by Cold Steel 165 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
James - At no time in the past has so much money and effort gone into understanding other species and protecting them from exploitation.
Killing big game used to be an acceptable hobby. The very fact that poachers killing elephants causes universal disgust is huge progress.
Qcmbr states the LDS position quite well. There is much we don't understand about spirit and intelligence. Christians differ on life after death. I just read that despite the fact the latest pope has given some respite to atheists, others in the Roman Catholic Church maintain that even if atheists do good works, they will go to hell. Talk about tough crowds!
There is no spirit realm inhabited by any kind of creature.
Well, if there is, you'll know it instantly when you pass from this life. And if you're right, we'll never know. When we die, things will go black, kind of like going under anesthesia, and that will be that. We'll be like a burned-out light bulb, to be discarded and of use to no one. But that would be preferable (to me) over reincarnation. My maternal grandfather insisted that his parents and friends who had passed on had visited him shortly before his passing. And my father told us he had seen his mother and had several conversations with her.
Then there is the account of the death of Stalin, one of the world's worst murderers, by his daughter, Svetlana: “Father was dying horribly and hard.. His face went dark and changed...his features were becoming unrecognisable. The agony was terrible. We could see how it was stifling him. At the last moment he suddenly opened his eyes. It was a horrid look—either mad, or angry and full of the horror, and sort of either pointed up somewhere, or shook his finger at us all.... The next moment his soul, having made its last effort, broke away from his body.”
In another account of the same event, Svetlana stated that although, at the very last, Stalin had seemed at most merely semiconscious, he suddenly opened his eyes and looked about the room, plainly terrified. Then, she recounted, “something incomprehensible and awesome happened that to this day I can’t forget and don’t understand.” Stalin partially lifted himself in the bed, clenched his fist toward the heavens, and shook it defiantly. Then, with an unintelligible murmur, he dropped motionless back onto his pillow and died.
(See Svetlana Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters to a Friend, trans. Priscilla J. McMillan (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 5-11. See also the account given by Ravi Zacharias in his Harvard Veritas Forum, 19-20 November 1992. Alliluyeva, Stalin's daughter, was an eyewitness to the scene. Zacharias heard the story from Malcolm Muggeridge who, in his turn, based his report on three weeks of interviews with Alliluyeva, conducted for a three-part BBC series.)
There are no souls, angels, demons or gods.
There will be no resurrection.
This life you have right now is the only shot you'll ever have.
This is not a rehearsal for something else.
This, of course, is conjecture; however, if there is no God, you are correct. I would find it difficult to face life with such an outlook. For myself, I cannot believe that all the correct events just came together without any guiding or intelligent life. What events? The distance of the earth to the Sun; a moon foreign to our solar system of just the right mass, distance and size to stabilize the planet so it has a fixed equator; temperatures that keep the water from either freezing or boiling; the complexities and beauty of the earth and its life forms. As one prophet observed, all things in nature denote there is a God. And even renowned atheist Albert Camus changed his outlook late in life and even contemplated becoming a Catholic priest. Unfortunately, he was killed in a car accident.
That said, I don't believe that atheism leads to an eternal hell. Certainly if there is a God, He would not condemn someone for their heartfelt views. But I think there's something within man that will eventually lead them to question their commitment.
After murdering millions, Stalin is said to have
shaken his fist at the heavens on his deathbed.
After murdering millions, Stalin is said to have shaken his fist at the heavens on his deathbed.
Sounds like conjecture to me.
The distance of the earth to the Sun; a moon foreign to our solar system of just the right mass, distance and size to stabilize the planet so it has a fixed equator; temperatures that keep the water from either freezing or boiling; the complexities and beauty of the earth and its life forms.
Its like the puddle that couldn't believe how the hole in the road was just the perfect size and shape.
You may want to google "anthropic principle".
What do anecdotes about Stalin have to do with anything?
Dear Cofty,
Nothing is totally black or white.
I understand that there is a tiny bit of progress being made in trying to amend some of the phenomenal amount of SOULESS harm and destruction that we have caused ourselves and the planet.
We need to first estabilish that humans have a soul. before we can honestly question beyond.
Hi Tammy, no disrespect was taken, truly.
Oh good.
I understand what you're on about, but remember you are writing from a different perspective from what I was intending. You are writing from a position of Christian certitude, based on theological verities, which is a point of view that I share. But I was attempting to reach others who do not perhaps have this certainty.
I understand what you are saying here.
I understand also that the approach you were taking might be more acceptable or understandable to people who do not have faith in Christ or God. However, those things are also perpetuated as actually being true by many people, and are taught even to those who are seeking Christ and God, and this can be misleading. And as you said, this forum has a variety of people and views, including those whose faith is for Christ and God. So I was directed to clarify, for the sake of those who are seeking Christ, and so, truth.
And you are correct. The bible is unclear on some things, and so going solely by that, we could only guess and try to reason a theory out, according to the words expressed within. Thankfully, we have the Spirit of Truth (Christ) to teach us, even now. That will not be received by some audiences, lol... but that is not up to me, nor am i offended by anyone who does not accept that. But for the sake of those who are seeking Christ and God, I must share according to what I am given to share... no judgment from me toward those who hear, or refrain.
Again, peace to you!
tammy
We need to first estabilish that humans have a soul.
We don't - but you were using soul metaphorically for something like compassion.
Cats and other animals have souls and don’t die when their bodies do, as has always been the case. Consciousness has always been unexplainable via a materialist only paradigm and always will be. Unfortunately because our apprehension is limited by the physical because it is made out of the physical, only indirect metaphors and such help in the understanding of the soul. Fortunately people do report, as my aunt did, strange occurrences surrounding deaths of family members and these sometimes include pets. The strength of this evidence is not going to be of the scientific paradigm due to the limitation mentioned above and will often, although not always, be denied those who have decided that they will not believe in anything other than a materialist paradigm either though disbelief of witness statements, for whatever reason, or incredulity at the mere possibility of metaphysically related occurrences.
For example when my aunts cat died at 25 years of age all the clocks in the house stopped or went forward or back by one hour. When her other cat died in the gardens at the back of the house she could not find the body, even after she sent my uncle out to look for it. That night she dreamed exactly where the body was, and my uncle was sent out again to find it, and it was found where my aunt dreamt it was. My aunt had a third cat and some things happened there also when it died, which I won’t go into. This is evidence that I believe because I know my aunt doesn’t lie to me, thus trustworthy witness statements are one form of evidence as with a courtroom but are dependent on trust alone.
I thought this article might be of interest as it concerns problems with the materialist paradigm.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/27/physics-philosophy-quantum-relativity-einstein
“In 2010 Stephen Hawking, in The Grand Design, announced that philosophy was "dead" because it had "not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics". He was not referring to ethics, political theory or aesthetics. He meant metaphysics, the branch of philosophy that aspires to the most general understanding of nature – of space and time, the fundamental stuff of the world. If philosophers really wanted to make progress, they should abandon their armchairs and their subtle arguments, wise up to maths and listen to the physicists.
This view has significant support among philosophers in the English-speaking world. Bristol philosopher James Ladyman, who argues that metaphysics should be naturalised, and who describes the accusation of "scientism" as "badge of honour", is by no means an isolated case.
But there could not be a worse time for philosophers to surrender the baton of metaphysical inquiry to physicists. Fundamental physics is in a metaphysical mess and needs help. The attempt to reconcile its two big theories, general relativity and quantum mechanics, has stalled for nearly 40 years. Endeavours to unite them, such as string theory, are mathematically ingenious but incomprehensible even to many who work with them. This is well known. A better-kept secret is that at the heart of quantum mechanics is a disturbing paradox – the so-called measurement problem, arising ultimately out of the Uncertainty Principle – which apparently demonstrates that the very measurements that have established and confirmed quantum theory should be impossible. Oxford philosopher of physics David Wallace has argued that this threatens to make quantum mechanics incoherent which can be remedied only by vastly multiplying worlds.
Beyond these domestic problems there is the failure of physics to accommodate conscious beings. The attempt to fit consciousness into the material world, usually by identifying it with activity in the brain, has failed dismally, if only because there is no way of accounting for the fact that certain nerve impulses are supposed to be conscious (of themselves or of the world) while the overwhelming majority (physically essentially the same) are not. In short, physics does not allow for the strange fact that matter reveals itself to material objects (such as physicists).
And then there is the mishandling of time. The physicist Lee Smolin's recent book, Time Reborn, links the crisis in physics with its failure to acknowledge the fundamental reality of time. Physics is predisposed to lose time because its mathematical gaze freezes change. Tensed time, the difference between a remembered or regretted past and an anticipated or feared future, is particularly elusive. This worried Einstein: in a famous conversation, he mourned the fact that the present tense, "now", lay "just outside of the realm of science".
Recent attempts to explain how the universe came out of nothing, which rely on questionable notions such as spontaneous fluctuations in a quantum vacuum, the notion of gravity as negative energy, and the inexplicable free gift of the laws of nature waiting in the wings for the moment of creation, reveal conceptual confusion beneath mathematical sophistication. They demonstrate the urgent need for a radical re-examination of the invisible frameworks within which scientific investigations are conducted. We need to step back from the mathematics to see how we got to where we are now. In short, to un-take much that is taken for granted.
Perhaps even more important, we should reflect on how a scientific image of the world that relies on up to 10 dimensions of space and rests on ideas, such as fundamental particles, that have neither identity nor location, connects with our everyday experience. This should open up larger questions, such as the extent to which mathematical portraits capture the reality of our world – and what we mean by "reality". The dismissive "Just shut up and calculate!" to those who are dissatisfied with the incomprehensibility of the physicists' picture of the universe is simply inadequate. "It is time" physicist Neil Turok has said, "to connect our science to our humanity, and in doing so to raise the sights of both". This sounds like a job for a philosophy not yet dead.”
By "soul" I mean the thing within you that thinks and is. It's the thing that leaves when you die. Whether that soul is composed of simply brain cells or whether there's a spirit is moot. No one can prove one way or the other that people or animals have spirits. My initial post simply asks for your opinion. Me, I'd be crushed if I continued to exist but my animals didn't.
I have close friends of other religions and beliefs, and some have told me that they think humans, being the crowning creation of God, continue on after death. But animals were created for man as companions, creatures of nature, food, transportation and protection. Some have horribly mistreated animals and hunted them for sport. My uncle, sadly, killed many animals and birds simply for recreation. He had the heads of mountain goats and other animals mounted around his house and in closets. He especially enjoyed going to Metropolis and shooting crows with a shotgun.
One fellow, a minister in Paducah, Kentucky, had stuffed animals all over his house. I was assigned to write a newspaper article on him and when I interviewed him, he told me that he considered himself a modern "Noah," and the animal collection was a way to let school children see "God's glory of creation." He saw nothing wrong with what he was doing, traveling all over the world to kill exotic animals, and worse, he got his income from being a televangelist. I let him talk and quoted him accurately. The photographer took some astounding photos, but he wasn't able to restrain his distaste for the man. When the article came out, he was initially pleased, but then came a wave of criticism that caused a dramatic decrease in his contributions. First, we got a ton of mail, virtually all of it venting fury over what he was doing. Then the local television news station got ahold of him and he tried to answer this criticism and of course he only made it worse. He thought if he explained it from his point of view, people would see the wisdom behind it. Instead, another wave of criticism hit him and when I left, his preaching show was virtually dead...and he had no idea why people were steamed. After all, isn't that why God created those animals? What better way of showing the glory of God's creations than going to other parts of the world and blowing them into eternity?
All souls ( body+spirit ) belong to GOD. I believe that the life force is more than just an impersonal force like electricity going to a toaster.
I have had many pets, and grew up on a farm. I have had a pet chicken, duck, goose, pig, horse, dog, cat, rat, rabbits, lizards, ect. They all have their own personalities. No two animals from the same species, even the same litter are alike. They are all individuals. Why would this be the case if the life force was impersonal? Animals would be like a machine that was turned on until it ran out of power someday.
Animals remember people, they form friendships, even some that cross the species barrier. They play, they become sad. Some even plan, like dolphins. Studies have shown that they appear to think like we do, even in abstract concepts. Chimps and Gorillas can learn sign language. Some gorillas have learned to paint.
I read a story of a gorilla who had a best friend, a small black and white dog. Every day the gorilla and dog would play " chase ", the dog would run in circles around the enclosure and the gorilla would run within. One day when the gorilla painted a picture he amazed his human caretakers. He painted a picture that he called " apple chase." Here it is.
Well, it doesn't look much like an apple, but " Apple " was Michael the gorilla's best friend, a dog. Here is " Apple."
At the time of the painting, Apple was deceased. Michael painted Apple from memory. http://www.koko.org/world/art_portraits.html This is not conjecture.
I have two cats with two distinct personalities. Their life-force is not impersonal. You could not swap their life -forces. They are as distinct from each other as you and I. The impersonal life-force is another WTBTS fallacy IMO.
