Yeah they do. Abraham is a Jewish concept. Like God. They wrote about him thirteen hundred years after they set him. A bit more for Him. Three hundred years more than Mallory’s gap from Arthur. You can’t help but be honest and make no claims. I like that. You still fall in to the white space outside the historical facts mind.
Jesus had no choice but to believe His culture’s framing story, add what His mother told Him, and there you have it. Naturally. Even if He was God incarnate.
Hey Joe (my favourite Hendrix track).
You’re another compulsively honest person.
I infer that your ‘I don’t know’ is in response to my ‘Which Cosmologists have debated that consciousness can exist outside of our corporeal existence, since 1900?’ because you said ‘…consciousness can exist outside of our corporeal existence is an idea that has been debated by Cosmologists for well over 100 years.’.
So why did you say that?
When I read that the only cosmologist who came to mind was Frank Tipler and his pseudoscientific Omega Point with John Barrow fed by the pseudoscience of Dyson and that of De Chardin.
The NYT article, which I can’t read, seems to be about the Boltzmann Brain, which is an altogether different form of absurd, meaningless extrapolation of states of matter over insanely large amounts of time.
The meat in that sandwich is that the Bible without the OT is meaningless one way or another. And yes, what the Jews thought they knew, whatever that was, and what they actually made up, is certainly relevant to what Jesus and later His apostles said. Which is said so differently of course.
There is only one God at most, and He as He is is changeless. He as Jesus was human, i.e. feeble and ignorant, and therefore couldn’t not believe that He was the Jews’ made up killer God. But His God nature transcended that. His God nature intuitively pointed His human nature to the best moral judgement in all situations.
I have no idea what you are talking about
What about this bit?
Yeah they do.
I agree, they didn’t see it that way. I think that it was difficult for a culture, who’s religion was based on following the law of Moses, to be critical of it. Jesus said (Luke 5:33) that the new wine could not be put into old wineskins. I think that this was an allusion to the problem the Jews had in accepting what he said. They would have to renounce something that was at the core of who they were as a people. I think that it is God’s plan, at the return of Christ, to demonstrate that he actually is the messiah. He isn’t done yet.
Yes, I am compulsively honest, much to my detriment at times.
As far as my saying, “I don’t know”, I was trying to politely disagree. I could provide some names. There were several contemporary Cosmologists mentioned. However, they don’t really believe in disembodied brains. They were arguing about how their mathematical models predicted things like that. What I thought was important is the idea that consciousness could, at least theoretically, occur without a body. If someone believes that there is no God who creates things, then this is just some circumstance that is unlikely to occur and therefore can be disregarded. However, if God exists, then He can can create the circumstances that would be required. I think that what I’m trying to get at is that these Cosmologists, who are actually discussing some other problem, are not challenging this possibility.
There is a book “The New Science of Consciousness” by Paul Nunez wherein he speculates as to the how consciousness emerges within our brains. He thinks that the neural circuit model is too simple to explain the depth and complexity of our experiences. Rather, he thinks that regions of the brain create electrical fields which interact with fields generated by other areas of the brain. When the two electrical fields intersect, an interference field is created. This could be imagined to be like the waves created by two stones being thrown into a body of water. This basic scenario would involve multiple electrical fields each of which is variable interacting with others. This seems to be a convincing model for understanding consciousness. Also, this model could explain how consciousness could exist outside of bodily existence.
I agree that there is only one God, at best. It’s my compulsion again. Since I have no special knowledge, I can’t be entirely certain. Yes he is changeless, but we are not. My concept of the various beliefs is that beginning about 70,000 years ago God has been suggesting ideas to us. However, he’s not the only one in our head. Whether a person believes in God and Satan or not we can probably agree that we have ideas. Some ideas are right and some are not right. My concept is that religion started out with the idea that there exists some source from which we come and to which we return. From that point onward, God gradually builds on that idea while Satan tries to destroy that idea. So its really the gradual solving of a problem. 2000 years ago, the Jews had the most complete solution. Then Jesus arrived and provided a more complete understanding.
Last, I love Jimmy Hendrix as well. That particular song was a bit disturbing though.
The thing is, the psalmist didn’t see the law as oppressive. Read psalm 119.
Then provide them.
You mentioned none.
I mentioned several.
As I said, I know what the cosmologists in the article are talking about: Boltzmann Brains. Which are not disembodied. So the thing you think is important is nothing to do with that.
And God can’t create consciousness in nothing. I.e. made of nothing. That’s meaningless. And the cosmologists dealing with insane numbers are not taking that even more meaningless word salad in to consideration at all. It doesn’t figure in their consciousness.
Nunez knows as much as the cat. Less. Pseudoscience is less than feline knowledge. I haven’t seen sci-fi that bad for many decades.
How do you know what ideas Satan is trying to destroy?
And yeah, Hey Joe. Where you gonna go with that gun in your hand?
I think this will work for you:
Thank you very much Kendel. Just as I thought. The correct conclusion is in the 3rd para: ‘Nobody in the field believes that this is the way things really work, however.’.
And the writer missed the implication of the accelerating expansion of spacetime conserved by the decrease in frequency (as in of everything): all force ceases to work. All matter disintegrates to isolated quanta.*
And it all has nothing whatsoever to do with consciousness, which is an infinitesimal evanescent window in the infinitesimal evanescent beginning of the universe. Trillions of years are nothing. There will be no consciousness anywhere in the universe in a hundred of them.**
'* As a thought, the probability of a quantum having enough energy to become a universe is fabulously low, as none have produced one in our light cone yet. There have to be at least 10^100 quanta (well at least this doesn’t disagree…) and they’ve been Planck ticking for 10^43 x 436,117,077,000,000,000s, call it 10^60, therefore 10^160 opportunities. I wonder how many it takes?
'** Apart from the theoretical possibility of the imparsimonious (my word, I like it) omnipresent intentional ground of being of course.
Did you read Psalm 119? Did you watch the video of Simchat Torah? If the law of Moses is so oppressive, why have the Jews held fast to their ancient faith, despite 2000+ years of Christian persecution?
I agree that it is really terrible what has happened to the Jews. Just before Christmas my wife and I visited a Jewish man whom I have known for about 20 years. He hates all religion, but he asked me why I believe. I told him that when I look around, it seems as if mankind is killing himself. If climate change doesn’t finish us off, a nuclear war will. So, I am trying to understand how God could exist and if he does, to try and understand how he thinks. I feel that it is worth taking a second look because I don’t see anything else that I believe is going to help us. We seem to have technical fixes for our problems but why is it that we are not able to fully commit to them?
I am familiar with psalm 119 and Simchat Torah. I think that the problem isn’t with the law itself, but with its application. Jesus said some interesting things, didn’t he? Of the teachers of the law, he said that their cup be was clean on the outside, but inside it was full of greed and self indulgence. I think that what he was saying is that they had a superficial way of understanding the law. Also, when people were about to stone a woman caught in adultery, he said let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Here, he seems to be saying that people ignore their own faults while being judgmental about someone else’s. In this regard, he said take the beam out of your own eye and then you will be able to take the speck out of someone else’s eye. However, clearly seeing one’s own faults clearly may not be entirely possible. Also, he said if you judge others, you will be judged. I think that his point is that people are in no position to judge others.
Jesus said if a person even looks at a woman with lust in his heart, he is guilty of adultery. Many people think he was saying that we should be above that, but I think he was saying that we are incapable of completely avoiding it.
There seem to be limits to our ability to follow the law. In our daily lives, don’t we force the law to bend to our circumstances? It isn’t really possible to never tell a lie, is it? However, there is a difference between lying in order to manipulate others vs. telling a lie to protect another person’s feelings.
I think that Jesus was saying that we need to use the law while allowing our spirit to guide us into it’s proper administration. This makes the law somewhat flexible so that it becomes less a tool for judging others more of an internal guide for our own behavior.
Just as a note: I was citing the New Testament from memory and that is why I omitted quote marks.
The inverse of Occam’s razor. I have to agree, it is a highly speculative argument that I am making. My compulsion again.
Hey Joe. That’s cool. Really cool. Honest. Open. Vulnerable. Reasonable. To be respected. God bless you.
My only point here was to say that the law of Moses is not “oppressive.”
That’s not what Jesus said. And you’ve got to be joking.
Well, it is off topic, but along these lines, I was reading a book by a Jewish rabbi targeting the Christian audience, and he held that Christianity tends to mistake the law for oppression, when instead following the law is part of the worship of God and is done in the spirit of thankfulness for God’s blessings. He also stated that the offering of sacrifice in Temple worship was similarly misrepresented as it is done out of thankfulness and obedience in response to God’s grace and goodness. At least modern evangelical Christianity teaches that the sacrifices were transactional, which is not the case. Indeed, even in the case of Abraham and Isaac, Abraham did not offer to sacrifice Isaac to receive God’s blessing, but rather out of obedience and faith in God’s promise.
So Jesus said that the law is oppressive? Where
What do you make of Luke 11:46?
But He said, “Woe to you lawyers as well! For you load people with burdens that are hard to bear, while you yourselves will not even touch the burdens with one of your fingers.
Looks like Jesus is speaking to the people who were adding to the law.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
This is a place for gracious dialogue about science and faith. Please read our FAQ/Guidelines before posting.