And I always appreciate your feedback. I think I’ve been addressing God as He when a pronoun is needed. When addressing the mystery which I think is associated with God belief I generally use “it”. It isn’t clear to me whether using a capitalized and gendered pronoun in those cases is actually less respectful by assuming an equivalence which only I feel is there. Tricky territory.
It’s more than that.
Pan psychism seems to have many different meaning depending on who you talk to. I don’t see that God and the cosmos being inseparable gives any grounds that they are the one and the same. I see God as much more than the cosmos.
While all of creation is created by God and infused with the Divine Consciousness, I think that each individual consciousness is still unique. And it is owing to this uniqueness that there is spiritual life or what we call the afterlife. This uniqueness is also what allows for reincarnation.
You may well be right. I’m in no position to know. However I think we are all in that position. With respect, when you say …
I see that as one more superlative which mankind has used to grasp and conceptualize what God may be, like the omni-powers and being the creator of everything. We know that whatever the mystery may be, it is beyond ourselves but we don’t and probably can’t know that because we can only see what is shown and I do believe what give rise to God belief cannot be apprehended except so far as He allows. We do need to pay respect to His importance but becoming adamant about details we can’t directly assess seems wrong headed to me. I prefer not to put the mystery on too high a pedestal.
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Would you please explain how reincarnation is incorporated with the union of Jesus death and resurrection that those who fully trust and love Him have.
…Is merely imagination.
(Universalists, please note the middle and latter parts of that – it doesn’t say merely “take away sins” nor “take away the sins of all”. To whom he brings salvation is also specified.)
Trying to communicate what that is like effectively seems nearly impossible. I know what you mean. Bart Ehrman knows what you mean, Bob Dylan, Brian Welch, on and on.
I think it must be scary to listen to us. We sound nuts I bet. If you haven’t met God on the inside, it probably seems like we’re describing some LSD that never wore off. For sure, it is out of this world. Science can’t touch it. The spiritual world is not found in the realm of scientific expertise. Science can’t explain why I mourn the death of a loved one. It can measure if neurotransmitters which rush through synapses are taken back up into the synapses, humans say they feel better and that is wonderful. But, it can’t tell us what love is. It doesn’t know love and joy and gratitude, yet. You never know.
It’s quite the change in lifestyle when seeing doctors makes up the bulk of our waking activities. We are but dust. Everyone who lived hundreds of years ago is gone. We will be too, sooner than we know. Gone. All gone
It’s possible to have “met God on the inside” with a less giddy demeanor and not be any less a Christian, though, not at all to demean your experience.
I agree with you, we can’t know God and sure it is what God allows that we can know. But I also think we are just an element inside the system. An element can’t know the system. We can never know God in any detail, not even in an enlightenment experience.
I don’t have any answer here because I don’t believe that Jesus is God nor that his death and resurrection were a sacrifice to save anyone. I do love Jesus and trust Jesus but I see him as a prophet.
With respect to reincarnation, I think what we do and think and say creates karma. This is information in the Mind, which is the field of all information and hence creation. So we will generate another birth if we have what might be called “unfinished business”. That is that we are not perfected enough to enter Heaven or Nirvana or whatever we can call the Spiritual realm. We need to grow spiritually. My experience tells me that it is not about one birth and that’s it.
Those that are evil and follow the path of darkness may even lose out on reincarnation and end up in oblivion.
They can explain and shame on them for not seeing the obvious.
The explanation in science would be as follows.
When the loved one is in our life, we have a lot of pleasure through the interaction. We feel joy and happiness. This creates neural activity and neural pathways in the brain.
When we lose a loved one and they are no longer with us in this life, we feel sad and we grieve but this has a purpose for the physical garment, the body.
The body moves to adjust the neural pathways. The old pathways associated with a higher, excited metabolism is diminished and may be erased. A new pathway is forged and that helps us adjust.
So the body moves to low metabolism and through the adjustment process slowly brings the metabolism up to resting metabolism.
We can change the degree of grieving when we know that there is an afterlife and furthermore when we realize that love is a spiritual connection between souls, conscious beings. So the loss is temporary. We will be reunited again.
If you don’t believe in His death and resurrection as the means of death to sin and a literal new birth, becoming a New Creation, then there is no way a person can become free from sin on their own. No amount of time can change the nature of a person. No amount of learning from ones experiences with the intent to do better can change their very nature. All are slaves to sin, one must die to sin in Jesus and be raised up in Him and recreated by the power and Spirit of God.
No amount of recycling a person from one lifetime to another is going to change their very nature. Only Jesus the Son of God can do that through His death and resurrection. This is the Good News, this is our only hope, this is the way the Father delivers us from the power of sin and the devil.
The death and resurrection of Jesus, the sovereign ruler over all of creation, is the power of God to salvation to all who trust in Him.
May the Father give you the ability and grace to understand and believe.
Well spoken. 
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The word “sin”, which in Greek is amartia, doesn’t suggest that it has anything to do with a person’s nature. It simply means “getting it wrong”. And it is opposed to transgression where there is a willfulness to do wrong. Here we might call a transgression a result of someone’s nature.
Also that nature is created. A person has to destroy their conscience and thus have no empathy, no love, in order to do a transgression. I don’t believe that this person, no matter what they profess, is ever going to be saved. They have crossed the abyss from whence there is no return.
I don’t believe we are recreated by the power and spirit of God. I believe we can only be enlightened by the power and spirit of God.
Sorry. I don’t understand what you are saying, but it’s nice that you are commenting.
An honest question here. You really dont have confidence in what the apostles said the death and resurrection does for use then, do you?
Jesus said we must be born again and that by the Spirit and the Father’s will. Unless we are born again from above, we cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Being born of God, born from above, is the only way for us to be free from the Law of Sin that is in the flesh and to be set free from the condemnation and wrath of the Lamb of God. This is clearly stated in scripture but this would have no place in the heart of those who reject it. Only through Jesus and what God did through His death and resurrection can a person be saved from the power of sin, whether it is missing the mark or iniquities. The Father loves the Son and gave Him all authority in Heaven and earth. If we do not acknowledge Him as Sovereign Lord, then we are lost. If a person only believes He is a prophet, they reject the testimony of the Sprit, Father and the Son Himself. They are without hope.
Funny that I didn’t get any flak about that.
Sounds like you’re pretty open to allowing that other traditions can be valid ways for people to connect with what is greater. I wonder if it will ever become commonplace for Christians to hold with faith that system into which they have come without insisting it is the only way?
If we who place all our hope and trust in freedom from sin through full reliance on Christ’s death and resurrection alone, turn away from that, we trample under our feet His blood and will receive condemnation and wrath. God forbid that from ever happening to me. There is only one name by which mankind can be saved. JESUS.
Practically speaking, how should or can we ignore Christ’s promise,“I am the way, the life and the truth. No man comes to the Father except through me.”
It’s not as if we want to force you to be as great or as special as we are, so you better join our elite group. Not like that at all. It is like, “God is Jesus. Get to know Him. He will blow your socks off.”