There is a semantic trick in the word supernatural.
It's pretty old. No one seems to question that it is a trick, but I think it is.
First, it is simply defined that only natural things exist. Natural means "from nature" and nature is composed only of things that are tangible, visible, have a volume and mass. All this is hidden, deeply buried in the assumption.
Then comes the trick: the people who adhere to that hidden definition can simply attach the adjectives "not natural" or "supernatural" to anything whose existence they dislike. Magically, this preference becomes a logical truth, and logical truths are natural, by definition.
All of this is irrational because the definition is wrong. At the very least, they had to expand the definition when they accepted the existence of electricity, magnetism, the invisible "force" of gravity (not a problem for Newton because he was a Theologian), and the atomic models to explain chemical bonding and molecular composition, without which they couldn't have invented genetics and genomics, which today most people believe to be absolutely true by the obvious miracle of cultural osmosis.
And they will have to keep expanding the definition. Which inevitable leads to a Personal God. If nothing else, our language forces every thought to go in that direction, which is terrifying for many.
I think most people, me included, make this mistake often, without realizing. It's the consequence of mental poisoning. I doubt anyone can overcome this problem without supernatural intervention, hehehehe.
By the way, supernatural is Latin for metaphysical or metaphysikos. And many scientists are known to abhor metaphysics.
Now that I think about this, it's weird that the things people fear the most are giants with clay feet: nuclear warfare, infections in general, genetic modification, fetal malformations, viral diseases, quarantines, concentration camps, explosive chips that can control your brain. All of these things would be dismissed as supernatural nonsense if they were delivered in a religious language. But the old myths of world destruction and divine punishment with disease and tyranny are now explained as normal, natural phenomena, and you are allowed to believe it by weirdos like Dawkins and Harris, and you are expected to be terrified by natural things, because the new shamans feast on your fear.
You are allowed to deny sin, but you are not allowed to question officially mandated physical scares.
Jesus died and came back to life to bring salvation from all this man-made abuse, and he made this salvation available to anyone who asks for it. Notice how the true atheists always deny salvation from abuse by any other means but self-deification and self-idolatry. The lesser atheists are ashamed of their own self-importance.
Your explanation is phenomenal and I was posing very open ended debate which you have done so well. Thus I will have to sleep on it as it's past my bedtime...
Christ can to redeem mankind. He had already created everything that exists, what possible benefit could be derived from his procreating again? Secondly, what kind of man would marry and have children knowing that he would be killed very young and leave behind a defenceless and impoverished family, and would those children inherit his sinless nature and then also fall into sin like his first creation had? Thirdly, he had no physical resources to support a family...he only owned the clothes he wore. There are more practical reasons why he remained a virgin, but I think my point is made.
LOL I'd like to think that if Jesus had married it would have at least been mentioned somewhere! Of course there have been alternative interpretations from the Da Vinci Code to Jesus Christ Superstar, where Mary Magdalene is cast as his lover. The Bible in my understanding leaves open the possibility that Jesus had half brothers or half sisters presumably after Joseph consumated things with MAry, though that is another story.
I have known of many situations where a child was abandoned due to the death of a parent. I know of one tragic case where both parents died within three years of each other when their son and daughter were young: the mother first from a sudden heart condition at 37 and then the father developed and succumbed to brain cancer. They were high school sweethearts and had only known each other. This was in the late 1990s before the Covid jabs. My prayers are that in these tragedies somebody steps up...and God provides...
Mary undoubtedly had more children with Joseph...the Bible alludes to that but if Jesus (who is God in human form) had physically sired children he wouldn’t be the “only begotten Son of God” as referred to in John 3:16 as any child he fathered would also be begotten of God.
I have experienced that same cognitive dissonance since I was young, and I busted out of bible class at age 6, when I had a disagreement with the teacher about taking the Bible literally, which I refused, and had my parents take me out of the (optional) class. Over time, the conflict resolved itself for me once I became clear that Jesus is a non-dualist teacher, and that clearly, to those outside the Kingdom it all comes in parables, and My Kingdom is NOT of this world. The purpose of this world is to prevent solutions, it is the endless problem to engage the mind and prevent us from seeking first the Kingdom.
I find it helpful to remember that the Bible was a construct of Constantine's Council of Nicaea which took place in 325 AD (there was a second one several hundred years later). By then the followers of Jesus had spread throughout southern Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa and were beginning to disrupt the Roman Empire.
Constantine brought in Iraneaus and some other guy to serve as Bishops and create a formal Christian church with an institutional structure that could be controlled from the top down... like government. They wanted to corral all of those freedom loving, independent, rabble rousing, decentralized followers of Jesus. The idea was to gather all the writings about the teachings of Jesus, sort out the ones they liked and put them into an official book. To give it credence they added the the Jewish books, the Old Testament. Then they went out and killed many followers of Jesus and destroyed the writings of those who did not participate in the Council. This is how the Catholic church was born, why there is a Vatican and why it's in Rome.
Problem was, they didn't get all the books. Of course many were purposely left out because they didn't conform to the agenda, but many were missed. Many of those books are quite mystical, which is why they're generally regarded as the Gnostic Gospels. Many of those scrolls were found in a cave at Nag Hamadi in 1945, many more in a cave near the Dead Sea in 1946.
The point being, those books indicate that Mary was either married or hooked up to Jesus because the apostles talk about them kissing. She also had her own Gospel, The Gospel According to Mary.
The Council of Nicaea and Constantine did not canonize the Bible and 21 (including the 4 Gospels) of the 27 books of the New Testament were accepted by all Christians over 100 years before Constantine.
"The writings attributed to the apostles circulated amongst the earliest Christian communities. The Pauline epistles were circulating in collected form by the end of the first century C.E. Justin Martyr, in the early second century, mentions the "memoirs of the apostles," which Christians called "gospels" and which were regarded as on par with the Old Testament.
A four gospel canon (the Tetramorph) was in place by the time of Irenaeus, c. 160, who refers to it directly. By the early 200s, Origen may have been using the same 27 books as in the modern New Testament, though there were still disputes over the canonicity of Hebrews, James, II Peter, II and III John, and Revelation. Likewise, by 200 C.E., the Muratorian fragment shows that there existed a set of Christian writings somewhat similar to what is now the New Testament, which included the four gospels and argued against objections to them. Thus, while there was a good measure of debate in the Early Church over the New Testament canon, there were also precedents for the current canon dating back to the second century.
The canonical Christian Bible was formally established by Bishop Cyril of Jerusalem in 350 C.E., confirmed by the Council of Laodicea in 363 C.E., and later established by Athanasius of Alexandria in 367 C.E."
The word "cannon" isn't even in the Bible. It's a Catholic construct. It's like Fauci calling the covid jabs safe and effective vaccines.
The early Christians, who did not call themselves Christians, had no institutional structure. Jesus was quite adamant about that. The use of institutional terms like bishop, canon, epistles and so on is merely the regurgitation of Catholic dogma. It's "safe and effective".
You are describing an instilled church belief. Yeshua was totally different than the Catholic developments. According to ancient historians, He was quite ugly and traveled to the East during his so-called missing years. The Renaissance artists painted him as a white, handsome fellow. Not true.
I did not always believe the Bible is true and is God's Word to man. I was well up in years when I came to. My parents were not believers. The Bible says faith comes by hearing and hearing comes by the Word of God.
I spent most of my adolescence and early 20s as an agnostic but I later developed a firm belief in God through things which happened in my life and now I seek consel. ONly an individual in their conscious mind can know truth which is why passages can be recited for decades with no external effect while for others perhaps during a crisis a flipping to a verse that speaks to them or a person on the TV who does likewise is life altering…
Do you ever run out of big ‘ol cans of worms to open? I love it. I’m not sure I have a direct answer to your title question, but I’ll share my orientation to it. My “religious experiences” begin with my choice to believe God exists. My logic and experience tell me the Bible and Jesus Christ are rational expressions of who God is. Applying and practicing the principles consistent with those two sources, my choice is consistently validated by my experiences and through the testimony of others. It might not be irrational to say I suffer from confirmation bias or benefit from self-fulfilling prophecies, and I’m open to evidence that I’m an idiot. In fact, I can cite plenty of evidence for that. But I can’t argue with my own reality.
That said, cognitive psychology intrigues me. I don’t find CP or any established scientific principles inconsistent with my Christianity. I’m convinced that if Science remains committed to only a materialistic world view—a commitment many scientific geniuses have rejected—it will never unravel the vast mysteries of human learning, instinct, intuition, and spirituality. Amjad Masad takes a wonderful deep dive into that in this recent interview. You’ll dig it. https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-show-amjad-masad
My primary source confirms what I find to be true. “The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit” (1 Corinthians 2:14). Not that I understand much of anything religious or scientific. But I’m convinced that the mysteries of God cannot be fully grasped by our mortal neurons, and yet we should not give up.
Dawkins doesn’t get it. He should grow a mustache. He’ll look like Mark Twain and appear to have a sense of humor—another thing inexplicable to CP.
Watch a couple videos on the concept of Flatland, a two dimensional reality. All sorts of miracles are trivial for a three dimensional creature in a two dimensional world. Give me a fourth dimension to act in a three dimensional world, and I could work miracles. Miracles are really nothing. The question is, "Do you believe in beings that have access to, and mobility in, a dimension we do not."
I have been pondering similar questions for quite awhile. It is clear that the framework for which we approach the world is wrong. I suspect that there’s huge fields of quantum entanglement, light and energy of which we know very little intentionally…
Regardsing whether I believe that beings have access to a dimension that we do not, I absolutely do…
Hi Amy. I have a habit of saying "you", but I really mean the universal you, mankind, and I wasn't calling you out specifically, just any that might be interested in this topic. With that said, I do appreciate your viewpoint, we've got a lot to learn. Have you ever checked out simulation theory? If so, could you see a way to meld it with Christianity? Conversation for another day, WAY past my bedtime. Take care.
Atheism and Theism are both matters of faith, untestable, unproveable. The only rational position is, damnedifIknow, agnosticism.
However much of the world, of the universe, is not rational, logical.
There are a number of ways to approach the bible, among them; as the Word of God, following the verses chronologically as changes, clarifications in man's understanding of God (A chaotic God, a vengeful God, a just God, a merciful God...), as the scripting of the oral history of the Jews. The approaches don't negate each other.
Was Latin already gone when your mother was a nun or did the Creed she was familiar with start Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem caeli et terrae, visbilium omnium et invisibilium...? The 'maker of heaven and earth and all this visible and invisible' notes the mysteries beyond the rational.
Which leads me to consider as I write this 71% of the respondents to your poll believe in miracles. I wonder if this is a sea change among the general populace or definitive of those attracted to your stack. In either case, quite impressive.
In answer to your title query, Christian w/o believe in supernatural? I'd say no.
However it's my understanding one can be good Buddhist, Zen and some other branches of such, without solid faith in the supernatural.
Buddhism is most interesting because Siddartha does not mention the presence of a creator God if you will, which have led many to claim that he is Atheist. Yet meanwhile Thai Buddhists are extremely superstitious types and it only takes watching a few Thai TV series to see their fascination with the spirit realm of all types. Buddha is also interesting because he really didn’t claim to be anything special i.e. the son of God, the great prophet, the Chosen One, et cetera. He believed it existed in all people to find enlightenment and break cycles of death and rebirth.
I believe there is a God and that the miracle of Jesus would be within the creator’s capability. From a broader viewpoint I also believe that we are accessing such a small amount of the information out there that much of what was written may have been altered by those in power to put us in a metaphysical cage. I am trying to blow through the silly argument that one must take an either/or position on this matter…
Fair enough. Let’s be more specific. You said atheism and theism are matters of faith and untestable and unprovable. What is your evidence of this claim?
For me and many people, the hardest parts of the bible to read are the parts where Moses characterizes God as a raging drunk. We like to think of God as our heavenly father, but if my father ever used the words that Moses puts in the mouth of God, I would have left home at 16 and never spoken to him again. But you have to remember that Moses had a Serious anger management problem. He killed an Egyptian an had to flee Egypt. When he descended from Mt. Sinai and the people were practicing idolatry he flew into a rage, smashed the 10 commandments, ground the idols to dust and made them eat it. There are many other examples but Moses is God's chosen servant for good and/or for bad. Finally God's judgement does fall on Moses for misrepresenting God's character. God tells him to speak to a rock and it will produce water for the people, and instead Moses flies into a rage, yells at the people and strikes the rock. For this final mis-characterization of God's love and care for His chosen people, Moses was condemned to die on Mt. Nebo and he did not get to enter the promised land.
Amy, I urge you to disillusion yourself by going down a particular rabbit hole - you can start by reading one of Mauro Biglino’s books, Gods of the Bible or The Naked Bible.
There is a semantic trick in the word supernatural.
It's pretty old. No one seems to question that it is a trick, but I think it is.
First, it is simply defined that only natural things exist. Natural means "from nature" and nature is composed only of things that are tangible, visible, have a volume and mass. All this is hidden, deeply buried in the assumption.
Then comes the trick: the people who adhere to that hidden definition can simply attach the adjectives "not natural" or "supernatural" to anything whose existence they dislike. Magically, this preference becomes a logical truth, and logical truths are natural, by definition.
All of this is irrational because the definition is wrong. At the very least, they had to expand the definition when they accepted the existence of electricity, magnetism, the invisible "force" of gravity (not a problem for Newton because he was a Theologian), and the atomic models to explain chemical bonding and molecular composition, without which they couldn't have invented genetics and genomics, which today most people believe to be absolutely true by the obvious miracle of cultural osmosis.
And they will have to keep expanding the definition. Which inevitable leads to a Personal God. If nothing else, our language forces every thought to go in that direction, which is terrifying for many.
I think most people, me included, make this mistake often, without realizing. It's the consequence of mental poisoning. I doubt anyone can overcome this problem without supernatural intervention, hehehehe.
By the way, supernatural is Latin for metaphysical or metaphysikos. And many scientists are known to abhor metaphysics.
Now that I think about this, it's weird that the things people fear the most are giants with clay feet: nuclear warfare, infections in general, genetic modification, fetal malformations, viral diseases, quarantines, concentration camps, explosive chips that can control your brain. All of these things would be dismissed as supernatural nonsense if they were delivered in a religious language. But the old myths of world destruction and divine punishment with disease and tyranny are now explained as normal, natural phenomena, and you are allowed to believe it by weirdos like Dawkins and Harris, and you are expected to be terrified by natural things, because the new shamans feast on your fear.
You are allowed to deny sin, but you are not allowed to question officially mandated physical scares.
Jesus died and came back to life to bring salvation from all this man-made abuse, and he made this salvation available to anyone who asks for it. Notice how the true atheists always deny salvation from abuse by any other means but self-deification and self-idolatry. The lesser atheists are ashamed of their own self-importance.
Your explanation is phenomenal and I was posing very open ended debate which you have done so well. Thus I will have to sleep on it as it's past my bedtime...
Sleep tight!❤️
Awesome. I suggest only that genetics and genomics were discovered rather than invented ; )
maybe, lol!
I just dropped another tome in another substack about that matter.
Go read this if you are interested in alternative takes: https://northerntracey213875959.wordpress.com/2021/06/30/the-amino-age-and-the-new-abnormal-doctors/
That was so far over my head I withdraw my suggestion 🤣
🤣
Christ can to redeem mankind. He had already created everything that exists, what possible benefit could be derived from his procreating again? Secondly, what kind of man would marry and have children knowing that he would be killed very young and leave behind a defenceless and impoverished family, and would those children inherit his sinless nature and then also fall into sin like his first creation had? Thirdly, he had no physical resources to support a family...he only owned the clothes he wore. There are more practical reasons why he remained a virgin, but I think my point is made.
And just to clarify, nowhere in scripture is sex declared to be sin. It is only sin when out of wedlock.
LOL I'd like to think that if Jesus had married it would have at least been mentioned somewhere! Of course there have been alternative interpretations from the Da Vinci Code to Jesus Christ Superstar, where Mary Magdalene is cast as his lover. The Bible in my understanding leaves open the possibility that Jesus had half brothers or half sisters presumably after Joseph consumated things with MAry, though that is another story.
I have known of many situations where a child was abandoned due to the death of a parent. I know of one tragic case where both parents died within three years of each other when their son and daughter were young: the mother first from a sudden heart condition at 37 and then the father developed and succumbed to brain cancer. They were high school sweethearts and had only known each other. This was in the late 1990s before the Covid jabs. My prayers are that in these tragedies somebody steps up...and God provides...
Mary undoubtedly had more children with Joseph...the Bible alludes to that but if Jesus (who is God in human form) had physically sired children he wouldn’t be the “only begotten Son of God” as referred to in John 3:16 as any child he fathered would also be begotten of God.
I have experienced that same cognitive dissonance since I was young, and I busted out of bible class at age 6, when I had a disagreement with the teacher about taking the Bible literally, which I refused, and had my parents take me out of the (optional) class. Over time, the conflict resolved itself for me once I became clear that Jesus is a non-dualist teacher, and that clearly, to those outside the Kingdom it all comes in parables, and My Kingdom is NOT of this world. The purpose of this world is to prevent solutions, it is the endless problem to engage the mind and prevent us from seeking first the Kingdom.
Amen to that!
I find it helpful to remember that the Bible was a construct of Constantine's Council of Nicaea which took place in 325 AD (there was a second one several hundred years later). By then the followers of Jesus had spread throughout southern Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa and were beginning to disrupt the Roman Empire.
Constantine brought in Iraneaus and some other guy to serve as Bishops and create a formal Christian church with an institutional structure that could be controlled from the top down... like government. They wanted to corral all of those freedom loving, independent, rabble rousing, decentralized followers of Jesus. The idea was to gather all the writings about the teachings of Jesus, sort out the ones they liked and put them into an official book. To give it credence they added the the Jewish books, the Old Testament. Then they went out and killed many followers of Jesus and destroyed the writings of those who did not participate in the Council. This is how the Catholic church was born, why there is a Vatican and why it's in Rome.
Problem was, they didn't get all the books. Of course many were purposely left out because they didn't conform to the agenda, but many were missed. Many of those books are quite mystical, which is why they're generally regarded as the Gnostic Gospels. Many of those scrolls were found in a cave at Nag Hamadi in 1945, many more in a cave near the Dead Sea in 1946.
The point being, those books indicate that Mary was either married or hooked up to Jesus because the apostles talk about them kissing. She also had her own Gospel, The Gospel According to Mary.
Reading the Gnostic Gospels can open a whole 'nuther door to Christianity. This book is a good place to start. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/110763.The_Gnostic_Gospels
The Council of Nicaea and Constantine did not canonize the Bible and 21 (including the 4 Gospels) of the 27 books of the New Testament were accepted by all Christians over 100 years before Constantine.
"The writings attributed to the apostles circulated amongst the earliest Christian communities. The Pauline epistles were circulating in collected form by the end of the first century C.E. Justin Martyr, in the early second century, mentions the "memoirs of the apostles," which Christians called "gospels" and which were regarded as on par with the Old Testament.
A four gospel canon (the Tetramorph) was in place by the time of Irenaeus, c. 160, who refers to it directly. By the early 200s, Origen may have been using the same 27 books as in the modern New Testament, though there were still disputes over the canonicity of Hebrews, James, II Peter, II and III John, and Revelation. Likewise, by 200 C.E., the Muratorian fragment shows that there existed a set of Christian writings somewhat similar to what is now the New Testament, which included the four gospels and argued against objections to them. Thus, while there was a good measure of debate in the Early Church over the New Testament canon, there were also precedents for the current canon dating back to the second century.
The canonical Christian Bible was formally established by Bishop Cyril of Jerusalem in 350 C.E., confirmed by the Council of Laodicea in 363 C.E., and later established by Athanasius of Alexandria in 367 C.E."
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Biblical_canon#:~:text=The%20canonical%20Christian%20Bible%20was,exactly%20the%20same%20books%20as
The word "cannon" isn't even in the Bible. It's a Catholic construct. It's like Fauci calling the covid jabs safe and effective vaccines.
The early Christians, who did not call themselves Christians, had no institutional structure. Jesus was quite adamant about that. The use of institutional terms like bishop, canon, epistles and so on is merely the regurgitation of Catholic dogma. It's "safe and effective".
Interesting. My main takeaway: people screw up everything.
Trees, plants, soil, water. Air The rest is man's folly. Good Luck.
Good luck to us all and God Bless!
You are describing an instilled church belief. Yeshua was totally different than the Catholic developments. According to ancient historians, He was quite ugly and traveled to the East during his so-called missing years. The Renaissance artists painted him as a white, handsome fellow. Not true.
I did not always believe the Bible is true and is God's Word to man. I was well up in years when I came to. My parents were not believers. The Bible says faith comes by hearing and hearing comes by the Word of God.
I spent most of my adolescence and early 20s as an agnostic but I later developed a firm belief in God through things which happened in my life and now I seek consel. ONly an individual in their conscious mind can know truth which is why passages can be recited for decades with no external effect while for others perhaps during a crisis a flipping to a verse that speaks to them or a person on the TV who does likewise is life altering…
Do you ever run out of big ‘ol cans of worms to open? I love it. I’m not sure I have a direct answer to your title question, but I’ll share my orientation to it. My “religious experiences” begin with my choice to believe God exists. My logic and experience tell me the Bible and Jesus Christ are rational expressions of who God is. Applying and practicing the principles consistent with those two sources, my choice is consistently validated by my experiences and through the testimony of others. It might not be irrational to say I suffer from confirmation bias or benefit from self-fulfilling prophecies, and I’m open to evidence that I’m an idiot. In fact, I can cite plenty of evidence for that. But I can’t argue with my own reality.
That said, cognitive psychology intrigues me. I don’t find CP or any established scientific principles inconsistent with my Christianity. I’m convinced that if Science remains committed to only a materialistic world view—a commitment many scientific geniuses have rejected—it will never unravel the vast mysteries of human learning, instinct, intuition, and spirituality. Amjad Masad takes a wonderful deep dive into that in this recent interview. You’ll dig it. https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-show-amjad-masad
My primary source confirms what I find to be true. “The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit” (1 Corinthians 2:14). Not that I understand much of anything religious or scientific. But I’m convinced that the mysteries of God cannot be fully grasped by our mortal neurons, and yet we should not give up.
Dawkins doesn’t get it. He should grow a mustache. He’ll look like Mark Twain and appear to have a sense of humor—another thing inexplicable to CP.
Watch a couple videos on the concept of Flatland, a two dimensional reality. All sorts of miracles are trivial for a three dimensional creature in a two dimensional world. Give me a fourth dimension to act in a three dimensional world, and I could work miracles. Miracles are really nothing. The question is, "Do you believe in beings that have access to, and mobility in, a dimension we do not."
I have been pondering similar questions for quite awhile. It is clear that the framework for which we approach the world is wrong. I suspect that there’s huge fields of quantum entanglement, light and energy of which we know very little intentionally…
Regardsing whether I believe that beings have access to a dimension that we do not, I absolutely do…
Hi Amy. I have a habit of saying "you", but I really mean the universal you, mankind, and I wasn't calling you out specifically, just any that might be interested in this topic. With that said, I do appreciate your viewpoint, we've got a lot to learn. Have you ever checked out simulation theory? If so, could you see a way to meld it with Christianity? Conversation for another day, WAY past my bedtime. Take care.
Atheism and Theism are both matters of faith, untestable, unproveable. The only rational position is, damnedifIknow, agnosticism.
However much of the world, of the universe, is not rational, logical.
There are a number of ways to approach the bible, among them; as the Word of God, following the verses chronologically as changes, clarifications in man's understanding of God (A chaotic God, a vengeful God, a just God, a merciful God...), as the scripting of the oral history of the Jews. The approaches don't negate each other.
Was Latin already gone when your mother was a nun or did the Creed she was familiar with start Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem caeli et terrae, visbilium omnium et invisibilium...? The 'maker of heaven and earth and all this visible and invisible' notes the mysteries beyond the rational.
Which leads me to consider as I write this 71% of the respondents to your poll believe in miracles. I wonder if this is a sea change among the general populace or definitive of those attracted to your stack. In either case, quite impressive.
In answer to your title query, Christian w/o believe in supernatural? I'd say no.
However it's my understanding one can be good Buddhist, Zen and some other branches of such, without solid faith in the supernatural.
Buddhism is most interesting because Siddartha does not mention the presence of a creator God if you will, which have led many to claim that he is Atheist. Yet meanwhile Thai Buddhists are extremely superstitious types and it only takes watching a few Thai TV series to see their fascination with the spirit realm of all types. Buddha is also interesting because he really didn’t claim to be anything special i.e. the son of God, the great prophet, the Chosen One, et cetera. He believed it existed in all people to find enlightenment and break cycles of death and rebirth.
I believe there is a God and that the miracle of Jesus would be within the creator’s capability. From a broader viewpoint I also believe that we are accessing such a small amount of the information out there that much of what was written may have been altered by those in power to put us in a metaphysical cage. I am trying to blow through the silly argument that one must take an either/or position on this matter…
What’s your testable provable argument for why only testable provable things are the only valid forms of knowledge
I did not say anything like only testable provable things are the only valid forms of knowledge so why should I provide an argument for such?
Fair enough. Let’s be more specific. You said atheism and theism are matters of faith and untestable and unprovable. What is your evidence of this claim?
My eyes, my ears, my touch, my mind.
Matters of faith and I'm not faulting such, faith is not a dirty word , are you suggesting that it is?
Yes you’re committing the error of fideism, which is condemned as a heresy. Reason leads to God even without faith elevating it
Whatever.
For me and many people, the hardest parts of the bible to read are the parts where Moses characterizes God as a raging drunk. We like to think of God as our heavenly father, but if my father ever used the words that Moses puts in the mouth of God, I would have left home at 16 and never spoken to him again. But you have to remember that Moses had a Serious anger management problem. He killed an Egyptian an had to flee Egypt. When he descended from Mt. Sinai and the people were practicing idolatry he flew into a rage, smashed the 10 commandments, ground the idols to dust and made them eat it. There are many other examples but Moses is God's chosen servant for good and/or for bad. Finally God's judgement does fall on Moses for misrepresenting God's character. God tells him to speak to a rock and it will produce water for the people, and instead Moses flies into a rage, yells at the people and strikes the rock. For this final mis-characterization of God's love and care for His chosen people, Moses was condemned to die on Mt. Nebo and he did not get to enter the promised land.
Maybe Jesus taught God how to love. Idk am just spitballing 🤭
I like that story!
Amy, I urge you to disillusion yourself by going down a particular rabbit hole - you can start by reading one of Mauro Biglino’s books, Gods of the Bible or The Naked Bible.