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  • EADD Moderators: Pissed_and_messed | Shinji Ikari

EADD Theology Megathread - Book II - Exodus

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Actually, I heard a preach on the radio about unity in the body of Christ. The preacher recounted how a local church had a sign outside saying something like ' We are a pentacostal/charismatic, word of faith believing, post millenarian, conservative church... Welcome'

Apparently, there were 6 people in the service.

Jesus came so there could be a relationship...not moulds and labels imo. If we are under Grace we are free from laws and set ways of doing things...But still some people like structure in a church and might feel drawn to a Protestant or Catholic community. But they don't need to be shackled to it though. In fact God might call them elsewhere.

Jesus said that the kind of worship that is acceptable to God is worship that is done 'in Spirit and Truth'.* and prayed we 'may be one'**

By the way I'm not liberal lol... I don't think that the Grace of God gives us free reign to just do just what we like.. I kinda used to and I was wrong on reflection. Grace draws us into unity with God and the body. Further, His Spirit teaches, and counsels us and enables us 'not to be conformed to the pattern of the world but to be transformed by the renewal of our minds'*** To be set apart...that doesn't mean we are some special, perfect beings...'He saved a wretch like me'..but He saved me/us to restore me/us to perfection not to leave us in whatever state we came to Him in.

Ultimately the Master Plan is for His kingdom to come in and among us and His will be to be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.

*John 4:24

**John 17:22

*** Romans 12:2
 
Actually, I heard a preach on the radio about unity in the body of Christ. The preacher recounted how a local church had a sign outside saying something like ' We are a pentacostal/charismatic, word of faith believing, post millenarian, conservative church... Welcome'

Apparently, there were 6 people in the service.

Jesus came so there could be a relationship...not moulds and labels imo. If we are under Grace we are free from laws and set ways of doing things...But still some people like structure in a church and might feel drawn to a Protestant or Catholic community to be a part of they don't need to be shackled to it though. In fact God might call them elsewhere.

Jesus said that the kind of worship that is acceptable to God is worship that is done 'in Spirit and Truth'.* and that we 'may be one'**

By the way I'm not liberal lol... I don't think that the Grace of God gives us free reign to just do what we like... I kinda used to and I was wrong on reflection. Grace draws us into unity with God and the body and His Spirit teaches, and counsels us and enables us 'not to be conformed to the pattern of the world but to be transformed by the renewal of our minds'*** To be set apart...that doesn't mean we are some special, perfect beings...'He saved a wretch like me'....but He saved me/us to restore me/us to perfection.

*John 4:24

**John 17:22

*** Romans 12:2
 
Vurtual said:
That's a good attitude - it sounds quite similar to quakers; the first paragraph stills sounds too exclusive for me - not much at all has been made clear to me by the bible if i have to include all books, as i've said before (not to mention all the apocryphal gospels i've got no reason to not consider). I prefer the way (some) quakers think about the bible (though i might substitute god with some other metaphor):

http://www.aboutquakers.org.uk/
Click to expand...

Without the Holy Spirit the Bible would prove frustrating. I don't know where you are at in terms of your relationship with the Spirit???

I know for me I used to watch my Mum devouring it like a banquet but couldn't get a morsel out it before I came to Christ in earnest.
 
NightsEpiphany said:
Without the Holy Spirit the Bible would prove frustrating. I don't know where you are at in terms of your relationship with the Spirit???

I know for me I used to watch my Mum devouring it like a banquet but couldn't get a morsel out it before I came to Christ in earnest.
Click to expand...

Your 'Spirit' may not be my spirit, which i think of literally as breath/life - but this is no less 'spiritual' to me, when i consider all life to be a unified interconnected creative whole born from a single cell. A lot of my 'spirituality' is interwoven with science - though leaning to the less reductionist stuff (eg complexity, emergence and quantum physics; fritjof capra's new book 'Systems View of Life' is a good overview - i think this stuff may be the next paradigm shift in science, and could end up with a science that isn't as inherently antagonistic to spirituality (but what do i know)).

I don't find the bible frustrating because i don't need it in a religious way, having never been a christian (outside of school assembly) - i find it interesting as a (semi-)historical document and as i'm interested in the history of religion, and in spirituality itself in general. Coming from this angle, i can pick and choose exactly what i want to keep (i have read it all years ago (though i was looking for aliens really)). The bits i listed above would be fine by me as a religion; the rest of the bible not so much (there's a few isolated good bits). This is the same in nearly every religious text i've come across - a kernel of reall good stuff; often the exact same stuff - there's not much argument between the heart of the gospels, the baghavad gita, pali canon, the verses of the qu'ran and stoic philosophy really, so who am i to judge any of them as wrong on the word of the others? I'm certainly not going to take the word of a preist of any sort to help me choose - i'll use my own 'god'-given reason to decide what to keep from wherever i want to look.

Once more than one person is involved, i think the ethical stuff (eg love, compassion, social justice) is the most important part of a religion and the rest is secondary or follows from it - i guess this makes me closer to a buddhist (though my reading of christ is about the same, as you've seen). As for my own spiritual path, i try not to think about it really - just try to be nice and not so selfish if i can (and probably fail).

(i like a bit of blake too - as much for his proto-anarchism as anything)
 
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Vurtual said:
Your 'Spirit' may not be my spirit, which i think of literally as breath/life - but this is no less 'spiritual' to me, when i consider all life to be a unified interconnected creative whole born from a single cell. A lot of my 'spirituality' is interwoven with science - though leaning to the less reductionist stuff (eg complexity, emergence and quantum physics; fritjof capra's new book 'Systems View of Life' is a good overview - i think this stuff may be the next paradigm shift in science, and could end up with a science that isn't as inherently antagonistic to spirituality (but what do i know)).

I don't find the bible frustrating because i don't need it in a religious way, having never been a christian (outside of school assembly) - i find it interesting as a (semi-)historical document and as i'm interested in the history of religion, and in spirituality itself in general. Coming from this angle, i can pick and choose exactly what i want to keep (i have read it all years ago (though i was looking for aliens really)). The bits i listed above would be fine by me as a religion; the rest of the bible not so much (there's a few isolated good bits). This is the same in nearly every religious text i've come across - a kernel of reall good stuff; often the exact same stuff - there's not much argument between the heart of the gospels, the baghavad gita, pali canon, the verses of the qu'ran and stoic philosophy really, so who am i to judge any of them as wrong on the word of the others? I'm certainly not going to take the word of a preist of any sort to help me choose - i'll use my own 'god'-given reason to decide what to keep from wherever i want to look.

Once more than one person is involved, i think the ethical stuff (eg love, compassion, social justice) is the most important part of a religion and the rest is secondary or follows from it - i guess this makes me closer to a buddhist (though my reading of christ is about the same, as you've seen). As for my own spiritual path, i try not to think about it really - just try to be nice and not so selfish if i can (and probably fail).

(i like a bit of blake too - as much for his proto-anarchism as anything)
Click to expand...

I read the Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra..oh about 19 years ago when I was studying religion at Uni. It really interested me at the time.. Like you i'd concluded that all religions were one. I don't see it that way now. Theres no cross, and no Christ in Buddhism/Hinduism/Taoism/anyotherisms. I loved studying them, particularly Hinduism but something kept pulling me towards Christ. I now see that something as a someone.. as the Holy Spirit who is described as a Person in the bible*..a Councillor (advocate) and teacher although He can be breath. He can be anything.He's one of the persons of the Trinity.. in my view and according to mainstream Christianity.


* John 14:16 http://biblehub.com/john/14-16.htm
 
Fair enough. It's not for me though - the exclusivity of the religion doesn't really work for me (and seems so arbitrary within the sweep of religious or human history) - once any religion starts getting exclusive on me, and telling me that certain people aren't 'right' (even though they're saying the same stuff in a different way), that's when i leave the church/temple.

If you're still interested, fritjof capra's book 'Web of life' from the 90s is really good 'hippy-science' book (but good science), it's as much about biology as physics; loads about complexity, fractals, chaos theory, emergence and all that. It's more of a 'pop science' easy read than the new one i linked above (which is pretty much a textbook (maybe showing how the ideas are getting more mainstream)).
 
Vurtual said:
Fair enough. It's not for me though - the exclusivity of the religion doesn't really work for me (and seems so arbitrary within the sweep of religious or human history) - once any religion starts getting exclusive on me, and telling me that certain people aren't 'right' (even though they're saying the same stuff in a different way), that's when i leave the church/temple.

If you're still interested, fritjof capra's book 'Web of life' from the 90s is really good 'hippy-science' book (but good science), it's as much about biology as physics; loads about complexity, fractals, chaos theory, emergence and all that. It's more of a 'pop science' easy read than the new one i linked above (which is pretty much a textbook (maybe showing how the ideas are getting more mainstream)).
Click to expand...

Well from one perspective you could say since the fall from Grace and Eden where humans were perfect and there was no death...none of us are 'right' until we are restored..by Life itself.

We are not meant to die. In fact some fields, I've read somewhere ( sorry cant be more specific on details and where I read it), can't work out why we die.. why a cell dies.

I'll have to try to google that for more details.
 
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We die to make room for the next generation. If all living things lived forever, the point would come where all the spare carbon atoms on Earth would be part of some living thing. And there would be no food for them.

If you don't break your old Lego models up, you run out of bricks .....
 
I think cell death is programmed in to a degree; maybe it's an adaptation against mutations which creep into dna with out a reset of a rebirth. As i remember, they managed to muck about with nematode worms to make them live half as long again (still not much) by messing with the telomere on the end of the dna which they think is involved with programmed cell death. I think a living system like a cell or organism is a totally dynamic system far from equilibrium, and that nature implies a certain time before the chaos kicks in and it conks out (vaguely remembered from capra's book)

My own personal cosmology is a lot more accepting of death and cycles. Entropy is a law of the universe, but so is the spontaneous creation of novelty (life/evolution/self-organised systems) in the right circumstances - novelty or new information is created locally, so entropy isn't broken globally, but it's enough for all this.

If you follow einstein's idea and consider everything there is/could be to be ultimately one single thing outside of time (which you could call god), then the apparent linear movement of a thing called 'present' through moments which are then lost forever becomes meaningless (the idea of a universal present was disproved by relativity anyway) - if everything that has happened or will/could happen is just one big interconnected thing, nothing is lost and everything is 'eternal' (compared to our time-embedded viewpoint at least). In this sense, maybe when you die (or plus four), you just lose the anchor that keeps you in the illusion of a present and instead just vaguely inhabit all the moments you were ever in (or could have been in) forever - plus though direct physical connection, all other people's moments/other particles too. Added together, by superposition, all the moments/particles over all time cancel out and become the 'nothing' of nirvana (and maybe this is the one 'soul' we all share - the ground of being, brahman as the hindus would call it). This waffle is what i intuited on drugs, but it'll do for me (for now).
 
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BecomingJulie said:
We die to make room for the next generation. If all living things lived forever, the point would come where all the spare carbon atoms on Earth would be part of some living thing. And there would be no food for them.

If you don't break your old Lego models up, you run out of bricks .....
Click to expand...


Different rules in Eden though remember. Adam and Eve 'walked with God'...were in relationship with the Creator; party potentially to space travel to far off places..minute places...phwerrrr.. any thing is possible for God.

More bricks than we could ever play with. I'd be busy playing with time travel for a few eons anyway.
 
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Vurtual said:
I think cell death is programmed in to a degree; maybe it's an adaptation against mutations which creep into dna with out a reset of a rebirth. As i remember, they managed to muck about with nematode worms to make them live half as long again (still not much) by messing with the telomere on the end of the dna which they think is involved with programmed cell death. I think a living system like a cell or organism is a totally dynamic system far from equilibrium, and that nature implies a certain time before the chaos kicks in and it conks out (vaguely remembered from capra's book)

My own personal cosmology is a lot more accepting of death and cycles. Entropy is a law of the universe, but so is the spontaneous creation of novelty (life/evolution/self-organised systems) in the right circumstances - novelty or new information is created locally, so entropy isn't broken globally, but it's enough for all this.

If you follow einstein's idea and consider everything there is/could be to be ultimately one single thing outside of time (which you could call god), then the apparent linear movement of a thing called 'present' through moments which are then lost forever becomes meaningless (the idea of a universal present was disproved by relativity anyway) - if everything that has happened or will/could happen is just one big interconnected thing, nothing is lost and everything is 'eternal' (compared to our time-embedded viewpoint at least). In this sense, maybe when you die (or plus four), you just lose the anchor that keeps you in the illusion of a present and instead just vaguely inhabit all the moments you were ever in (or could have been in) forever - plus though direct physical connection, all other people's moments/other particles too. Added together, by superposition, all the moments/particles over all time cancel out and become the 'nothing' of nirvana (and maybe this is the one 'soul' we all share - the ground of being, brahman as the hindus would call it). This waffle is what i intuited on drugs, but it'll do for me (for now).
Click to expand...

No its not waffelish.. Virtual i'd like to read it, and digest it, when I can keep my eyes open though in order to respond properly.




Night
 
Vurtual said:
I think cell death is programmed in to a degree; maybe it's an adaptation against mutations which creep into dna with out a reset of a rebirth. As i remember, they managed to muck about with nematode worms to make them live half as long again (still not much) by messing with the telomere on the end of the dna which they think is involved with programmed cell death. I think a living system like a cell or organism is a totally dynamic system far from equilibrium, and that nature implies a certain time before the chaos kicks in and it conks out (vaguely remembered from capra's book)

My own personal cosmology is a lot more accepting of death and cycles. Entropy is a law of the universe, but so is the spontaneous creation of novelty (life/evolution/self-organised systems) in the right circumstances - novelty or new information is created locally, so entropy isn't broken globally, but it's enough for all this.

If you follow einstein's idea and consider everything there is/could be to be ultimately one single thing outside of time (which you could call god), then the apparent linear movement of a thing called 'present' through moments which are then lost forever becomes meaningless (the idea of a universal present was disproved by relativity anyway) - if everything that has happened or will/could happen is just one big interconnected thing, nothing is lost and everything is 'eternal' (compared to our time-embedded viewpoint at least). In this sense, maybe when you die (or plus four), you just lose the anchor that keeps you in the illusion of a present and instead just vaguely inhabit all the moments you were ever in (or could have been in) forever - plus though direct physical connection, all other people's moments/other particles too. Added together, by superposition, all the moments/particles over all time cancel out and become the 'nothing' of nirvana (and maybe this is the one 'soul' we all share - the ground of being, brahman as the hindus would call it). This waffle is what i intuited on drugs, but it'll do for me (for now).
Click to expand...

This aligns with my hopeful thinking mostly. I assume with no evidence that a system like this SEEMS to make sense if logically sorted (logically to me?) I think its akin to the universe being consciousness and the physical is projected in order to have a medium to experience itself. Like a self aware AI testing it's limits and questioning what it is. It seems logical to fragment its consciousness and run simultaneous programs all over in order to exist, grow, learn, expand etc. I also think it would be entirely wasteful for such a system to extinguish its knowledge/wisdom after a life time as a human on earth, say. It would make more sense to reincorporate it and maybe rebirth it for continual evolution across life times.

Now this is just a guess, maybe wishful thinking! If I die and find out woo, if I die and that's it, I will never really know or be disappointed I suppose!
 
BecomingJulie said:
We die to make room for the next generation. If all living things lived forever, the point would come where all the spare carbon atoms on Earth would be part of some living thing. And there would be no food for them.

If you don't break your old Lego models up, you run out of bricks .....
Click to expand...

I always find your posts to be very wise. We cannot live forever but I think it's more magical how all of living creation supports one another----good ol' photosynthesis. I believe that we're all connected.

Can I ask a question?

This is the theo thread, right? Why do we only seem to debate Christianity n thus go around in circles?

I propose a question to the masses n a good ol' thriving debate.

"Differentiate, including evidence and / examplars, the different between faith n religion."

I asked this question on Facebook when I used to (bore) try to infuse people with philisophical debates. I received one answer to which I found interesting n thus will share here

We'll call her Jenny.

Jenny replied "I believe that supporters of a football team can be classed as a religion in that they show up to support their team religiously; they mosre often than not, give their loyalty, their committtment n they truly believe in them. Faith is when an individual or group of individuals follow a specific belief system without any necessary evidence----they keep an open mind, so to speak."

Now, when I began this debate I never expected an answer like this at all n was fascinated.

Unfortunately Jenny n I had a row, blocked one another over something insignificant, n thus could no longer continue this discussion.

Over to you all. Let's discuss!

Evey
 
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In my experience, the people who (in this context) make the distinction between 'faith' and 'religion' are generally the ones who want to pick and choose the bits of religion which validate their view of the world or appeal to their vanity and / or sense of fear and inadequacy, and ignore the parts which are of less appeal to them. Or the ones who don't bother actually analysing the source texts of their chosen 'faith' in the first place.

The word 'spirituality' has been sullied in this fashion as well.

Faith was also a beautiful girl at our college. She was really something.
 
Sammy G said:
In my experience, the people who make the distinction between 'faith' and 'religion' are generally the ones who want to pick and choose the bits of religion which validate their view of the world or appeal to their vanity and / or sense of fear and inadequacy, and ignore the parts which are of less appeal to them.

The word 'spirituality' has been sullied in this fashion as well.
Click to expand...

Interesting viewpoint, Sammy G. :D Any responses?

Evey
 
Vurtual said:
sometimes you seem to imply that there's a general truth of christianity including the whole bible that's easily accessed online, but there are various different interpretations around that are quite divergent (catholic, protestant, orthodox and their many daughters). Your tendency to assume every bit of the bible has truth and twisting to make them fit sounds like some evangelical people i've met (one of who is a friend (we talk about religion a lot)); i really think focusing on the love your enemy/turn the other cheek/do unto others/cast the first stone/beatitudes stuff that jesus said makes the whole rest of the bible redundant, or just important as backstory; i think this type of christianity (if it would still be that) would be better, logically, morally and spiritually
Click to expand...


Erm, in all the responses I gave beliefs accepted by major church denominations and that are coextensive with most recognised Christian expositions. Though there are a lot of differences, the fundamentals discussed are - to my knowledge - similar in most prominent denominations.
 
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