Thanks for your comments, I do appreciate them.
I haven't actually read the bible recently - but did do an evening class in the history of the bible a long time ago.
My point of view, is from the unexplained. I have read lots of things about the unexplained for over 30 years. It was long long ago that I did read a great deal of books relating to all manner of topics. Like UFOs, UFOs and the Bible (Ezekiel is a good example), ancient civilisations (how advanced their technology was - they used very large heavy blocks which we cannot reproduce today, their scale and scope of engineering - we use much smaller components, which are assembled into a structure). I did have a page on my site about that side of things, but I've forgotten the address for it. [This was not accessible by the menu, you had to know the exact reference to it.] If I find out what it is, I'll post it here in another post. It was scans from the book 'Heaven's Mirror' by Graeme Hancock? I read about psychic phenonena, Near Death Experiences and Out of Body Experiences, etc.
I tend to believe in the unexplained - because this keeps on happening time and time again. They are not isolated events. I tend to view them as the 'truth' and they do interlink with each other, to give you a more accurate world view or cosmology. They of course, do not fit into accepted beliefs and theories - they get rejected because they do not fit in with established views. The UFO phenomena tend to highlight that governments have been lying to us about them. There is a classic book, the 1956 edition of 'The Case for the UFO' which is still readable today, by M. K. Jessup.
The unexplained, does explain things - but you have to have an open mind - or else it appears to be so far fetched and fanciful. Except there is the data/evidence there for that phenomena being true. Skeptics tend to pooh pooh all these things - but they are in complete denial, they won't even look at things - and just dismiss them straight away.
Here is a post, I wrote in a Newsgroup, which sums up what I believe in ....
Evolution is a theory - and all theories are work in progress -
some more accepted than others.
They serve in the intermin until something better comes along.
The accumulation of data/knowledge is a good thing.
But theories tend to reject certain data as invalid - otherwise the
theory seems not to be truthful to the data that is there.
I guess you can apply this to religions and their belief systems.
eg. Jesus, for the christians, is the only one? to have survived death?
Now what if someone else survived death? Would that person also be viewed
like Jesus?
And if everyone did survive death - ie. a person's spirit lives on in the
afterlife - the physical body dies, but the spiritual body lives on.
This would be against all christian beliefs - wouldn't it? And of
Judiasm, and Islam.
And to ask the question - where was the soul before birth?
How do christianity, judiasm and islam answer this?
To those who believe in reincarnation - the answer is, that the afterlife
is our natural home, and we come down to earth, to live a life every so
many thousand? or hundreds of years - for life experiences, which the
soul determines it needs. Also it's possible to go to other dimensions and
other physical worlds for other life experiences.
There is no hard physical evidence for the above, but at least it sounds
plausible enough, if you care to investigate it further (read up about
Near Death Experiences and Out of Body Experiences --- and about
reincarnation, and reincarnation and the bible, etc).
Now provide something that makes more sense than the above?
The one life theory - while simple, doesn't answer all the questions
you may have. ie. you live and you die.
Harvey
Here is a page of spirit photographs that was shown in a US TV program "Beyond". I've never seen these photographs before, or ones like them, so I was very surprised to know these exist at all.
http://members.tripod.com/~plain2/page-a.htm
Oh, yes --- I tend to believe that a lot of religion is 'crap'. There is no other way to put it. They deliberately deceive you and present what I view as 'nonsense'. I think they have to feed something to the public. I don't believe in the trinity at all - I think it is more invention than anything else. What is the christian world view of "reality" here? I can guess at what it is, and I believe that is crap.
I guess the eastern religions, such as Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism has more of a 'real' feel to it, than others. Jesus is suppose to have gone to the far east to be taught eastern beliefs - and there is the claim that he returned there (he didn't die or go off to heaven, etc) and his tomb is in Kashmir. There is a TV 'Did Jesus Die?' that was shown over Easter here, which was well presented. I can get around to providing a transcript of that part of it, if there's the interest in it? I can get around to putting it onto a SVCD, and make it available to anyone who has a DVD player that can play SVCDs? Or on their computer?
Harvey
