“The work of God”?

[Onholiday(somemightsay)]

David Silva had fuck all to do with it

(Cue incoming abuse from the regulars on the Yaya thread)........... ;-)

 

[Onholiday(somemightsay)]

More likely to be the work of the easter bunny.

Both as likely to exist

 

[blue44]

 

[Onholiday(somemightsay)]

I believe as a society we have become like Sodom and Gomorrah. A society which is full of vanity and selfishness.

May not be God that caused it, maybe it was humanity itself. But I do know we need God to help us.

I can only speak for me, but it was Jesus Christ that saved me when nothing else could. He even said that we who follow him will be mocked.

Most people who like to say negative things about the bible have never read it.

Qui?

 

[Cheer Up Peter Reid]

Here's Alan Watts on the subject that I raised at the end of my previous post:

'The most impressive fact in man’s spiritual, intellectual, and poetic experience has always been, for me, the universal prevalence of those astonishing moments of insight which Richard Bucke called “cosmic consciousness.” There is no really satisfactory name for this type of experience. To call it mystical is to confuse it with visions of another world, or of gods and angels. To call it spiritual or metaphysical is to suggest that it is not also extremely concrete and physical, while the term “cosmic consciousness” itself has the unpoetic flavor of occultist jargon. But from all historical times and cultures we have reports of this same unmistakable sensation emerging, as a rule, quite suddenly and unexpectedly and from no clearly understood cause.

To the individual thus enlightened it appears as a vivid and overwhelming certainty that the universe, precisely as it is at this moment, as a whole and in every one of its parts, is so completely right as to need no explanation or justification beyond what it simply is. Existence not only ceases to be a problem; the mind is so wonder-struck at the self-evident and self-sufficient fitness of things as they are, including what would ordinarily be thought the very worst, that it cannot find any word strong enough to express the perfection and beauty of the experience. Its clarity sometimes gives the sensation that the world has become transparent or luminous, and its simplicity the sensation that it is pervaded and ordered by a supreme intelligence. At the same time it is usual for the individual to feel that the whole world has become his own body, and that whatever he is has not only become, but always has been, what everything else is. It is not that he loses his identity to the point of feeling that he actually looks out through all other eyes, becoming literally omniscient, but rather that his individual consciousness and existence is a point of view temporarily adopted by something immeasurably greater than himself.

The central core of the experience seems to be the conviction, or insight, that the immediate now, whatever its nature, is the goal and fulfillment of all living. Surrounding and flowing from this insight is an emotional ecstasy, a sense of intense relief, freedom, and lightness, and often of almost unbearable love for the world, which is, however, secondary.

Often, the pleasure of the experience is confused with the experience and the insight lost in the ecstasy, so that in trying to retain the secondary effects of the experience the individual misses its point—that the immediate now is complete even when it is not ecstatic. For ecstasy is a necessarily impermanent contrast in the constant fluctuation of our feelings. But insight, when clear enough, persists; having once understood a particular skill, the facility tends to remain.

The terms in which a man interprets this experience are naturally drawn from the religious and philosophical ideas of his culture, and their differences often conceal its basic identity. '

That last sentence is significant for me. Watts implies that there is a common core to mystical experience that gets unpacked theistically or non-theistically, depending on the mystic's cultural background.

This notion that there is a common core to spiritual experiences in world faiths is rather controversial from the standpoint of the Philosophy of Religion. But I have often thought that there might be something in it.

One interesting recent development in this field has been the revival of interest in research into hallucinogenics like LSD and psilocybin. At the moment I am just in the process of familiarising myself with the territory, but my understanding is that these long derided psychedelics have, to give one example, been used to induce the experience that Watts describes above in terminally ill cancer patients in order to help them come to terms with their mortality.

And this kind of research isn't being conducted off the grid. It is happening at institutions like Johns Hopkins university.

Michael Pollan's recent book on this subject is the primer that I would recommend for anyone who is interested:

I am up to page 65. Pollan's argument thus far appears to be that there may be a convergence between the reports of mystics (who if they operating from a theistic perspective tend to conceive of God very differently and sometimes impersonally) down the centuries and the profoundly life-changing accounts that recipients of these so-called entheogens have self-reported.

Pollan is also a sceptical author. But as far as I can tell, even he seems to think it possible that these experiences are nor simply hallucinatory.

Reminds me of my youth - as does this :)

 

[Onholiday(somemightsay)]

The king James Bible, or the Old Testament?

Both of which are just a collection of stories, most of which were written years (in many cases 100's of years) after they were supposed to have happened. They have been translated and transcribed so many times that the message of the original stories have been diluted so much, that I'd be surprised if 5% were even close to the original message. In the case of the King James Bible, it was written by servants of the ruling class as a tool to control the uneducated, and no doubt changed to suit the narrative of the king.

I'm not going to mock anyone who follows any religion, but it's not for me.

That's a very reasonable stance to take - But would you mock me if I followed the books of Harry Potter for their messaging? ;-)

 

[Trevor Morley's Tache]

That's a very reasonable stance to take - But would you mock me if I followed the books of Harry Potter for their messaging? ;-)

Absolutely. ;-)

 

[Onholiday(somemightsay)]

This thread is really about an issue that arises in the philosophy of religion, namely, the problem of evil. I'm making this post as an attempt to provide a bit of context and to distract myself from anxiety about the coronavirus.

So here goes. The bits in bold are not intended to patronise but simply to emphasise key points.

The classic or logical problem of evil as outlined by Epicurus (who was a Greek philosopher not a Christian) is as follows:

If God is all-powerful (omnipotent) He could therefore put a stop to evil.

If God is all-loving (omnibenevolent) He would therefore want to put a stop to evil.

But evil exists.

Therefore God is not all-powerful or not all-loving (or both).

Some philosophers argue that because God is omniscient (all-knowing) this is also incompatible with the existence of evil in the world because God must have known in advance what was going to happen. One example is Bertrand Russell, who wrote that ‘If I were going to beget a child knowing that the child was going to be a homicidal maniac, I should be responsible for his crimes. If God knew in advance the sins of which man would be guilty, He was clearly responsible for all the consequences of those sins when He decided to create man’.

A second problem, known as the evidential problem of evil says, not that the existence of evil is logically incompatible with the existence of an all-powerful, all-loving God but that the existence of evil provides good evidence against the existence of a God that has these qualities.

According to the evidential problem of evil, the amount and type of evil now becomes relevant. Even if we acknowledge that an all-powerful, all-knowing God might have created a world with at least some suffering in it (perhaps for the sake of some greater good), surely he would not have created a world with this much suffering?

We can sharpen the evidential problem of evil by noting that God will presumably not allow any unnecessary or pointless suffering to exist. There must be a good reason for every last bit of it.

Philosophers generally distinguish two types of evil that must be explained: moral evil – the harm humans knowingly do to others; non-moral evil (suffering, natural evil) from earthquakes, floods, disease e.g. coronavirus. A good explanation (known as a theodicy) for why God allows evil must account for both of these forms of evil.

Now I will cut to the chase and add my own views.

When we start to consider the enormous amount of suffering in the world – including the millions of years of animal suffering caused by natural events that occurred before humans even made an appearance – doesn’t it become overwhelmingly unlikely that every last bit of suffering can be accounted for in this way?

Additionally, the Russian novelist Dostoevsky argued that whatever God’s plan is that it cannot justify the suffering of innocent children. For example, some babies are born with a genetic skin disease that causes blistering all over the body, so that the baby cannot be held, or even lie on its back without pain. It seems odd to think that some kind of greater good or higher purpose can be achieved through permitting this kind of natural evil to exist.

Plus, we already have lots of other diseases that strike randomly and inflict evil and suffering on us.

For these reasons, the existence of pointless evil seems to me to suggest that the God of classical theism in all likelihood does not exist.

However, that's not all that I have to say, as there are other, very different ways in which Ultimate Reality has been construed down the centuries. Exposure to the mystical writings of various faiths and cultures which centre on contemplative experience have persuaded me to remain agnostic on this issue.

Very good read

 

[tonea2003]

I’m no scholar, so I don’t know exactly why some books were taken out of the King James Bible, and left in the one the Orthodox use. But I do know, most will say the same thing, just translated differently.

You can’t prove that God doesn’t exist, just as I can’t prove to you he does. That’s your opinion and I respect that. As for Jesus, as a man there is plenty of historical evidence of him. Josephus, a Roman historian confirms this earliest.

no there is not, there is virtually nothing from the 1st century and nothing at all from the time of his alleged lifetime, and of any of the comtempary writers of the time no one mentions a jesus christ which is unthinkable given the deeds he has supposed to have carried out, there is no recording of the miraculous rising from the dead/sky going dark for 3 days apart from the bible.

also its well documented that none of the gospels were written by who the say they were and two were copied from mark and johns is completely different to the rest

 

[Deleted member 77198]

I’m no scholar, so I don’t know exactly why some books were taken out of the King James Bible, and left in the one the Orthodox use. But I do know, most will say the same thing, just translated differently.

You can’t prove that God doesn’t exist, just as I can’t prove to you he does. That’s your opinion and I respect that. As for Jesus, as a man there is plenty of historical evidence of him. Josephus, a Roman historian confirms this earliest.

There is not one bit of historically reliable evidence that Jesus ever existed. Not a single one!... NONE!

And the Jesus story is told in dozens of pre-Christian religions (even in Christianity- Jospeh from the Old Testament).

Christian’s Jesus story is plagiarised from more ancient relgion stories from a lot further back than his Christian story, Horus/Dionysus/Adonis/Mithra/Zalmosxis/Vishnu (to name but a few), all have the same or mostly the same stories, and are all about the Sun! Life v death, daytime v nighttime, birth, growth, rebirth (when the sunrises each day; when Winter becomes Summer), Summer v Winter, warmth v cold, good v evil..... they aren’t real, just personification stories of the big thing in the sky that gives us life... our star, the Sun!