Originally posted by jaywillwhat a load of bushwah
I only feel to repeat here.
God is not real often because of the separation between the man and God's presence by sins.
God has made provision for this separation in the blood of Christ's redemption. When we believe and claim that His blood does indeed cleans us from all of our sins, as He taught, and we accept it personally, the Holy Spirit bears wi ...[text shortened]... Brother Lawrence entitled [b]"The Practice of the Presence of God"
Look it up.[/b]
all you have is the assertions you make -- you have no evidence
yet you write as though others should listen to you and believe you
nonsense
it doesn't matter how many people "believe" a lie -- it is still a lie
you rely on false appeals to authority -- as though the word "history" is proof of a valid premise or a fact. History is merely the account, often wrong or biased or concocted of whole cloth, of past events. It doesn't prove anything -- it is used to support assertions about the meaning of those past events.
Belief, in and of itself, is not fact.
Spirituality does not depend on belief.
One may dedicate one's being and consciousness to the pursuit of awareness, of seeing what reality is without the filter of lies and delusions, such as your line of propaganda.
One should never believe everything one thinks or feels.
Religious belief is dangerous.
Spirituality is not dangerous.
The one is a symptom of the will to power; the other is a valid goal for those who seek true awareness and freedom from the lies of others who seek dominion over them.
You can learn to control your mind, to step outside of this endless cycle of desire and aversion. You can learn to not want what you want, to recognize desires but not be controlled by them. This does not mean that you lie down on the road and invite everybody to walk all over you . It means that you continue to live a very normal-looking life, but live from a whole new viewpoint. You do the things that a person must do, but you are free from that obsessive, compulsive drivenness of your own desires. You want something, but you don't need to chase after it. You fear something, but you don't need to stand there quaking in your boots. This sort of mental culture is very difficult. It takes years. But trying to control everything is impossible, and the difficult is preferable to the impossible.
You can't make radical changes in the pattern of your life until you begin to see yourself exactly as you are now. As soon as you do that, changes flow naturally. You don't have to force or struggle or obey rules dictated to you by some authority. You just change. It is automatic. But arriving at the initial insight is quite a task. You've got to see who you are and how you are, without illusion, judgment or resistance of any kind. You've got to see your own place in society and your function as a social being. You've got to see your duties and obligations to your fellow human beings, and above all, your responsibility to yourself as an individual living with other individuals. And you've got to see all of that clearly and as a unit, a single gestalt of interrelationship. It sounds complex, but it often occurs in a single instant.
Yes, I decry and oppose faith in the sense of believing something because it is written in a book or attributed to a prophet or taught to you by some authority figure. My meaning here is closer to confidence. It is knowing that something is true because you have seen it work, because you have observed that very thing within yourself. In the same way, morality is not a ritualistic obedience to some exterior, imposed code of behavior.
So, here is what I have found works. We all want to be moral beings. I will propose three levels of morality as a means for discussing this. It is not dogma and not "The Truth" or revealed to me, etc.
The lowest level is adherence to a set of rules and regulations laid down by somebody else. It could be your favorite prophet. It could be the state, the head man of your tribe or your father. No matter who generates the rules, all you've got to do at this level is know the rules and follow them. A robot can do that. Even a trained chimpanzee could do it if the rules were simple enough and he was smacked with a stick every time he broke one. This level requires no meditation at all. All you need are the rules and somebody to swing the stick.
The next level of morality consists of obeying the same rules even in the absence of somebody who will smack you. You obey because you have internalized the rules. You smack yourself every time you break one. This level requires a bit of mind control. If your thought pattern is chaotic, your behavior will be chaotic, too. Mental culture reduces mental chaos.
There is a third level or morality, but it might be better termed ethics. This level is a whole quantum layer up the scale, a real paradigm shift in orientation. At the level of ethics, one does not follow hard and fast rules dictated by authority. One chooses his own behavior according to the needs of the situation. This level requires real intelligence and an ability to juggle all the factors in every situation and arrive at a unique, creative and appropriate response each time. Furthermore, the individual making these decisions needs to have dug himself out of his own limited personal viewpoint. He has to see the entire situation from an objective point of view, giving equal weight to his own needs and those of others. In other words, he has to be free from greed, hatred, envy and all the other selfish junk that ordinarily keeps us from seeing the other guy's side of the issue. Only then can he choose that precise set of actions which will be truly optimal for that situation.
What, then, is real? My aim is to experience the world in an entirely new way. I wish to become aware of what is truly happening to me, around me and within myself. It is a process of self discovery, a participatory investigation in which I observe my own experiences while participating in them, and as they occur.
I want to apprehend the true and deepest qualities of life, and I don't want to just accept somebody else's explanation. I want to see it for myself.
We usually do not look into what is really there in front of us. We see life through a screen of thoughts and concepts, and we mistake those mental objects for the reality. We get so caught up in this endless thought stream that reality flows by unnoticed. We spend our time engrossed in activity, caught up in an eternal pursuit of pleasure and gratification and an eternal flight from pain and unpleasantness. We spend all of our energies trying to make ourselves feel better, trying to bury our fears. We are endlessly seeking security. Meanwhile, the world of real experience flows by untouched and untasted.
Originally posted by rwingettThat is where the Holy Spirit enters in and breaks the cycle.
If it is true, as you say, that you have to believe to have faith, and to have faith to believe, then it seems to me that this is a closed system. If both attributes are necessary, then a person who lacks one or the other can never enter that self-reinforcing circle. I could say the opposite, that I don't have faith because I don't believe, and don't believ ...[text shortened]... n-believers will continue to not believe, and there can never be any crossover between them.
Originally posted by jaywillSins are defined with respect to God. If there is no God, there is no sin.
[b]============================
If God is not real to me, then sin is a nonsensical concept. Your argument is circular.
=================================
But sin is real to you even if God is not real to you.
If you did not think so ask yourself, are there people who have offended you?
If sin is a weak concept or circular why do you ...[text shortened]... some kind of circular reasoning will cause your sins to not be too serious on that day.[/b]
Originally posted by AThousandYoung===============================
Sins are defined with respect to God. If there is no God, there is no sin.
Sins are defined with respect to God. If there is no God, there is no sin.
==================================
That is something that I will take time to think about.
However, my desire is to impress some open minded is that there CAN be "no sin" which would be a comfort to some. But the reason is not because "there is no God so there is no sin." Rather the reason is "there is the Savior who bore its penalty therefore there is no sin."
My focus is on God's answer to the problem of our guilt which separates us from God making God so distant that we cannot sense His reality.
To touch the Spirit of Christ Who is the Spirit of God, requires that the stain of actual wrong doing be cleansed from out conscience. Faith leaks out and leaks away because of a guilty conscience.
"Having faith and a good conscience, concerning which some, thrusting these away, have become shipwrecked regarding the faith." (1 Tim. 1:19)
When Paul compares faith to the word picture of a ship at sea, he says some have become "shipwrecked" - ruined at to faith, because of thrusting away their conscience.
Saying "But there is no God so there is no sin" is another way of man thrusting aside the concience. Will a man tell the robber holding him up, "There is no sin. Don't worry about it. Here's my money. You can even shoot me and hide my dead body in the river. Or you can leave it here to rot. You see I don't believe that there is iniquity or transgression or wrong doing or sin. I am an Athiest. No God = no sin. Do what you want to do."?
The robber might say "Now you're talking ! There is no God so there is no sin. I like it. I like it a lot. For NOW at at least." Bang !
Now we also have to be careful what we mean by "no sin". For the purpose of this thread which I started. I mean that the guilt of sins commmited can be totally erased and the conscience put at tangible REST. This results in Christ and God becoming tastable and real and experiencial and intimate.