Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
41
There are no known, detectable non-material aspects of God’s creation. Energy is material. See Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. Even unobserved dark energy beyond undetected dark matter. I certainly have room in my ravenously hungry yearning heart for the transcendent, which is the next level of God’s creation: I desire God to be real. I know that the pathetic claims that I have tried to be party to for over four decades are just products of weak, ignorant, cognitive bias. I can’t unknow that now. Which doesn’t touch my longing.
Love is cognitive. Love is enlightened self interest. Love works. Everything is the better for being loved. Love is its own reward. Love is rational. Everyone is the better for loving. It’s not magic. It doesn’t make God intervene directly. It isn’t God doing it directly. Even when love doesn’t work, can’t work. As with psychopaths and the extremely bipolar and many other mental states and unhelpable situations. It must still be extended, transmitted, said even if there’s no reception. Love is human. God’s demonstration of it needed a human.
They are all on the same very hard wired spectrum where rationality is the poor relation and very much the slave of the passions, as it should be.
Religion without reason - the Spirit of a sound mind - hasn’t either. Fides ET ratio.
I don’t see any reason to believe God is giving out prophetic messages to anyone based on scripture or experience and I also don’t believe that God is giving divine knowledge to people on how to handle these other situations. He’s given us scripture that can be applied in many ways and human reasoning that can be based on logic and compassion.
But God is not telling someone the exact way to handle the virus. We are all drawing our own conclusions on it. Some smarter than others granted. But there is not a specifically moral and doctrinal approach.
But to each their own.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
43
Why do I need to read it again? And what relevance does it have? How does Paul’s body metaphor apply to common human mental states and vague, meaningless claims made from ordinary human cognitive bias? What difference does making strange noises, in private of course, make? Personally uplifting tho’ it may be. I have sung without words, produced mouth music, under extreme duress, it helped. What difference does cold reading your own mind make? It can be cognitive I’m sure. What have these things got to do with the ineffable working of the Holy Ghost? And what is prophecy in a modern context?
Yep, God is revealing Himself and His work to and through me even.
It is Paul’s presentation of the truth that people in the church differ from each other, with different functions and different needs and different gifts.
Those who see only their own needs and gifts while assuming every other Christian should be the same are missing the richness of God’s creation and the diversity of His church.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
46
MarkD, iron to iron friend, brother!
Because it is all ordinary human cognitive bias. All. Including mine. Choose your bias. Like choosing your suffering. Because we will all suffer. [Not that choice is real, we can’t help our wiring, our dispositions, our conditioning, it’s random.] Nothing anyone ever experiences need be explained by divine intervention at all. By the supernatural. By direct transpersonal psychology. The blizzard of superstitious, random chaff in ‘charismatic’ churches will inevitably contain grains of wheat. That’s how gambling addiction works. Why is it when Christians experience it it’s God, but when Muslims, Hindus and other folk mystics do it isn’t? It’s easily done by illusionists like Derren Brown. He’s honest. All the religious hucksters aren’t. Many knowingly. Many are innocently self deceived. All are making it up.
To vaunt the cold reading of minds, including ones own, as the orthodox working of the Holy Ghost, is a normal, rationally impenetrable, delusion. It’s as harmless as reading tea leaves and Tarot. I.e. harmful to the degree it exacts an opportunity cost. Because whatever we serve is our master. We are what we do.
I play Age of Empires and read.and watch TV to escape. And waste my time here. A Puritan rationalist. Pruned of 50 years of hollow growth, of growths, purged with the fire of deconstruction. Yay a voice crying on the wilderness. A broken, uncompromising, unyielding, unreasonable voice of reason.
You’re a decent man MarkD. Don’t let it stop you thinking.
[And Mark, is it 50:50? Are the irrational and the rational explanations of ordinary human thinking and feeling finely balanced? What ratio would you ascribe? To modern claims of words of knowledge, prophecy, healing, tongues, dreams, the images that pop in to peoples’ heads in pre-service prayers by ministry teams etc, etc a hundred ripples on from the splash of two thousand years? Or we just don’t know? We can’t discern?]
1 Like
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
47
Yes Realspiritik. That Paul. Because rational is rational. Sly? He was honest. He made no claim beyond that it was of God, whether it was real or a vision he could not say. That massively enhances his credibility as a witness. His criteria for determining the interpretation of a tongue or a prophecy are timeless common sense. He might well have been away with the fairies with private glossolalia, as it is easily induced as are altered states of consciousness by starvation, thirst, anoxia, chanting, swaying, singing in a crowd for hours and acute and chronic stress - I have sung ‘in tongues’ and been glad of it. If you’re present at such events, nothing can protect you, not even rationality. The flesh is weak. The Spirit is sound.
So Paul didn’t meet the risen Christ on the road to Damascus and probably spend years alone with Him in the Arabian desert?
A claim which goes a tad beyond currently contemporary claims of random grains of wheat in the blizzard of charismanic chaff being direct divine intervention. Anybody who made a claim like Paul’s would be rightly institutionalized.
I agree completely. Yet that which is interpreted as such need not be any of those things and yet still convey great significance. What I’ve come to believe is that cultural traditions which preserve reverence for something beyond ourselves also provide impetuous to value and develop sensitivity to what is in our hearts by way of the intuitive mind. Frankly I am much more suspect of those in the Christian tradition who approach theology in a purely lawyerly way. Of course relying on the non rational can open the door to deliberate exploitation but no risk, no gain. Keep too heavy a rational grip on it all and all you end up with is control.
What matters is that we be able to read our own minds -both our conscious ruminations and what is given in intuition. It is too great a sacrifice to settle for just that which we can justify because we’ve built it up from smaller facts of which we are certain. There are fully human dimensions which are not dependent on rational pedantry. I’m sure you know this. Perhaps you feel the need for that death grip because you see too many too eager to find confirmation there; too many who rig the reading of their hearts to deliver what they already believe. That is something to be avoided of course. But I for one will never settle for a relationship with what my heart tells me which is modeled after a police interrogator. This life is an endeavor that requires some risk and some faith.
There is something puzzling and anomalous about the way in which you assertively and continually demean the Christians who have had non-Materialist experiences of the Divine, yet at the same time demonstrate a credulous willingness to accept everything Paul said about non-Materialist experiences. And Paul said a lot more about such experiences than Jesus did.
(By the way, on the matter of the term non-Materialist, you are quite mistaken when you say “there are no known, detectable non-material aspects of God’s creation.” In this case, you’re trying to twist the accepted definition of “non-Materialist” to suit your personal agenda. I didn’t say anti-Materialism. I said non-Materialism. Non-Materialism, as I’m sure you know, is a philosophy that rejects the Materialist philosophical stance. Materialism, as I’m sure you know, is “a theory that regards matter as constituting the universe and all its phenomena.” Obviously, the world we live in as human beings is constituted of baryonic matter, but, as I’m sure you know, the baryonic matter classified, studied, and applied using classical physics constitutes only about 5% of the energy in God’s universe, and the rest of the energy seems to be governed by quantum physics, which we understand very poorly, but which is at the very least a complex collection of non-Materialist phenomena. So please. If you prefer NOT to accept that most of the universe operates according to the non-Materialist phenomena of quantum physics, that’s your business. But don’t expect me to bow to your personal interpretation of physics just because you seem to have great difficulty accepting that your rational explanations are sometimes at odds with the facts.)
So back to the question of Paul. Taken as a whole, Paul’s letters can be described as an ode to non-Materialist phenomena. Paul’s self-proclaimed history and authority derive from non-Materialist phenomena. Almost all of Paul’s ominous warnings about false messengers invoke non-Materialist phenomena. Paul’s various theologies and quasi-Platonic teachings find their basis in non-Materialist phenomena. It is factually true that he wrote floridly about non-Materialist phenomena. The phenomena he proclaims may not in themselves have a factual basis in science. But it’s a fact that Paul wrote about them as if they were facts. Paul writes about angels and elementals and speaking in tongues and prophetic gifts and levels of heaven and direct revelation because all those things are the foundation of his teachings, not some vague byproduct of a man whose primary focus was actually common sense reason (as you seem to believe). Paul uses authority – divinely appointed authority, not reason – to keep his flock in line.
In other words, if you insist on making the claim that rational thought is 100% inconsistent with Christian claims about God’s presence and actions in our lives, then Paul is not your man, and your thesis that “rational is rational” when it comes to Paul makes no sense whatsoever.
If you want to look at Jesus’ teachings and talk about Jesus’ deep respect for the blending of heart and mind, the interweaving of faith and reason, and need to put common sense practices ahead of religious prophecy, then we might find some common ground. But you’ve staked your argument on Paul, and that’s what I’m challenging.
And as for your comments on love:
I’m sure all the great poets and artists and parents and healers (and so on) who have felt the profoundly transformative emotion of love would be surprised to learn that love is cognitive and rational and just enlightened self interest. Cognitive empathy is cognitive. The Big Five personality trait of agreeableness can often be purely cognitive. The logic of quid pro quo is cognitive. Even altruism can sometimes be a logical, rational cognitive choice. But love isn’t any of these things. If you haven’t felt it, I can’t explain it (and if you’re not holding your breath about rational thought, then I’m not holding my breath about your proclamation about love).
These human experiences are NOT on a single spectrum (as you say you believe). There is nothing whatsoever in the field of neuroscience to suggest that the human brain operates on a single spectrum. It operates in much the way a large orchestra does (lots of different inputs and outputs to create a harmonious but non-linear “voice”). It’s convenient from a theological perspective to believe that all human thoughts, feelings, and behaviours lie on a single spectrum, but, once again, the facts do not support your thesis.
You claim to place reason and rational thought above all other concerns – like the Stoics you so closely resemble. So please don’t play fast and loose with the facts!
2 Likes
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
50
You are completely and utterly wrong about the material. So reflect in your own last sentence. Please quote a physicist otherwise.
All the articles I posted refer to real science. If you want to read the original papers, you can look at the links via the articles I’ve posted. The articles I’ve posted are more accessible to most readers (including myself) than the articles in peer-reviewed journals, but if you find that too wishy-washy and unscientific, then perhaps you could write to Scientific American and tell them their science writers aren’t scientific enough for you.
P.S. I’ve said what I can meaningfully say on this particular thread and will leave the field to you, Klax.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
54
No they are not. Panpsychism is not. Quantum gravity is entirely theoretical science, not magic. Strange (repeatable) superconductor properties of a thin film of crystalline bismuth and palladium are pure science. Material. None of that is enough for a start.
[content removed by moderator … insulting remarks do not help make your case.]
With regard to the “parting shots” I just now removed above, I’ll only say that “physics snobbery” may be shared in varying extent by some others here. And while most of us would agree that there are some fields that are more fringe than others … even so, physics is far from being the only valid science, nor even necessarily “king of all the sciences” (at least not in my opinion - and I say that as someone who leans toward physical sciences myself.)
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
56
All science is built on physics, the queen of the sciences. There is, could be, no science without it. It was the first science. All science is equally valid science; rational enquiry in to the physical, which is all scimus. Woo, aka pseudoscience, in defence of irrational cognitive bias is beyond the fringe. And my apologies for causing your intervention, again.
Jesus, was designated by God as his Father, to be called Lord, by all who would be members of the Kingdom of God. Jesus is King of the Kingdom of God. He is also called the shepherd of God’s flock… Jesus said “My Sheep hear my voice” . All shepherds speak to all the animals in their flock, In Jesus’ day the flocks included both the sheep and the goats. Every single person who has made the decision to follow Jesus as his shepherd - ( the one who loves and cares for him tenderly) will be spoken to by Jesus. When Jesus said “My sheep hear my voice” He was commenting on the fact, that all who want to be included in the flack, are. However, only true sheep “hear” His voice;l the goats do not “hear” Him.
Jesus voice’ is in the precepts of the Bible; the universal principles of holiness, righteousness, purity, truth, godliness. Jesus’ voice is in the commands of Moses and His command that we love one another; that we care for one another; that stand by one another, care for poor and encourage the downcast. Recognizing His voice is one thing; obeying His voice is another. “Goats” may be part of Jesus’ flock; they may know what Jesus said about loving others unconditionally, but they do not “hear”. If they heard, they would obey. When Jesus said His sheep “hear His Voice”, He meant they not only know what He said, they obey it.
There are two levels of God’s speaking his words to us, whether it is written in the Bible; spoken by an anointed prophet or other servant of God; directed to our conscience (heart) individually by the Holy Spirit; or “quickened” (made alive in our heart by the Holy Spirit any way He chooses); or by a revelation, supernatural gift of the Holy Spirit. Any word God has given to all Christians, to be generally true at all times is Jesus “speaking” to all of us in the Bible. It is the LOGOS (universal principal) WORD. Examples of the Lord speaking a Logos word: “You shall do no murder”; “You shall tell the world the good news of salvation through faith in Jesus”. There is a second level of the Lord “speaking” to every individual sheep in His flock (but we will only hear Him if we are both listening for His voice, and have learned to filter out the background noise of our own and other people’s desires).
Older, mature sheep are usually better able to pay attention and “hear” the Lord’s voice. Often, lambs need to rely on mature, loving, humble, wise, godly-charactered sheep to help them filter out background noise and hear Him for themselves. There are many voices in the world that compete for attention. The loudest voices come from our own flesh. “I want this” “I like the way that feels” “I want to experience the other thing”. The next loudest voices come from the people we are most used to, the people we most want to please. The voice of the Lord may be a still small voice. We have to truly want to hear His voice above all others, and want to do His perfect will above our own. Then we may hear His voice, through the media mentioned above, not just in the universal Logos, word but the specific RHEMA word, giving us specific marching orders for the day. For example, when Jesus told Peter to go catch a fish, and take the gold coin from its mouth to pay taxes. It was true for PETER only, not John, and that day only - not next week. This is the Lord’s day by day and sometimes moment by moment guidance to us individually. As lambs we may not be able to recognize His voice as He speaks individually to us, be will never be of any value to Him, until we mature as sheep and learn to recognize, hear, and obey His rhema words to us. It is usually, an inward knowing in your conscience when you are at peace, having been in prayer and praise.
Some of the literal rhema words Jesus has spoken to me in the past few weeks, inwardly, usually “out of the blue”, not when I was thinking about the subject have been. “There is some white cotton fabric on a shelf in the closet.” (I knew I was to make masks (COVID19 protection) for the family). “Send a check to neighbor John Doe who was laid off. You’ll have money when you need it. Give and it will be given unto you; pressed down, overflowing, in good measure.”; “Get up” (The alarm had not gone off, and I wanted to sleep longer. Unknown to me if I had not gotten up when I recognized the voice of the Lord say “get up” I would have missed an important phone call).
The Lord speaks to Christians through their conscience all the time, and they do not recognize it is Him.
Hello Olayrinka… Nice question. And happy Thursday!! As for God speaking directly to people — don’t count it out. But other “things” or beings can also speak to us. If what someone “says” they were told does not fit the teachings of the Bible, it was not a statement from God. I cannot judge every experience another individual has had. But if what they said t hey “heard” conflicts with the Bible, I stay clear. And as an example of something that conflicts with the Bible, I would point to people who think God has told them to stop eating. (I can think of people who have said God told them that.) Also, anyone who says God is going to kill them if they do not raise large sums of money --stay away. Other things may be less obvious. But it takes knowledge of Scripture and also interpretive principles.
The manner in which God spoke to people in the OT may not always have been the same. Samuel seems to have heard an audible voice calling his name — and did not believe it. This would call Klax’s analysis into question for at least some occasions. If God wants to speak, even Klax would have to listen — no matter how the speech came. But if God spoke to Samuel by calling his name, He spoke to Moses out of something that looked like, but evidently was not, a burning bush…and how He addressed Adam and Eve may — when they were still sinless – have been (for all we know) even more direct and fact to face…with still othre people, it may be really different. But if something that was said contradicts biblical teaching, then it was not God speaking.
I hope these few words will help. I too tend to be leary of those that habitually claim that God said such and such to them. Such tends to be hardly more than attention getters.
God speaks to us through our prayer lives. Did He not promise that we will find Him when we seek Him? Aren’t we admonished to always seek his will and that we are unwise if we don’t? As long as we prayerfully stay in touch with Him He through His spirit will keep and guide us and our followers on the strait path.
