Seeing is believeing

[Ted]

Capt. :-6

It is interesting that you should use the word mind. That is precisely what quantum theorists are now looking into and are calling even that a mytery.

Shalom

Ted :-6

[capt_buzzard]

Read it yourself, ''All in the Mind, A Farewell to God'' by Ludovic Kennedy published by Hodder & Stoughton.

A Good read

[Ted]

Capt. :-6

Mr. Kennedy is entitled to his opinion just as every other human being is.

You have ignored my question concerning the message of Yeshua.

How am I to ignore the personal experiences that I have had. Ah! please don't try to explain my experiences since neither you nor Kennedy have had my experiences. How can anyone tell me what I have experienced. They are not me. They are not the essence of me.

Anyway science cannot, as they now realize, explain "mind". If Kennedy thinks he can he must be away ahead of the scientists who are studying the phenomena of mind.

As you well know I refuse to get into a discussion of the reality of the Divine because it is an endless circle and a total waste of time. Many folks in the world believe in the reality of the Divine and some don't. It has always been thus and always will be.

No matter. We must each walk our own path through this mortal life. That in itself is interesting. The very fact of "existence" eludes science. But now we have our own modern creation story and that is evolution. Now we can read Genesis for what it is; midrashic literature containing some very ancient but valuable wisdom. It would be a shame to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Shalom

Ted :-6

[Ted]

Thinking about the title of this thread is interesting. We have never seen; the wind, quarks, electrons, love, hate, X-rays, the so called dark matter in space, the mind etc and yet we admit to believing in them. We've never seen "strings" as in string theory but many are beginning to accept their realit. One scientist I know recently said to me that they still don't know what an electron is.

Quantum theory has shown that many unusual and unbelievable things happen in this world such as the interreationship between atoms, light as both wave and particle depending on the circumstances, the fact that the very fact of observation in an experiment can alter its outcome. Some of these things are unbelievable but we are coming to believe in them.

We are now even beginning to question reality itself.

One thing is for sure. The more we learn the greater we realize is our ignorance in terms of almost everything. The more we learn the more we realize how little we really know.

Shalom

Ted :-6

[nvalleyvee]

Ted wrote: Capt. :-6

Mr. Kennedy is entitled to his opinion just as every other human being is.

You have ignored my question concerning the message of Yeshua.

How am I to ignore the personal experiences that I have had. Ah! please don't try to explain my experiences since neither you nor Kennedy have had my experiences. How can anyone tell me what I have experienced. They are not me. They are not the essence of me.

Anyway science cannot, as they now realize, explain "mind". If Kennedy thinks he can he must be away ahead of the scientists who are studying the phenomena of mind.

As you well know I refuse to get into a discussion of the reality of the Divine because it is an endless circle and a total waste of time. Many folks in the world believe in the reality of the Divine and some don't. It has always been thus and always will be.

No matter. We must each walk our own path through this mortal life. That in itself is interesting. The very fact of "existence" eludes science. But now we have our own modern creation story and that is evolution. Now we can read Genesis for what it is; midrashic literature containing some very ancient but valuable wisdom. It would be a shame to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Shalom

Ted :-6


Ted - this reminds me of a debate we had in philosophy class in college - 3 decades ago - my opinion was that the mind is a course in physics - Newton's Laws. I believed at the time - and still do - that the mind is energy in its natural way of being and since energy cannot be destroyed - but is converted to another form or place - then heaven - nirvana - grace - is met on a plane that is energy. All the spiritual leaders and mankind itself will look down at the Earth's wars over religion and laugh. I think they laugh now. I do not see any religion - past or present - as winning the battle of not being a rotting corpse in the ground. We could be an energy source in thousands of years - our physical bodies.

I am saying existence is the physical part of living - the mind is the spiritual. Our minds - ie brains - are energy. So what do you think Ted? I'd be interested.

[nvalleyvee]

PS - that wasn't a challenge - just an I'd be really interested in your opinion.

[capt_buzzard]

I just can't swollow it anymore Ted. Unless you or someone else can prove otherwise,that all this 'Religious' God believing and God fearing stuff is true. Well I'll respect you in what you believe in.

[Accountable]

:yh_angel I find it interesting that so many people get so wrapped up in this subject, especially when you only agree on the origin not the result.

It doesn't matter. If you believe that when you die, that's the end, and obey the law to avoid punishment, fine. If you're right, it doesn't matter what all the believers do. If you're wrong, you've still behaved basically the same as 80% of the believers (except for that pesky hypocrisy thing I won't mention). So you will likely find the same fate as that 80%.

The same goes for the creationism/evolution argument. Why does it matter? If you believe God exists, then He created the laws of nature. If the theory of evolution is true, then it would follow those laws. How does that contradict creationism. Maybe - just maybe - God created man from the soil of the earth, starting with a single molecule and building from there using His own laws of nature.

How does it affect the big picture one way or the other?

.

[Ted]

nvalleyvee :-6

That the mind may be the spiritual is quite possible. I won't disagree with that. Just a point about Newton. With the advent of quantum theory Newton's theories are being called into question in a very serious way because they do not hold in the quantum world.

It is a most interesting study.

Shalom

Ted :-6

[Ted]

Capt. :-6

I have no problem with that. As I said, we must each follow our own path.

Shalom

Ted :-6

[Ted]

acydikeen :-6

"We see, feel and experience nature around us everyday"

Exactly. I have no agrument with that whatsoever.

There are millions who feel and experience the Divine everyday. Just because we can't see it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Many, like the apostle Paul and Mohammed as well as thousands throughout the millennia have also had mystical experiences in which they have encounted the Divine as well.

It is interesting that even pre-historic man had a belief in the Divine.

Shalom

Ted :-6

[capt_buzzard]

Ted wrote: Capt. :-6



Mr. Kennedy is entitled to his opinion just as every other human being is.



You have ignored my question concerning the message of Yeshua.



How am I to ignore the personal experiences that I have had. Ah! please don't try to explain my experiences since neither you nor Kennedy have had my experiences. How can anyone tell me what I have experienced. They are not me. They are not the essence of me.



Anyway science cannot, as they now realize, explain "mind". If Kennedy thinks he can he must be away ahead of the scientists who are studying the phenomena of mind.



As you well know I refuse to get into a discussion of the reality of the Divine because it is an endless circle and a total waste of time. Many folks in the world believe in the reality of the Divine and some don't. It has always been thus and always will be.



No matter. We must each walk our own path through this mortal life. That in itself is interesting. The very fact of "existence" eludes science. But now we have our own modern creation story and that is evolution. Now we can read Genesis for what it is; midrashic literature containing some very ancient but valuable wisdom. It would be a shame to throw the baby out with the bathwater.



Shalom

Ted :-6True Ted

[Accountable]

acydikeen wrote: Prehistoric man had no belief in the "divine" YOU refer to.

They believed in what has become the "pagan" gods, they prayed for luck hunting, luck with fertility, luck with crops..

But not to the same God you worship..

What? You "feel" the divine like I can feel the wind upon my cheek, or the sunlight on my skin?

Sorry, it is NOWHERE near the same..


I'm always curious about the base of such passion against something that isn't supposed to exist. Why are you so (apparently) upset about others beliefs? What other supposedly nonexistent things bug you?

[Ted]

acydikeen :-6

God has a thousand names.

Shalom

Ted :-6

[koan]

I've been thinking about this thread for a while. I've decided to wax on so, forgive me. :p

Seeing is believing. Exactly. If someone has "seen" the proof they require, they got it and you don't. It is impossible to share what has convinced you of something with someone else. It is also impossible to not be somewhat aggrevated that someone else got proof and you didn't.

What if God is something that can never be the same to any two people. It would then require a separate set of proofs individual to what each required. That one person has not "seen" what another has does not invalidate what the seer has experienced. If the person who hasn't seen does never get the proof they are looking for may merely be that it is not suitable to who they are to have a belief in the divine the way other people "see" it (or at all).

Many feel the need to ask for proof or offer it in case the person is not recognizing what is right before their eyes or, perhaps, being too specific on what proof they require. To demand someone believes what you do because you have proof/ lack of proof for it is somewhat absurd.

If we were all meant to experience the same thing in life there would only be need of one person on the Earth.

after thought. what one person sees as the image of Christ on a grilled cheese sandwich another may see as burnt lunch.

[Accountable]

koan wrote: Many feel the need to ask for proof or offer it in case the person is not recognizing what is right before their eyes or, perhaps, being too specific on what proof they require. To demand someone believes what you do because you have proof/ lack of proof for it is somewhat absurd.




AMEN, Koan

:-2 No offense, everybody

[Ted]

koan :-6

I can agree with that. We each have our own path to walk and our own set of experiences that cannot really be described to others.

Shalom

Ted :-6

[capt_buzzard]

I have to 'See first before I believe:-2

[koan]

capt_buzzard wrote: I have to 'See first before I believe:-2


What is it you wish to see?

[capt_buzzard]

Whatever! I don't go in for unseen Gods.

[koan]

capt_buzzard wrote: Whatever! I don't go in for unseen Gods.


You are missing the point. If you don't wish to see proof you will not see it and that is fine because you don't care. If you do wish to see it, it is helpful to have an idea of what it is you are looking for.

[spot]

Nature has no necessary place in feeding me, or keeping me alive, or guaranteeing the success of those who come after me. Previous generations may have been in thrall to nature but I spurn it. I have factories which can manufacture my food and my air and my surroundings. Nature steals my resources. I shall pass from end to end of this planet sterilizing as I go, burning out all non-human life down to the microbes and wormy bits. This land is my land now, it's raw material, not a playground for lesser life forces. Nature may have demanded worship from more primitive societies but it's had its day. I've seen the future, and it is concreted over, tunnelled through, filtered clean and all labelled mine.

So much for believing in what you can see. God's not quite in the same position as Nature. The experience of people who have gone looking is that something within reality responds when you reach out. The reports tend to have large areas of overlap, in terms of what the experience is like. Why anyone would want belief, I don't know. Belief seems to me a pathway to ignorance, bigotry and death. Experience, on the other hand, is a perfectly normal part of life. Those who choose to experience what, for want of a better label, people call God, expand their horizons and their spirit. It's all quite optional. Why is it controversial?

[koan]

Actually, it's a great argument, a la Joseph Campbell. Mr. Campbell devoted his brilliant life to showing people, through the study of myth and archetypes, how they all believe essentially the same thing.

[koan]

I loved "Dogma"...the holy loophole. :wah: Kevin Smith is a genius.

It's not exactly what Campbell is about, though. In Dogma they have angels that look like humans and are supposed to be real. In Campbell's work (hard to summarize) the figures in any given religion are archtypes and representational of concepts/energies in the world.

[Accountable]

acydikeen wrote: Eh?

I really don't get this, what are you saying?


I mean you went to considerable effort to disavow believing in a higher being. Then you (apparently through your writing) get quite upset that others do believe. We have some atheists here in the US that seem to want to stop everyone from exercising their beliefs because they themselves feel uncomfortable seeing it.

You appear to fall in the same category & I was wondering why.

[koan]

acydikeen wrote: Terry Prattchett mentioned something like this once:

"Gods are born of the peoples believes.

Belief may not move mountains. but it can create someone that could."


Belief is a powerful force, even outside of religion. If scientists didn't believe they could go into space and survive we would never have landed on the moon (not asking for argument that we didn't really land on the moon, thanks to anyone who thought of it )

So with belief as a force in mind, and a very creative force, it is possible to imagine we could create God (OH, the blasphemy!) I do believe anything is possible. It's an interesting direction to wander in. If we could create God, how would we want it to be? OK. Done with that. A god that man created would be horribly limited. That's why I like the religions that focus on what God is not.

[spot]

Hello Billy and Michelle.

I wonder whether I've misunderstood your question? "how do you think that we got our heart and lungs"?

Either you mean that as "how did the first hearts and lungs come into existence", or you mean "I'm stood here, I have hearts and lungs, how did they grow out of the nothing that was there before my parents met".

I think, since you mention mothers and "inside of someone else" you mean the second of those.

I'm going to write a bit of background before I try answering the second, I'll need to refer to it in my answer.

At different times in history, people have had different ideas of how babies got started. Just looking at written history, for 2400 years the standard view was that it took a man and a woman; that the man gave the woman a too-small-to-see fully-started baby, or at least everything that was needed to form one, as a complete creation; that the woman was solely an incubator, or nest, for the man's seed to grow in. That takes us to the 19th century, and it was a totally wrong opinion except for the first bit.

The reason people decided it was too simple a view is that they could see the babies obviously inherited characteristics equally from both the father and the mother. If the baby was already fixed before the mother got to incubate it, that would be difficult to explain. A monk spent years growing peas and eventually (after he was dead, actually) his experimental results persuaded people that half of the baby (or new pea plant) was formed from a description of the mother, and half from a description of the father.

People can see, with microscopes, parts scattered all through living material which are the combined descriptions from the parents. From the mother and the father they can see the descriptions before they come together. The descriptions that can be seen are a set of a few dozen very large messages. The process of creating the baby involves randomly taking half of the messages from each parent into a new set, and then making many copies of that set.

In a laboratory, you can take that chemical message set out of a minimal scrape off a body - usually called a cell - and read it. Every cell has a full set. You can print the entire message as a book, on paper. You can transmit that book by fax from one side of the world to the other. You can - though nobody yet has - take the faxed version of the message, and put it back bit by bit into chemical message set form, and start a new baby with it just as you could with the original chemical message set. The chemical message set isn't alive, it's just information. It's enough information to build the body of the person it describes.

OK, I needed to get to that chemical message set before I get onto hearts and lungs. History lesson over.

In the starting baby, when it's a single cell dividing into two, then four, then eight cells and so on, the juice mix that they contain varies randomly. That's enough to start a feedback system into defining one end as the head, the other end as the tail, one side as front and the other as back. Once they're differentiated, each cell is in a neighboring pool of juice that has many gradients of proximity chemicals across it, influenced in turn by cells further and further away. The parts of the chemical message set which respond to that particular proximity chemical concentration start to be expressed, or copied many times, into the cell where they become the templates for making more local juice. Somewhere in the front of the head mixture, a cell will start pumping out "I'm an eyeball!" proximity chemicals, and because it does that, it divides and grows into an eyeball, while the neighbor cells react to the juices it's pumping out to become eye socket cells. There's rules, throughout all of these different solutions, for building bones and skin and veins and arteries.

If you take a blank unstarted cell with that full chemical message set in it, and wash it with the juices from a liver or a heart muscle or a lung lining, the cell starts dividing and eventually forms a new complete liver or a heart muscle or lung lining made of many cells. They communicate with each other chemically. The juice they each make drifts into their neighbors. It's the combination of juices in a cell which turns on this and that bit of the complete message set. No cell turns on the full chemical message set. The cell juice in a particular part of a body turns on just those bits of the chemical message set that make the cell which creates that juice. It's a feedback system.

Every single step of this can be repeated on a laboratory bench. Starting with a blank cell containing a full chemical message set, and splashing it with proximity chemicals to fool it into thinking it's in a particular part of a body at a particular stage of development, you can grow any body part at any fetal - or adult - age. It's all in the signalling. You want a length of artery, you take "artery juice" off the shelf, and some nutrient, and just watch it grow.

I think the point I'm trying to get to, here, is that nothing happens "inside of someone else" that you can't completely repeat on a laboratory bench. Nobody has yet gone down the entire route and grown a complete baby to term from a faxed instruction set. I don't think there's any mysterious part of the process that hasn't been performed in part on a small scale, though. If we can do it on a laboratory bench, part by part, why do you think nature on its own can't or wouldn't be able to do it inside someone else?

[abbey]

acydikeen wrote: I wouldn't say I was "qualified" for a debate on the Bible, but at the end of the day, I will make my voice heard!.....and heard......and heard.....and heard......and heard......and heard...and...

[buttercup]

im not religious & i certainly cant spell but i did want to include a thought

acydikeen you say you have to see it & feel it

i see & feel love, if i was to show it to you it would be in my eyes, if you were to touch it you would have to use your soul

[spot]

billyandmichellecoffey wrote: I can not say that i fully understand what you are saying. I understand a little bit of it but not alot of it. I was being rather ambitious in trying to write that in the first place. I don't understand enough, and I write very ineptly. I wrote about how different tissues form because you'd said "please answer my question", and the question wasn't an easy one, centering on "I dont think that nature could/would be able to make our lungs while inside of someone else".

billyandmichellecoffey wrote: All i am saying is that there is nature out there but who or what do you think invented that nature from the start.Ah. Well, I did say at the start, do you mean that as "how did the first hearts and lungs come into existence". It looks like you did, after all, and I guessed wrong.

I could have a try at how hearts and lungs evolved, what stages they passed through in the fossil record, if that's any use, but it's a longer story than the one I tried earlier. I'll give it a go later today, though, I think it matters.

billyandmichellecoffey wrote: Did science and technology invent the wind?Science doesn't invent, it investigates and describes. No description of anything is the same as the thing itself - there's always more to the wind than just a scientific understanding of the weather. Having said that, I think technology probably could invent something with all the function that wind provides, in any particular field. It wouldn't be asked to come up with the same solution in every field that wind has an effect, so the product would be quite likely different to nature's wind.

billyandmichellecoffey wrote: feelings that we have? Or the miracles that we see happen every day?

I have a child that the doctors said would not live to see 3 years of age and there was nothing that they could do for him medically but he is now 14 years old and healthy as can be for his handicap. I read that if you see it you can believe it. Well i seen the works of something higher than nature and technology and that something was a powerful, foriving God.I'm sure nobody but an atheist would think that you're mistaken, and even then he'd be impolite to suggest it. I'm pleased your faith has given you something so valuable.

[Ted]

acydikeen :-6

Way back in my post concerning God has a thousand names was not intended to be an argument of any kind.

Shalom

Ted :-6

[Ted]

billy and michelle :-6

God words in mysterious ways and you have been wonderfully blessed.

Shalom

Ted :-6

[Ted]

Koan :-6

I think you are entirely correct in your post concerning evidence. If one doesn't want to see then one has no desire to look for the evidence. On the other hand if one does want to see it helps to know what one is looking for.

Sometimes folks become discouraged because they don't see what they want to see. That, however says that they have a predetermined idea of what they are looking for. I don't believe that God works that way.

Shalom

Ted :-6

[koan]

I find it interesting to think of someone asking God to send a red feather if s/he exists and then standing there, staring at the sky, disappointed that a red feather hasn't floated downward as a woman walks by in a dress made of red feathers.

[Ted]

koan :-6

LOL

Shalom

Ted :-6

[Tombstone]

Hopefully you all know who Blaise Pascal was. He was once attributed as saying:

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't.

[Tombstone]

koan wrote: I find it interesting to think of someone asking God to send a red feather if s/he exists and then standing there, staring at the sky, disappointed that a red feather hasn't floated downward as a woman walks by in a dress made of red feathers.
I second that!