I love my kids very much. If I stepped in and rescued them from the consequences of their inevitable dumbass choices they would never grow up to be adults. As they learn to be responsible adults they may come to me and say “Gee Dad, you were right but I couldn’t see it at the time” Then we will love each other as peers as well as parent and child, rather than parent and constantly dependent child.
As is your right. I recognize my knowledge is incomplete and try to respect the rights of others to discover the truth in their own way. What annoys me are folks like hard line athesits or religious zealots who assume the things they presume to be true must indeed to be the absolute truth. {no reflection on our exchange, just a little venting}
I would say Gandhi and Martin Luther King qualify. I’ll bet we could find others.
The physical world, of course, has physical limitations. As animals, we pursue food, sex, play, and rest, and we don’t always get what we want. But as gods, we pursue fulfillment, and wherever we go, there we are.
I couldn’t tell you when it happened but I remember years ago coming to that realization and what an epiphany it was. I was reading the section in the NT when Jesus was talking about the prayers of the pharisees. They do it for attention and to be seen by others, so thats what they get and thats all.
So much of what we treasure remains in our subconscious that a lot of people don’t even acknowledge what they treasure.
Instincts (and in some cases behaviors) don’t apply to what I’m trying to say and I shouldn’t have included them. I want to be clear that I’m not talking about genetic factors or reproduction.
Honestly, I think going on about gods is pretty much a red herring in a discussion of spirituality in general. Some people have a spiritual sense that does not include gods; some people with gods have a spiritual sense that does not include them specially, as well. (And I have nothing to say about omni-whatever gods, since none of mine are, even if I considered them relevant to the discussion.)
Ah yes I anticipated this. My kids know I’m here but don’t consider me omnipotent. {the ungrateful shits}
If God did make us aware of an omnipotent and omniscient existance, how could you call anything we did after that, free will. It is the sruggle with faith, truth, love, and the discovery of the nature of God {and our own nature for that matter} that helps us grow to be spritual adults rather than dependent children.
Lilairen has suggested this may be a bit of a hijack which is not my intention.
I don’t need a rule that says everytime I have 1 apple and place another apple next to it, I’ll have two apples. I can use experience to say that this will happen everytime. If I do it a gazillion times and it always comes out two then I’m pretty much assured that that the next time it will still come out two. Have you ever had two apples magically become three apples? Do you constantly check the money in your pockets to see if that 10 dollar bill suddenly turned into a 20?
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Again, you value things that you can see — like measurements. So your viewpoints are to be expected. But given the brain’s proclivity for lateral inhibition, it turns out that what you really are trusting is what you don’t see.
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Well, I’m pretty trusting that the spiritual hammer you just hung on the wall isn’t going to fall off and bonk me on the head, so yeah, I’d agree to this.
Some men end up in straight jackets in the looney bin for seeing them, too.
Are you aware of this fact? Most religions don’t try to hide the fact that he is omnipotent and omniscient. Most proclaim it as the gospel. If god exists as you say he does, then we don’t have free will. Thus my arguments are foreordained. We are nothing more than puppets to dance to the maker’s tune.
This thread reminds me of something Saul Bellow said in his nobel lecture (i know i’ve been evoking this lecture a lot lately but it is a damn fine piece of work).
“The essence of our real condition, the complexity, the confusion, the pain of it is shown to us in glimpses, in what Proust and Tolstoy thought of as “true impressions”. This essence reveals, and then conceals itself. When it goes away it leaves us again in doubt. But we never seem to lose our connection with the depths from which these glimpses come. The sense of our real powers, powers we seem to derive from the universe itself, also comes and goes. We are reluctant to talk about this because there is nothing we can prove, because our language is inadequate and because few people are willing to risk talking about it. They would have to say, “There is a spirit” and that is taboo. So almost everyone keeps quiet about it, although almost everyone is aware of it.”
There is an important difference between induction and deduction. Important philosophically, rhetorically, and logically, at any rate, though not necessarily so in daily life.
