who died in the hurricane are home now with their Lord.
"But if what you’re talking about is the after life, it isn’t here today."
Actually, John, Jesus is Lord of my life today the same as during Eternity.
"So then God still should be in the imperfect city today to at least make it better."
I wouldn't try to tell God what He should be doing, John. Actually it works the other way around-I seek His guidance for my life, what I should do.
Doug,
Well wait now, I see how you’ve taken that the wrong way. I’m not arguing anything theological (I’m atheist remember? 
) I was just talking as to what actions people do based off of their understandings. It was incredibly abstract and probably careless. I should avoid such, I think. Sorry for the diversion.
Athiest would explain why you seem clueless as to spiritual matters. My statement remains the same. "John, you've heard all your life about sin, and the need for Salvation-it's pretty cut and dried:if you, John D, are not saved, you are in danger of dying in your sin and going to Hell. New Orleans is full of the bodies of people who thought that they could put off thinking about Jesus, accepting His Salvation. Those Christians who died in the hurricane are home now with their Lord."
Athiesm isn't anything to be proud of, John. No smilies today.
Socrates felt that the rule of many would turn into mob rule and the rule of the few would mean only the few would benefit, while the rest would be left undefended. He also thought that a unfettered monarchy would ultimately be corrupted. He once descibed the perfect king as one "Who had no desire to rule at all".
He asked these questions for the eternal search for truth. To have these questions: what is the nature of truth? What is justice? Who is wise? that is to know ourselves and our world. And even a weak grasp of that knowledge is better than a storg grasp of the anti-truth, the lie.
Souls being carried around in sinful bodies. Sinful bodies walking around in a sinful world, which is eventually going to be replaced.
Why do you hate life?
"Why do you hate life?"
Antigone, why do you continue to act as if you don't understand English?
Please see here.
Actually, see here:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obido...=glance&
s=books
Mark, interesting books, and no doubt Augustine had some insights, but why would I look to Augustine for answers rather than the Bible? Why would I value in his opinions about Scripture?
The Holy Spirit illuminates the Scriptures, teaches me more than Augustine could.
Well I think Mark’s suggested book is a newer translation, and it might have some useful background information in it, but here’s the full text of "The City of God":
http://www.newadvent.org/fathers...athers/
1201.htm
Mark, I must have been tired-I answered your comment on my site, forgetting were you posted. Here's part of my answer:"I don't know Augustine from Sophie Tucker, I've never studied his works, so I have no opinion about whether he is a good source for information. Having said that, I know a better authority about the city of God: God."
Mark, I have no doubt that Augustine was thoughtful, a good writer, a deep thinker-the question is why would I look to him for answers that are clearly found in the Bible? If someone honors Augustines writings, derives a world view and philosophy based on his works, isn't that idolatry, a
form of 'secular religiosity'? After all,Augustine was just another man with opinions.
I enjoy the works of Charles Spurgeon; if I were to reverence his writings, he would come back, knock his book out of my hands and give me a Bible.
Spurgeon also creatively states the Salvation message in all of his works,as his focus was winning souls for God's Kingdom, not merely insights into the character of God. Was Augustine an evangelist, Mark?
The issue for any Christian is that we are to pray for our leaders, whether we agree with them or not; live quiet lives to keep out of trouble; honor God at all times. Christianity is not concerned about the form of government; one should be concerned with how the Christian life is to be lived.
Pat
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opini...9/06/
do0602.xml
Mark Steyn has a clarity of vision akin to Ted Williams sizing up a fastball coming into his wheelhouse.
Everything that has to do with THIS life, this world, this flesh: everything fun, everything pleasurable, everything that feels good, everything that makes this life worth living for any reason: happiness, joy, connections, society; you all seem to hate. That's why I ask, why do you hate life? And if all of this is so sinful and bad, what exactly is going to happen in the next life that will be so great?
Antigone, thanks for the softball question. Imagine this beautiful world
without war...sickness...hate...evil...imagine this world where each person lives in peace with his neighbor. That is the world that is coming, when Christ returns and sets up His Kingdom. Don't imagine for a second that I hate life-I have a life which has been Blessed by God, and I treasure life as a gift from God. But I hate sin. I hate hate. I hate that this world is corrupted, filled with war and destruction.
You boast that you know the Bible better than I do, Antigone-look through the Prophets and you will find wonderful descriptions of the world to come.
Your comment begins, "Everything that has to do with THIS life" - I am living for God, not THIS life, this world as it is. There is much beauty inthe world, Antigone, and I appreciate that, even in it's sinful, fallen condition, God created a beautiful world, one that will blossom and become even more beautiful in the future. Time for work-have a good night.
Granted there are a lot of great things about life in general. I think the pleasure seeking aspect of the world - which is often (but not always) counterproductive to a persons body mind and soul is what Christians are to avoid; for example premarital sex, drunkenness, greed, gambling, foul language, and even intellectual things such as relativism, or exciting thrill seeking behavior like when kids drive fast with no seatbelts, or general rebellion against society, body piercing, tattoos, drug abuse, etc etc etc. These are things of the world God calls His saints to avoid and for good reason, they pollute the soul, as all sin does.
So, what's in heaven?
Not, what IS NOT in heaven, what IS in heaven.
Peace is not always peaceful, health is not always joyful. What is in heaven?
The Bible only has some vague phrases about land of milk and honey, and about praising god. Heaven seems like church for all eternity.
The Milk and Honey description was when God was referring Moses to Canaan, which is today's Israel. The descriptions of heaven are spoken about a lot by Jesus in fact, although he doesn't offer phisical descriptions, Antigone, his descriptions are very metaphoric. However, the book of Revelations goes into some actual descriptions of heaven that are very interesting.
Antigone:
Fundamentalist Christians hate life because the only people who become fundamentalist Christians are people who have had their spirits broken by life. This usually happens in one of two ways:
(1) They are indoctrinated in Christian dogma from the time that they are old enough to speak and understand language. This way all of their most basic words and concepts are tinged with Christian metaphysical assumptions. Our concepts inform our perception of the world, so with these concepts hardwired into their brains, Christian fundamentalists don't have the ability to experience the world openly and directly; all of their experiences and thoughts are filtered through a 2,000-year-old tradition of Christian dogmatism. Now of course this dogmatism is nothing but a collection of words designed by priestly and political elites to shape the minds of the common masses in order to make them docile and easily ruled, obeying their masters, giving to Caesar what is Caesar's, and turning the other cheek. When carefully examined in the clear light of reality, this collection of words is found to be merely an abuse of language, ambiguous concepts mixed together into a system that can appear to have meaning after years of indoctrination, but which actually fails to point to anything real.
(2) The other way that people come to be Christian fundamentalists is through traumatic life experiences that leave people nearly as open to suggestion as a child learning her first language. The alcoholic who hits rock bottom or the prisoner with no future ahead of him often turns to Christian dogma in despair of this life and especially his own ability to deal with this life.
The only way to make any of this nonsense take hold of an otherwise rational human mind is to destroy the mind's belief in itself, to make it feel corrupt, dirty, sinful, etc. If I can't understand the "Word of God," then it must be because there's something wrong with me, and so this confused collection of words called Christian dogma is called a "mystery," rather than being given its more proper denomination, "nonsense."
The religious fundamentalist (Christian or Muslim) response to such assessments of their psychological states is typically something like, "God's mind is incomparably greater than any human mind, therefore I trust God's reason, logic, and commandments to any merely human reasoning." An appropriate response is to compare our situation in relation to God to an ant's relation to us human beings. We human beings are vastly superior to ants in intelligence and understanding, so we could conceivably design an ant society much better than any ant could. We could set up a system of rewards and punishments for them much like God supposedly sets up for us. The problem is communication. How is an ant supposed to know what a human being is saying to him? How can he tell the difference between a benevolent human being looking out for his own good and a malevolent human being seeking to play wicked tricks on the ants for his own amusement? This is precisely the situation that human beings face in relation to the various competing religions that are presented to them. We're like a colony of ants being gestured at by beings incomparably superior to ourselves, each one saying that his is the only true path and that the others lead to eternal misery. Do the ants choose John or Jane? Do we humans choose Christianity or Islam? The problem with having trust in a being incomparably superior to oneself is precisely that one is inherently incapable of understanding what that being understands and therefore of judging whether what claims to be from such a superior being is actually from a superior being or simply from a deceptive being not much different from oneself. Imagine an ant that had an encounter with a benevolent human being and went back to the colony to tell all of the other ants about it. How are the other ants to know whether this ant ever actually saw a human being, and, if so, whether this was really a benevolent or malevolent human being. Similarly, how do we ordinary, inferior human beings judge between genuine prophets who have seen God, versus liars trying to get attention, versus people who have been deceived by extremely clever demons (as Christians claim Muslims to be, and vice versa)?
I've been on both sides of this as a Hindu growing up in India around our large Muslim minority, and now I see it with the Christians here in the U.S. It's really very sad to see people with such broken spirits, rejecting themselves and everything around them because of religious programming created to serve the interests of the elites and handed down through the centuries. We Hindus have our own history of this with the caste system that kept down the untouchables to benefit the Brahmans, but thankfully we're overcoming this with time.
Sorry, the italics should have ended after "vice versa." This thing really should have a preview feature before posting.
LOL. We fogive you Bhagavad, I wonder if we could preview every choice and attitude before we act it out however? A preview button before we die to see eternity before we chose our life - there isn't one, but there are pleanty of warnings Jesus left behind.
Hmm, I'm actually quite surprised that they let you keep your post up Bhagavad-Gita.
I was actually hoping for a Christian perspective that amounted to more than "God says so" or "The bible says so" or "Because it doesn't really feel good, what actually makes you happy are actually things that you claim make you miserable and the things that make you claim make you happy are actually making you miserable and shallow".
It's interesting to see secular minds trying to understand spiritual matters-sort of like first graders trying to explain nuclear physics...
I'm not suggesting that this
Bhagavad-Gita isn't actually a Hindu originally from India, but his writing style is reminding me of WestEnder who used to visit here. Except a bit more educated. Bhagavad-Gita buddy, how about a website or e-mail so we can converse?
Antigone: Don't hold your breath.
Doug: Hindus aren't secularists.
I don't mind giving out an email address, but unless you have something more to say than what you said to John D,
"if you, John D, are not saved, you are in danger of dying in your sin and going to Hell. New Orleans is full of the bodies of people who thought that they could put off thinking about Jesus, accepting His Salvation. Those Christians who died in the hurricane are home now with their Lord,"
then I don't think that any discussion between us could be very productive. I've learned from two different worlds of experience that I don't have the ability to help religious fundamentalists, like you or the bin Laden want-to-be's back in India, out of their brainwashed state. And I've spent enough time in the South here at Duke to have heard just about anything in favor of Christianity that you could say to me. It all pretty much adds up to, "The Bible is true; all other books are false. The Holy Spirit tells me so, and if you can't see that for yourself then something is wrong with you, not God's Word. God is greater than any human being, so you should trust His Word above your own experience and reasoning. And, by the way, if you don't, you'll go to hell." Religious fundamentalists always resort to terrorist threats, Christians in the afterlife, Muslims in the here and now. We Hindus believe in peace, so I reject all of your threats. And I've already dealt with the "God's reasoning is superior to human reasoning" argument, so I'm not falling for that.
Doug,
Augustine wasn't an evangelist. He is a saint. You know, St. Augustine. His work quotes scripture inumerable times. I'm sorry, you must feel silly now...
Maybe this will help clarify some more of Augustine's relevance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Aug...ustine_of_Hippo
Also, I'll email you the essay I wrote on his seminal work, The City of God, my first year in college if you like.
I thought all the faithful were saints: "But now I am going to Jerusalem to minister to the saints." Romans 15.25 "Greet all those who rule over you, and all the saints." Hebrews 13.24
le
You are correct le, I mean Saint le. A Saint is not a special kind of Christian, just a garden variety one! At least thats how the Bible defines one.
I feel a bit heady now. 
le
That's head lettucy.
le
Mark, are you Catholic? I'm pretty sure the rest of them are protestant.
No, I'm engaged to a Catholic, but I'm a lifelong Methodist. Nonetheless, I really enjoy Augustine's works. He reflects what I do like about the Catholic Church and what Martin Luther was trying to revive and reform to.
Mark, I visited your site awhile back, so I know that you are quite educated.
I don't feel silly a bit. As Michael and le have pointed out-Saint Augustine according to whom? I reject out of hand the Catholic idea of sainthood. Augustine may have been a great man, and may be a Christian that I will meet in Heaven, but down here he was just another sinner hopefully saved by Grace, just as you and I are. By all means send along the essay, Mark, if you like. I enjoy reading biographies and historical literature.
My point remains that there is no need for a "middleman" to explain the Bible or tell us about God-His Holy Spirit is our Teacher.
I'm almost a little hurt, no one commenting on my,"Political limbo is challenging-the bar is set way low."
where the winner is determined by who can go the lowest. Ah well.
And if all of this is so sinful and bad, what exactly is going to happen in the next life that will be so great
No one said ALL is sinful and bad and no one knows what is going to happen 'in the next life' except that it is promised to be better than this one. So if you love this life and the next one is going to be better it would seem logical to find out how to participate in the next one.
BG - How did you ever acquire such a myopic view of Christianity? As a 'blue devil' you should know that such generalizations won't wash. Am I wrong in supposing that you are a graduate student, perhaps a PhD candidate?
Fundamentalist Christians hate life
Which is why they eat, sleep, work, raise families, and do most of the other things life requires.
fundamentalist Christians are people who have had their spirits broken by life.
No doubt many people have been rescued from a self-destructive lifestyle, drugs, alcoholism, etc., by Christianity, but all? I'm sure you will provide numbers to support that contention.
Christian fundamentalists don't have the ability to experience the world openly and directly
Right, they experience it only vicariously and indirectly by eavesdropping on others.
They are indoctrinated in Christian dogma from the time that they are old enough to speak and understand language
Right again, and they all talk funny, have one leg shorter than the other and crooked teeth.
The other way that people come to be Christian fundamentalists is through traumatic life experiences
You mean like discovering that the pursuit of earthly pleasures leads to no lasting peace and joy, so maybe I'll look elsewhere.
The only way to make any of this nonsense take hold of an otherwise rational human mind is to destroy the mind's belief in itself
Sort of like everyone creates his/her own reality, after all it is all dependent on one's frame of reference (Einstein) and one's powers of observation (Aristotle). Thus, when two disagree about what really occurred, what rationality do we use to determine who is right? Ask a third? A fourth? We disagree about reality, we disagree about spirituality. We disagree about the seen, we disagree about the unseen. How do we know who is right? What measurements do we use? Whichever ones are in vogue at the moment. Christians have their measurement device, it is called the Bible.
help religious fundamentalists ... out of their brainwashed state
What is the difference between 'brainwashed' and 'brainunwashed'?
Religious fundamentalists always resort to terrorist threats, Christians in the afterlife, Muslims in the here-and-now
Boy, I can hardly wait to strap on that heavenly suicide belt!
As a part of a major university, you do not make a very good representative of well-reasoned discourse. You attempt to sound erudite and come remarkably close at times, but you reveal your fangs too frequently. The points you make are trite, have been made thousands of times before, and nearly always with no supporting data except personal anecdote. You should have learned along the way that anecdotal evidence is fairly meaningless at best, harmful at worst. You are like the worst of the Bush haters who, regardless of obvious evidence to the contrary, will find some reason to fix blame on the president. You do the same with Christianity and it is a testimony to your own shallowness, not a deficiency of that which you criticize.
Allan, very fine answers, though I doubt if either of us can make a dent in her armor-I just put together a few notes for her on the other post. Her high opinion of herself is matched by her low opinion of Christianity. Before someone bashes me for insulting her, Bhagavad-Gitas type-and they're all of a type-cannot be insulted. The opinions of others do not matter to her, so I and my insult would be ignored. Allan, do you know who she reminds me of?
"Fundamentalist Christians hate life
Which is why they eat, sleep, work, raise families, and do most of the other things life requires."
All while crying out "I'm not worthy, and can't do anything right". And anything that is fun has to be rigorously controlled, less we like it to much (St. Augustine: missionary position only. *yawn*). And if you do something fun, you better make sure it leads to life-draining consequences (let's keep with sex...it has to lead to kids). This stuff is not a sin: eating good food is not a sin. Having sex, even having kinky contracepting sex, is not a sin. Work doesn't have to be a 24-hour thing. Sleep doesn't have to be the highest joy. You don't have to hate everything that makes you feel good.
"Religious fundamentalists always resort to terrorist threats, Christians in the afterlife, Muslims in the here-and-now
"Boy, I can hardly wait to strap on that heavenly suicide belt!"
It's not the people in heaven that concern me. It's the terrorist God sending people to hell for all eternity for not being able to make the correct choice about which book is the authentic word of God, as though the limited human mind could be held responsible for such a cosmic decision. For more on this, see here.
Bhagavad-Gita, at least you capitalized God, which shows respect. Antigone-note that! That's how it's done.
But beyond that, Bhagavad-Gita, you lapse into rhetoric. Cosmic decisions?
Who decides which Book? Spoken as a skeptic who doesn't even believe the Vedas. Am I right, Bhagavad-Gita?
For all of your education, all of your obvious intelligence, you can't understand those who live by faith. I commend you for seeking to learn-I am a lifelong student, even after college,but I believe true wisdom and knowledge come from the God you don't believe exists.
I say "cosmic decision," not in the sense that by making one decision or another any single human being determines the fate of the cosmos. I mean it in the sense of making a decision about the cosmos. We wouldn't hold an ant responsible for knowing or not knowing the governor of the state he happens to be in, or a first-grader for recognizing the genuine nuclear physicist next to the fake one, so we shouldn't hold a human being responsible for knowing or not knowing the ruler of the entire cosmos. If Christians said that Muslims just got a slap on the wrist in purgatory for not recognizing the true God, then I wouldn't have much problem with them at all. It's the infinite, eternal consequences for a decision so far beyond human capacities, that I find so offensive.
With respect to my belief in the Vedas, you'd actually find that the statement of beliefs that I made here is actually a kind of amalgam between Vedic doctrines and certain Western philosophical thought. But it's important to note that "belief in the Vedas" is not the same thing to Hindus as "belief in the Bible" is to Christians. The Vedas are very important to Hindus, but they are not seen as the exclusive source of truth about divine and spiritual matters, as the Bible is claimed to be by fundamentalist Christians. We believe in a virtually infinite number of worlds, and we don't assume that every world will be under the authority of our book. The Vedas are a pathway to truth but not the sole path. Ghandi said that he didn't care whether the Bible or the Quran or the Vedas were read in the temples, as long as God was being worshipped. What's important is not this or that belief about whether this man was the Son of God or whether this individual was an Avatar. What's important is right conduct which leads to a better condition in the next life. A Catholic monk or a Buddhist monk or whoever could accomplish the same exalted state through pure living, and those of us who aren't capable of being monks in this life can hope to become them in the next by living our worldly, married, family lives as wholesomely as possible.
"Ghandi said that he didn't care whether the Bible or the Quran or the Vedas were read in the temples, as long as God was being worshipped."
Would Ghandi be OK with the satanic bible being read in the temples and their god being worshipped? Pluralism can be a bit of a problem. Who gets to decide what is a better condition?
le
le:
Anything that has the essential message of love and peace points toward the truth. I would assume that the satanic bible isn't about love and peace.
Jesus said that He was the one true God. Either that is true or not. If it is false, then you must believe that Christianity does not have the essential message of love and peace because it is pointing toward untruth. How would Ghandi allow this untruth to be read in the temple? Christianity is not compatible with pluralistic religions and Hinduism is apparently not compatible to Christianity because if everything must point toward truth, and Christianity points to a lie, it could not be acceptable.
I would not be surprised to hear that witches believe their readings/writings/beliefs are about love and peace. Would Wicca be allowed but not Christianity?
Who gets to decide what is wholesome living?
Is India a wonderful place to live because of the wholesome living Hinduism encourages?
le
Antigone-
If St. Augustine said the the "missionary" position is the only acceptable position to have sex, I would like to know his authority for that question. The Bible says nothing about sexual positions. It does reserve sex for married people and it should be between people of the opposite sex (although I have never figured out whether it is the man or woman who is the opposite-if you know please advise). Most of Christianity has no problem with contraceptives that prevent the sperm and egg from meeting, whether using a condom or snip snip to either the male or female. I believe the Bible teaches that sex is meant to be mutually enjoyable. Maybe I misspeak, but I believe that husband and wife should make sex an important form of recreation. What better way to spend an autumn afternoon? Or any other, for that matter.
There's nothing wrong with fine food, as long as one does not make oneself a glutton. Fine alcoholic beverages can be appreciated in moderatiion (I'll get some grief over that).
You may find it fascinating to learn that at least one PURITAN...YES, PURITAN woman went to her elders to complain that her husband was not meeting her sexual needs. They took it under advisement and excommunicated him until he repented of his selfishness. Unfortunately, I do not know whether the guy ever came around or not. See? Those Puritans weren't so puritanical after all! That is a true story!
Antigone, have a nice day.
Pat
PS- Mike, don't ban me- I don't think I went too far in anything I said.
It's the infinite, eternal consequences for a decision so far beyond human capacities, that I find so offensive.
So it's the length of time which bothers you? Time is a unit of measurement devised by human beings and it is inaccurate, or at least quite flexible. It is, in fact, so flexible that it can be stopped altogether (E=mc²). Anything as relative as time can be neither understood nor depended on. This can:
To everything there is a season; and a time to every purpose under heaven Ecc3:1
There is no time in heaven and neither you nor I nor anyone else can conceptualize eternity. Maybe it means totality, maybe it means completeness, it certainly means the absence of time.
Doug,
If the Holy Spirit is supposed to be our only guide to understanding the scriptures and our faith, why did Jesus send the apostles out into the world to preach to us? Why is community so important? Why do we have bible-study groups? Why do we go to church on Sunday to listen to someone else teach us about God's message?
I don't mean to be insulting to anyone, but the idea that we can learn about scriptures and God's message all on our own, with or without the Holy Spirit, is simply arrogant. God put us all here together, to help eachother, to grow with eachother, and to aid one another in our spiritual education.
One has to hear the Word in order to be saved, that is why the disciples were sent out. They went out with the power of the Holy Spirit, however, not in their own intellect or self-motivation.
If you were in a prison cell with just your bible, or perhaps just some memorized scriptures in your head, on whom would you rely for understanding of the scriptures? From where would you draw comfort? The Holy Spirit is the teacher and comforter.
Teachers, preachers, books, bible studies are good, insofar as they are inspired by the Holy Spirit, not that person's intellect or agenda. If it is not so, we have no unity as Christians. We would just be leaning on our own understanding, and by that I mean everyone's understanding as they see it. Sound familiar?
"Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God. These things we also speak, not in words which man's wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual....For 'who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct Him?' But we have the mind of Christ."1 Cor 2.11+
"Not that we are sufficient to ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God, who also made us sufficient as ministers of the new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit, for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life." 2 Cor 3.5,6
We need the revelation of the Holy Spirit to understand the Word. Often, others are inspired by the Holy Spirit, and we would do well to listen, but we must all be like the Bereans (Acts 17), checking everything against the Word.
le
BTW Pat - no I will resist the powerful urge to ban you Thats pretty funny about the
Puritan woman appealing to the elders because of her husbands failure to meet her sexual needs. I can assure you my wife does not have this problem.
Hmmm....once again. Does your wife read these comments?
le
Le- I am not sure if your last post was directed toward me- but I am widowed and have been for nearly five years. If it was directed at Michael, please ignore this.
Pat
Pat:
I was directing that to Michael's last comment.
Your comment was very entertaining. Well, so was Michael's. Thanks!
le
Mark-
It is unhealthy and dangerous to be a lone ranger Christian. There is no mention of that in the Bible except for Paul being alone for several years, and he was in a very unusual circumstance. Christians are to be a part of the Christian community. We absolutely are to learn from one another. We are to study the word together. We should read commentaries. We need to make sure that we do not get off course and end up with some strange, aberrant doctrine.
However, due to ill health or some other unusual circumstance, it is entirely possible that someone may have to study the Bible alone. That person should be very careful to compare scripture with scripture and not get off track.
Ultimately the Holy Spirit is our guide...and if two people come up with different interpretations of scripture, then one or both is not listening to the right spirit.
I would like to challenge you to think of Martin Luther. He by himself, alone, came to the conclusion that we are saved by grace alone through faith alone. This teaching had been buried for many centuries. He recovered it alone. Was he wrong in doing that because he was not part of a Bible study? When he stood alone against the Catholic Church, was he wrong? He studied the scriptures alone. We are ultimately accountable to God alone for what we have learned from scripture.
I came to believe in the doctrines of grace by reading sermons from a dead guy. I spent nearly twenty years in what I would call the spiritual wasteland of American Protestant evangelicalism wondering what on earth was wrong with the churches around me. Finally a church came along that preached and continues to preach the doctrines of grace. Was I wrong to come to my beliefs apart from a Bible study group?
Pat
BG - Your ant analogy fails on several counts.
First, God created the heavens and the earth and God created man. Man did not create ants nor the world they populate. We cannot create anything, we can only transform things and we can certainly not create life in any form. Hence, the relationships God to man and man to ants share no similarity in that regard.
Second, ants do not to our knowledge think, speak, write, or in any way we can recognize communicate with one another nor with any outside agency. Humans do communicate regularly, they speak, they write, and God knows this since God created man and therefore created those functions as well. We are not likely ever to communicate with ants.
Allan:
(1) Hinduism doesn't acknowledge a creation ex nihilo, out of nothing. Matter is co-eternal with the deity. By the way, some argue that it is not clear from the original Hebrew text of Genesis that that text actually presents an ex nihilo creation, as opposed to a making from eternal matter that was originally formless. Needless to say, I don't care what the actual message of Genesis is on this matter, since I'm not a Christian. I just thought I'd bring it up.
(2) I've already updated the ant analogy into a child analogy. Children do think, reason, and communicate; but nevertheless the gulf between their capacity for understanding and that of a nuclear physicist is enormous. I'll go ahead and quote here:
let's say that we human beings are all first graders and God is the nuclear physicist. So two women come into a classroom, both claiming to be nuclear physicists, but only one of them is genuine, the other is fake. Each one tells the story of what nuclear physics is supposedly about and how nuclear bombs work. They then bring in a nuclear bomb with a ticking countdown clock. Each one says, you must listen to me and defuse the bomb the way I tell you, or else you will all die. Now does it make any sense, or fairness, to put children in this kind of situation, using their small, undeveloped minds to comprehend the competing messages of these two superior, adult intellects, with their very lives in the balance? So how is it fair to put human beings, with our inferior human minds, in the position of deciding between, say, the Bible and the Quran, as to which one is the genuine word of God and which one the work of a deceptive demon—with the stakes being eternal reward or punishment? It seems to me that what this supposed God is doing is infinitely more unfair than the cruel game the nuclear physicist plays.
Do you have the same problem with this analogy?
Hi Bhagavad-Gita,
You said:
Existence is nothing other than certain feelings or experiences being ordered in particular ways in various observers. But every object is in some sense an observer, however dimly. Consciousness and will exist to some extent in every object in nature, though obviously much less in a rock than in a human being.
How could a rock have consciousness and will, even if they were very dim? Do you mean it has the potential of those things? Or are you talking about the rock’s perspective being interpreted by another observer in which it’s connected to? The only other way I think you can give it a will is to say it is 'part of God' or something, which may be what you’re saying.
Thanks,
Bhagavad-Gita, you sound confident explaining what Hindhus believe. How often do the different "flavors" of Hinduism agree with each other? Not very often. That's why I asked you earlier which beliefs you were aligned with.
As a side note, you have no standing whatsoever to comment on the Genesis account of the Bible. Stick to your paganism.
Michael,
Your last sentence in your most recent comment was inappropriate. If you were writing on my blog, I would replace all of your vowels with asterisks to conceal the meaning of the message.
LOL - John...all I can say is *** * ** **** and *** **. So there.
Doug,
I think you're contradicting yourself. You're point to Martin Luther as an example of not needing community and teachers to prove that we can't take outside sources as authoritative.
Further, I should clarify that in the beginning I didn't mean to insinuate that Augustine is THE truth, only that he was a very good guide and had many wise and insightful things to say on the topic of the City of Man vs. The City of God.
Doug:
I've already acknowledged the difficulty in talking about Hinduism, with its many variants.
I wasn't interpreting Genesis. I was passing along the interpretation of others, especially certain Jews, who have a different interpretation of their book from the interpretation that was given to it by medieval Christian philosophers who didn't even know Hebrew and passed along to modern Christians like yourself.
John D:
A rock has will in that it has the power to produce feelings in other beings. It has the will to produce a certain visual sensation in my consciousness, the will to produce a certain painful sensation when projected against my skin with sufficient speed, the will to move toward other masses when otherwise unobstructed. We call the last form of will the force of gravity.
I was probably wrong to use the word "consciousness" in relation to a rock. A better word would be feeling. Consciousness is properly limited to humans and perhaps some higher animals. The particles in a rock have the same feelings that the particles in our bodies have. Let's say that the parts of our eyes that convey photonic sensations are made of carbon atoms. Those carbon atoms have a certain feeling when they are struck by light, and one atom conveys that feeling to another atom, and so on, all the way to the focal point of consciousness in the brain. An atom of carbon in a lump of rock would have the same feeling when struck by light that the atom in our eye does; it just doesn't have anywhere to send it, so all of the atoms in a rock just sit there with their extremely small, extremely dim feeling. It's so dim that it's generally not worth our time to pay attention to, but that doesn't mean that it's not there at all. What makes animals and humans in particular so special is that our structure takes all of the feelings from all of the different parts of our bodies, and amplifies and integrates them into a single focal point of consciousness. Out of many parts comes one being, whereas a rock cannot be said to be a single being but merely a collection of atoms that can be broken up and recombined indiscriminately.
BG - Because given time those children will increase their mental capacities, hopefully to the point where they indeed can make a decision. The ants will never progress to that point.
If you are suggesting that the kids must decide within minutes then it is still a false analogy since we do have a lifetime of growth before we truly must decide.
"Anything that has the essential message of love and peace points toward the truth. I would assume that the satanic bible isn't about love and peace."
Your guess is as good as mine, as I have never read it. But if satanists believe sincerely they have a message of "love and peace," (perhaps they think we should all love satan and that would bring peace) would that point to truth, and would that be acceptable according to Hindu principles? Or is there some standard the message in their bible would have to hold, in order to have those essentials? And does that standard determine whether they are living rightly?
I realize you are not a practicing Hindu, but you do seem to lean toward a Hindu-like belief system, believing that we are all (including animals and rocks) similar pieces of a sort of cosmic essence. (If I am totally misunderstanding you, I apologize.) Do you believe there is a pure and right way to live and according to what standard? (I assume you must since you feel we all must try to live in "love and peace.") Whose standard are we all to follow and why?
le
"...medieval Christian philosophers who didn't even know Hebrew and passed along to modern Christians like yourself."
To which medieval philosphers are you referring?
le
Allan:
we do have a lifetime of growth before we truly must decide
But what if I'm hit by a bus tomorrow? Christian preachers often like to make urgent appeals to be born again now because one never knows when death is coming.
those children will increase their mental capacities, hopefully to the point where they indeed can make a decision
I still don't think you're getting the analogy. Yes, children will grow up to the point at which some of them will have the mental capacity to comprehend nuclear physics and make an informed decision, but we adults will never grow up to be as infinitely intelligent as God. The only way to be able to make an informed decision about nuclear physics is to have something close to the intelligence of a nuclear physicist. In a pinch, if we found ourselves in a situation in which the bomb was ticking with only minutes left, we would probably trust the nearest person with some air of authority about her; she wears glasses and a white coat and uses big words, so she has more of a chance of being a nuclear physicist than I do, so I'll trust her if there's no other alternative. But that doesn't mean that I actually know that she has the ability to get me out of this situation. She could just be a fraud who feels as though she might as well pull one last prank in the last few minutes she has to live. It certainly wouldn't be fair for someone to put me in a situation in which my life depended on my making the right choice here.
So it is with the Christians and the Muslims. They present us with a ticking time bomb, our own lives, with eternal happiness or eternal misery at the end of the fuse. The length of this fuse we don't know; it could be a minute or a hundred years. And each one claims to have instructions from a vastly superior intelligence for how to live our lives in such a way that we avoid eternal misery and gain eternal happiness. The problem is the same as with nuclear physics: We don't know what we don't know. We don't have divine intelligence, so we can't have divine knowledge, so we can't tell true divine knowledge from demonic fakery. So each person makes a guess as to which religion seems more authoritative. People's minds are formed by their upbringing, so most people choose the religion most prominent in their own society. The point is that our choice is nothing more than a guess, and just as it's not fair to expect children to save their own lives by making a guess about something that is beyond their intelligence, so is it unfair to expect any adult human being to be responsible for the fate of their immortal souls for a guess about the identity of the divinity.
To which medieval philosphers are you referring?
You could look to Thomas Aquinas. He's one of the most prominent Christian philosophers of the period. He used a combination of Greek Aristotelian philosophy and a Latin translation of Genesis to determine that creation was ex nihilo. The reason the term is in Latin is because the Western church of that period was all Latin. The Eastern Orthodox church no doubt has a Greek term since they used the Greek Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. None of the people who created these doctrines in the West knew any Hebrew.
Then the Protestant Reformers came along, still working in Latin. They learned a little Hebrew, just to get by, but they were hardly on the leve of Jewish interpreters of the Hebrew Bible in their knowledge of the original language. These Reformers tried to excise as much supposed Catholic "innovation" as possible, but their whole perspective on the Bible was still informed by their upbringing in the Latin theological tradition. So they kept this doctrine of creation ex nihilo, still in Latin, assuming that the Hebrew, which they didn't know nearly as well, must be close enough. But as genuine Hebrew scholarship works its way into Biblical exegesis, people are starting to challenge old assumptions. My suspicion, not being a scholar of Hebrew myself, is that there's really no way to tell definitively what the answer is. The word that is translated as "created" in the first verse of Genesis is found almost nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible or in other Hebrew literature, so there's not much to reference it by. I don't know why it's so important to take a firm stand one way or the other on this issue. God created matter, or matter is co-eternal: let God tell you when you get to heaven; don't worry about it now when it doesn't affect the way you live your life.
Are you saying that the bible translations of Genesis commonly used by Christians today do not square with known Hebrew translations of Genesis? Or are you saying that certain beliefs by various Christians over the ages about creation are in disagreement with some ancient Hebrew text? I hope you don't think I am just being argumentative; I simply want to understand your position.
le
As for the satanists, my instinctive response is to say, Who cares? If Satan is just another god to them and your Christian God is the bad one, then I'm not going to play referee between you. If satanism is something deeper than that, about rebellion against God, then I don't see how that could ever be reconciled with peace and harmony. It also seems incredibly foolish, like trying to rebel against Nature itself. No one can rebel against God or Nature, whichever you prefer, because God or Nature is always going to find you. Nature, in order to be mastered, must be obeyed. Rebellion is futile, even meaningless.
Do you believe there is a pure and right way to live and according to what standard?
The standard is the law of karma. Everything that you do comes back to you. You can tell whether you're doing right by looking at what you're getting in return from the universe. If you don't like what you're getting, then chances are that you're either doing wrong now or you've done wrong in a past life for which you're still paying. And if you like what you're getting now, then you still have to be careful, because you might be doing wrong but won't get hit with it until another life. You can look at it as an experimental process, just like adding two chemicals together. You learn the laws of chemistry by adding chemicals together and watching the reaction. You learn the laws of morality by performing actions and watching the consequences. You lose some data from one life to the next, not remembering your actions from the previous life, but on a subconscious level it's always there. Over the course of many, many lives you get a sense of who you are and who you've been and what the consequences are for certain actions. You can look to the Vedas for guidance, since they were written by people who had developed much wisdom, or you could look to many other books like Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. But no book will ever give you true, deep down knowledge of morality. The teachings of books are simply words on a page until they're internalized, and only personal experience can do that. A book can't make an immoral person moral, but it can help you to recognize the morality you already have, to focus it in your consciousness so that you are less likely to stray from it.
It's important to distinguish between Eastern religions on the one hand and Abrahamic or Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions on the other. Abrahamic religions tend to be legalistic, consisting of laws and rules laid down by a supreme lawmaker shrouded in mystery and authority. Eastern religions are about the natural consequences of one's actions. If I perform this action and send this pain out into the world, then it will come back to me, just as a ball comes back to me when I throw it against a wall. It's not about divine judgment for punishment or reward. It's about being in harmony with nature and nature's laws.
The only way to be able to make an informed decision about nuclear physics is to have something close to the intelligence of a nuclear physicist
Not at all. What is required is a nuclear physicist who can communicate complex ideas to the common man in an understandable form. In other words, communication is a downward event, not an upward one.
God is capable of letting His wishes be known through Scripture and the Holy Spirit. What the preachers say is their business, but if it doesn't square with Scripture it can be safely ignored.
About Genesis:
What I'm saying is that the way that modern Christians understand the word "creation," as used in their Bibles, and with the connotations that that word has gotten in that Biblical context from the Western theological tradition, might not agree with the meaning of the word used in the ancient Hebrew text by the original author(s). Words often don't have direct matches with words in other languages, only approximations. "Creation" is the best approximation in the English language to the word in Hebrew, but whether that word has the precise meaning that the Hebrew word did, is unclear. It's clear that the Hebrew text means that God is responsible for the state of the world as it now stands, but it's not clear whether the word used in the text means, "Created out of nothing," or, "Created with pre-existing materials." Westerners assume that it means "Created out of nothing" because of their theological tradition, from men like St. Thomas Aquinas on down, but they might have been mislead.
"If you don't like what you're getting, then chances are that you're either doing wrong now or you've done wrong in a past life for which you're still paying."
And this seems more fair to you than a loving Father who makes Himself evident to the world by the appearance of His Son, Who then takes upon Himself your wrongs to save You from paying for them yourself (over and over lifetime after lifetime), if You only believe in Him?
le
"It's clear that the Hebrew text means that God is responsible for the state of the world as it now stands, but it's not clear whether the word used in the text means, "Created out of nothing," or, "Created with pre-existing materials." "
I know of a professor here in Phoenix who teaches Hebrew and especially studies the word picture aspect of the ancient written Hebrew language. I am going to get his name and try to correspond with him on this with your comment to see what he thinks. I am well aware from teaching by my pastor that he believes that the Hebrew word used means "created from nothing." I will speak with him as well for his insight. Thank you for your comment.
le
"No one can rebel against God or Nature, whichever you prefer, because God or Nature is always going to find you."
Anyone can rebel against anything. Whether they can be successful or not is another issue.
le
"You learn the laws of morality by performing actions and watching the consequences. "
If I am a successful bank robber, the consequences are wealth. Is robbery not a bad moral choice?
le
Of course I didn't mean to imply that we would be paying for our sins over and over lifetime after lifetime. We only get one life to live and then the judgment. I'm mixing the Hindu belief into the stew for the sake of argument.
le
What is required is a nuclear physicist who can communicate complex ideas to the common man in an understandable form.
That's fine, and that's what I would like. But that's not what fundamentalists like Doug say. See, what you're saying is that God creates a message that is comprehensible to our more limited rational faculty, hence it is "understandable," hence we can argue about whether it is true or not. If the message is understandable, then the Christian must be able to make a rational argument to a Muslim that can convince him, rather than saying, "This is the way it is, believe or go to hell."
For a nuclear physicist to explain things to a child, she would have to be able to take the child through all of the elements of the science and let the child see them for himself. This is an atom, this is a proton, etc. But it would have to be more than just transferring knowledge of the what of nuclear physics, it would also have to be knowledge of the why of nuclear physics. Let's use yet another example to make things simpler. Let's say you wanted to tell a child about the earth and its relation to the sun, stars, and other planets. Not only would you have to show the child a diagram of the Solar system and say, "This is the way things are." You'd also have to explain to the child how we know that this is true. You'd have to give proof. Because if you don't give proof that the earth is the third planet from the sun, then once again you can't rightfully ask him to risk his life on a guess that you're telling him the truth. You'd have to take the child outside with a telescope for several months and let him watch the movement of the heavens at night, recording the observations. You'd teach him geometry and arithmetic through mathematical proofs. And eventually you'd put the whole thing together in such a way so the child could see that there's no other way to explain what he's seeing, except with this theory about the structure of the heavens. Then the child would actually know that the earth is the third planet from the sun, and wouldn't simply be guessing that you're an honest person who knows what they're talking about.
Now does the Bible do this? Does it provide evidence and demonstrations and proofs of its claims? Or does it merely describe our human situation in relation to the divine and expect us to believe that the authors are honest people who know what they're talking about? The Bible talks about the creation of the universe, saying that it happened in a certain order in a certain amount of time. Does it show us the fossils, does it demonstrate the process of carbon dating and prove that its account of things is the best account in light of the evidence? The Bible says that in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God, and that the word became flesh and lived among us. Does the Bible provide any demonstration of this, or does it expect us to take in the description and believe it on its own authority?
I'm saying that it's not fair to throw someone into a life-or-death, eternity-in-the-balance situation, in which the outcome depends on the players' belief or non-belief in a system of dogmas that he or she can't have demonstrated to him or her. Yet Jesus explicitly says, "Blessed are those who have not seen but have believed." What else is he doing but praising people who make the right guess and condemning people who make the wrong guess?
"You learn the laws of morality by performing actions and watching the consequences. "
If I run into the street to save a child and am hit by a car and permanently disabled, have I made a wrong moral choice? Haven't we been taught by the universe that it is a bad idea to try to save a child?
In our very first incarnation, what are we paying for the first time we fall down and hurt ourselves? Did we do something wrong in the womb?
le
And this seems more fair to you than a loving Father who makes Himself evident to the world by the appearance of His Son, Who then takes upon Himself your wrongs to save You from paying for them yourself (over and over lifetime after lifetime), if You only believe in Him?
(1) See my previous comment about what constitutes evidence. (2) I reject the notion of a God who's interested in reward and punishment in the first place. Vengeance is evil no matter who's doing the avenging. A good God would be interested in "punishment" only insofar as it serves as a correction of our bad habits. But eternal punishment doesn't allow for the possibility of correction. (3) The notion of a substitution is equally foolish. Why does God have this need to take out his anger on someone, anyone? Why doesn't he just get over his anger and move on? (4) And about the "only [believing] in Him" part, my previous comment should help answer that. It's not fair to make someone's eternal condition rest on a guess as to who's telling him the truth about divine matters.
"Does the Bible provide any demonstration of this, or does it expect us to take in the description and believe it on its own authority?"
What is your demonstration of reincarnation?
le
"Vengeance is evil no matter who's doing the avenging."
What is your basis for believing this? Your belief of what God should or should not be? Why should anyone but God get to decide who He should or should not be?
le
If I am a successful bank robber, the consequences are wealth. Is robbery not a bad moral choice?
Karma says that there are more consequences than the immediate. If you steal, for example, you will be stolen from in this or another life. If you are a man who rapes a woman, you will be reborn as a woman who is raped. You can get away for a short time with enjoying bad behavior, but eventually it will catch up with you and in the long run you will be happier not stealing and raping.
"The notion of a substitution is equally foolish."
You seem to have made your choice not to believe in God by the way you feel about Who God should be. You do not want to believe in a God who is a judge. You do not want to believe in a God who gives you a choice to believe in Him or not.
Can you provide evidence for reincarnation? Yet you choose to believe in that. Perhaps you do not believe in reincarnation, but are simply giving the Hindu belief? If you do not believe in reincarnation, how do you personally make moral choices since that would take karma out of the picture.
le
If I run into the street to save a child and am hit by a car and permanently disabled, have I made a wrong moral choice?
Karma is an important law of the universe, but it's not the only law. Some things happen to people for reasons unrelated to their moral worth or lack thereof.
In our very first incarnation . . .
There is no first incarnation. The world is eternal.
What is your demonstration of reincarnation?
I don't have one. It's just a theory. I but don't think that anyone is going to be condemed to hell for all eternity for failing to believe in it.
Why should anyone but God get to decide who He should or should not be?
It's an opinion based on an observation of nature. Anger is an unpleasant experience; it is painful. No intelligent being chooses to be in pain if he or she doesn't have to, so no intelligent being would choose to allow him- or herself to become angry. Love is always a pleasant experience, and intelligent beings always choose the most pleasurable experiences. Therefore an intelligent being would always choose love over anger. Not being angry, a being would have no desire to see another being in pain unless it would lead that being, whom one loved, to greater pleasure in the long run. So a being who only loved others and never got angry with them would always seek the best for those other beings and would only cause them pain as a way to correct bad habits that were self-destructive to the beloved being, or were causing pain to other beings that one loved. So if God preferred pleasure over pain and love over anger and hated, then he would have no desire to create a place such as hell but rather a place like purgatory that only lasted as long as necessary to correct the bad habits. And being an intelligent being myself, I love all other beings and wish them well; therefore, I would want to see God happy and wouldn't want him to experience the pain of anger and the futility of vengeance. But in the face of such a horrible being, showing such a lack of love to certain beings that I love, sending them to hell rather than choosing to lovingly correct their bad habits, I could not help but be angry with God and despair of such a universe that had such an awful, foolish ruler who chose pain over pleasure and anger over love.
**By the way, as though it weren't obvious, those previous few Anonymous posts were mine**
**...wouldn't want to see God unhappy...**
You seem to have made your choice not to believe in God by the way you feel about Who God should be.
I believe in what the evidence leads me to believe. Everything that I know from my own experience of pleasure and pain, love and hatred, leads me to believe that no intelligent being, and certainly no supremely intelligent being, would ever allow him- or herself to be overcome by anger and to react in vengeance. I have nothing to base my beliefs and decisions on, other than my own experience.
"It's an opinion based on an observation of nature." God is not nature. He created nature and He has revealed his nature to us--He is a faithful, loving Father, who must nonetheless judge sin.
The main rules of Christianity are to love God first, and to love our neighbor as ourselves second. That seems pretty good to me. The idea of karma and reincarnation, of endless lives of paying for things we don't remember and spending each life relearning life's lessons doesn't seem too attractive.
Of course, it's not the attractiveness or lack thereof that has drawn me to Christianity. It is Christ Himself and that He chose to love me first.
I'm too tired to think anymore. Goodnight, BG.
le
You seem to have made your choice not to believe in God by the way you feel about Who God should be.
On what basis should I make my choice? On what someone else believes God should be? On what some 1st century C.E. Palestinian scribbler thought God should be? On what God thinks God should be? But that's the whole point. How do I know what God thinks God should be unless God speaks to me, points to my experience, and builds a rational demonstration of his identity to me? If God wants to me to understand something, then he needs to sit me down like the astronomer and the little boy, show me the stars, let me see how they move, show me the mathematical proofs, and put it together in one big demonstration. He can't just say, "Believe in God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit," or "Believe that there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet," and expect me to recognize him as God without any other evidence but his own self-assertion to the title.
God is not nature. He created nature
If so, he needs to prove it.
He has revealed his nature to us
No, he needs to prove it.
How do you know He is not speaking to you through this blog? He can do what He wants. He did, after all, use the jawbone of an ass once to get the job done.
Goodnight. It was a pleasure speaking with you.
le
How do you know He is not speaking to you through this blog?
Because there's no empirical examination or rataional demonstration going on here, just as there's none in the Bible.
And by the way, le and Allan, you are both much more pleasant to speak to than Doug. At least you try to reason and engage my arguments. Doug just makes pronouncements like a tyrant and thinks he's making clever arguments thereby.
God is not a mathematical or scientific equation. He cannot be demonstrated as such. You are willing to believe in reincarnation, which makes me believe that everything does not have to have a rational explanation for you. Why do you insist that God must be rationalized?
Doug is my dear friend. God uses him and I won't be the judge of his methods. When he gets too surly (sp?), he apologizes. What more can anyone do?
le
So 1) You are willing to believe in reincarnation even though there is no empirical or scientific evidence, but not in a God who is the creator of all unless you have empirical or scientific evidence. 2) You believe that God should behave and react in the way humans behave and react, at least in your experiences in this lifetime. 3) You believe God should sit you down and explain which is the right choice and why, if He wants you to believe in Him.
Are these statements fair, or do I misunderstand your beliefs? I know you probably object to my boiling it all down to a few statements, but it makes it easier to wrap my little mind around your way of thinking.
I have to go the airport now. I won't be available today or much of tomorrow. Have a wonderful Saturday.
le
(1) There is some reason to believe in reincarnation. Specifically, past-life hypnotic regression has helped some people, including myself, recover memories from past lives. It's enough evidence for me to strongly suspect that it's true, but there's still a possibility that it could be proved false, which is why I say that I don't go so far to say that I have an empirical-rational demonstration for it.
(2) I believe that any being with whom I could have any relationship would have to behave in a way that I am capable of understanding. If alien beings came to this planet, arbitrarily making up rules and punishing those who violate them, and demanding to be worshipped; I wouldn't simply bow down and worship them just because they have vastly greater intelligence than ours. They could say, just like God could, that they are superior, that we are not capable of understanding them, that their minds are vastly different from ours and therefore vengenge, anger, and hatred all make sense from their enlightened perspective. Would you be any more likely than I would to worship these aliens, to want a relationship with them, to love them?
It's not just the way that humans act that is my standard of judgment. It's all of nature. All of living nature seeks pleasure and avoids pain. Dogs seek food and avoid electric shocks from invisible fence collars. Plants seek light as they grow toward the sun. If you say that nature is the way it is because it was God's will that it be that way (and God himself doesn't necessarily conform to natural laws), then I have to ask, What was the cause of God's willing it to be that way? If you say, We can't know the cause of God's will, then I respond, Then I can't possibly have a relationship with God. I can't have a relationship with a being of whose motivations I have no understanding. I can't love a being who behaves in such hateful, vengeful, irrational, destructive ways.
I'm not saying that the Christian God's laws are bad. Love thy neighbor as thyself is a very good rule. I just wish that God were wise enough to follow it himself. If your God is love, as he claims, then there shouldn't be any hate in him, which clearly there is if he is punishing people for the sake of vengeance and not for the sake of correcting their bad habits.
(3) Precisely.
Bhagavad-Gita,
Okay in terms of gravity, you could say a rock has ‘will’. Also the way you’re talking about ‘feelings’ in the very material sense, a rock could have them. But I think it’s better to call that a passive will and a potential will respectively, as when people think of “wills” they think of active conscious ones. Now the construction of some wills seems to have both active and passive components. Maybe this is what you’re saying at large, and I concede it can be useful to not partition things out so much.
A question I’ve been asking myself lately is how can wills be modeled with more precision though. It’s an age-old question!
--
I’ve read that some Hindus are atheists. When they say the word “God” it’s more of a philosophical name. Also those atheist Hindus don’t really stress karma as an after-life thing, or a definite perfect thing, but as some philosophical importance. You don’t seem to be in this category though. Your belief in karma seems like a Karma Wager based off of your experience that everything else in nature seems to have a harmonic relationship. Now I’m not saying that’s your only reason for being moral, you had other moral arguments, which I happen to agree with. But I’d add that the reason for human beings to be moral is that we are bound together by our Equality to one another and our shared need for Peace and Meaningfulness (which you might have been saying too, but differently).
--
Reincarnation; there could be another explanation. Have you ever heard of Benny Shanon? He’s a cognitive psychologist that’s been taking the psychoactive “Ayahuasca” mix with local Amazonians. He’s done it thousands of times, and has basically experienced the whole range of thought of what people traditionally think of as the supernatural (or much of it anyways), including seeing Angels and Guides, Demons and Evil / Good dynamics, the Creation, something like Adam and Eve (though I’ll get some flack saying that here), past lives, visions of the future, Serpents of all kinds, Spirits, many mythical stories including many of the popular ones, etc. What he suggests is that contrary to popular belief (at least of believers that are “non-believers”), the mind computes these things on its own without explicit stimulus from the subject’s environment. For instance he’s hallucinated several mythological stories that he didn’t even hear about until he looked them up later.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/
obido...d=22EQ0V0S30Z7G
Let me expand on (3) a little bit.
Let's say that there was a community of people whose entire culture was based on a trust in empirical evidence and reasoning about empirical evidence. That is, they don't consider themselves to know anything unless it enters their minds through one of four channels: (1) sensation (any of the five senses), (2) perception (the mind's delimiting particular objects from its sensations, e.g. perceiving a ball from its sensation of a round red spot in its field of vision), (3) reflection on its own internal operations (so not only does the mind perceive external objects, but by internal reflection it also knows that it perceives), (4) conception, i.e. the development of concepts that organize certain perceptions under a single heading, extracting their common essence, for the purpose of easier mental manipulation and calculation (for example, grouping together our experience of various particular human beings, we extract the concept of humanity, which we can use as an intellectual shorthand for mental calculations).
So this society is based solely on experience and reasoning about experience. It has science, obviously, to allow it to develop the technologies that help solve its problems. And it has an ethics much like what I described earlier. It says, pleasure and life are good, pain and death are bad, because we all desire the former and avoid the latter. Love is a pleasure, and hatred is a pain, so we choose to love everyone and hate no one. Because we love ourselves, we seek to maximize our ability to experience pleasure, and this requires a certain amount of discipline. A healthy body is capable of greater pleasure and of greater self-defense, so we are willing to undergo the minor pains of avoiding certain pleasant but unhealthy foods, as well as the pains of vigorous exercise, in order to have a healthy body that will give us longer life and more pleasure in that life. And in order to seek pleasure, we must have a social order that is peaceful and orderly, not violent and disordered, so we establish laws against murder and assault and theft to allow each member of society to have the ability to pursue his or her own interests peacefully, and we establish punishments for the violation of these laws to deter those who are mentally defective or not properly educated from breaking the laws, to correct the violators' bad habits, and to protect all of the other members from the violator.
So we have this society, with members who are self-disciplined, seeking to develop their bodies and minds to the fullest to experience life in all its rich variety and intensity; with a government and laws that provide a strong degree of law and order which allows the members of society to have the freedom to pursue their own happiness; and they even have educational institutions that shape children as they are growing up to be well-adjusted members of this society, so that each individual's desires are in harmony with the plan of the whole society.
First I would ask, What is wrong with such a society? What are they missing that your religion can offer them? They have peace, love, and harmony; and their science will eventually allow them to cure aging and death and resurrect the dead to everlasting life in their paradisiacal society. But second, and more to the point, I would ask, How would you go about addressing your Christian message to such a society? How would you explain to them who God is, and how would you make them understand and know that he exists? How would you guide them from their own lives of empirical reasoning to faith in the one true God?
These people live their lives according to their own experience and reason. You want them to live their lives according to the will of their Creator. Why would they want to do that when they're perfectly happy? If you don't think that they're perfectly happy, then how are you going to demonstrate to them that they're not perfectly happy? You can talk to them about God all you want, you can describe to them a bunch of Biblical events that they've never experienced and that don't fit into anything that they've ever experienced. Unless you (or God) demonstrate it to them, prove it to them, why would they ever believe? Don't just think about it from your own perspective as a Christian—you're already converted—try to think about it from their perspective and what makes sense to them. How are you going to help them to understand that you are more than just a wild-eyed lunatic who never would have gotten as confused as you are if you'd gone through their educational system?
And by the way, let's say that Jesus made his second coming directly to this society. How could they tell the difference between Jesus' miracles and the advanced technology of a vastly more developed alien race (teleporters, holographic projectors, etc.)?
John D:
it’s better to call that a passive will and a potential will
That's probably true. It is passive in the sense of the Latin root of the word passion, which means suffering or endurance. It acts only in reaction to external stimuli, just like a man overcome by his passions, reacting to the infidelity of his wife, as opposed to acting out of deliberate self-knowledge. And it is potential will insofar as it has the potential to be a part of a conscious/active will. An active will is one that acts freely out of self-knowledge, seeking its own happiness. A person who is brought up well, as in the society I described in my previous comment, will be predominantly active will, whereas those who are brought up amid primitive, violent, confused conditions will be guided more by their passions and not by deliberate, self-conscious thought.
how can wills be modeled with more precision
The only way to model something precisely is to emulate it perfectly in a virtual machine. Anything less than that is always only an approximation, some better, some worse.
the reason for human beings to be moral is that we are bound together by our Equality to one another and our shared need for Peace and Meaningfulness
I don't know about the equality part; I haven't seen any evidence of that. But you're certainly right about peace, as I described in my previous comment about the morality of an empirically-based society. We need a peaceful, stable social order to be able to pursue our individual happiness.
Reincarnation; there could be another explanation.
You're right. That's why I say it's not something that's conclusively proven.
Bhagavad-Gita
"There is some reason to believe in reincarnation." Actually, it's the forlorn hope for a second chance, many second chances.Rather than face that we have a single lifetime in which to live, those who cling desperately to reincarnation are fooling themselves by thinking that they get a do-over if they screw up their life. And to put a happy face on it, this foolishness suggests that you can advance or retreat up or down through an evolutionary scale by doing well and treating people kindly in your 'current' incarnation. So at least there's some traction, some movement possible, and not just loops of "Groundhog's Day" (the movie-NOT my last incarnation!) sameness. And of course, the idea of reincarnation is refuted by the Bible: "It is appointed to a person that they shall live once, and then comes the judgement"-Not sure of the location-Romans, I think. I'm not at home right now, so I can't look it up.
Bhagavad-Gita, you must be enjoying having a forum for your ideas. It's interesting that you react to the Gospel just as Antigone, Jake or IaintBacchus does-the fact is, the Gospel message is one which any and all can grasp and accept. You wouldn't react so violently against it if it weren't true. Rejecting the Gospel has concequences which the heart of a person understands, even if that person would never admit it to another.
Bhagavad-Gita, you may have noticed that I flunked out of charm school. IaintBacchus can tell you that I sometimes have graceless ways of making a point. But I am standing by Grace, which is a gift from God,and part of my fierceness comes from knowing that this life is short, and the only-the Only decision any of us make which has any meaning is whether we accept or reject the gift of Salvation won for us on the cross by Jesus Christ. I accepted that gift in 1978, probably before you were born.
I have hope, and more than hope, conviction that I will spend eternity with God, as a member of His family. So will le, Allan, Michael, and every one else who has accepted Christ.
And Salvation through Christ is possible for you as well.
Doug:
I don't care one way or the other whether reincarnation exists. I lean to the side of believing that it does because, as I said, I've experience past-life hypnotic regression in which I've recovered memories of past lives. Maybe they're just my imagination. Maybe Jesus's divinity and miracles were just in the imaginations of the gospel writers. I need more evidence before I can make a definite decision on either question. If reincarnation doesn't exist, then when I'm dead I'll just be dead and won't feel any pain and won't care, so I might as well enjoy the life that I have now while I have it. And if I'm lucky then some day science will discover a way to make humans immortal and to resurrect the dead to everlasting life.
Yes, of course the Bible denies reincarnation. It asserts and denies all kinds of things and proves nothing.
Yes, the gospel is a message that anyone can understand and accept. So is the Quran. That doesn't make either of them true.
We wouldn't react so violently against the gospel if it weren't true? Don't you believe in reacting violently to Islamic jihadism? To communism? To fascism? Does that make all of these doctrines true?
Doug, not only have you flunked out of charm school; you simply don't listen to what other people say and try to make relevant responses. Le has been listening to me and taking on my arguments directly; so has Allan; but you refuse to do so because you don't have the ability to listen to other people, understand their point of view, and address it. You're irrelevant when it comes to the very thing you should be trying hardest to do, help non-Christians to become Christians.
le and Allan, you are both much more pleasant to speak to than Doug
I resemble that remark! No one calls me pleasant without me returning at least a "grrr"! And you haven't seen le's surly side yet.
Westerners assume that it means "Created out of nothing" because of their theological tradition, from men like St. Thomas Aquinas on down, but they might have been mislead
Hebrew scholars, Jewish rabbis, and others say that is what is means. Have they been misled?
Maybe Jesus's divinity and miracles were just in the imaginations of the gospel writers
As near as I can tell no one has ever presented any evidence of reincarnation other than blatant assertion. The miracles of Jesus were witnessed by hundreds of people. In addition, his risen form was witnessed and attested to by many. Archeological digs are daily unearthing evidence of the veracity of the Bible, David's city, Jericho, etc.. The Roman historian Josephus reports on many events during the time of Jesus and afterward although he obviously doesn't comment on the divinity of Jesus.
Allan, one of the best forms of evidence for reincarnation that one could have is the memories of those who claim to have had past lives. What would you have us do, put a homing beacon on a person's soul and track it to their next life?
The miracles of Jesus were witnessed by hundreds of people . . . according to the four people whose written records we have of the events, none of whose identities can now be confirmed. We don't have the written records of hundreds of people, which could have been forged anyway over the course of centuries. We don't have photograhic evidence. And even if we did, why should we care? Maybe Jesus was just an alien from an advanced species, trying to help guide the development of the human race by teaching a message of love and peace.
Have the other Hebrew scholars been misled? I don't know. I don't care. I said from the very beginning that I was just presenting this as a possibility. If this possibility were to be conclusively shown to be the truth, then I suppose the Hebrew scholars who are currently in the majority will be shown to have been mistaken. Have they been taken in by an intentional falsification somewhere in the past? How should I know? I suppose that would be figured out in the course of determining the genuine, original meaning. I personally would recommend that anybody interested in learning about the formation of the cosmos go talk to the astrophysicists at one's local university, rather than consulting a book written by people who didn't even know that the earth was round.
Bhagavad-Gita sez "I've experience past-life hypnotic regression in which I've recovered memories of past lives."
No you haven't. I won't believe in past-life hypnotic regression until I can have physical evidence right in front of me. Actually, I'm mocking Antigone right now, sounding as she does when arguing about God. For a skeptical analytical person,Bhagavad-Gita, you sure have some strange beliefs. Hypnotism doesn't mess with memory, does it? Can you prove that it doesn't? I notice in your next post you're hammering away on the Gospels not being believable recordings. Christian apologetics answers all of your points, but I doubt if you have enough trust in you to believe in anything beyond that which your own limited vision can perceive. You are right on one point-le and Allan are nicer to talk to than I am. I'm glad they are posting here. Think about this though,Bhagavad-Gita:though they have more graceful ways of speaking, ask them about any point I have made, and they will probably agree. Because we are all indwelt by the same Spirit, so we have been taught by God things which are beyond anyone who does not have His Spirit.
Bhagavad-Gita,
This blog has had some interesting conversation ever since you showed up. I hope you’ll stay around. One thing I’ve noticed here is how wild the conversation can go, and how that conversation is always tied into everyone’s apparent willingness to have it. There are so many things people want to talk about, be they grievances, aspects of reality, or ideas about the future; and this blog seems to be a place where the people are attracted in wide groups. It is unique in that the conversation can actually stay stable for good lengths of time, even though an occasional foot may get trampled. And Michael, who runs the blog, is always making posts that trigger all of these conversations. Though the blog’s subtitle has changed, I think it still has the sense of religion and politics in the same meal. And I think they mix together nicely (at least for the dialogue).
Also could you email me your email address? I’d hate for you to you disappear into the shadows of Duke University. I don’t normally get the chance to talk to Oxonians or Hindus for that matter.
John you don't miss anything. I did change the subtitle to better reflect the content, in truth I do bring up religious matters much more frequently than political ones. It is really hard to find a blog that really splits both down the middle, normally people have a preference for one or the other.
Doug, how many times have I said that I don't conclusively believe in reincarnation? How many times have I said that I think it's possible and that I lean in that direction but that I don't believe in it conclusively yet? Why are you bothering to critique the accuracy of hypnosis when I myself already acknowledge that my memories could be the product of my imagination? How many times do I have to say things before you'll actually take the time to read my answers? Why would I be interested in "Christian apologetics" that's simply written by people like you who take the conclusions as pre-established and make up the proofs to fit your prejudices and dogmas? Why am I bothering to talk to somebody like you who doesn't listen?
anybody interested in learning about the formation of the cosmos go talk to the astrophysicists at one's local university, rather than consulting a book written by people who didn't even know that the earth was round.
First, we don't know what the ancient Hebrews believed with respect to the shape of the earth since they don't make any mention of it. No educated person since at least the third century BCE has believed that the earth was flat. That medieval Christians believed that is simply a myth propagated, apparently in the 19th century, by some wishing to slander Christianity. You can read about it here:
http://www.id.ucsb.edu/fscf/libr.../
FlatEarth.html
Read any summary of a science symposium and you will find more disagreement than among religionists. Scientists, many of them highly respected in their fields, find much to disagree about in the more speculative areas of science such as those involving the study of origins. One scientist who addresses these very points, origins of the universe, is an applied physicist named Gerald L. Schroeder.
one of the best forms of evidence for reincarnation that one could have is the memories of those who claim to have had past lives
How is this evidence any better than that of the Gospel writers which you dismiss as being unreliable? Consistency should permit you to dismiss those testimonies as well.
One of the major objections to Biblical accuracy is the lack of agreement of the Gospels with each other as well as with secular histories of the period. I am not particularly troubled by such inconsistencies, in fact they are rather comforting. If the Gospels fit hand in glove with each other and with secular histories one would have to suspect that they had been manipulated. Nothing in life is 100 percent consistent. So I see those inconsistencies as evidence attesting to the veracity of the Gospels.
Yeah, it doesn't really matter whether they thought the earth was round or not. It's not as though anyone could blame them for not knowing that. From our perspective, close up, the earth does look flat. The point is that they didn't have the scientific instruments and methods that we now have to be able to study the origins of the universe empirically.
I don't know why it would be considered "slander" to say that medieval Christians thought the earth was flat. It was the Dark Ages. Most of the learning from the ancient Greeks was lost. Who could blame them for thinking the earth was flat? It looks flat to me where I'm standing.
It seems odd for you to point to the fact that scientists disagree with each other more than religionists do, as pointing to a defect in science in its search for truth. Of course religionists all agree with each other. They're all looking at the same books! Would you expect two people reading the Bible and treating as authoritative to disagree on the number of days it took God to create the universe. "I think it took six days," one says. "No, I think it took eight days," says the other. Well, just look at the book; it's right there.
It's a little more difficult when you're studying a universe tens of billions of light years across with tiny little microscopes on a tiny little planet. Of course people are going to disagree. We've only been at it for a few thousand years. The universe is at least several billion years old. Assuming our species survives, we still have billions of years to sort things out. We're only at the very, very beginning. No single human being can come up with a full-blown theory of the universe all in one go in one lifetime. We have to build on the work of others over many generations. And there will be disagreements along the way. That's a sign that the system is healthy and is not being choked by some dogmatic orthodoxy.
For people who haven't had past-life regression, there's no more reason to take the word of others than there is to take the word of the gospels—except that you can actually talk to living people who've had past-life regression and get a sense of whether they're credible or not, whereas the writers of the gospels are long dead and can't be cross-examined. The only answer is to do what I did and actually have past-life regression done; then you'll have the most direct evidence possible.
If the Gospels fit hand in glove with each other and with secular histories one would have to suspect that they had been manipulated.
. . . or that they were inspired by a divine source that was actually capable of keeping his story straight.
This thread is too long and my mind is too tired from the weekend. God bless you all until the next time.
le
Michael,
I’ll believe it when I see it. I say it’s 50% political and 50% religious. Or to use some “fuzzy logic” 100% political and 100% religious.
Well okay that’s not completely true. Lately it does have more religious content and maybe I didn’t notice the content before as much as I should have.
We actually do know what the Hebrews thought about the world's shape. The Bible teaches that it is round. That would be their opinion.
Pat
Thank you, Pat. I meant to bring that up a while ago, but lost my way.
Isaiah 40:22
God sits high above the round ball of earth. The people look like mere ants. He stretches out the skies like a canvas-- yes, like a tent canvas to live under. MSG BIBLE
le
It is interesting to note that the Bible, when it speaks about certain verifiable scientific facts, gets it right every time, and it was written well before those things were empirically observable. How do we explain that?
Pat
Read Al Mohler's weblog for Sept. 15 for a good comment on this topic.
Pat
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