Originally Posted by Someday
I agree with what you are saying and I disagree with what you are saying. I agree that there is no real separation from God, and that it is an illusion. A very very powerful illusion, but illusion nevertheless.
I also agree that on one level God is not hung up about morality like we are in our present condition. Originally there was no veil between us and God, and mankind ate freely of the Fruit of the Tree of Life. The operative word being fruit, the same sense as is used in "fruit of your labor". I'm sure this was a spiritual existence, not the physical existence that is our state of being now.
Something changed though, and a veil was placed between us and this Tree of Life. The ancient Hebrews hung a veil across the entrance to the Holy of Holies in the Tabernacle and later the Temples that Solomon and Herod built to represent this illusion. There wasn't a wall or a door or anything substantial between us and God, just a veil.
The Tree of knowledge of Good and Evil bears fruit too. This is the Tree Adam chose to eat from. Once Adam ate of it, that is, once he partook of the FRUIT (the effect or consequence of knowing good and evil) Adam saw his own flaws and began building up an illusion of inadequacy and he hid in fear of God. This is the veil that we live under when we live in Adam. This is the veil that was rent when Christ was crucified. We chose this world, and Christ offers us the chance to return home and eat of the fruit of Life. Through Christ within us all, we can can be in Christ, as he is in the Father. That is, the illusion of separation can be rent. If Christ is in God, and we are the body of Christ, how can there be separation? Our choice today is the same as it was in the Garden story. Live under the knowledge of Good and Evil or live under Life. This is why Paul wrote that the Law is Death.
That is where we agree, although I am sure we come to this agreement from completely different sources. My reason for this belief is from the Bible itself.
Where we disagree is on the issue of morality. Man eats of the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, but that does not make man the inventor of it. Mankind may twist morality, disregard morality, encode morality, enforce morality, and have many beliefs about morality. None of this means that man invented or created it in the first place.
Let me explain a little. Consider a parallel with something scientific a moment. Gravity. At one time gravity was just the belief that certain things had a natural place. Rocks and people belonged on the ground, so when lifted, they fell to their natural place. Steam on the other hand belonged in the air with the clouds, so it naturally just went to where it was supposed to be. Later scientists wanted to explain this effect better, so they investigated and came to the conclusion that masses tend to attract toward each other. Gravity was like magnetism, and any two masses would pull towards each other because of this effect. Then it was noted that as light, which has no mass, passes near objects in space, it tends to bend slightly towards that object. So current theory is that gravity is the result of the fact that objects with mass cause a curvature in "space-time".
This does not, though, mean that there is no objective law of gravity which exists independently of human society. The beliefs in gravity which I described are attempts by human societies to approximate reality. Clearly, some approximations are better than others. Perhaps the current belief in the curvature of space-time is also incorrect and will later be replaced by an even better approximation. However, most people would have no problem agreeing that the curvature of space-time explanation of gravity is a better approximation to reality than the explanations which came before it.
The reason that we believe that a rock will fall to the ground when we let it go is because that is what always happened in the past. There is a little more to it than that, of course, but not much. Our current theory of gravity predicts many specific phenomena. The only reason why we do believe in our current theory of gravity is because every time we have observed these phenomona, what we saw corresponded with our predictions. If we are deprived of these observations, we wouldn't have any reason to believe in gravity at all. There is no way, using logic alone, that a person can prove that gravity exists, or that one belief about it is better than any other. Morality is like that.
This is getting long and my time is short......hopefully you are getting some idea what I am trying to say.
Blessings
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