Ralphie, I’m not as conversant in the Christian mythos as many here. I think I’ll have to leave off for now but look forward to getting back soon for @Ani99 and others who share on this thread. Right now we are preparing to host our primary social group for English tea in the garden on Saturday, our first such meeting since the pandemic. Summer is tough on a garden, especially in a climate noted for its mildness when we get out occasional heat wave … which of course is right on schedule. Its peak will be on Saturday with many places in the bay area hitting triple digits. I’m hoping our nearness to the bay will keep us under 80. If so it will be a relief for those coming from other places.
I believe in an afterlife, but am not sure what the nature of that will be. It seems it will be quite different that the concept of heaven in popular culture. I do think that eternal conscience torment is not going to be the case.
2 Likes
You were given a chance to make the correct inference and didn’t?
(Was it an 850 or a 124? 
)
I think many of us would like to play a country song backwards and get it all back.
1 Like
Ah, that feeling you get when you realize your body parts are no longer under warranty…
4 Likes
Whereas I think that consciousness is reducible to a process of life which can be mathematically modeled.
Now we are touching on one of the reasons I believe in any of this spiritual stuff, because I cannot believe that reality is reducible to mathematics, but as a physicist I know the measurable universe is very much reducible to mathematics apart from any particular conception of mathematics by intelligent species residing therein. This is established by the unmatched success of mathematics in predicting and uncovering new things about the measurable universe. Apart from our mathematical conceptions there are still the irrefutable way in which things are governed by fixed rules that care nothing for what we may want or believe.
OH, ALL OF THEM! Definitely! I include even those choices from before the existence of our nervous system involved in deciding our physical appearance. I simply accept the fact that MANY of our choices are not conscious deliberative ones, and I don’t see why that would make them any less ours. From a certain perspective you might think some of our free will is just a matter of owning those things which are not determined by pre-existing conditions. But I think we only loose if we refuse to own them – making ourselves into a vague and formless shadow. I don’t think it pays to make too much of the conscious-deliberative part of our experience.
But I like the way you put this difficulty, because I think it explains a lot in what I have seen in the thinking of many people.
Interesting… Perhaps part of the explanation for the above differences in our thinking come from my being a physicist and equating the physical universe with the mathematical and the measurable, where you are perhaps using the word “cosmos” to describe an extension of reality beyond the understanding by us physicist and possibly including in some sense some of what I call the spiritual.
As you can see I made connections between your comment and very different things I said. So perhaps it is best that I explain my comment more. I think one problem here may be your attempt to restrict my meaning to your own context which still seeks to embrace some sort of naturalism. Whereas I am speaking completely of something beyond our life experiences to a time afterwards when our existence is based only upon our own choices alone. This was in response to your request, after all, that we explain our understanding of what comes next. The problem is if we are confined to our choices in life alone, then how can we have a continued experience of life which requires new experiences. So the point is that in order to have a continued experience of life we must have forged a connection with others by which we can continue to experience new things. There is no eternal life to be found in isolation.
1 Like
As Christianity is no longer settled for me and I know excellently settled atheists, better, more functional than any Christian I have known in five congregations in this city (I always go… went to the nearest), I’ll continue to decrepitate with the best of care by our awesome health system, my family, my neighbours and try and do them proud.
1 Like
When a person comes to the end of this temporary existence, it would be wise to reevaluate their life. Only those things done in trust, love and obedience to God will last. A life void of the Father is vanity of vanities. God is God and a life lived outside of a relationship with Him was no life at all.
The joy that a true believer, a child of God will have when he hears the Father say, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into a kingdom that was prepared before the foundations of the world.”
A deep hope that all wrongs are righted. That sin is punished and those who suffered horrendous abuses at the hands of sinners are lifted up. Oddly enough, the problem of evil and hope is ultimately what nudged me back to God from atheism.
Vinnie
3 Likes
"Jung was blunt. He told Roland that any further medical treatment was pointless.
Stunned, Roland asked if there was any other hope.
Jung held out only one- – that Roland experience a “genuine conversion,” a spiritual transformation. According to Jung, such experiences were rare among alcoholics. But alcoholics who had them stopped drinking.
This shred of hope was enough for Roland. He returned home and began his spiritual search.
Bill, in his letter to Jung, told of his firsthand knowledge of conversion. For Bill, it happened in 1934 during his last “detox” at Towns Hospital in New York City. At that time, Bill was also an alcoholic at the end of his rope. Dr. Silkworth, Bill’s attending physician, laid out the options to Bill’s wife: She could let the authorities lock Bill up, watch him go insane, or let him die.
Bill knew the doctor’s prognosis. “My depression deepened unbearably and finally it seemed to me as though I were at the bottom of the pit,” he wrote to Jung. “All at once I found myself crying out, ‘If there is a God, let Him show Himself! I am ready to do anything.’”
At that moment, Bill wrote, his hospital room seemed to flood with white light. “I was caught up into an ecstasy which there are no words to describe. It seemed to me, in the mind’s eye, that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing. And then it burst upon me that I was a free man.”
I had never heard of Bill Wilson, cofounder of AA and I had never heard about anyone having a spiritual experience, Mark, but when I cried out to God, the same indescribable ecstasy flooded my life. I was on that mountain top for 3 months unable to grasp what was happening to me. Turns out, we were calling on the same God of the prophets.
1 Like
Though not a Higher Critic, CS Lewis writes much about such issues that drew you out of atheism and back to God. Mere Christianity is short, well written and incredible.
1 Like
Yes it is a classic. Some very good stuff inside. I read the Screwtape Letters and his work on Miracles as well. My favorite from him, however, is Till We Have Faces. A bit slow at times but the end packed a deep and meaningful punch for me.
“The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered… When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
"I ended my first book with the words ‘no answer.’ I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words.”
2 Likes
That reminds me of the Latin anagram that answers Pilate’s question:
Quid est veritas? “What is truth?”
Est vir qui adest: “It is the man who is here.”
1 Like
why Christianity is no longer settled for you, Klax?
Because there is no rational reason for it to be whatsoever and never can be, on the contrary. And desire isn’t enough. So one must be kind regardless. And it’s a bit late for that!
Klax, could God do anything to prove to you, and just you, that He Is and that He is worthwhile and dependable? Your desire to love through faith is Godly. I think He wishes that everyone would desire that kind of goal. What could He do for you or in you to assure you that He loves you, personally? How could He help you?
Do I understand correctly that you are now an atheist?
I’m sure He’s doing all He possibly can.
Except in my withering old heart.
Dear God, Klas is so cool, so honest, so smart and clever. And profound. I’d like to ask you to do me, all of us, a favor, if it would be okay?
Touch Klas. Whisper your gentle love in a way that only you can.
You, too, are so cool. Tough to understand sometimes. Confusing, but there’s no one like You. Thanks for your love. You are one big God.
3 Likes
Ordered this from the library.
Have the book in front of me now and moving my comments to the thread for this book.
2 Likes