Good, now you are beginning to understand my quandary.
So I’ll ask you another question. Given that the universe is finite, how many possible permutations of its finite attributes are there?
Hotflungwok You can change my statement to ‘Given all the time and energy in the universe then perhaps we can know everything.’ if it suits you better.
Reading Isaiah 55 in context, I can see that the only reason the ways of God are higher than our ways is that we do not believe enough in the ways of God to do them. God says to the unbeliever that His ways are higher than theirs.
God gave us life and the universe (kosmological system) to live in. All of the workings (energia) of God are for our benefit—to give us life eternal. We collectively, choose not to engage in His ways, therefore, we do not enter the “day of rest” which is eternal salvation, promised by God if we were only to keep his commandments and act in faith. Faith is our belief in action. We are to seek a kingdom or place that all of mankind can live forever. As we do, seek the kingdom, the substance of the kingdom hoped for, will be seen and will be the evidence of the truth of the ways of God the Father and the Son, and the next step toward living in eternity will be opened to us. As God the Father has given to us, even His Son, faith without works (Charity or giving) is just a big gong and the noise of hypocrisy.
Isa 55:9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.
Jas 3:17 But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy.
His ways, the ways of God, are only higher than our ways because we choose not to keep His ways. God tells us how to do it, but, we choose to do it our way and the resultant is His ways are higher than our ways—the kingdom never comes to fruition.
Our motto seems to be “What about me?” instead of what can I do for you as the Son of God asked? The answer comes when we entreat God to help us to help those of the world to believe—including our enemies. The way to the Kingdom and His righteousness is to give away the kingdom and His righteousness to the world as He has done for us.
There is no mystery and His ways are not higher than our ways if we collaborate and help each other to do and keep his ways.
As He did and does for us, we are to kill our enemies with the sword and the sword is giving the word and life and the light of God to those who do not yet know that our ways can be as high as His ways—if we do as His son did for us.
There is no mystery. The veil is taken away from our eyes when our faith is an action that is edifying to another.
In a physical manner, the whole of the kosmological system, is given to proclaim life. It is the Spirit and workings (energia) of God that proclaimed, “Let there be light: and there was light.”—Gen 1:3
Blessings
The problem is you’re thinking solely in terms of Earthly life. Specialisation is needed because we do need certain people doing certain jobs. In terms of Earth alone, no, it’s not important.
The minute you begin to guess at any spiritual possibilities, though, the situation changes completely. The elevator operator might be missing out on an objective good, or on the possibility of an afterlife. And that’s potentially much more important than our time on Earth.
The alternative is a priesthood or independent philosophers; people who specialize in this area who study and think and then come back and tell us the answers. I can’t build a car, so I rely on people who can. Why shouldn’t I rely on people who can do the work and then just hand off any epiphanies to me at the end? Two main reasons. First off, and one of the few actual facts in this area; the majority of people are wrong. Possibly we all are. What’s the solution to this? Well, one is to share our ideas, not just inform. A priesthood handing down ideas to people unwilling to consider for themselves is reliant on a few being right. People thinking for themselves and disseminating as equals means everyone’s involved in spotting flaws. It’s like this forum; if any one of us opened a topic, arranged our views as we saw them, and the rest of us accepted it, we’d have loads of potential flaws. It’s only in the debate with many minds that we can point them out to each other.
The other reason is that spirituality, unlike other things, is very much a personal experience. Religious people often claim they feel a connection to a being or force. Assuming people aren’t lying (and I think in most cases they aren’t), it’s clear that if there is any kind of spirituality it affects people in many different ways. If Der Trihs comes to me, for example, and tells me of a philosophy based on not feeling any god, what happens if I actually do? Likewise, if **lekatt ** presents his philosophy based on feeling a God of love, and I don’t, what can I do? People need to work things out for themselves because every situation is different.
Revenant Threshold This forum is in a way a bad case study for this question, because it is the appropriate venue for having people question their beliefs. If they are not willing to do so, they shouldn’t come here.
As for specialization, perhaps there is something intrinsic in the experience of being an elevator operator. Not just the elevator operation which is admittedly a fairly simple task, but the act of serving people on a daily basis, the type of people he comes into contact with, the pride he takes in bringing home the food for his family, or perhaps the realization of his own dissatisfaction with his place in life.
One of the things that faith in God brings is equality. Everyone can know God. Not everyone knows God in the same way, but they all have their own relationship with the divine. Or if not God, some sort of spiritual experience. At least from the Christian experience, intellectual development and progress is not necessary for the person to be saved.
However as far as priesthood’s go, sacerdotalism is a major point of contention.
These quotes are very nice,but they are the words of humans, so we cannot use them as a proof of any thing God has said unless a person is already a beliver of the person who wrote the quotes.
Monavis
I’d use my knowledge of machine guns in self-defense to mow down the hostile waves of the ignorant until enough of them die off to be replaced by a subsequent generation unafraid of change.
I fail to see any substance in what you have just said. Mass murder for some nebulous and facile notion of change is justified?
Hey, you’re suggesting I could be treated as a heretic if I don’t keep my mouth shut, simply because some people are too determinedly ignorant to handle a new idea. If someone tries to burn me at the stake, I fully intend to defend myself using technology these ungrateful wretches could never have come up with, locked as they are in the past.
No, that’s not what I suggested at all. I never said that it is right to burn you at the stake. I started a thread about the social impact of heresy. Though, I wouldn’t really point to a gun as some sort of thing to be grateful for. Certainly it’s useful, but its entire reason for being is to kill other people, the fact that it kills animals more efficiently is an useful side-effect.
However, to shed another light on it. Heresy is not always correct. Sometimes a heresy can be very wrong and lead to disastrous consequences. Some heresies while leading to a deeper truth, also lead to dramatic social upheaval.
One of the first lessons of any mystical tradition is silence. Learning not to speak what you know among the unitiated. If it is the sort of thing you would randomly just go tell on the mountain or spout out in a philosophical debate in a bar, you’re probably not part of any secret elect that has this information, by that time it’s headed for mainstreamization.
So put them guns back in their holsters cowboy. 
All the more reason to teach our citizens to be intelligent rather than reverent, making disasters less likely.
Dramatic social upheaval isn’t automatically a bad thing, either.
It gets ignored because it’s not so. Religious people are constantly spreading hate, imposing hateful laws and spreading lies and ignorance in the name of their religion. They undercut society at every turn. How does beating a gay man to death or killing an doctor who provides abortions or forbidding gay marriage or hiding pedophiles provide “social cohesion” ? Either such things undercut society’s cohesiveness, or they create a malignant cohesion based on tyranny, hate or predation. Yes, some religious people are well meaning and constructive ( a minority I believe ), but that doesn’t matter for the divisive, destructive nature of religon. The “social cohesion” that religion provides isn’t worth the price, when it isn’t bad in itself.
Yes; faith should be weakened or destroyed wherever it is found. If I was in charge of designing a new species, I’d make them incapable of faith ( and eliminate the religious impulse while I’m at it. )
Is it finite ? Last I heard the scientific consensus is that we live in an open universe, which means it’s infinite.
Hardly. People typically use their faith in God to convince themselves that unbelievers are evil or subhuman, and that various of their fellow believers don’t believe quite right or quite hard enough and are inferior.
Because they are so damned stupid, so lacking in evidence or worth that anyone not already heavily disposed to believe will laugh in the “mystics” face. And because part of the purpose of such orders is to boost the egos of their followers.
As for "God works is mysterious ways and similar rhetoric, it’s equivalent to covering your eyes and ears and screaming “LALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU ! !” like a child. It’s an attempt to deny something you cannot argue against. An attempt to shut down an argument without admitting that you are wrong.
But, Diogenes, surely you know that none of the characters in that narrative actually said any of the things ascribed to them - it was all inserted a couple of generations later by someone else entirely.
Unbounded but finite is the phrase I remember.
The more recent cosmological results impling that the cosmological constant i.e. “dark energy” is real, mean that the universe will expand forever, and is infinite, as I understand it.
I think you are confusing society with the class system, because the “salt of the earth” types are often perfectly willing to go wreck someone *else’s * society because “the lord works in mysterious ways”. For reference, see Iraq, Vietnam, the Crusades, etc. So the appeal to the wisdom of the common man really doesn’t fly so much.
Who suggests that they are defective? What strawman are you tilting at? I am guessing you must be talking about the hostility of certain educated people to less educated people. If that’s the case, I propose that there is far more hostility in the other direction. A quick look at history more often shows the noble elevator-man banding together into churches and larger political organs in frantic efforts to attack the creation of new knowledge that would undermine his supernatural belief systems (see Galileo, evolution, etc). So if the educated have a bit of antipathy toward your salt-of-the-earth elevator man, consider that it is not based purely on his ignorance and superstition, but his tendency to try to force his ignorance and superstition upon others.
I used it only to show that debate and equality among philosophy is to be desired, not philosophy handed down from someone else. Less flaws, less bias.
But how will he know all this unless he thinks about it? I could go further - perhaps in fact being an elevator operator is the epitome of Thor’s wonder. Thor loves all elevator operators; they get special treatment in the afterlife for them and their families. How will he know about this if he doesn’t think about it? To say that it’s not important for some people to think about religion or irreligion is to say that all of this it isn’t important. Your own beliefs of a God aren’t important enough for people to look into it themselves. I can’t think you really believe that.
But this is my point! If everyone has their own, personal, different relationship, how on Earth can someone rely on the words of another? Their experience is different to mine! If Bob works, researches, and comes up with a religion based on his own experiences (as it would have to be) - then anyone who submits to his ideas rather than their own will have a system that does not reflect their own true beliefs.
Intellectual development and progress are not necessary for a person to be saved… under your view. Say you were an “elevator operator”, and you left your thinking in this area to another person - and they said it wasn’t important. Ok, but what if it* is*? By not thinking about it yourself, you’ve doomed yourself. And that’s the thing here; we’re talking about possible damnation and salvation. Likewise, we’re talking about view systems that will affect our lives on Earth in sigificant ways. I for one would prefer the least flaws possible with my views, thanks, even if it means I need to go out of my way to learn more.
Not just the priesthood; anyone who is trusted to do the thinking.
Again i’d point out that I don’t believe there is anyone who uses this as a motivation to not learn.
Revenant Threshold See here’s where I think we are getting seperated. I am not talking about thinking at all. I am talking about revolutionary thought, being at the bleeding edge of a new discovery. What level of responsibility do we have to manage its dissemination? I am not talking about an unexamined life or treating people as mechanical cogs suited only to their function. In my experience original thought is rare. It’s not something that comes out of the blue all the time to everyone. You have to know something about the tradition you are doing the thinking in to know whether your thought is original. Say I am said elevator operator, and I come across a revolutionary idea for modern medicine while I am sitting there contemplating my life. The fact that I know next to nothing about anatomy and what has already been discovered, or who is working in which field on which idea greatly hinders my ability to disseminate my idea. So lacking context, I chalk it up to fanciful thinking and press the button for the 9th floor for the pretty lady and her three children.
So whether it is elitist or not, one needs to know something about what has come before to know that their idea is revolutionary. I have hung out with enough rebellious leftist activists to know that oftentimes what seems like a revolutionary idea is actually kind of mundane and has been beaten to death by philosophers over thousands of years. Of course to the 20 year old sophomore in college they think they are on the cutting edge.
What I’m referring to is the person who IS on the cutting edge, and KNOWS they are on the cutting edge, and can understand the possible implications of their newfound understanding should they disseminate it.
What you asked in your OP is (paraphrased) whether knowledge for its own sake is “good”, and whether there is something “bad” about not appreciating the intrinsic value of knowlege. You went so far as to present as an example the question of whether the elevator-man needs to delve into life’s mysteries, specifically using that language. Now you’re claiming that you’re talking about whether someone who has actually delved life’s mysteries has any responsibility to disseminate them.
These are individually valid questions, but how are we supposed to have a coherent discussion when you post one question and then claim to be asking something entirely different?