Why is that glib? Seem a plain and simple fact to me. You should no more extend a truth about your living room to the whole universe than you should extend the limits of your own personal experience to the experiences of everyone else. I am not saying you should believe whatever anybody says, but only that this is something that must go both ways. Ok, you have reason to doubt whether someone claims they saw a unicorn means that unicorns exist, but at the same time why should the person who saw a unicorn listen to your pontifications about the lack of evidence for the existence of unicorns? By all means go with the evidence you have and YOUR personal experience and tell the person claiming to have seen a unicorn that you have to reserve judgement until you see one for yourself. And as for what they saw or didnāt see (whether prank, schizophrenic hallucination, or some other less likely explanation) that will have to wait until you get more evidence upon which to come to a conclusion.
On the contrary, I specifically refuted the idea that reality is either exclusively subjective or exclusively objective. That is a reality which is big enough for both science (consisting of objective participation) and life (consisting of subjective participation) together.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
234
Jesus loves him and will fix Him just fine, like He will Gestas. So youāre in good company. In fact Heās fixed him already, like the hundred billion dead of hundreds of thousands of years, unless Heās waiting for us to become extinct. We should easily get to a trillion by then. Hundreds. Getting on for a quadrillion. The glorified Earth might need to be a tad bigger.
Well, what I mean is that the betrayal was necessary. I imagine Judas accepted his part knowing it would make him hated because it was needed. And to sacrifice your legacy seems like the ultimate price to pay.
Matthew 23 "but woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! It would have been better for that man if he had not been born.ā
I knowā¦ I knowā¦ I have a plan to make world peace and you just have to do one little thing. Afterwards, I am going to have to torture you eternally and make it better if you had never been born but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.
This evil is necessary for good sounds like a Zoastrian invasion of Christianity.
Of course I donāt believe any of that nonsense. It was better if Judas had not been born because what Judas did was evil and the result was not better but worse than otherwise. That is the case with all evil which is done, because evil does not make the world a better place. Of course, a big part of this is because I donāt believe in any black magic power of human sacrifice or that God requires any such thing in order to forgive people. In fact, I donāt believe in any indulgences for sin no matter what voodoo price anybody may pay for it. Jesus demonstrated that forgiveness requires nothing for he constantly said, "your sins are forgiven so go and sin no more.
NOOOOā¦ Jesus did NOT sayā¦ Your sins WILL be forgiven IF a human sacrifice of a completely innocent person is madeā¦ The point is that which followsā¦ āso go and sin no more.ā All that is really important is that we stop it with these self-destructive habits of ours because those are going to drag us down into hell.
You have something in common with some Western New Guinea cannibals last century.
Their highest ideal was to make friends with a warrior in another tribe and get him to trust them, and then betray him and eat him. There was one ideal higher, though, the redemptive allegory mentioned above, and many of them became Christians.
Yep. Have this book on my shelf and have read at least twiceā¦ hey maybe its time to read that one again. Its a bit vague but the peace child was a way of bringing peace between two tribes and ending the endless cycle of cannibalistic retaliationā¦ right?
But of courseā¦ just because we can turn a cannibalistic ideal and practice into an understanding and conversion to Christianity doesnāt mean there was any ultimate truth to the to original practices of the culture. With Israel surrounded by cultures making animal sacrifices to appease their gods it is understandable that God would turn this practice towards repentance for sins among the Israelites. But it doesnāt follow that God therefore needs blood like some Aztec deity in order to forgive sins.
Yeah, I have no clue where my original copy went. Since I posted that link before, itās been digitized and is now available electronically. I may have to get it.
Thatās the way I remember it, too. The tribes were ready to go to war but both really did not want the missionaries to leave, which they would have if the tribes were warring.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
245
That doesnāt work for me at all, itās not in my beholderās share. It doesnāt fit my Neanderthal experience of human nature that I bring to the party. For Judas to be knowingly playing a prophetic role would mean transcendental understanding; heās be thinking in Heptapod.
I know people who had the opposite experience. They prayed to God and nothing happened. Are these people, now Atheists, justified in their atheism in your opinion?
At night, when my wife would go to sleep, I would crawl out of bed and pray, weeping desperately, hoping that there was something more than the ceiling above me. At times, I had to take the pillow with me, because I was weeping so uncontrollably, I had to hold it to my face to muffle the sounds not to wake up my wife. I begged, screamed and pleaded. I whispered until my lips refused to move anymore. All I asked for was one sign from Jesus, that he was real and I was not making him up in my head. Just one small sign by which I could reliably know it was all real. I promised to give away all my wealth, my life, my finances, my hobbies. I bargained, I begged and cried, and yet, all I heard was silence. I really wanted to believe, in fact, I still do today, but after hearing only silence I secretly admitted to myself that I was an agnostic atheist
Sometimes I wonder if you and others Iāve heard from who had that experience of wanting to believe but not getting any indication of encouragement are expecting something too explicit and certain. I donāt believe in God as something out there that created the world and gave me a soul. But I am amazed at how the world is held together and renewed with every new discovery with no conscious effort on my part. I also think about how we are able to feel our way into new situations and recognize what in it has importance for us. I often find music transporting and natural beauty too. It just seems to me that there is much in the quality of our experience which is gifted to us - not by a divine gifter, in my opinion - but just by processes only some of which we understand empirically but others retain an element of mystery.
From life experiences Iāve come to believe there is much that intercedes on our behalf. Does it matter if we call that God or the Force or just a mystery?
To the degree the church offers dead certainty and detailed answers it sets people up for disappointment IMO. Perhaps who ever instilled in you the expectation that all would be revealed and the belief that true believers already know much was just wrong. I think our actual epistemic position is such as to permit only a glimmer of something more going on and gratitude for whatever it is which makes beings like us possible. What holds us up is a living truth with more potency than can ever be enumerated as a finite set of objective facts. So Iāve stopped looking for those.
It is the first step to victory and great accomplishments.
Yours is the error often made by those deluded that they can live their life by objective observation alone.
God is certainly in the subjective realm of life. In fact, you can say that I am a classic agnostic when it comes to objective knowledge of God ā I donāt think that is possible. Believing in God is more about deciding who you are than about how the world is and it is certainly not about what can be demonstrated about the world.
Iād say believing in something is unavoidable even if that belief is in a mechanistic world. But I agree that āwantingā is irrelevant. We always already do believe. The question is - in what?
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
252
I want to believe that love wins. That there is hope. That we will achieve global social justice. That weāre worth it. All and every one. I look forward to the next step.
