Yes. I agree with the Jews and intelligentsia who know it is all a myth that tries to explain God.
I believe that Gnostic Christian thinking is older than Christianity from the fact that Christianity usurped what I believe were the holy books of the founders of Gnostic Christian, the Chrestians.
youtube.com/watch?feature=p … At-PAkgqls
Regards
DL
Explain how god began and you will have answered you own questions, just substitute “life” for “god”. Is god alive or not?
As I said, life could not have begun because if it had, then it would have emerged from nonlife, which is impossible.
I tried that, but realized I was worshiping someone who threatened and punished me in order that I’d love him. Yahweh is a petulant child created by a primitive people.
I don’t believe in supernatural or artificial. Anything and everything is natural.
Yeah I guess. I think I need a definition to work with and a celestial north korea with praising dear leader all day is not a good definition of heaven. Any definition of heaven would eventually get old and boring and I’d wind up right back here in the midst of randomness and surprise. I woke up this morning thinking that the reason this place exists is that the other place, whether blissful or not, was unfulfilling. Why else have this world?
The interaction of me and not-me is what I call reality. Me and not-me are two poles of the same thing.
Evolution explains how life changes complexity, but can’t explain the beginning since life cannot have a beginning or else life came from nonlife. If life came from nonlife, it would simply mean that nonlife was actually a process of life. If life came from stars, then it simply means stars are a process necessary to life and must be considered alive in that way. Go all the way back through an infinite regression and we can never come to a point where something could be considered not-alive.
What does it mean to be alive?
In 1964, James Lovelock was among a group of scientists who were requested by NASA to make a theoretical life detection system to look for life on Mars during the upcoming space mission. When thinking about this problem, Lovelock wondered “how can we be sure that Martian life, if any, will reveal itself to tests based on Earth’s lifestyle?”[8] To Lovelock, the basic question was “What is life, and how should it be recognized?” When speaking about this issue with some of his colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he was asked what he would do to look for life on Mars. To this, Lovelock replied “I’d look for an entropy reduction, since this must be a general characteristic of life.”[8] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_a … ve_entropy
So if organization is life, there where is non-life? Atoms are not organized? Stars squish hydrogen into helium and carbon and that’s not an entropy reduction? What about gravity? Mars itself is a reduction of entropy from the cloud of star dust accreted into a big ball we now call a planet. The real question here is not how to find life, but how to find nonlife.
Well, we can take the view that life is a complicated form of matter or that matter is a simple form of life. I prefer the latter because it eliminates explaining how life came from lifeless matter. So in my view, there is nothing that is not alive; never was and never will be.
These critters look alive in their own right to me:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjPcT1uUZiE[/youtube]
Start at 27:00 here:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyhZcEY5PCQ[/youtube]
So the believer thinks that god always existed and god is life and god created all that exists and then breathed life into it. That’s not much different than the way I see it except that the creation process is an extension of himself: god has 100% control over everything that exists like I have 100% control over the movement of my arm, so what exists is the dream, thought, idea of god which exists as a construct of the fabric of god and created from nothing like dreams we have that exist only in our heads and made of the stuff of our brains.
My axiom is that god cannot create anything that is not of himself and therefore everything is made of god. The reason for that is distinct things cannot exist in relation to each other. God cannot be disconnected from everything else and also interact with it; if he interacts, then he is part of it.
Distinctiveness is the distinction between myself and believers: I don’t believe in separate things, but they do.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdnZiv24fLc[/youtube]
the message of Billy Graham is
36:25
approximately what I’ve given you and of
36:31
all what I will call fundamentalist
36:34
forms of catholicism and protestantism.
36:39
What would the real gospel be; the real
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good news? It’s not simply that Jesus of
36:47
Nazareth was the son of God, but that he
36:53
was a powerful son of God, who came to
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open everybody’s eyes to the fact that
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you are too. And this is perfectly plain
37:09
if you will go to the tenth chapter of
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St John verse 30, there is the passage
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where Jesus says “I and the father are
37:23
one”. And this is… there are some people
37:26
who are not intimate disciples around,
37:28
and they are horrified, and they
37:30
immediately pick up stones to stone him.
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He says “many good works I have shown you
37:37
from the father and for which of these
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do you stone me?” And they said “for a good
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work we stone you not, but for blasphemy,
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because you being a man make yourself
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God.” And he replied “isn’t it written in
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your law: I have said you are God’s?” He’s
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quoting the 82nd Psalm. “Is it not
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written in your law ‘I have said you are
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gods’? If God called them those to whom he
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gave his word ‘gods’ and you can’t deny
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the scriptures,
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how can you say I blaspheme because I
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said ‘I am a son of God’?”
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Well that’s the whole thing in a
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nutshell. Because if you read the King
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James Bible that descended with the
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angel,
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you will see in italics in front of
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these words “son of God” the Son of God,
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because I said I am the son of God, and
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most people think that the italics are
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for emphasis;
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they’re not. The italics indicate words
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interpolated by the translators. You will
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not find that in the Greek. In the Greek
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says a son of God. So it seems to me here
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perfectly plain that Jesus is God in the
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back of his mind that this isn’t
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something peculiar to himself, so when he
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says “I am the way, no man comes to the
39:12
Father but by me”,
39:14
this “I am” this “me” is the divine in us.
this
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discovery is the gospel that is the good
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news,
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but this has been perpetually repressed
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throughout the history of Western
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religion because all Western religions
40:43
have taken the form of celestial
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monarchies and therefore have
40:50
discouraged democracy in the kingdom of
40:53
heaven.
KIS, as you do in thinking, is always good buddy.
Regards
DL
Let me be the Devil’s advocate here to pick your brain.
We, apparently, came out of amino acids and lightning. Neither of those are life, yet the seem to be what has produced life from non-life.
Your thoughts?
Regards
DL
Indeed. I like that you KIS, but to religious con men, the more complicated and mysterious the notion they are trying to sell, the sooner they can say to their mark that they just do not understand and have to believe on faith alone, the better it is for the con.
“These critters look alive in their own right to me:”
I have no problem with your view that we are all made from star stuff. It is an old idea and accurate.
If you can’t see God in all, you can’t see God at all. -Anon
“What does it mean to be alive?”
To me, life must have the characteristic of consuming from it’s environment and being able to react to it. IOW, a nervous system that must feed so that it has what it takes to reproduce.
Do you agree with that?
DNA is necessary to make us, but as individuals strands, I would not be able to call it life as it is just information. We are like biological computers that can somehow take that DNA information and actually create the nervous system I described.
That is life from non-life. No?
Regards
DL
I really appreciate all the contributions here so far.
I especially enjoyed Gloominary’s contributions and Serendipper’s recent replies. I’d like to study the Hebrew and Greek texts closer. I do NOT take the Bible literally, and I am currently reconciling scripture with evolution, along with supernatural acts described with what they could mean to life application in a non-supernatural way. I will admit that I take more of the NT literally than the OT, but the OT is so rich and moreso misinterpreted that the ‘can of worms’ of language and interpretaiton is something I am not learned in yet. I live in an enchanted world, full of music and learning, travel and the remembrance of my own past, to help others find theirs.
Greatest still has lots of things to explain, without all the repetition and emotional conjectures, some depth of sources and information. If good works were solely for boasting, then people are being arrogant and will lose touch with the faith and knowledge which forms the basis of good works. Ask yourself honestly, if you have done any good works recently, and in secret, should you establish and grow these things? I don’t care to know, but only want to instill these good habits in you and others, free of charge. I’m almost certain that Jesus talks about the importance of secret charity, dieting, and prayer in Matthew 6. I’m also almost certain most people don’t do any of these things in secret, and those who do these things strive to make them exaggerated for public display, for some deep sick self-esteem issue for which I do not share. If you do these things, I’m sure there will be change in your life.
I agree with Gloominary, ecumenism and new age crap is poisonous. Christianity is the supreme religion for obvious reasons, but human nature makes lots of people feel offended from this supremacy, the truth of it, the ethics of it.
You guys mention lots about dualism and pantheism, some deistic ideas, but forget panentheism. I like panentheism. I’m not sure what I believe, but I try to establish the foundations of what I know and move from simple principles, morally rewarding habits, and a natural philosophy that extends to as much material being as possible. Materialism often discounts the vastness of things, and claiming some things, forgets others. Are you particles or waves?
Also, about the misogyny and homophobic thing, America (and most of the West) has been feminized. A century or two ago, there was significantly less divorce, less anal and oral sex, less babies born out of wedlock, and less abortions. These things let the snake into the garden. Homosexual sexual acts breed disease and a divergence from family/procreation. Implicit and unintended consequences from touchy issues, that intend to free those in the minorities affected, have actually made society’s masses more shallow (along with the mass worship of mammon and baal). These minorities grow until they claim majority, and a moral superiority over others just because they are apart of a minority. I have always hated the sin and not the sinner, but unfortunately the gay community will have to repent for that which they insist defines them completely, and at times, makes them ‘superior’ to others because of inevitable oppression, public judgment, and tough times growing up. The real tough times are poverty, outlier intelligence, lack of family, love loss, deaths of loved/close ones… yet the feminization forgets these in a conquest to free those who are oppressed for more superficial reasons. This opens up the issue of whether some sins are worse than others, for example, gayness versus murder, or cheating on a partner versus telling white lies to children. Some theists level the playing field by insisting sin is sin, all humans are equally perverted and sinful and evil-leaning, some people insist that some sins are worse than others and put themselves in a rabbit hole of defining the hierarchy of moral abhorrence themselves. Personally, I insist, people haven’t read Leviticus in Hebrew and haven’t reconciled Jesus in Greek with the OT law. I haven’t yet either, so I can’t really face these issues honestly, but at least I know these things exist so, eventually, I can look for resolve.
Another big issue here is causality, which seems useless debating. I like the conversation surrounding scripture and morals, but temporal issues are way out in left field. The beginning of all things will forever be foreign to you and I, and when we abandon this obsession with knowing the first and last, we can know the understanding of these things come in faith. Faith for you may not mean to submit to a being existing only in an incorporeal ‘supernatural’ ultimate reality, but in accepting that our limited perception forces us to incorporate some randomness and vastness into our blundering beliefs.
I really enjoyed reading Serendipper’s Sly Man and The Devil story. At first, I was scared, and at last, I felt calm. There was no mention of Jesus, the popularity of the issue and stance, and no mention of a natural philosophy of things/the cosmos. Gurdjieff had some interesting beliefs, and of course, an amazing stache, so I’ll definitely be looking into him more. I don’t see myself in the groups listening to the devil who were sure to get to heaven boasting of their works. I am just some young guy from the north who would prefer a life of privacy and deep connections with few people. St. Peter is always at the gates, but where’s Paul and John? There was a Paul and John in the 1960s who made some good music, but it seems the big guy and the higher tier apostles are often missing in our latter day stories.
We have already mentioned the ten commandments, but there is also a promise before and a lengthy covenant afterwards. You guys read those? In Hebrew? Latin and English too? These things matter to me, even though lots of people have laughed at my drive to learn ‘dead’ languages.
In a thread posing the question of understanding Jesus and the Bible, we’ve spoken about first things and morals, but haven’t honestly addressed the question, not even the OP Greatest…
I have learned some things about Him, and the scripture, but only beginning to understand. The important part is my drive, and your drive, of some understanding and ideal of better-ness. The snakes will eventually be stomped out with bronze feet, with our tongues like swords, and the cleansing of our robes until the evil is separated from good by the sake of knowledge and progression through time so long.
We also had slavery, wife and child beating, no possible way of saying that a husband raped a wife, no recourse for a child being abused sexually by a parent, systematic racism, indentured sevants (which was a form of slavery) child labor in horrible conditions that was legal and more.
Why do periods that have Christian values never have responsibility for what comes after?
IOW in these types of discussions the 60s leads to all sorts of horrible things in later decades, but the more conservative 50s is free from any responsibility for creating the 60s or other problems that came after.
If one comes here as a believer in a traditional God one does get a lot of crap. But some of what you said reminded me of so many things religious people say and it seems to me a kind of selective and self-serving type of memory thing. They are nostalgic for a moral past that did not exist. And blame current problem and what they consider problems only on what they don’t like, when there are aj lot of causes that are left out.
I stopped at your gay bashing. Piece of human garbage and liar.
And you think I should change my ways. F Y homophobe.
Regards
DL
It’s definitional. You’re defining amino acids to be nonlife and then presenting the problem of how life comes from nonlife. I circumvent that problem by claiming that amino acids must be a very simple form of life. My axiom is life cannot come from nonlife. I suppose it’s an argument from ignorance because I cannot see how life could come from nonlife, but by occam’s razor it’s the simplest solution.
A similar issue is how a cause influences an effect. I circumvent that problem by surmising that cause and effect are the same process.
My point of departure is the maximum number of things in any universe can only be 1. The universe is the only atom (atomos - the uncuttable).
I think religion will fizzle out when prosperity enables the proper development of brains both through nutrition and reduction of environmental stress as well as education where people are put into positions of having to use cognitive processes rather than suppress thinking in favor of simply having faith.
Christopher Hitchens pointed out that humanity once saw gods in everything until it boiled down to monotheism and he notes we’re getting closer to the real number of zero. It’s humorous, but the progression seems to be a function of prosperity and knowledge of how the world works instead of using gods to explain everything.
That’s cool! I’ll have to remember that.
Alan Watts said that if you see the universe as a mechanism, you really have to concede that you are a mechanism as well. How you choose to regard it really depends whether you want to put the universe down or exalt it.
Jakob said something to the effect of “how miserable it must be to imagine the universe as empty and sterile as your heart.” Something like that. Hopefully he’ll notice my unpoetic recollection and clean it up, but you get the point.
That’s fine by me. So, what defines nonlife?
But dna consumes from its environment and reproduces on its own (and at the speed of a jet engine according to that video - amazing!). How do those molecules know where to go and what to do?
Well let’s see. Let’s start with hydrogen (1 proton + 1 electron). If we have enough H, then stars form, completely unassisted. Then stars squish H together to make He, completely unassisted, then squish He together to make C, N, O (and all the way up to Fe. Beyond Fe requires a supernova). These are things that will happen every time, all by itself.
After stars live and die, then elements arrange themselves according to mass and acrete into planets, moons, asteroids, rocks, whatever. This will happen every time, all by itself.
Then the rocks provide structure for organic molecules to form (molecules made from CNHO). This will happen every time and all by itself.
Cytosine, adenine, guanine, and thymine are just different ways of arranging CNHO. Nothing magical, but just a result of random ways of making molecules. If there are enough of them, then chance allows for the formation of some type of rna or dna. Dna that manages to survive will replicate while others swim in circles and go extinct. The shear numbers of molecules and the rate at which they form allows plenty of quantity to guarantee just about anything… every time and all by itself.
Eventually, some of the critters utilize a source of radiation (star light or radioactive elements) to break an H+ off and use it to “digest” a piece of rock (splitting molecules requires energy). H+ is an acid that will displace any other cation (NH4+, Ca++, Mg++, K+, etc). From here they make shells, skeletons, teeth, etc from Ca and all our limestone on earth came from those guys and are evidence of life. The gravel or concrete in your driveway is evidence of life; the byproducts of life.
You can fill in the rest of the blanks to get to humanity, but the point is there are no miracles required; it’s stuff that will always happen and happens automatically from simply having enough hydrogen as a starting condition. I don’t see stars forming He from H as any different than the formation of dna or a woman giving birth or anything else going on. If the Big Bang is how it began, then you are still the Big Bang coming on. A tree growing in the yard is the Big Bang coming on. Me pruning the tree is the Big Bang still happening. Me writing this is the Big Bang still happening. All that’s really up for debate is whether I am a machine or if the stars are alive, and that boils down to whether one wants to exalt the universe or denigrate it.
That was me, not Greatest. Good works done for salvation are arrogant.
We shouldn’t strive to do good because it’s good, but because it’s sensible. Would you rather play with the kid who is nice to you only because his father threatened to spank him or the kid that was nice to you because he’s hoping for reciprocation? I want you to be smarter, not because I’m trying to do a good work, but because smarter people create a world that is better for me to inhabit. The source of my morality is complete and utter selfishness: I treat you good because I want you to treat me good and not because I fear a god is going to spank me. I’d actually be offended if I thought you were only nice to me because you feared some retaliation. With that in mind, if I were god and you came to me proclaiming lots of good works performed in hopes of saving your own ass, then I’d be pissed. You see? The only reason you helped people was because you feared hell.
So if you seek to save your ass, you’ll burn, because the only reason you’re doing anything is to save your ass. So salvation cannot be about works and the only way to screw it up is to try to fix it.
You are saved by grace, through faith, not of works, lest any man should boast.
Panetheism seems to be god existing as the universe + some other substrate of god that for some reason is not part of the universe. Makes no sense to me because all things are connected, and if they are not connected, then they don’t exist relative to each other and cannot interact.
One can’t exist without the other. Waves exist as waves only because particles exist as particles.
You’re assuming some things are inherently good or bad. That is arrogance because there is no way for anyone to take an objective view of the universe in order to draw conclusions about absolute truth. From the humanist point of view, family values may be considered a good thing, but that view assumes the propagation of the species is a good thing and that they know best how to achieve it. It could be the case that the State being “husband and father of last resort” is actually better for the species than relying on traditions. It could be that the breakdown of the family is best for humanity, but who can say for sure? Only the arrogant can be sure.
Why reinvent the wheel? Listen to everything Bart Erhman has to say first.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOPd80FN2ew[/youtube]
Greatest U R wrote:
Where did this come from? Life came to earth from space…
For evolution to occur a massive amount of new genetic information has to come from somewhere. Space?
According to the theory of evolution it takes longer - hundreds of millions of years, but an extension of time does not change the science.
There is no known law of physics able to create information from nothing.
So where does this leave evolution?
It is a wish theory for those scientists who wish to maintain a purely mechanical model for our existence.
When evolution makes bacteria resistant to antibiotics, where does the information to make them resistant come from?
Serendipper wrote:
We should all be concerned about the impact of antibiotic use in producing a new breed of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which are causing food poisoning epidemics around the world.
The theory of evolution does not provide a plausible explanation of our origins, and that the geological and paleontological data do not support evolution over long periods of time, but rather imply catastrophism, which is consistent with the Genesis account.
Serendipper wrote:
Joyce Meyer is a Word of Faith Charismatic / New Age teacher who preaches along the lines of Kenneth Copeland, Kenneth Hagin, Fred Price, Charles Capp, Benny Hinn.
Some of her most serious heresies:
Jesus tortured in hell, Jesus first born again man, Jesus became sin on the cross and stopped being the son of God, our sins atoned in hell and not on the cross, etc., and
Joyce Meyer teaches that she is sinless. 
But you didn’t answer the question. Where did the info come from to make bacteria resistant to antibiotics?
I suppose making people arrogant is the purpose of religion.
Serendipper wrote:
Serendipper I am not a scientist, are you? Nevertheless, I think you may have an opinion on this ‘bacteria resistant’ topic and I am interested to read what you have to say, in the meantime I will do some reading up on it.
Let’s us get down to the nitty gritty.
She mis-quotes scripture and she knows no one will actually check to see if what she is quoting really lines up to the truth.
Why do false teachers always come up with such clever means of deceiving people? Because she is actually very clever and knows exactly how to stop you from thinking for yourself.
The perfect example of this is the vid you provided. “Quit asking and you won’t be confused”
You’re not a mathematician but you know 2+2=4 right?
Antibiotic resistance happens when at least one bacteria is a little different from the rest and that difference, which ordinarily wouldn’t confer any advantage in survival and may even be a disadvantage, suddenly becomes a huge advantage when the antibiotics kill all the bacteria except for that one. So the lone survivor reproduces and now all the bacteria are resistant to the antibiotics.
It works the same with weeds and herbicide. We spray farm fields with herbicide and one weed isn’t bothered by it, so it survives and reproduces and now none of the weeds are bothered by herbicides.
It can work in your garden too. If you pull weeds then weeds that have a long taproot have an advantage, so all you accomplish is teaching the weeds how to resist you pulling them by growing longer taproots that you can’t pull.
That is how evolution works. Random changes result in new advantages when the environment changes. The information doesn’t come from anywhere, but is a random happening.
Deer have long legs because predators chase them. Long legs are not an advantage because they break easy, but if predators chase them, then long legs are an advantage. If predators go away, then long-legged deer have a disadvantage. If predators return, then short-legged deer have a disadvantage.
If deer run fast, then predators have to get smarter. If deer are easy to catch, then having smarts is no advantage.
I don’t know of any 2 people who interpret the bible the same way. What is the truth? Everyone thinks they have the truth.
There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death. Proverbs 14:12
She has no interest in truth, but only in constructing a fantasy world to inhabit and insisting everyone else play along.
