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There are many paths to God.
Wisdom on this from trout:
There are many paths to God. Nate makes a wise observation on this:
And Tzaphkiel turns that observation COMPLETELY around by leaving out the first part of that observation to serve his own purposes. That first part reads: "When you use the "big lie" technique of propaganda..." and leaving it out is just another example of how to practice lies.
Using a holy book while at the same disparaging that very same holy book
In other words, you don't think someone should discern what is good as good, and what is evil as evil, when it is written in a "holy book". Everything any human wrote in one of those books must be accepted as truth.
Quote:
Having a path to God yet spitting on other different paths to God
Claiming to have an infallible internal measuring stick to ferret out " truth," which apparently even after 40 years still promotes the view "religion sucks"
Does it make God happy talking like that?
Is that the person God wants him to be?
Are you the person God wants you to be?
I agree that any religion sucks to the degree it causes harm. And, yes, it's up to my "internal measuring stick" to ferret out the truth of what within a religion is harmful. Since everyone is on a path to God (in my opinion), even the harmful stuff is part of that path. But the harmful stuff definitely needs to be spit on. I was just thinking the other day how grateful I am for the internet. I don't think I'd ever have been exposed to people spitting on some of my religious beliefs to the extent I was otherwise, and I would still be mired within the harmful aspects of that religion.
...tz, I get the align part. You are saying to a believer that he, in your opinion, is aligning with a pushy non believer. sorry trout, just using you as example here, you know I love you..
Thank goodness for pushy non-believers.
(The whole post was deserving of a repost...)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Arach Angle
correct me if I am wrong.
tz, I get the align part. You are saying to a believer that he, in your opinion, is aligning with a pushy non believer. sorry trout, just using you as example here, you know I love you. But you are focusing on how we are using the bible . I think you are mixing the two stances up.
truth, justice, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all people. Others call it love, compassion, and understanding. that's who we align with. It has been my experience that people who follow these are called not real theists, not real atheists, not real liberals, and not real conservatives.
mystic and I disagree on siding with milli mentalist-think also. He feels siding with milli-mentalist-think's personal emotional need as the formation of a belief is fine. So long as it meets his agenda. I don't have the same agenda, but I have an agenda, we all do.
Tz, you will find anti-religious siding with anti-religious for many reasons. The strength of the "anti-" is based on the gut wrenching event in a person's life.
some just feel tricked. So they have lesser intensity of hate. Some feel tricked and can't blame their loved ones so they blame religion. Toss in some very stupid religious rules and this intensity can be amplified. rightfully so sometimes.
Others have been abused or feel they were abused. They are what they are. Adult children of abuse, addicts, and just plain mentals, are landmines that we step on all the time. When they go off, people rights get stomped.
Some, like me, have had no dealings with religious people other than the normal interactions most people have with crazy.
thats just chapter one:
other chapters will address the literalist (milli/fundy) take "personal accountability" and take on "hypocrites'.
I didn't believe since like 9 years old. My parents said "Don't hurt other people, BGTL community as an example, if you don't believe in god, believe that I will hold you accountable."
So do you believe in magic? The Bible does not teach it. Nowhere is it said that any of those things were accomplished by magic.
Apparently you have a different definition of 'magic' than the rest of us. I would be curious to how you would define the word 'magic'.
I suspect that you see magic as 'sorcery' - the use of rituals, special symbols, etc. to cast spells. Christian tend to associate this sort of thing with the work of demons, etc., which is probably why you want to insist that Jesus did not use magic. Am I on track, so far?
But most of us are going with the more fundamental concept of magic, which is basically any event that is "supernatural" - meaning beyond or inconsistent with the laws of nature/physics. Of course there is wiggle-room. Something that appears magical to us could just be the application of some laws of physics that we do not yet comprehend, or it could be an indication that something we are currently calling a law of nature isn't really a law. Another possibility is that some (maybe even all?) laws of nature are fundamentally statistical in nature, meaning that if you wait long enough, something wildly improbable could happen - like flipping a fair coin 1000 times and getting heads on every toss. If you have an eternity of flipping coins, sometimes you'll get a string of 1000 heads, and when that happens most people would be convinced that someone has to be either cheating or using magic.
Technically, the fundamental laws of physics appear to be time-reversible (there is some debate over this, but let's skip over that for now). In principle, it is possible for a partially decomposed body to come back to life by sheer chance. Or, some super-advanced alien creatures might have some technology to do this that we can't comprehend at the moment. But if Lazarus didn't pop back to life by astronomically improbable pure luck, and if Jesus didn't somehow apply some super-duper technology, then the story of Lazarus is almost certainly the story of a magical event. Somehow Jesus straight-up violated the laws of nature.
Mystic's strategy for avoiding the term 'supernatural' in his explanations is to posit that the laws of nature are, essentially, just God's thoughts. From this perspective, the laws of nature are mostly consistent - and thus, they can be codified by science and used to create highly predictable technologies. In other words, the laws of nature are our way of noticing the habits of God. God has, for the most part, a predictable way of thinking, and we depend on this predictability for science and technology. But, in principle, habits are just habits. God can think whatever he wants whenever he wants. He can be unpredictable on some occasions. He has "free will". On Mystic's view, these unpredictable events are not "supernatural" because - like everything else that happens - they are just God's thoughts. Nature just is God, and nothing is outside of God, thus nothing is "outside of" or "beyond" nature, even if it seems blatantly "supernatural"/"magical" to us.
I favor a non-theistic variation of Mystic's idea. Charles Sanders Pierce famously argued that "natural laws" are, in fact, "habits" of Nature rather than strict inviolable "laws". Some highly respected physicists are currently exploring this line of thought as well. (Lee Smolin, for example.) Another example (albeit it an embarrassment to many scientists), is the work of Rupert Sheldrake whose notion of "morphic fields" is essentially the same idea, but Sheldrake took his idea into paranormal research, made money selling popular books, and became a pariah to mainstream science. The main difference between a "habits" view, and Mystic's view, is that habits tend to change slowly over time (eons in most cases) - not just on a whim in the mind of God. Mystic's view allows for more on-the-spot miracles like the rising of the dead to occur. He could be right, but from my perspective Mystic's approach seems a bit too convenient and there is no way to test it. No matter how an experiment turns out, you can always just say that's how God happens to be thinking today.
I see Reality as fundamentally qualitative (thus "proto-experiential") but not primordially intelligent (thus no Intelligent Designer). My theory does not posit a God, but if there happens to be a God, then God's mind (like a human mind) is probably emergent and is 99.9% unconscious and essentially "rule-driven" in a way that is basically indistinguishable from Pierce-style habits of Reality. As I see it, the impromptu magical nature of many of the Biblical stories count's as good evidence for saying that the Bible is a lot like a collection of fairy tales. I agree with Mystic, however: IF something seemingly magical does happen, it is not really "supernatural" - it is just a twist in the plot that we didn't expect and cannot yet explain.
Using a holy book while at the same disparaging that very same holy book
Having a path to God yet spitting on other different paths to God
Claiming to have an infallible internal measuring stick to ferret out " truth," which apparently even after 40 years still promotes the view "religion sucks"
Does it make God happy talking like that?
Is that the person God wants him to be?
I think the best comment overall was made by Transformer (what thread I don't know), who pointed out how close those that have snipped out nearly all the bible to suit themselves, are to becoming atheists. I would think that if an atheist could see it and have the same opinion as those of us they consider "fundies", that would cause one pause for thought since not one but TWO diametrically opposed sides have come to the same conclusion, but apparently it doesn't and didn't. How much more of a giant red flag one needs, I don't know. Peace
... But the harmful stuff definitely needs to be spit on. I was just thinking the other day how grateful I am for the internet. I don't think I'd ever have been exposed to people spitting on some of my religious beliefs to the extent I was otherwise, and I would still be mired within the harmful aspects of that religion.
Apparently you have a different definition of 'magic' than the rest of us. I would be curious to how you would define the word 'magic'.
I suspect that you see magic as 'sorcery' - the use of rituals, special symbols, etc. to cast spells. Christian tend to associate this sort of thing with the work of demons, etc., which is probably why you want to insist that Jesus did not use magic. Am I on track, so far?
But most of us are going with the more fundamental concept of magic, which is basically any event that is "supernatural" - meaning beyond or inconsistent with the laws of nature/physics. Of course there is wiggle-room. Something that appears magical to us could just be the application of some laws of physics that we do not yet comprehend, or it could be an indication that something we are currently calling a law of nature isn't really a law. Another possibility is that some (maybe even all?) laws of nature are fundamentally statistical in nature, meaning that if you wait long enough, something wildly improbable could happen - like flipping a fair coin 1000 times and getting heads on every toss. If you have an eternity of flipping coins, sometimes you'll get a string of 1000 heads, and when that happens most people would be convinced that someone has to be either cheating or using magic.
Technically, the fundamental laws of physics appear to be time-reversible (there is some debate over this, but let's skip over that for now). In principle, it is possible for a partially decomposed body to come back to life by sheer chance. Or, some super-advanced alien creatures might have some technology to do this that we can't comprehend at the moment. But if Lazarus didn't pop back to life by astronomically improbable pure luck, and if Jesus didn't somehow apply some super-duper technology, then the story of Lazarus is almost certainly the story of a magical event. Somehow Jesus straight-up violated the laws of nature.
Mystic's strategy for avoiding the term 'supernatural' in his explanations is to posit that the laws of nature are, essentially, just God's thoughts. From this perspective, the laws of nature are mostly consistent - and thus, they can be codified by science and used to create highly predictable technologies. In other words, the laws of nature are our way of noticing the habits of God. God has, for the most part, a predictable way of thinking, and we depend on this predictability for science and technology. But, in principle, habits are just habits. God can think whatever he wants whenever he wants. He can be unpredictable on some occasions. He has "free will". On Mystic's view, these unpredictable events are not "supernatural" because - like everything else that happens - they are just God's thoughts. Nature just is God, and nothing is outside of God, thus nothing is "outside of" or "beyond" nature, even if it seems blatantly "supernatural"/"magical" to us.
I favor a non-theistic variation of Mystic's idea. Charles Sanders Pierce famously argued that "natural laws" are, in fact, "habits" of Nature rather than strict inviolable "laws". Some highly respected physicists are currently exploring this line of thought as well. (Lee Smolin, for example.) Another example (albeit it an embarrassment to many scientists), is the work of Rupert Sheldrake whose notion of "morphic fields" is essentially the same idea, but Sheldrake took his idea into paranormal research, made money selling popular books, and became a pariah to mainstream science. The main difference between a "habits" view, and Mystic's view, is that habits tend to change slowly over time (eons in most cases) - not just on a whim in the mind of God. Mystic's view allows for more on-the-spot miracles like the rising of the dead to occur. He could be right, but from my perspective Mystic's approach seems a bit too convenient and there is no way to test it. No matter how an experiment turns out, you can always just say that's how God happens to be thinking today.
I see Reality as fundamentally qualitative (thus "proto-experiential") but not primordially intelligent (thus no Intelligent Designer). My theory does not posit a God, but if there happens to be a God, then God's mind (like a human mind) is probably emergent and is 99.9% unconscious and essentially "rule-driven" in a way that is basically indistinguishable from Pierce-style habits of Reality. As I see it, the impromptu magical nature of many of the Biblical stories count's as good evidence for saying that the Bible is a lot like a collection of fairy tales. I agree with Mystic, however: IF something seemingly magical does happen, it is not really "supernatural" - it is just a twist in the plot that we didn't expect and cannot yet explain.
you are speaking to the notion that legs walk, they are not separated. The universe processes information. The potentials you speak of, and you never answer me, are dynamic. the universe is in homeostasis, in terms of potentials. and work is being done. There is a vast number of interactions (types of work) in a fairly small volume. That's life, by any reasonable definition. That's what you are speaking to.
This life is not the omni thingie. But its life. Nor do we have to deny anything because we feel the public can't handle it. or it gives "theists something they can use". as i was told by one dope.
Mystic ignores the power (work/time) needed to change this region of space in a miracle. There is no way around that yet. The change over eons is what we see. Thats human eons, to the universe it might be a nano second. Just like a human lifetime is an eon to a bug that lives only a month. or eons to the aggregate of spherical wave within a proton.
hey, did i just say that and not hear of one person's name you dropped? you should try it.
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