UFO followers have had experiences too. Why don’t you give them the same benefit of the doubt you would wish we give you?
Joseph Campbell has a great set of four volumes where he talks about this: “the Masks of God”. He sets forth the idea that God appears to people in a manner they will accept and can apprehend. So, to briefly answer your question, it’s the same God with a different face.
Uhmm not exactly. The oldest bits were written 2.500 years ago.
It’s not the accumulated writings of over 3000 years.
What, you want a bibliography? Yes, I am going that route, with the note that human beings are imperfectly able to understand the nature of God and the divine, so it’s a lot like the blind men and the elephant.
Great, one I can answer. UFO followers, at least from the 20th Century on, are making their claims against a background of established science theory (which, obviously, didn’t exist in the 1st Century AD), and therefore are required to provide better evidence than a blurry photo of an undetermined aircraft. If the scientific principle had been in use in the 1st Century AD, there’d be a much different discussion going on regarding Jesus.
It’s over two millennia, therefore the writings took place over three millennia. It doesn’t have to include the entire 3,000 years.
What is the Limit of Man? What mountain can he not climb? What river can he not forge? What cell can hold him? The curiosity of Man is tool and weapon, limitless and unbound by god or devil.
So you would limit us to the evidence of the past and the methods of the past to judge to past?
That was kind of a rhetorical question. Mustard and gas plants contain volatile, flammable oils which, when mature, can burst into flame with the slightest spark. The slightest spark can be ignited by lightning, or a rolling flinty rock kicked off the mountain by a goat or sheep. Flammable, volatile plants occasionally catch on fire in the presence of the right conditions. You call those conditions God; I call them weather or botany.
Yeah, not a good idea to credit all military or financial success to divine intervention.
Nearly every cult leader has made the same claim, yet I doubt you credit Smith, Koresh, Phelps, or Jeffs the same divine blessing.
The limit of man? about 120 years.
What mountain can he not climb? one on a planet in another solar system.
What river can he not forge? (ford?) undersea rivers.
What cell can hold him? a cancer cell
The curiosity and imagination of Man ARE great things, but God’s scope [as stated in the previous post) is beyond infinite.
Not the methods of the past, no. If the past is to be judged, and there is nothing but the evidence of the past to judge, then that pretty much limits it right there.
This thread is very old yet I find it very interesting. People have been helped
by the Divine all thought the ages. It is fascinating reading. I find most interesting the
experiences that just happened when least expected. I have read many of them and experience some of them myself.
The miraculous part mentioned in the OT is that the bush didn’t burn. Maybe it simply didn’t seem to burn to Moses to call his attention to it.
Agreed. I’d put it on a case-by-case basis and even then I wouldn’t want that task.
Supra.
Given time, we can do any of those things…and it probably won’t take an eternity to do it, either. Does blind faith in the unseen actually require you to dismiss all previous evidence-supported faith in the seen? As I’ve said before, looking at what we’ve done in the short time we’ve been, how can you even imagine what we are capable of given a mere 5 or 10 million years?
There’s no miracle to it. The plants don’t disintegrate; once the extrememly volatile methane has quickly burned off the moist, green plant does not provide fuel for the fire. Watch this short video: http://youtu.be/c8yDWkwu5aI?t=10s
Wow! If you do it right, you can learn something new every day. Thank you!
There are two things an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent god cannot experience: Progress and Loss.
What makes you think mankind will last 5 or 10 million years? As far as I can tell from scientific websites, we’ve been around about 200,000-250,000 years now, and, between nuclear weapons and climate change we’ve severely threatened our own existence for the next few centuries.
So same question as with the previous post, but it is posed to you as you are today, and not a human in the distant future: how can you understand something that is technically beyond the limits of your knowledge and senses well enough to judge it?
Unless he incarnates as a human being, and then he can experience anything we can.
Not knowing something is a piss-poor excuse not to try to find out, and limiting us to only judging that which we have a complete understanding of is asking far too much. I have the right to judge according to my own standards, and hopefully the wisdom to adjust my thinking when new evidence presents itself. “You don’t know me-you can’t judge me!” is something you expect to hear from a spoiled teenager throwing a tantrum, not a supposedly superior god.