The Lex Talionis, (“an eye for a eye”), was an effort to impose more just responses to injuries. It required that the punishment for inflicting harm not be excessive. Earlier forms of response, pure revenge, led to Lamech’s statement in Genesis 4, that he had slain a man for wounding him and that if Cain was avenged seven times, he would be avenged seventy-seven times.
By setting forth a proportionate response to violence, the commands in Exodus and Deuteronomy were setting boundaries to reduce violence and feuds.
That’s just fairly historical revision by the defenders of religion. The religious have historically assumed that they were right and that the facts would back them up; it was when science came along and started disproving all their claims that it became “unreasonable” to expect evidence from religion.
And religion isn’t “about worship”; religions have all sorts of components that don’t involve worship, and some don’t involve worshiping anything. Religion is about making claims about the world that are based on faith; “there is a god who wants to be worshiped” is just one such claim. Religion does try to do many of the same things as science; science just does it much better.
That’s good information. But most Christians I know do not know that. So they use it to wiggle out of Turn the other cheek. Again, I’m from a small southern town originally, so that may have something to do with my viewpoint and my bias. “It says right there in the Bible, by God, an eye for an eye!” Yeah, but it also says, turn the other cheek. So which is it? When 911 happened, do you know how many Christians I heard say that they should make a parking lot out of the entire Middle East? Under the banner of “And eye for an eye!” It seems to me for all the good that’s been done in the literal interpretation of the Bible, more damage has been carried out. Let’s not forget about those Middle Ages.
"Jacobo Grinberg, in 1993, at the University of Mexico, was trying to demonstrate quantum nonlocality for two correlated brains. Two people meditate together with the intention of direct (signalless, nonlocal) communication. After twenty minutes, they are separated (while still continuing their unity intention), placed in individual Faraday cages (electromagnetically impervious chambers), and each brain is wired up to an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine. One subject is shown a series of light flashes producing in his or her brain an electrical activity that is recorded in the EEG machine from which an “evoked potential” is extracted with the help of a computer upon subtracting the brain noise. The evoked potential is somehow found to be transferred to the other subject’s brain onto his or her EEG that gives (upon subtraction of noise) a transferred potential (similar to the evoked potential in phase and strength). Control subjects (those who do not meditate together or are unable to hold the intention for signal-less communication during the duration of the experiment) do not show any transferred potential.
The experiment demonstrates the nonlocality of brain responses to be sure, but something even more important–nonlocality of quantum consciousness. How else to explain how the forced choice of the evoked response in one subject’s brain can lead to the free choice of an (almost) identical response in the correlated partner’s brain? As stated above, the experiment, since then has been replicated twice. First, by the London neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick in 1998. And again by the Bastyr university researcher Leana Standish and her collaborators in 2004.
The conclusion of these experiments is radical. Quantum consciousness, the precipitator of the downward causation of choice from quantum possibilities is what esoteric spiritual traditions call God. We have rediscovered God within science. More over we have a new integrative paradigm of science, based not on the primacy of matter as the old science, but on the primacy of consciousness. Consciousness is the ground of all being which we now can recognize as what the spiritual traditions call Godhead
Right, sorry. A different interview with Dr. Goswami, I should have copied the link. I searched for it by typing in Peter Fenwick nonlocal consciousness. I believe. I wanted to see the data. Marley was right, Dr. Goswami was not conducting the experiments but instead was interpretting. But these people were conducting experiments. Leana Standish, 2004, Peter Fenwick, 1998, Jacobo Grinberg, 1993.