Mervin. I saw Rohr’s work. His thinking appears to be close to the eastern thought which places emphasis on individual spirituality in contradistinction to that of the church. Thank for drawing my attention to this. I will try to read more of him. Best wishes.
Kevin. I agree with you. God knows. But by that measure it is also possible that God wanted them to eat. I think we get into no-mans land if we take this line. I would rather we apply our minds and make sense of what God did with best of our abilities.
Mitchell. If the child does not drink milk, the parent may just say, “do not drink milk” in order to get the child to drink. So both interpretations are possible. Please see these below:
Roxanna Erickson Klein, registered nurse and licensed professional counsellor, Dallas, Texas, tells us:
The unconscious tends to process in positive terms, ignoring negative clauses.
…patients need hope and encouragement. Sometimes, these are more readily accepted, if negated.
–“Do not go into trance, just yet.” (Good idea)
–“Do not tell me anything you do not want me to know.” (Good idea)
Negative suggestion is like “reverse psychology,” it is most effective when some part of the patient does not respond well to direction, or is overly pessimistic. (Klein, Roxanna Erickson and Dan Short, “The Form & Function of Hypnotic Suggestion,” Tokyo, June 2016, http://www.iamdrshort.com/Workshops/Tokyo%202016%20Suggestion%20II%20Form.pdf, Retrieved July 8, 2020).
Dr. Sherry Buffington, Dallas, Texas based doctor of psychology and the originator of Accelerated Mind Patterning says:
The subconscious mind does not recognize non-visual words. When you hear the word flower, you don’t see the word, you see a flower. If you happen to like daisies, you might see a daisy. If you like roses, you may see a rose. Even reading these words, your subconscious mind formed those pictures: a daisy and a rose. Notice that all the other words only served to direct the way you perceived the flower. None of the other words have a visual component so, while your conscious mind used the words to create a linear sequence and make sense of the idea, the subconscious only held onto the flowers.
The subconscious mind does not recognize negatives… Words like no and not have no visual component. So when we say “I choose not to overeat,” the subconscious sees only overeat. Overeating has a visual component. Words with a visual component are very powerful programmers, which is why we are frequently advised to watch what we think and say. What we think impacts only us. What we say impacts us and everyone else who hears our words (Buffington, Sherry, The 24 Unbreakable Rules of the Subconscious Mind http://banishblocks.com/MBenefits/The24UnbreakableRulesoftheSubconsciousMind.pdf, Retrieved July 8, 2020).
Richard Campbell, author of Dark Psychology says:
It is often believed that the subconscious mind cannot hear negatives. Instead, any negatives communicated to the subconscious mind are interpreted as positives. For example, if you were to tell someone, do not go peeking into my room when I am away, that person is likely to interpret this subconsciously as, do go peeking into my room when I am away. This is probably the reason why there are so many exasperated parents of kids who seem to do the exact opposite of what they are told not to do (Campbell, Richard, Dark Psychology: Super Advanced Techniques to Persuade Anyone, Secretly Manipulate People and Influence their Behaviour without them noticing (Emotional, Body Language , NLP, Psychology Tricks) , e-book, 2019).
I have posted my interpretation elsewhere. Repeating here:
We give below our interpretation of Romans 5:12-15 in this perspective:
So then, just as sin entered the world through one man and death through sin , and so death spread to all people because all sinned . (5:12)
We understand this verse as follows:
So then, just as the active psyche entered the world through one man and the spontaneous connection with God was severed , and so the active psyche spread to all people because the spontaneous connection with God was severed for all. (5:12)
The next verse is:
for before the law was given, sin was in the world, but there is no accounting for sin when there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam until Moses even over those who did not sin in the same way that Adam transgressed. (5:13-14)
We understand this verse as follows:
for before the law was given, there was no way to attain peace , but there is no accounting for sin when there is no law. Yet the spontaneous connection with God was severed from Adam until Moses even over those who did not sin in the same way that Adam transgressed by not eating of the Tree of Knowledge despite being told to do so. (5:13-14)
The next verse is:
But the gracious gift is not like the transgression. For if many died through the transgression of the one man, how much more did the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one man Jesus Christ multiply to the many! (5:15)
We understand this verse as follows:
But the gracious gift is not like the transgression. For if many suffered the severing of the spontaneous connection with God through the action of eating of the Tree of Knowledge of the one man, how much more did the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one man Jesus Christ multiply to the many by reconnecting actively with God ! (5:15)
Similarly 1Corinthians 15:21-22:
For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead also came through a man. For just as in Adam all die , so also in Christ all will be made alive. (1Cor 21-22).
We understand this verse as follows:
For since the severing of the spontaneous connection with God came through a man, the reconnection with God of [those whose] spontaneous connection with God was severed also came through a man. For just as in Adam all severed the spontaneous connection with God , so also in Christ all re-establish the connection with God. (1Cor 21-22).
I am anxious to hear if this interpretation has any difficulties. Thanks folks for your engagement.
If it was necessary for us to learn through experience, then perhaps that is true. That is largely the Eastern view of the purpose of material existence. But here is a crucial difference between that view and the view presented in the Bible. Enlightenment in Eastern spiritual thought is the liberation from attachments that enables escape from material existence and even individual identity, to merge with the “field of consciousness” as it has been called in Buddhism. Material existence is simply an illusion and of no value other than as a vehicle for attaining enlightenment. The Bible, though, says material existence is good, so long as we are not separated from God, and that we separate from God through rebelling against him, which we have done.
In the Eastern view, there is no God to teach us. In the Biblical view, there is. God gave us the Bible and Jesus and the Holy Spirit and much else in order to teach us that we might understand the source of our difficulties and our salvation and be reconciled to him and materially exist.
I have a hard time believing that God preferred that we learn this very difficult way that entails so much suffering and destruction, if it had been possible for us to learn another way. And as I have said, the Bible seems to indicate that there was another way, which would have been the way if Adam and Eve had not succumbed the serpent’s temptation.
And do they say, “when you drink of that milk you will die.” I haven’t heard any parent use that particular tactic before. LOL Any sane person trying to communicate what you are suggesting would tell the story in a completely different way… first telling them to eat of the fruit and only when they stubbornly refuse (usually with some explanation given for why), they they might try a little reverse psychology – but not by telling them they would die if they ate the fruit.
Sorry but no, this argument is not believable in the slightest. I quite agree that God would want us to have knowledge of good and evil. But one does not acquire knowledge of good and evil by eating a fruit. What one can get much more easily than actual knowledge is the authority to dictate to others what is good and evil. Is this not what tyrants have been doing since the dawn of time? (And the way such tyrants have declared themselves god is quite reminiscent of the snakes promise to A&E that they would become like God - the superficial similarity of power and authority rather than a similarity of substance in love and wisdom)
In this case the fruit represents something which will give them the authority to dictate good and evil to others without the long learning process by which such knowledge has to be acquired. And the hints throughout the story such as the increase of pain in childbirth suggests that it is by becoming parents that they acquire this authority, and it is also obvious that they did not do a very good job with this task of teaching the difference between good and evil to their children. When one is telling a story of how everything went wrong then this is an excellent explanation: children having children without being able to teach them the difference between good and evil.
But what lesson are you imparting with your backwards interpretation? That we should quickly disobey anything God tells us to do. It not only sounds like another monster god, but it is ultimately self defeating. A message from God that we did not disobey fast enough? Are we then not encouraged to throw message you are pushing from God into the garbage as quickly as we can. That I can certainly do. 
This might work with the Deist god but it has all kinds of problems with the God who participates in our lives. So how do you fit these together…
- God sees a single timeline with not only what we do but what He does already written and laid out in front of Him. Sounds like the Deist God again who only sits back and watches – and who wrote this story He is watching?
- God sees a branching timeline based on His own involvement. But then HIs omnipotence would imply that all outcomes are open to Him and thus He is controlling what happens in every detail, making the only decisions which matter.
- If you add free will into the picture, then He would see a branching timeline based on both His involvement and our choices. But then His omnipotence implies that He can make all our choices come to nothing so that only His own choices has any effect on the outcome. What then was the purpose of free will? Was it just so that God can mock us?
- In order for free will to have any meaning God has to refrain from doing what is described in number 3. In order to have any kind of meaningful relationship with us then God would wait for our choices before deciding what to do Himself. It is the difference between writing a book with mere characters and sharing the writing of the story with us. It is the difference between a God who values love and freedom rather than one who will never let go of the slightest amount of power and control. The latter is not a being for whom I can have any respect.
I have never been able to see why knowledge / awareness from without necessarily must preclude participation / presence within. I know it doesn’t fit our human experience for how we can do things, but then again … we’re not speaking of humans here.
And along that same theme … I have a similar response that I think roughly covers nearly everything among all four of your points (excluding #2 - will treat that separately).
To hit the last first … I’ve also never understood why the presence of a single time line (which in the end will exist, contra the #2 speculation) and why God’s foreknowledge of it must necessarily exclude free will. It wouldn’t any more than my foreknowledge of an actor’s performance in a movie that I’ve seen many times before must imply that the actor therefore was not a free agent while actually performing it. I can’t see any logic tying those two things (foreknowledge, and pre-determination) together.
Which I think already addresses your #1. To think that God may have the ultimate and objective perspective of all space and time is not the same as thinking God isn’t involved. I think I can imagine how your scientist brain throws red flags everywhere at the mere suggestion: how can someone both be a disinterested observer from outside an experiment and yet simultaneously stick their fingers in the test tubes and on the scales to participate in the experiment itself? To us such a thing is impossible and any analogy we throw at it (like passively watching a movie) quickly breaks down. In fact the word “disinterested” already disallows the scientist in her lab analogy as I don’t believe God is anything like disinterested and certainly not Deist. But I’m not dogmatic about how this all plays out. I’ll be the first to admit I don’t have a clue what I’m talking about here, and am happy to just trust with the contemplative traditions that God’s “got it all in hand”.
But that is a perfect example of free will which is meaningless. The actor has to follow a script, and what you are suggesting with your comparison is to extend that to their whole lives where they can never go off script.
As for the rest of it, I never except this God can do anything excuse to ignore logical contradictions. This runs afoul of one of my frequent declarations: omnipotence does not mean that God can do anything by whatever means you care to dictate. The result is not independent of the means.
As for free will, I cannot help comparing things with a book or a film which are simply inanimate object with no life or conscious anywhere within them. The characters in such things have less life than a robot or an npc. Thus I am convinced that it is only because the future exists in a superposition of possibilities that the universe cannot be equated with a book or film and thus we can be alive and conscious as the characters in a book or move are not.
But… ok… whatever… we have explained our thoughts and that is pretty much end of it. I don’t expect either of us are going to convert the other to our own way thinking.
No they don’t. They could have messed up their lines, could have added their own flourish to it … etc. But even so, if we want to insist that the actor has to follow a script (under pain of needing to do it over), then, yes the analogy is no longer true to life for that particular requirement.
So in real life … “has to follow a script…” No. Going into the future we are not provided any script. But “did follow a script…” - that’s a different question with a very different answer: Yes - we did. No way around that one. In the end you, I, and everyone else throughout all of history will have followed one and only one historically, finally realized thread - contra all the fun sci fi with all their alternate “realities” - and possibly also contra Schrodinger’s multiplying universes of differently collapsing wave functions which I won’t seriously engage with here, as I don’t understand those.
No … all we have to do to see through the “one-script = no free will” scenario is just use our own memory and experience with past experience. In the past I said and did one set of things. I can’t go back and change it. Nor is the past subject to editing (God, I wish it was sometimes!) But it’s a concrete and immovable part of reality now and forever. It turns out that I followed only one (precisely one) exact thread (never branching into two different choices anywhere - how could it?). So does that now-highly-scripted past mean that I wasn’t making choices while I was still in it? Absolutely not. From our perspective, the future is malleable, full of unrealized possibilities to which I can apply my free-will (even if limited by circumstances). But after the fact, we can see it perhaps more like God sees it, though in the latter case, completely with perfect clarity.
No, we did not follow a script, we wrote a script. You are running roughshod over the difference between past, present, and future. That is the difference between life and a book or video tape. The latter doesn’t have a present or future. The past is written and future is not.
To be sure the many universes of the Everett interpretation of QM sounds like science fiction, but mathematics which backs it up is excellent. However, this is easily interpreted as the multiplicity of future possibilities rather than an actuality of multiple universes.
Well that is a problem, because quantum physics is a part of why I believe, without which we would be stuck with the deterministic materialism of Laplace’s demon and the science of the nineteenth century – and I would see no room or possible relevance for any of this religious stuff.
But from quantum physics we know that things exist in a superposition of many possible states and there is no science fiction about – its demonstrable. And so we have no reason to insist that the future must be a singular possibility of an already written story either. I think this is not only the arrow of time, room for the involvement of God and free will, but the very reason we experience consciousness.
Well, that’s fine if you want all that hovering as possibility around the edges or even in the foundation of your faith - far be it from me to go poking at it, especially since it’s beyond my understanding anyway.
But as for me, I only know of one universe, and I’ve never seen science or math reveal to us any other universes or any other timelines. So until somebody actually produces those things, as far as I’m concerned there is only one past that we all share … only one (now scripted into history) string of events that we all can remember with our various and variously faulty perspectives. As soon as you or anybody else start showing me any alternate realities that somehow coexist as “other actual pasts” other than in our productive imaginations, then I’ll take the obligatory leap toward needing to accommodate the existence of those things within my faith.
The distinction between past, present, and future is, I suggest, an illusory part of our … present, in that it’s a moving target. What is real to you now will be your past tomorrow. And tomorrow you will make one, and only one set of decisions. You haven’t done it yet, and so have the freedom to make those as you will. But the day after tomorrow, those deeds you haven’t done yet, will by then all be done and written into history … fitting just as neatly into that as the most tightly scripted theatre performance you could imagine. You will no longer have the freedom to go back and revisit any of it one whit. And yet you were 100% free as you did it with all the freedom in the world, just as God could foresee you doing it all without impinging one iota on all that glorious freedom.
I’m not saying that all the above actually is the case (how would I possibly know?). But what I’ve never seen shown (in any way I was able to grasp any way) is why it could not be a plausible understanding of how God is.
But I’m certainly not going to die on this hill (much less fight anybody else over it … that wouldn’t be very Anabaptist of me!)
Seen in a multi-panel cartoon known as “Pontius Puddle” by Joel Kauffmann (from my memory)
Character to Pontius: “How was Sunday school this morning?”
Pontius: “Great! I corrected three misconceptions, refuted two shoddy arguments, and completely crushed one person’s entire worldview!”
Parting comment from first character: “I had no idea Sunday school was such a contact sport!”
Please explain to me how there is life without time? Or is life an illusion too?
I’m not sure how you got that out of what I said. Probably from my use of the word ‘illusory’ - which I will concede was a wrong choice of words. I certainly don’t deny that time exists. Kinda hard to discuss things like past, present, and future without it. Let me try again … I think our notions of “past, present, and future” as those relate to time are merely our own perspectives on the matter. Not necessarily God’s perspective (at least in my conception of God “outside of as well as inside time”)
Ok, then what is the difference between life and a movie/book? If we make our movies/books with fancier technology with smells and stuff, then do the characters in the book have a perspective of time too, thinking that they are alive just like us?
I was only enlisting the movie analogy for a modest point: as a comparative aid for imagining how God might comprehend the entire timeline from outside of it. I don’t put that analogy forward for any more service than that one narrow aid. So I’m not saying life is like a movie or being in a movie. The movie is simply something that we can hold in our brains all at once as a completed work, since we are indeed outside of it and can hold the entire thing in our brains in its entirety.
From our own perspectives life is not scripted (because, like you, I also believe in free will - vehemently so even), and we can, within reason, make it up as we go. But once it’s behind us … it may as well be a movie because you aren’t gonna change it. What’s done is done. The only difference is there were no cameras there and no helpful scripts for you to be reading. But you may well have had an audience for much of it … family, friends, colleagues, … God. So maybe the analogy can be pressed for just a bit more, but … it’s just an analogy. Like scientific models, its use is limited - if indeed it was useful at all.
I wasn’t talking about your analogy. This is a comparison I make on my own. And the question I asked you is the one I ask myself. And it seems to me the only real difference is that the future is not written but a superposition of possibilities – that is when we are actually living it. To be sure once it is all in past then it is like a movie and something we can reflect back on as we want in our memories – but that is not the same as living it.
But as I was reading your response you reminded me that it was a matter of God’s perspective as opposed to ours. But this really doesn’t make much sense to me. If it is like a movie to God then that would only be after He has participated and the story is actually written. But that is exactly the same perspective we have described for ourselves. Whether it is God or us, doesn’t matter, there is only the question of whether we have done our bit and it is thus in the past already written. But when we are actually participating then it is not a story already written because it is waiting for our contribution.
Please let us not bring in the Eastern view. I hold no brief for it. As I understand it man was living blissfully in a primitive existence. God wanted him to act and become conscious. Purpose of this Universe is for us to consciously connect with God. But Adam was lethargic. Hence God gave him a negative suggestion to eat. till he did not eat. Then God inspired his psyche (the serpent) to encourage him and he did eat. The only suffering could be that man was deprived of his primitive bliss. The only sin could be the activation of psyche.
I think we need not dismiss out of hand the possibility that there was some fruit that activated the mind just as aphrodasiac. Further, we would be interpolating into the Bible by taking this line (just as I am interpolating by adding a "negative suggestion.).
That’s an interesting take on sin and the serpent. What evidence does the Bible offer for it?
It’s also interesting to me that you (and many others) reject ideas from the East, but embrace ideas from Western science. Eastern thought springs from an effort to know reality as it is and live according to its rules, and in Buddha’s case to end suffering. It does not divide things in this endeavor, as Western science does, but rather looks at the whole on the assumption that the parts cannot be understood without also understanding the whole. The only meaningful difference between the ethics of Buddhism and Christianity is the role of God in them. Buddha’s teachings come from a scientific investigation of the cause of suffering. He did not consider himself a deity or a savior. His teachings and practices were intended to lead others to do what he had done, to find out for themselves. People have made religions out of that, turning him into an idol and cluttering their lives with superstitions, rituals and tokens, but that is not what Buddha taught. People have done the same thing with Jesus, but Jesus’ teachings are at the heart of human existence, which includes both our individual and collective dimensions. And it is built on the massive text of the Bible, as well as, the culture that produced the Bible and that which is founded on Jesus. Buddha precipitated no such culture, his writings are much less cohesive and the Upanishads of the culture that produced him are also much less cohesive and much more abstract. We are individuals, but we are also part of a body, whether or not that body has Christ as its head. Buddha did not address the collective dimension and this is, on a practical level, why his teachings fall short. Nevertheless, as Western science clarifies the way things work in the material world, for which it is valuable, Buddha’s teachings clarify the way the mind works in this world, for which it is immensely valuable (and of which Western science has taken notice in the past few decades; see the Mind and Life Institute). It is, IMHO, more valuable than Western science, for it enables awareness of the level on which we are actually making decisions and from which our feelings about things spring and our ideas emerge.
Western science, OTOH, springs from a desire to replace the church, to rely on man rather than God, to prioritize the intellect over the heart, and to view all problems as problems of knowledge and material action rather than problems of human corruption and spiritual healing and growth. It is the ultimate in rebellion against God, and it sees no value in looking at the whole or any cost in dividing the whole up into isolated areas of study. Consequently, there is no branch of science that tries to put it all together. A great book demonstrating this difference between Eastern and Western thought and perspective is The Monk and the Philosopher.
Nevertheless, from it has come things of value. It is likely a necessary component in God’s purpose, but I would contend that the developments in Ancient India that produced Buddha are, as well. I would argue the acceptance of Western science by Western Christians while rejecting Eastern thought is primarily the product of cultural bias and ignorance.
Yet, I still maintain that the benefits from science and Eastern thought are not because at the outset God wanted human development to go this way, but rather because we rebelled against God and thus made any other way impossible. God is love. I can’t see deliberately causing us to go down a path of such suffering and destruction (and confusion) as we have gone down and on which we continue as being an act of love. Do you really believe it is?