Comments on The Limits of God Part 5

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Krisles--  yes,  I am ready for more mining,  after years of digging shallow or barren holes in search of nuggets of truth,  I learned mostly where they were not.  Now,  I hope to find a nugget or two.

And to all--  I already regret my criticisms of Christianity / Catholicism below, because I do consider Christianity to be the religion closest to the totality of moral truth, with the best chance of getting us there. 

So let this not distract us from our discussions elsewhere of the religion farthest from moral truth,  that being Islam. 

posted by GoldenMean on December 16, 2015 at 9:46 PM | link to this | reply

GM

While I'm still waiting for the end to go back and re-read, I really liked this description of the Bible as it's exactly how I recall my not nearly as thorough...but it was waaay before the Internet, lol....investigation into the origins of the Bible and why I never considered it perfect and, therefore, understood your use of the word 'flawed' to mean these are the facts that keep it from ever being a perfect book.  The thing is, that was never important to my faith....I frankly never understood how Fundamentalists could be.  But, I know they shake their heads at plenty of stuff I come up with, too!  The powerful....and incredible ......thing about the Bible is, in spite of all its flaws, there are just these basic messages that so clearly come through.....and those coalesce to form what Christianity is.  Many of us might not think about it all that much until we reach a certain point in life....but we feel it in our hearts, and go about it in our own way.  And, often, when we are ready we open that book back up and start reading it, mining it for the stories with different, wiser eyes. 

posted by Krisles on December 16, 2015 at 8:11 PM | link to this | reply

Nautikos--  thanks for your wonderful thoughtful comment.  It would take several posts to address all the elements of your comment,  but I will take a crack at it. 

You keep saying that you disagree with the Basic Premise,  and by that I must assume that you reject not only the existence of God, but the existence of any spiritual or metaphysical elements of life at all.  This is,  after all,  the basic atheist premise. I will be addressing this issue in future posts,  if I can hold your attention that long.

With your agnostic hat on, you say that a transcendental (metaphysical?) God is not knowable.  I think that a transcendental or metaphysical God is indeed knowable by us,  because we ourselves are transcendental or metaphyscial entities ourselves.  As proof,  I offer for you the incredible phenomona of near death experiences (NDE), which is becoming very well-documented.  There is also the growing clinical data of tens of thousands of amazing cases of past-life regressions by dozens (perhaps hundreds by now) of very intelligent psychiatrists, who observe actual physical healing after these regressions.  I am well aware of psycho-somatic disorders,  and these healings go well beyond the scope of that.  Then there are the amazing accounts of small children,  especially in India and Thailand, sometimes just 2 or 3 years old,  who remember their just-past life with intricate details,  which are verified by their astounded parents, doctors,  and investigators.  In some places,  these cases are carefully documented,  and at least one book has been written about them. 

But just because God may be knowable,  that doesn't mean that any person or religion actually DOES know a lot about him.  So we search, we discuss, we investigate,  and I think we might get a bit closer to another bit of knowledge.

Yes,  I said that the Bible is a flawed document.  The Bible is a great book that contains some teachings from God.  But it is also a flawed collection of ancient books,  chosen by arrogant,  power-hungry Christian (Catholic) bishops in the early centuries after Christ,  with the specific agenda to make God omnipotent,  and to make humanity the scum of the earth,  with the bishops as the intercessors between God and the scum He banished from Eden,  with the bishops holding the keys to Heaven or Hell,  and dangling those keys in front of their fearful flock of sheep-like scum,  and their local priests.  In the second century,  they started calling the church  “Catholic”,  to separate it from the Gnostics,  Arians,  and other groups who held different Christian beliefs,  and who accepted writings other than the ones that ended up in the Bible.  The clashes between those groups and the Catholic church escalated.  There were many battles fought over the content of the Bible,  and many good books were rejected and burned,  along with their readers.  If you doubt this,  please do some research on your own,  starting with the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 AD:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea   This council was called a  “synod of blockheads”  by one of the observers.  It forcefully settled the basic conflicts of Christian doctrine,  and punished the losers,  the Arians,  which set the stage for choosing which books would be included in the Bible,  and which books would be banned and burned.  These decisions took place at other later councils.  Even after all these deadly doctrinal battles,  we ended up with an amazingly good collection of books in the Bible.  Then,  after reading those books,  with their obvious agenda,  some interpretations of the Bible’s teachings make sense,  in accordance with logic and morality,  and some do not.

Jesus himself condemned the interpretations and conduct of the Pharisees and Saducees,  who were recognized as leaders of the Jewish religion.  Jesus himself blinded Saul the Pharisee on the road to Damascus.  Most of the current leaders of the Christian religion should be challenged as well,  for their teachings are just as faulty as the Pharisees.

Christians,  and followers of all other orthodox religions,  should begin to realize that the doctrines that they hold dear have been carefully crafted to follow a certain agenda of domination,  by religious leaders similar to the Biblical  “Pharisees”,  who were far from wise,  who may have been what we now call narcissists,  who were interested primarily in the domination of believers and ensuring that those believers contributed plenty of their hard-earned money to support the church;  an agenda that is not completely in their own best interests.  While crafting those doctrines,  those leaders suppressed and destroyed writings which held truths that were perhaps more important than the writings they allowed to survive.

After all the censoring and deleting and banning,  not to mention difficulties with interpreting from one language to another to yet another,  what is presented in the Bible is best studied with great care and some skepticism.  President Thomas Jefferson studied the New Testament and possibly other writings about Jesus,  and offered this opinion to John Adams in a letter in 1814:  “In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man;  and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds.  It is as easy to separate those parts,  as it is to pick out diamonds from dunghills.”  I do not know what criteria Jefferson was using to  “separate those parts”,  but Jefferson was a great man,  a great intellect,  and a great spirit,  and I think he was right about this.  The Bible has been tampered with,  by many people with different agendas over thousands of years,  and it contains both treasure and trash,  diamonds and dunghills,  and it is up to the reader to separate the parts. 

Unlike Jefferson,  you,  Nautikos,  are rejecting the whole kit and kaboodle.  I think you might be throwing out the baby with the filthy bath water that the baby was drowning in,  LOL.  So while you have rid yourself of the bilge (and there is a lot of bilge)  and while thinking you have saved the baby,  the baby is growing up without you.

I almost deleted all that,  to start over and make it much shorter,  but it was all needed to answer your question fully.  I hope we are still buddies,  LOL .

posted by GoldenMean on December 16, 2015 at 7:22 PM | link to this | reply

GM

I've been busy with all kinds of things, and haven't been around much in Blogitville, but it's high time I commented again.

I admire you for this interesting 'investigation', and its very intelligent and articulate presentation. It's just that for me there is 'The Problem of the Basic Premise', LOL..

And even if one were to adopt that basic premise for the sake of argument, there is still the issue ot 'testability'...I have mentioned that I am a bit of an amateur physicist, and on occasion I have 'looked into' string theory. Aside from the fact that the math was over my head, the question arose in my mind, 'How do essentially four-dimentional beings such (three spatial ones + time) as us ever test something that requires x number of additional dimensions to make even mathematical sense? There are real physicists who ask that question (e.g. Smolin) and can't find an answer...

So, if I doff my 'atheist' hat and put on my 'agnostic' one, I say a transendental God is not knowable; and if not knowable, one can specualte at will, as of course has been done over time in many ways - except that these speculations then sort of 'coalesce' into 'facts'...

There was observation of yours (I can't at the moment place its location) that the Bible is a 'flawed' document, and I made a mental note to myself to ask you what exactly you mean by that; it might surprise you, coming from me, LOL, that I am not at all sure how it is possible to meaningfully speak of it as 'flawed', unless we accept one of the x number of versions as 'perfect'... As far as I am concerned, each version 'is what it is', LOL...

The most interesting discussions related to the Bible I have ever encountered is found in Northrop Frye's book The Great Code, that I have sitting on  my shelf; you might find it interesting. (Many years ago I even had the pleasure of attending some of his lectures at the Unniversity of Toronto. I was not enrolled in his course, but I had this habit of 'auditing' all over the place, and his was one of them, LOL)

To get back to 'basic premises' - I prefer the Greek Pantheon (though I am not Greek), particularly the great god Pan...

posted by Nautikos on December 16, 2015 at 7:50 AM | link to this | reply

G3--  therein lies the dilemma.  Does God know all outcomes?  Then what is the point of giving Satan free will,  giving all of us free will.  I think the whole point of free will is changing outcomes.  God may be able to achieve overall outcomes in a general way,  but perhaps "the devil is in the details",  and our personal outcomes are very much at risk,  and the overall outcome is partially at risk.  Thanks for reading!

posted by GoldenMean on December 15, 2015 at 8:53 AM | link to this | reply

Probably the most suffering of all

But I don't believe a knowing all God takes risk. He just do because He Knows the outcome. Praise the most High!You are on the right track with that one. A lesson I know for me, if I pay more attention.

posted by Grandpa3 on December 15, 2015 at 8:43 AM | link to this | reply

Intern--  Only recently did I pay much attention to Job.  I handn't considered it for 20 or 30 years.  When a friend suggested I go look at it again,  it was like I was reading it  "with new eyes",  eyes that could see some of what was really going on here.

posted by GoldenMean on December 14, 2015 at 6:05 AM | link to this | reply

This is my favorite book in the Bible that explains a whole lot.

posted by FormerStudentIntern on December 14, 2015 at 5:32 AM | link to this | reply