by FireNBandits 41 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
Hi Bernadette
I think my responses make my position quite clear. Evolution is fact, science. God is a belief, and a mystical experience. That's not science, except insofar as neuorology is mapping the brain, discovering which parts of the brain are responsible for various mystical experiences. Might there be more to it than simply neurochemistry? Perhaps...but that's faith, not science.
Martin
FireN
Bring on the EVIDENCE that your Great and Powerful Oz answers prayers!
Why isn't your god still rasing people from the dead and performing miracles? Is he too old to "get it up" supernaturally speaking? What's his prob, man? What's his prob? "Perhaps he is away and had to use the privy."
Silly...don't you know ? HE's an absentee landlord. [rimshot...!]
I think my responses make my position quite clear. Evolution is fact, science. God is a belief, and a mystical experience. That's not science, except insofar as neuorology is mapping the brain, discovering which parts of the brain are responsible for various mystical experiences. Might there be more to it than simply neurochemistry? Perhaps...but that's faith, not science.
Martin I understand what you are saying and what you have said.
My question is to do with how God was involved in evolution. Do you leave that aspect open because at present it isn't/can't be understood ? Do you have an inkling of it mystically?
bernadette
You wascally Wabbit! When my Uncle Frank and I snapped out of fundyism, that was our first thought. "Maybe God just created the universe, set it on autopilot, and went off to do other stuff." Man we thought we were really Original Thinkers by golly. It wasn't long until we discovered Deism and that "there's nothing new under the sun" at least religiously. I get a bang out of showing fundies that our floundering fathers were Deists for the most part, not Bible believers. Their eyes blink, the data is rejected, and they continue on spewing the same nonsense. Martin
Hi Bernadette. I love your name by the way. It reminds me of Bernadette Peters. What a cutie. Anyway, you wrote: "My question is to do with how God was involved in evolution. Do you leave that aspect open because at present it isn't/can't be understood ? Do you have an inkling of it mystically?"
I leave all sorts of questions open. The more I come to understand this relativistic quantum universe the more doubt enters my mind concerning such things as the Cartesian Split, Aristotelian logic, and even basic epistemology. Relativity and quantum
mechanics...especially some of the new advances in String Theory...have imbued the cosmos with a sense of mystery again. Now, how was God involved in evolution? What I am about to write has nothing at all in it that is scientific in nature, but neither is it faith in some doctrine or dogma that someone laid on me and said "Believe this or burn in hell." It's based on my own intuitive/mystical experiences during several decades of intense and regular meditation.
The supreme reality is not the universe. Pantheists are mistaken. The universe is magnificent, mysterious, awe-inspiring, and downright beautiful. Yet it's also violent, uncaring, and life can only arise from death. For you and I to live SOMETHING ELSE HAS TO DIE. That's how the universe is made. The supreme reality of which I have a subjective experience of is absolute Love, the very principle and power of love. Selfless love. It isn't the universe nor did It create the universe. The universe has always been and always will be. String theory has made that idea not only intellectually respectable once again, but has added new twists such as an infinite number of eternal universes. Parallel universes.
God is God, the universe or universe are the universe or universes. Yes, it's classic Dualism. In traditional Gnostic thought, the god that fashioned this universe is called, in Greek, the "demiourgos" or "demiurge. The half-maker or Artisan. That god merely gave form to already existing matter. Most modern Gnostics don't literalize the demiurge, but understand the demiurge as a personification of the forces of nature which are good and evil, light and darkness, beauty and stark ugliness, birth and death, kind and cruel, etc. The demiurge is a symbolic being, representing Nature. Gnostics love the natural world as much as anyone...myself probably more than most...but we do not venerate it as divine or semi-divine. It isn't God. Some Gnostics see the universe as a distant emanation of an emanation of an emanation of an emanation from the final and supreme reality--God for want of a better term--but would still be very careful not to confuse the universe with God. (If you meet someone who claims to be "Gnostic" but they're a pantheist, they're not a "Gnostic" in the historical/classic sense. "Gnostic" has become an umbrella term under which mysticism of all kinds are placed. The word has become almost useless because it's lost it's original usage.)
So, the forces of nature operating in "matter" have no beginning, nor does matter itself have a beginning. God...and I REALLY don't like the word God due to it's asinine anthropomorphic associations...is not it's originator, not it's creator or sustainer or any of that. God is "beyond" nature yet is discoverable as the ground of our own sentient consciousness. (Not all conscious entities are sentient; a frog is conscious but lacks sentience: self-awareness and the ability to reflect and reason) Gnosis is a personal experience not an item of faith. Most Christians believe whatever they're told to believe by the church they grew up in or converted to. Gnosis dares us, challenges us, to turn within and "have faith" only in our OWN inner Light. Not someone else's words and testimony. Most religious people are herd mentality types who find safety in numbers, in groupthink. A genuine Gnostic stands alone. We champion "Doubting Thomas" whereas the Book of John rebukes Thomas for his "show me" attitude and pronounces as blest those who "do not see and yet believe." To a Gnostic, that's being infantile. We want to EXPERIENCE the Truth DIRECTLY for OURSELVES. We're spiritual skeptics.
I sure hope that answered your question Bernadette. If not, I'll try again. Martin
Theistic evolution is the idea it happened exactly like science says it did, but god 'blew on the dice' of chance and steered things to its intended goal. At least that's my understanding of the definition.
I'm not one myself, but I often wonder why Creationists bother with all the bronze-age goatherd ideas about how things happened. Logically speaking, god could make the world any damn way it wanted, and if the evidence says evolution, then the goatherd is obviously mistaken.
Of course I know why many do cling to the literalistic stuff. If you make everything that simple, obvious, and black and white, it's really easy to cling to a silly Creation belief as if you insist that is right, you can also insist the moral code and beliefs you take from the same text are right.
It's silly; as has been pointed out, using the fruits of science most of the day, then saying it's wrong if the goatherd says something different. But it is easy and satisfying. Theological heroin.
As for such ideas belonging in school; in a religous education class where various beliefs re being compared, fine. How on earth are you going to teach it in a science class? What facts can you impart? How can you do a practical experiment (or lab work I think Americans call it)?
The whole ID movement is a trojan horse for largely Christian interference with science curriculums, as Creationtism in science class is now a hard sell even in Chickenshit Falls, Bulah County, Kentuky. Check you 'The Wedge' on Wikipedia.
Hi Abaddon. I try hard to keep my personal mystical experiences seperate from science because my personal mystical experiences aren't scientific. I have friends who have graduate degrees but who are also fundies and rabid defenders of ID. Once I understood what a meme is, the behavior made more sense, but it's still a shock to find intelligent educated people who do not understand what the scientific method is, and who can argue that this cosmos displays intelligent design. If anything it displays a blundering blind stupidity. Martin
FireNBandits
Your post 202 was a keeper
I have to ask, where did your name come from?
thanks Martin for answering my question.
The supreme reality of which I have a subjective experience of is absolute Love, the very principle and power of love. Selfless love.
that's a beautiful expression of your experience of divine reality.
bernadette
Thanks, Starting Over.
Probably thirty years ago I was reading a copy of The Mother Earth News, and that particular issue had a short folksy mini-comic inside. The comic was written from the point of view of two German Shepherd dogs owned by the farmers. The chickens and rooster got loose and the dogs were running around shouting "Fire and bandits!" in dog-speak. So, whenever I hear a dog bark I think,"Fire and bandits!" Yeah, it's kinda anticlimactic.
Martin
