ok, so we've had the views of christians on this board.
http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/10/67335/1.ashx where sirona respectfully asked for christians only to comment.
fair enough, but i'd personally like to know what everyones view of christianity is.. as sirona said:what is the truth about christianity?.
I think God is way too undiscribble, for any humans:::: and Christianity's attempts to discribe God too much;;;; they made Him and so they dictate what he is,,, they just want keep him in this safe little box they have made for Him.
Any God that you can discribe isn't "God" he isn't worthy to be considered "God" just a invention of the human imagination, any God you can discribe is not "IT".
interesting c&p plus link:
this, however, lead to lovelock perceiving the earth as a complete whole.
while on a walk in the countryside in england, lovelock described his hypothesis to his neighbor william golding (author of lord of the flies), and asked advice concerning a suitable name for it.
Beautiful Insignificance! When we get a glimps of it!
C&P&L:
http://www.geocities.com/~gaiachurch/adrs-9-3.html
. It's harder to unlearn the crap that society sneaks into your head, than learning all you ever will! ... That's both my diet and my path to Zen; there are many diets and many paths. Fortunately, enlightenment has many keys. Unfortunately, the door has many locks.
. . As well as sugar, I ignore the various gods --thousands of them. I finally decided that I know as much about any real god as anybody on earth --namely nuthin'. All the religions think that everybody else's idea of God is wrong, and they're all probably right about that! Religion so often gets in the way of spirituality. I think... Full awareness of reality is the greatest prayer and adoration. In this, the fool may surpass the genius in his awe of the ineffable.
. . Notice... when you fall, you don't feel gravity. Something not in resistance to a force does not feel that force. (It's not just physics --there's something very Zen in that.) That's what I'm sayin'! Don't resist the real picture. We paint pictures on the universe, like we gild the lily. When you try to see it, you paint it --to the degree that you try. When you see it as it is, without resistance, you'll lose the "gravity" of the situation. (enlightening!) (You'll still "chop wood, carry water", but... differently.)
. . To vastly over-simplify, "enlightenment" might be an awareness of the pure reality that is hidden from our awareness by the colors of our preconceptions.
. . Note that "reality" is popularly used in two senses: objective, scientific reality; and someone's experience of it. ONLY in the latter sense can there be more than one "reality".
. . Reality, science, and Gaia/Zen spirituality have this in common: that all see things as nature insists they are, rather than as modified by the trip thru human perceptions and pre-conceptions and mis-conceptions. (Pre-)Conception colors perception. ...gilds the lily. To perceive, de-conceive. What misguided conceptions color your world? What would it be if you didn't?
. . Various of my moments were revelations --I loved 'em... like, 1: Darwin; 2: that the function of genes is just to make proteins that do and influence other stuff; 3: Socio-Biology, to explain motives and identity; 4: the ever-larger cosmos, compared to the insignificant Earth.
. . The earth is insignificant; you are insignificant. But I repeat myself --you and the Earth are the same, just as your every cell knows how to make all of you.
. . Somehow, a sense of insignificance is important and basic to any understanding --it compensates for our ego. I remember when I lay on the grass and looked at the stars, and FELT the sun behind me, the dark earth between us, myself pushed against the side of this tiny globe (gravity felt funny!), and I saw the different distances of the stars in 3-D. A great revelatory moment --I was about 14. To feel in such a way that you could not possibly find
interesting c&p plus link:
this, however, lead to lovelock perceiving the earth as a complete whole.
while on a walk in the countryside in england, lovelock described his hypothesis to his neighbor william golding (author of lord of the flies), and asked advice concerning a suitable name for it.
WHAT DANGERS LIE AHEAD? by James E. Lovelock (1994)
. . Even if we reform immediately, we shall still see the Earth change and we, its first social intelligent species, are privileged to be both the cause and the spectators. The imminent change in climate is as large as between the last ice age and now.
To comprehend the magnitude of the change ahead, glance back to the depth of the last ice age, some tens of thousands of years ago. Then the glaciers reached as far south as latitude 35 in North America and to the Alps in Europe. The sea was more than 100 meters lower than now, and therefore an area of land as large as Africa was above water, and where plants grew. The tropics were like the warm temperate regions are now. In all, it was a pleasant world to live on, and there was more land. What will happen, as a result of our presence so far, will be a change as great as that from the last ice age until about 100 years ago.
To understand what has already begun and will develop in the next century, imagine the start of a heat age. Temperatures and sea level will climb, by fits and starts, until eventually the world will be torrid, ice free, and all but unrecognizable. Eventually is a long time ahead, it might never happen to that extent; what we have to prepare for now are the incidents of a changing climate, just about to begin. These are likely to be surprises, things that even the most detailed of big science models do not predict. Think of the ozone hole--this was a real surprise. The most expensive computer modelling and monitoring of the Earth's ozone layer failed to see or predict it. It was seen by observers looking at the sky with simple instruments. Surprise may comes as climatic extremes, like ferocious storms, or as unexpected atmospheric events. Nature is nonlinear and unpredictable and never more so than in a period of change.
This is an occasion when we cannot look to Gaia for help. If the present warm period is a planetary fever, we should expect that the Earth left to itself would be relaxing into its normal comfortable ice age. Such comfort may be unattainable because we have been busy removing its skin for farm land, taking away the trees that are the means for recovery. We also are adding vast blanket of greenhouse gases to the already feverish patient.
Gaia is more likely to shudder, then move over to a new stable state, fit for a different and more amenable biota. It could be much hotter, but whatever it is, no longer the comfortable world we know. These predictions are not fictional doom scenarios, but uncomfortably close to certainty. We have already changed the atmosphere to an extent unprecedented in recent geological history. We seem to be driving ourselves heedlessly down a slope into a sea that is rising to drown us.
We must, in our own interest, recognize that our planet is at least as important as we are. If we continue to pollute and destroy for narrow self interest, we could bring about the end of the Pleistocene and the dawn of a new hot Earth. The future depends on decisions made now on the supplies of food and energy. We must moderate our passion for human rights and begin to recognize the rest of life on Earth. Individual risk, such as of cancer from exposure to nuclear radiation, or to products of the chemical industry, are to be prevented, but they are no longer the most urgent concern. First in our thoughts should be the need to avoid perturbing Gaia and exacerbating its present natural instability. Above all, we do not want to trigger the jump to a new but unwanted stable climate.
http://www.theonion.com/onion3734/god_clarifies_dont_kill.html
new york?responding to recent events on earth, god, the omniscient creator-deity worshipped by billions of followers of various faiths for more than 6,000 years, angrily clarified his longtime stance against humans killing each other monday.. "look, i don't know, maybe i haven't made myself completely clear, so for the record, here it is again," said the lord, his divine face betraying visible emotion during a press conference near the site of the fallen twin towers.
"somehow, people keep coming up with the idea that i want them to kill their neighbor.
While I posted this thread tongue in cheek, I have to say we make God into a human much like ourselves because, we can only make him according to our concepts we are familiar with being our imagination is so feable.
God is Undifineable, and(speculation) our universe is probably just an electron in a atom on the pimple of some creatures ass and it could go on and on infinitely and we would not know it. Infinity can go in both directions to the unfathomably huge to the unfathomably small.
i know this is a touchy subject.
most people, hate suffering, and feel there is no good reason for a person to suffer.
i feel like that often, but less and less often.
Circa,
I wish you the best in your exploration. May you find peace and comfort in your search.
interesting c&p plus link:
this, however, lead to lovelock perceiving the earth as a complete whole.
while on a walk in the countryside in england, lovelock described his hypothesis to his neighbor william golding (author of lord of the flies), and asked advice concerning a suitable name for it.
C&P and Link:
http://erg.ucd.ie/arupa/references/gaia.html
Recent scientific work, such as in the field of complex systems, have begun to give us the impression that this opposition of terms, the larger caused by its constituents, or the costituents created by the larger, may be one of those oppositions which are the constructs of our own minds, and must be dropped if we are to understand the truth, which is neither the one nor the other, but more difficult to comprehend and more fascinating to behold. Perhaps there is awareness appropriate at every level.Perhaps that is a property of life.
And what might be the nature of its evolution, this planetary being called Gaia? Anthropocentrists to the last, we might assume that the production of the human species is a great step upward for Gaia, a sort of rapidly evolving brain tissue. Or that she prepares the earth as a cradle and crucible of consciousness evolving. Other analogies come to mind: are we part of her arsenal of interplanetary spores ?
And what might constitute a life cycle for such a being- might it be as strange as that of the slime mold ? What stage would Gaia be in now? Is our species part of her maturity or an incubation period ? Is Gaia herself somehow part of a larger living being, perhaps on a galactic scale ? If so how do the cells of this larger being remain in communication? Will we eventually be able to experience something of the awareness which Gaia has ?
interesting c&p plus link:
this, however, lead to lovelock perceiving the earth as a complete whole.
while on a walk in the countryside in england, lovelock described his hypothesis to his neighbor william golding (author of lord of the flies), and asked advice concerning a suitable name for it.
I wounder how long the Earth(Gaia) will keep us around, and of what use we humans serve.
Boy have we humans come a long way from being the center of the Universe to just a very small insignificant part.
Oh how strangly comforting!
We are just Worms!,,,, I tell you,,,, Worms!
interesting c&p plus link:
this, however, lead to lovelock perceiving the earth as a complete whole.
while on a walk in the countryside in england, lovelock described his hypothesis to his neighbor william golding (author of lord of the flies), and asked advice concerning a suitable name for it.
Interesting C&P plus link:
This, however, lead to Lovelock perceiving the earth as a complete whole. While on a walk in the countryside in England, Lovelock described his hypothesis to his neighbor William Golding (author of Lord of the Flies), and asked advice concerning a suitable name for it. The result: 'Gaia'?after the Greek goddess who drew the living world forth from Chaos?was chosen.
Lovelock acknowledges that he was not the first to conceive the idea of biological regulation. Scientist Alfred Redfield put forward the hypothesis as early as 1958, when he theorized that the chemical composition of the atmosphere and oceans was biologically controlled. While other scientists had also considered the same hypothesis, the idea never gained much audience and even the papers co-authored by Lovelock and Lyn Margullis largely went unnoticed until Lovelock's book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, caught attention. In the book Lovelock states that humankind is part of an overall complex biosphere organism.
http://www.lifepositive.com/Mind/philosophy/gaia-hypothesis/gaia-hypothesis.html
i know this is a touchy subject.
most people, hate suffering, and feel there is no good reason for a person to suffer.
i feel like that often, but less and less often.
JT, (However, is all this true? Am I this fragile and fragmented entity? Is it insane to question it? Or insane not to?) Yes to know what we are Ultimately, is beyond our thoughts, and can't be felt with the senses of the physical body. If we knew the answers to those questions, you make would require us to see God, as he Really is. Which to me is imposible to do unless God strengthens us to so see Him for we need the Eyes of God Himself to see God Himself. Which would require unreachable humility for Him to show Himself to Us.
i know this is a touchy subject.
most people, hate suffering, and feel there is no good reason for a person to suffer.
i feel like that often, but less and less often.
I know this is a touchy subject.
Most people, hate suffering, and feel there is no good reason for a person to suffer. I feel like that often, but less and less often.
I think that our view of suffering either: increases its uncomfortableness, or decreases uncomfortableness. I'm sure everyone here will agree with that.
How does a person making peace with suffering?
Will life really be better if there were no such thing as suffering?
What is really the right view of suffering?
What role does love for our neighbor as ourselves play in our view of suffering?
Could there be a benign intelligence that causes us to suffering for good reasons?
