In one sense, love is the space for all of that to happen in. Individuals get jealous, envious, boasts and so on, you might say love holds all of that. Of course, this would be love that is all-inclusive, not the kind of love that only loves itself and rejects the rest.
Introspection
JoinedPosts by Introspection
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3
gods love and jealousy
by SpiceItUp inin the bible....... .
1 john 4:8 & 16 states that "god is love".
exodus 20:5, exodus 34:14, deuteronomy 4:24, deut.
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47
DID JESUS LOSE HIS FAITH?
by plmkrzy inin god?.
jesus spent close to 20 years convincing people he was the savior and the son of god.. .
he did such a good job of it that 2,000 years later a large portion of the world still believes it.. .
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Introspection
This question assumes the traditional idea of faith in a belief, you might even say faith in God is something else.
If you ask me, the only way the statement "why have you forsaken me?" makes sense is that a separate self was forsaken, the 'me.' But of course this is a completely different way to frame things, most people who believes in the bible thinks God is a separate entity and that everyone is separate from everyone and everything else. (actually belief itself requires separation, but that's another story) If anything it would just be a loss of faith in the role, or actually just sensing the end of the role of an individual at the time. Frankly humans are biologically wired for survival, which means it is a matter of preserving the individuality, being 'perfect' wouldn't take this instinct away or else you'd be dead a long time before reaching adulthood.
I wonder if anyone has considered that the idea of ransom or substitution is relative in nature. What I mean by that is because you have this an eye for an eye thing the whole thing is dependent upon the condition that another person replaces Adam. Why would a relative movement yield something that is absolute? How does Jesus' perfection transfer to other people anyway? I mean you'd think it's genetic with Adam, but then how would him being perfect change what happend thousands of years ago, even if it did change people starting at that point in time through some unknown mechanism?
Separation make things relative, that's why any belief based spirituality is hardly spirituality at all, it's just a mind game the ego plays with itself. Not only does real understanding come from not identifying with one particular belief against the others, it involves not identifying with the mind. First you stop tail chasing, then you stop chasing altogether. When you get to that point then you an ask what is it that's been doing all this chasing? The behavior is a complex of conditioning, but then what knows it is a complex of conditioning?
Belief is nothing more than faith in your mind, and issues such as this regarding one's belief system only goes to show that there isn't faith in any real sense. I'm not saying this to criticize anybody, just calling it as I see it. Perfecting a belief system wouldn't do anything for your faith, if anything you would just cling to your set of beliefs even more.
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Have you experienced God?
by Sirona inhave you ever had an experience that you think revealed you had been visited by a divine being?
what was that experience like?
how would you know if you had encountered a "god" or "goddess"?
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Introspection
Yes. I see "ultimate truth" as being mostly beyond the grasp of a human being incarnate. We can only have "experience" via our senses and obviously we are talking about subjective experiences.
Well, it seems to me if you have many gods then that would also all be subjective in the same sense, although there is the idea of subjectivity without object - that would be from the perspective that all is one, so there is only the subject. If there is any separation it is necessarily relative, you have subject and object - however powerful in whatever sense, it is conditional. Now to take this to experience, it is also clear that to experience something it requires a subject/object duality, therefore all experience is by nature relative. I think to classify any experience as better or more divine than others involves a certain confusion - more precisely it would be the fusion of an insight and the sensory experience that arise in the same time frame. Feelings and emotions, although deep are still more superficial than an insight which may hardly even be on the radar so to speak, and often that blip gets co-opted by the mind, put into a conceptual framework which more than likely distorts and misrepresents what it actually is, at best it is reduced to an idea.
This is the danger of talking about experiencing God - what is this God idea, or feeling? Even Einstein's cosmic religious feeling would be a byproduct which is only relative and conditional. If you say it's a matter of experiencing the divine, I say what isn't the divine? But no-thing is it, so not any thing that can be experienced, but then I have to go back to the question of what is having the experience? By that I don't mean the mind which will have its reactions to the experience - positive or negative - actually the mind itself is a part of what is being experienced, so what is experiencing all of that?
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Are there any real reasons to go on living?
by Robdar in.
i would be interested in hearing a few.
for the life of me (pun intended) i can't think of any good ones.. robyn
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Introspection
I'm not going to provide any reasons just because it involves trying to appeal to your mind in some way, and I don't know you well enough to do that with any accuracy anyways - and secondly because I don't believe a reason is needed to live anyway, it would be dishonest for me to appeal to your mind when I don't really think that way. Things in life require a reason just like it is the things in life that suck, but life itself is something else. It's a question of content for most people.
Having said that, I can only tell you what may be of interest, I don't think it is a reason for anything, but it may be an interesting way to experience. First of all, I was depressed for years. I'm not depressed anymore, but that doesn't mean I don't feel 'negative' emotions - in fact I would say that's one thing that indicates I am not depressed, I'm not numb. Instead of trying to cling to the 'positive' and avoid the 'negative' I kind of decided to let it all in, and there's a certain richness in that. Just in the last few days I was noticing there's a bittersweet quality about how I experience things in life, sort of like seeing both sides I suppose. As far as I'm concerned life is not supposed to be all joy and bliss, and people who only wants to see that will not see the very real sadness and tragedy that befalls them and those who may be close to them, (not in any good way - after all it still happens to them, they're just unconscious) and in my book that's the kind of bliss that comes from ignorance. I for one am glad I can feel as much of the sadness and relate to other people who may feel the same way, if I didn't then I wouldn't be living - it would be some kind of joyful undead in a sense, not unlike certain groups of religious fanatics. All I can tell you about this is even though I have the so called negative emotions still, it is just not causing any suffering. I can tell you that it doesn't stay long, but more accurately it's that it does not stick. So this is a different approach to be sure, I'm not into conditioning myself with happy thoughts and feelings. It's normal to feel sad and loss in life, it's as much a part of life as the joyful feelings. I mean hey - if someone close to you died then it is certainly expected for you to mourn the loss, it's a natural reaction.
I imagine this wouldn't sound appealing to many people, but I do know people like to have someone listen to them when they're down. All I can tell you is from here, those feelings are not a problem, so the problem of depression is essentially non-existent.
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23
Have you experienced God?
by Sirona inhave you ever had an experience that you think revealed you had been visited by a divine being?
what was that experience like?
how would you know if you had encountered a "god" or "goddess"?
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Introspection
Well the last post didn't take, maybe this will..
Sirona, what I meant in that second paragraph is basically it takes no imagination to believe in something you were told - for example God according to Jehovah's Witnesses. Regardless of whether this is just a mental thing or even a feeling, the fact that you start having these experiences after 'studying' would be very telling - I think we would call that being brainwashed, or perhaps under mind control. But more to the point I would focus on what is having the experience rather than the experience, after all experience is by nature transient and cannot be the ultimate truth, which would be unchanging.
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How Would You Prove That JW's Do Not Have The Truth?
by minimus inone thing jw's believe is that they have the truth.
they believe jehovah god guides them in every possible way.
they state that all other religions are condemned by god.
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Introspection
You know, all this discussion focus on arguing with them conceptually doesn't it? What about bringing real life situations into play? Even if you are successful in making the point, how far have you gotten if you've only changed the beliefs? You're basically operating on the same level as you were before. I'm not saying not to talk about the beliefs and ideas, but rather putting it together with things that happen in life. Of course this takes more work, but maybe it just goes to show you there's no magic bullet that will change their minds.
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How Would You Prove That JW's Do Not Have The Truth?
by minimus inone thing jw's believe is that they have the truth.
they believe jehovah god guides them in every possible way.
they state that all other religions are condemned by god.
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Introspection
These days I think I would question the mind itself, how do you know any belief is true? I'd say they'd have to prove to me how anything they claim is not just their idea of what is true rather than the actual truth. The truth is, what you have is just a person who happens to be a Jehovah's Witness that thinks they 'have' the truth. What they have is just some thoughts they think is true, the thought that their thinking is the truth is yet just another thought. Then maybe I'll ask: "What have you got besides a bunch of thoughts that you think is right?" Sure they'll be more interested in what those thoughts are about, but lets get down to the nature of what they're tossing around here..
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23
Have you experienced God?
by Sirona inhave you ever had an experience that you think revealed you had been visited by a divine being?
what was that experience like?
how would you know if you had encountered a "god" or "goddess"?
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Introspection
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Albert Einstein
Hmm, I'm curious to know the context of that statement. I've heard it before, but something about this context makes me wonder. I suppose Einstein meant that imagination is more important than what is generally regarded as facts, mechanically logical reasoning that doesn't see beyond other possibilities than the ones right before you. But when I read this a thought that popped up for me is: "Is importance imagined or is it known?" (actually, it all depends on your point of view and what it means to you) Of course, I would say what's more important is the question of who or what is 'imagining', but that is probably getting a bit predictable in my posts.
Incidentally Hamas, I don't think that was really your imagination - that was just what you were told, we were all told that. If anything it only takes a dash of imagination to make a pre-defined character come to life, a big hint that it's just pre-existing programming is that it's all based on information you've previously assimilated. I mean that's not even creative in any sense, atleast when someone has some creative idea there's enough imagination to pull it together in a fresh and unique way that sort of makes sense. Has anyone ever said "I saw Jehovah's hand in my life before I became a witness"?? If anything they might say they felt God was directing their life or something, but can they honestly look back and say "Oh yes, I can see that it's clear from the information available to me at the time that it was specifically Jehovah." Memory being an unreliable thing it would be questionable if they even claimed that, but I've never heard of anyone even making such a claim. If anything they would only make the assumption 'because there is only one God, so therefore Jehovah was directing my life because that is my conceptual framework for God.' *(it wouldn't be that explicit of course, that would be a little too much honesty to maintain that way of thinking - hard to see through something and still go at it unconsciously)
*edited to add this
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6
Twisted Scriptures of the Watchtower - Part 2
by joe_from_kokomo infriends: .
this one may not qualify as a "fully-twisted" scripture, in the sense that so many others are more twisted and more misused, and more transliterated.
but, i did run across a scripture that is incorrectly translated in the new world translation i felt it needs to be brought to light.
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Introspection
I haven't read this thread at all, but just wanted to share that I thought of Twisted Scriptures as the name of a band, you know instead of Twisted Sisters...
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49
Are people happier married or single?
by JH in.
it think it was paul who said in the bible that people are happier single than married.
do you share paul's point of view?
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Introspection
In verse 32 and 33 Paul talks about being anxious and wanting approval - (well, according to the NWT rendering atleast) in both cases it is in relation to someone else. I say whether you're single or married you wouldn't want to be anxious about being approved of, it seems to me the bible says something about not being anxious too. Maybe it's a matter of living with someone else's anxiety and need for approval - you still have your own but you're just used to living with it.. Maybe I'm just off topic, seems like this is more about peace.