Evolution verses’ Christianity.

[The servant]

Originally Posted by Someday

The Servant,

I agree with much of what you are saying here, however, as I usually tend to do, I want to point out the main difference in our beliefs. I do not think intellect plays as high a role as you seem to believe it does in the Fall of Man.



Blessings

Hi again Someday
And I thank you again for taking the time to converse with me, my path is a very lonely one, and I love to share my gifts (knowledge) with others.

To build a house we need the foundations first, this is just again a small piece of the foundation for me to build the picture I am trying to give you I will answer more fully as I get more time to do so.

Firstly I do not expect you to understand or agree with me completely as I am not that clever in putting things over as I see them, and taking them from my self and putting them into words so people can understand me.

Let me try to put in another way how I believe I am shown how to see things,
We have two brains, the rear brain, and the frontal brain, the rear brain (small brain) was our spiritually receptive brain, and our spirit is in the area of the solar plexus, the frontal brain is now known as the large brain which houses the intellect.

I believe that we receive guidance through our spirit, as said above which is in the area of the solar plexus, you have probably noticed the feelings you get from time to time in this area, these guidance’s we feel here are called intuition, from the solar plexus, the spirits impulses it receives are put into the earthly, from here (spirit) impulses are sent to the back brain, which is the spiritually receptive brain, which is then reformed and sent to the front brain to put these impulses into earthly deeds, such as speech, motion.

During our first earthly incarnations our brains were of equal proportion, and the process was complete. But as with a muscle if it is over used it will become strong, as with a muscle that is not used it will not gain in size or it will shrink, so now I come to the frontal brain, which was used to a degree far above the rear brain, it absorbed knowledge and as a muscle does it became larger, in doing so it became more dominant, and shut off our guidance from the more luminous realms, the rear brain, in the course of time the back brain was unable to receive guidance from the higher realms in creation due to being stunted, and the earthly frontal intellectual brain became the dominant ruler.

During our early progress here on earth Lucifer was sent to the earth to help illume our intellect, the intellect, the intellect was to be a tool of the spirit, and a grounding agent to prevent us from being too spiritual while on the earth and not fulfilling our task here as we would have stayed too spiritual with out the necessary grounding, I will go into the fall of Lucifer later.

Peace and Light

The servant

[Someday]

These are interesting thoughts.
I wouldn't personally worry too much about frontal and rear parts of the brain, but I do agree in part with the concept you are conveying with the muscle analogy.
There can be no doubt that there are huge differences between the "modern" mind and the psyche of "primitive" men. Psychologists such as Jung illustrated the differences in how we perceive the world around us. He taught that `primitive' peoples think as they do because they live in a state of unconsciousness. This is our original mystical and prelogical state of being. Many will tell you that the primitive mind is inferior to the modern mind, but Jung would disagree, and I follow that thinking. Primitive men do not develop the powerful ego mind we have in our society today. They deem all things identical with one another yet somehow still distinct. In other words, a person is at once a tree and still a human being. The primitive experiences the world in a completely different manner. The illusion of separation from the gods is not their problem the way it is a problem with us. They see with a mind that we barely have the ability to look through. This is spiritual mind. This is the mind that can see the Body of Christ as a reality, not an illogical conceptualization. To Quote Paul:

"“For even as the body is one and yet has many members, and all the members of the body, though they are many, are one body, so also is Christ. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free, and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. For the body is not one member, but many.”

"So, we who are many, are ONE BODY in Christ"

"we who are many are ONE BODY”

“and might reconcile them both in ONE BODY to God through the cross”

“you were called in ONE BODY"

Before giving His life as a ransom, Jesus prayed the following:

“I ask...for those also who believe in Me...that they may all be one.”
The oneness Jesus asked for was the believers’ oneness in the Father and in Jesus. He states:
“Even as You, Father, are in Me and I in you, that they also may be in Us.”

These are concepts that the modern mind has a hard time wrapping itself around. In our western world, the individual is celebrated to such a degree that seeing ourselves as connected and one with our neighbors is very difficult.

Look at how some of our more science minded react to anything that seems superstitious in their world-view. A world view that has lost the ability to live in mystical communion. A world view that has no concept of theosis. A world view that can't seem to recognize the ego mind as a foreign entity to the true self (as can be proven to oneself if one takes the time and learn to hear the ego mind think as an observer.....something that could not be done if the ego mind is the "true self"). It need not be this way of course, anyone can learn to think more spiritually. But one must realize what has been meant by spirituality over the eons, not solely the "inner examinations" that it has come to mean today.

Blessings

[friendly hardline atheist]

Reading the conversation between Someday and The Servant, I get flash backs from the time when this place in its old days. The tone is nothing like the old fundie babbling, but there's two elements in there do remind me of the past.

First there is the depressingly negative attitude about mankinds abilities. Mankind has matched or even exceeded a number of the supposed miracles of the bible. Medical science can heal the sick, sometimes even bring a person back from the dead if they hadn't been dead for too long. Modern agriculture can feed the hungry, in far larger numbers than jesus supposedly did from two fishes and some bread. We can create light in the darkness (in fact, I did so only last night when I woke up because I needed to take a pee). And on the negative side, we could unleash horrors that would equal or even outdo the worst, largest-scale cruelties committed by god in the old testament.

So what is the appraisal of all that? Well, since it makes god seem rather smaller, it must be talked down of course. The things that are praised when jesus does them, become 'mundane' or less important when man equals or exceeds them. We can't allow any competition to jesus' glory, now can we? There's not just the double standard in the unappreciativeness, there's the occasional hint of hostility towards mankinds abilities: intellect can be to spiritual development 'an obstacle if you allow it'. That depressingly negative attitude really rings familiar of the past of this blog. Why is it so impossible for christians to be even a little positive towards anything that doesn't come from god? Lesser achievements are praised as miraculous. Would it be too much to ask for less blatantly different standards?

And it appeared that weaved into it at various points, was the good old god of the gaps. Not explicitly mentioned, but noticeable if you read carefully. Someday is wise enough to concede the physical world to science. But there must be something to cling to, so the spiritual world is postulated into the discussion. Not wasting any time to declare it much more important than the physical world. When nothing is presented that would convince a skeptic that those spiritual feelings and thinking are anything more than the physical world acting out in a very complicated (and tremendously interesting!) manner. I think god will come to feel the squeeze in his shrinking gap ever more painfully with every bit of progress in our understanding of how the human brain works.

greets,
Peter

[Someday]

Your protest is noted.

You and I have a different view of reality. We have different experiences to draw from. You have taken the path of the skeptic, and there is nothing wrong with that. The world needs skeptics.

If I tell you that I dreamed I was a bird last night, is it up to me to prove that I had that specific dream, or is it up to you to prove that I haven't?

You may be skeptical that I had that dream, and I would have no way to prove to you that I had it. On the other hand, your position is much weaker because your evidence would have to overcome my own memory of my personal experience. Your task is nearly impossible.

This is what the atheist is up against when trying to prove our personal spiritual experiences are not real.

You may be tempted to quote Sagan here, and tell me it's somehow different because "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". I don't buy that.

Blessings

[friendly hardline atheist]

Hello Someday,

Originally Posted by Someday

This is what the atheist is up against when trying to prove our personal spiritual experiences are not real.

If that is all atheists are up against, then we have it easy. Personal experience is usually the last resort if no acceptable arguments are available. Pinned down, out of answers, no one left to blame but yourself, tired of a discussion in which you're getting trounced? -> Try something that is inaccessible to scrutiny and that others can't ask you difficult questions about.

"Prime minister, if you could answer the question this time, why did you take the country to war when there was no evidence of WMDs, the people made it abundantly clear they didn't support the decision, your own Labour party was strongly against it, and members of your Cabinet resigned over it?"

"Well Jeremy.......uhmmm......you know........stutter..... . Jeremy, this is hard to explain but I did feel I was doing the right thing. I know this is an answer you won't like, but I did feel the hand of God on my shoulder. That decision was a well guided one."


or


"The defendant must answer the question. Why did you kill your wife and three children and then torch your house with their bodies inside?"

"They were evil! They were possessed by Satan! Whenever I was in their company, I felt this demonic presence. I'm sure I did the right thing and I know from my personal experience that God will forgive me. He wanted me to do it."


But in case where it is not obviously just to blame others, there are still huge problems with the personal experience argument. What would you do if someones personal experience gave him/her the exact, irreconcileable opposite idea that you got from your personal experience? Would you just dump your idea and accept his/hers? After all, he/she got it from personal experience. Or would you expect him/her to accept their idea to be wrong and adopt yours?

You say you don't go along with the idea expressed in Sagans quote. Care to give some reasons as to why you don't?

greets,
Peter

[Someday]

Essentially, I think asking whose personal experience is the "correct" interpretation is a non sequitur. The question is how can you convince me, the one that experienced a phenomenon, that that experience is not real. I have already stated that I would have a hard time convincing the skeptic. I'm not interested in doing so.

Don't you see something extremely subjective as to what is extraordinary? Extraordinary is only a relative term. Sagan's rephrasing of Marcello Truzzi's statement about extraordinary claims does not take into account that Truzzi himself regretted making the statement, calling it "meaningless and question-begging". The fact is that a person's presuppositions strongly affect how and to what degree the statement is applied. Different people will claim different requirements for validating phenomena based upon their presuppositions and the type of evidence involved. I've argued in the past that Mr. Sagan has been quite hypocritical on this point himself. I have quoted Sagan making claims to knowledge that he does not actually have any evidence for whatsoever. Extra-terrestrial life for example. He repeatedly admitted belief in it, yet we do not have one single particle that hints it is or was a form of life that does not originate on Earth. Technically speaking, that makes the actual probability of extra-terrestrial life next to zero. And that's not even including intelligent life. He was a proponent of heaving huge sums of capitol into programs such as SETI, without any evidence there was anyone intelligent out there to detect. Yet he wouldn't even entertain the idea of investigating the dragon in everyone else's garage. Just because your garage is empty does not mean everyone else is kooky. It means your garage is empty.

Blessings

[friendly hardline atheist]

Hello Someday,

Originally Posted by Someday

Essentially, I think asking whose personal experience is the "correct" interpretation is a non sequitur.

Calling the problem of contradicting personal experiences 'non sequitur' doesn't provide much of a solution to the problem of contradicting personal experiences. Neither does saying that you're not seeking to convince others. That sounds like an admission of a lost case, followed by withdrawal. Without a solution to the problem of contradicting personal experiences, personal experience does seem to remain the last resort for those who don't have answers that can stand a critical discussion.

greets,
Peter

[Commodore Angryy]

Wall of text, can someone give me the jist of what has been said?

[JM]

Do our experiences create our beliefs, or do our beliefs create our experiences

Could it be that we experience what essentially we believe, and so we think what is absolute for all is absolute because we have experienced something

or could it be that we have been taught something, we believe in it and so experience it at some level, making what is absolute for all different for each person

[Commodore Angryy]

It's a mixture of both. When you 'experience' a religion, I dare say it's alot like a mirage. A traveller wandering a desert is bound to see a fresh spring of water sooner or later, because he just wants, needs it so damn badly. Just like the theist feels they need to experience a belief, and thus their mind concocts one just to keep itself happy.