In The Beginning...

by Blueblades 17 Replies latest jw friends

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  Blueblades

  Beginnings are always difficult. Wherever one starts, there is always the question: What was before that? This question comes from our sense of objective causality - that everything must be preceded by its cause.

  Must everything have a cause? If "no," then one leaps immeadiately to invoking mystical beginnings. If "yes," then the beginning is a logical impossibility. There can, by definition, be no beginning if everything must have a cause.

  By the logic of causality, beginnings are illogical. The logic of causality requires ( because we DO exist ) the intial existence from which we are derived to erupt spontaneously from nothing.

  Clearly, the notion of objective causality must violate its own logic in order to get started.

  The other alternative, there is no beginning, existence is somehow infinite and perpetual, is itself a mystical assertion that comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. Such an unbounded mysticism offers its supporters no possibility of either answers or clues.

  From the theory of everything.

  Blueblades, just keeping it simple.
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  stillajwexelder

  God created Heaven and Earth
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  minimus

  In The Beginning......Minimus said to The Lord:
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  rmt1

  I'll offer a simple model for how time could have looping cause or a non-existent First Cause:
  
  Time flows in one direction.
  The earth rotates in one direction.
  Time is contiguous and continuous along all points we observe.
  The earth's surface is contiguous and continuous.
  A single causality in time has a small adjacent set of causes and a small adjacent set of effects.
  A single point on the exact Equator has a single adjacent point to its West, and a single adjacent point to its East.
  
  Now think of our 3D reality existing within a 4D hypersphere where time is a fifth orthogonal direction. And think of East as cause and West as effect. If time wraps around the hypersphere, then any individual line of causality will meet its (Eastern) "cause" if it traces its effects down the 'Westward' line, and will meet its (Western) "effects" if it traces its causes down the 'Eastward' line.
  
  You will logically ask, well who created the 5-dimensional hypersphere with time as a continuous loop, and you got me.
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  jaguarbass

  You will logically ask, well who created the 5-dimensional hypersphere with time as a continuous loop, and you got me

  We did. We are God, conciousness, and we keep reincarnating.
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  Farkel

  :he other alternative, there is no beginning, existence is somehow infinite and perpetual, is itself a mystical assertion that comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. Such an unbounded mysticism offers its supporters no possibility of either answers or clues.
  
  Yep. So what does that all mean? It means, "let the good times roll! NOW!"
  
  That's about it.
  
  Farkel
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  No Apologies

  Life here... began out there...

  So say we all!

  No Apologies
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  Blueblades

  We all have a belief system and that is actually a trap, hence, the belief trap. It is ones culture that starts the belief trap. To admit ignorance is very difficult. We wrap ourselves inside our belief system like an ostrich putting his head in the ground.

  Whatever gets us through this life, it is what it is, etc,etc.

  It really is a small world after all. Each has its own culture belief system that comes from where each of us were and are born.

  Everyone has a corner on knowledge and truth, until we die, then.....who really knows...oh I do, you see I have this belief that such and such is the truth. Don't tell me, you too!

  Blueblades Have a merry whatever it is you celebrate according to your belief system, your culture, etc.
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  Narkissos

  Thinking (or consciousness, which imo are not as anthetical as it is currently fashionable to... think) is always second. Second to physical, biological, linguistical and cultural existence. Whence its ever-frustrating fascination (as far as we can look back in history, or even prehistory) for beginnings or origins. The beginning in se is unknown and unthought. The "first time" of anything is unknown and unthought. In a sense, the present, the "now" is unthought too. Repetition, memory, loss and absence are integral parts of our cognitive process which can only think back. As in re-flection, in German nach-denken (lit. "thinking after").

  Rightly or wrongly, I tend to connect this basic idea with Paul's passing remark in his famous parallelism of the two Adams (1 Corinthians 15:46): "it is not the spiritual that is first, but the physical, and then the spiritual."

  One interesting leitmotiv in Heidegger's Was heisst denken? ("what does thinking mean?", but the German phrase is stretched to ambiguity: "what is called thinking," or "what calls for thinking") is (approximately): "what calls for thinking, in our age that calls for thinking, is... that we do not think yet".
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  Witness 007

  Does an end have a beginning........and a beginning have an end? ....ooooooh deep!