To be led by the Spirit, does not indicate that sin is a control issue. The reason we sin is the flesh tends to be weighted to that end. Sin is not our enemy, but death. Sin is the condition from being seperated from any spiritual condition. Being Spiritual is not our current natural state. We have to accept an outside spiritual guide and affector to follow after God or anything spiritual for that matter. Paul declared that crucifying the flesh is a daily task. I do not see a gradual evolution from a physical to a spiritual state, nor can we divorce the physical and create a solely spiritual state. Adam’s death was the separation of the physical and spiritual union. Now to be spiritual, calls for a change of mind, not a physical component.
@jstump
To understand the problem of death one must understand the meaning of life and that is why most of us fail to understand the impact of sin death of the logical consequence of sin. Can animals die? If you do not identify yourself as an individual material being you can by definition not die but only undergo a phase transition, e.g. a shift into another existence. It means that your physical unit may perish but that is of only minor consquence to your spiritual being. It is only once mankind had eaten from the tree of (self) realisation that one became so focussed on the self that the losoo if the self became a problem to humans self identity.
Having done my PhD on defining viability I have now a universal declaration of life and can therefore answer what the meaning of life is all about. To have tea for two isn’t that far of the mark if people understand middle endian humour of DA.
It was easier to define viability by defining death, and that can be an eye opener to understand life. And clearly sin is the cause of suffering death, but not as a revenge act of God, as he indeed pleaded with them to do his will and refrain from eating from that tree but that was what their puberty was all about, becoming their own self. And “Thy will be done” is incompatible with “my will be done” even if they both want the same thing to happen. Jesus clearly demonstrated the meaning of “thy will be done” and earned his everlasting life from that. We just don’t want to hear that.
So please tell us the meaning of life.
Best wishes, Shawn
Shawn, note that his post was #42. Coincidence? I think not.
Was not the point, that humans can come up with all the answers? Which is pointless because they ask the wrong questions.
I guess it’s too obvious. It’s called the word of God, the driving force of evolution and the ground rule of all existence, “to love thy neighbour like thyselve”, not oneself.If you love others like you love yourself you live in sin as you use your own self as the standard, that is like the golden rule just golden, but a dead end to progress. Only if you give up your self for the benefit of yourselves and others you can progress.
Life is not as we mistakenly believe in my field of science a function based on cells, but the cells are a consequence of live, e.g.the consequence of the movement of energy or matter at will. In prokaryotes, eukaryotes and animals this information is encoded in the genetic information that allows you to move energy and matter according to the information embedded in the genetic code and the amount of post processing they can muster by what is commonly referred to as instinct. Humans overcome this by extracorporeal non genetic transmission of information. We have free will and can thus either move matter and energy at our own will or at the will of others. Thus if we act in accordance with Jesus will he is alive in us as it is his will that is done, not ours as we act out his instructions. So for deep thought the answer “to cooperate” was all thet you could have expected as "to love one another was beyond his comprehension 
I had not noticed but it made me smile indeed, so thanks for pointing it out. I did not wait for that, it was indeed pure chance that I happened to browse by, not having been here for weeks
Dear Marvin,
I guess I was expecting a philosophical meaning, not the golden rule. The golden rule is a way to live, but it exposes no reason as to why this is desired. The meaning of the creation of the cosmos and life on Earth for me is for the restoration of the fallen. The golden rule is part of how this is accomplished.
Best Wishes, Shawn
Sorry for giving you a logical meaning but you could be philosophical about trying to understand why I say it is precisely not the golden rule.
So what do you find unphilosophical in answering the question “why am I here” with "to love thy neighbour like those who you understand to be part of your “self”, e.g. those you consider your own like grandparents, parents, brothers, sisters or your children? If anything I would say it is not the lack of philosophy in the answer but the lack of applying some critical thinking / philosophy to the word of God.
The question how love works is not at all answered by the golden rule but by the life of Jesus. That is why he explains to his disciples the “how” in to “love one another like I have loved you”. To love oneself would be a call for optimistic nihilism, to love like you love thyself is a call to a love that is meant to be sacrificial.
I have regular encounters with those who apply the golden rule to justify how to accomplish love and because they like a particular sin they want to enact upon others they also want that particular sin to be enacted upon themselves and call it love and organise big parades about it and claim it to be agape love.
As a philosopher once said, if your sin does not make you feel good you need a better coach for your sin :-), so feel free to be philosophical about the “golden” rule and how death is related to human sin in the context of being “self centred”, particularly in the context of physical and metaphysical life and death.
thanks for checking the comments.
Death will come as a friend to those who are at peace with God and see it to be time to return to God. Suffering death is the logical consequence or sin, e.g. the desire of authority over ones own self, thus the separation from God and being in conflic with all other selfs .
The eating from the forbidden tree is the act if refusing authority over the self. To call it “the tree of realisation of good and evil” thus the desire to be God like in making our own judgement about is a very poetic use of language. Not only does it describe the conceptual understanding, but also the concept of “making it reality” .
Prior to the fall the death of plants or animals had no value of good or evil attached as reality was solely under the authority of the creator serving creation as the unit of “self”. This is why we do not look at the killing of the lion cups by the lion “stepfather” as an act of evil on his behalf as we do not imply him having the capacity of moral authority over his actions in his duty of genetic propagation. Similarly predator pray relationships are seen as natural, like we do not see it as sinister that a female spider eats it’s male partner post copulation to make him provide the nutrition for their joint offsprings in the interest of propagation. Neither of those two examples however can be used to justify similar behaviour in humans, albeit some people trying har to justfy their behaviour based in what they see animals do.
The change of all of that comes with the fall, this poetic description of puberty. Like in our society, moral responsibility for oneself starts with the age where we are understood to act under our own authority, e.g. post puberty. Having realized ourselves in our own material self makes death our enemy, so we suffer it like any other state deviating from our desires for reality. We suffer death as a logical consequence of being self, not as an act of divine punishment. However, understanding reality this way has profound consequences on your understanding of Christ and his death. It makes you realise that he did not die to make God happy, nor became our scapegoat to please Godin an act of penal substitution, that would point at an unfair God. It helps us to understand that he truly died for us, to show us how in giving up our self and obeying the authority of God we can free ourselves from sin and become one with God again.
I was always told that science fiction intake would warp my perception of God. What about god worship and idols doing the same thing to humanity? Did they not understand the first 4 commands at all? Then to relegate God to mere human invention and a religious concept did not help. What ever happened to God being in every aspect of life?
God created physical reality to love and return admiration to God. Humans were the physical God self on earth. What if the knowledge of good and evil instead of the accepted notion that made humanity more like God, ONLY allowed free will and giving humans the knowledge of evil instead of making humans draw closer to God sent them further away. The goodness of God leads to repentance.
Imo God did not know evil, until Jesus carried it on the cross. Yet Jesus was there at the beginning as part of “Us”. Making up fabrications about death before such knowledge to ease our conscious does not make sense to me. What God did with the knowledge was still create the universe, and still sent Jesus to experience good and evil. And still gave Adam the choice in the form of two options in the Garden. God loved God and still created a universe that was able to reject God whole heartedly.
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