is the Christian concept of the One from a philosophical point of view true?

[seeds]

Immanuel, Immanuel, do you not see what we are up against when we encounter you? confront you? have to process what we are to take you as? You are problem after problem stacked six ways to Sunday — or Friday evening when “three stars” become visible.

The “argument” that The Parting happened in accord with science-principles indicates a mushy brain. Belief cycles backward, perversely, and causes the rationalizing mind to fabricate an argument that quells genuine thought.

As I am sure you well know, people tend to get caught-up and trapped on the inside of a "thought bubble" that is comprised of the fanciful details of a particular myth...

(in this case, the parting of the Red Sea)

...and thus, in turn, fail to see (as mentioned earlier) where "myth meets matter."

In which case, allow me to elaborate on my earlier point about the "Golden Calf."

Here is an aerial view of the estimated 400,000 people who attended the Woodstock music festival in 1969...



Now, multiply that image by 7.5 and you will have a general visualization of the alleged 3,000,000 (three million) humans who for several hours...

(along with their carts, and cattle, and sheep, and whatever else they needed)

...made their way between two separated walls of water that, once again, were approximately two miles high at various points.

Now, just to get a better picture of what these three-million humans would have been experiencing and witnessing in real time,...

...if you could lay one of these vertical walls of water on its side and somehow walk the horizontal distance of what would have been its height, then on average it would take you approximately 30 to 40 minutes to complete the journey. That's how high these two parted walls of water would have been.

Now I am not suggesting that the Creator of untold billions of galaxies of suns and planets couldn't pull-off such a stunt, no, that's not the point.

Indeed, the real point I am attempting to drive home is that for anyone to imagine that 3 million humans could have personally witnessed (with their own eyes) such an unimaginably profound and spectacular miracle in their lifetime would eventually dismiss it - and the man who orchestrated it all - and revert back to worshiping a puny little statue of a farm animal...



...is utterly ridiculous!!!

It is time to let the "old paradigm" go and seek out a new one.
_______

[Alexis Jacobi]

Immanuel, Immanuel, do you see? Do you see that we want to help you cure the disease that has gripped your mind? The first steps will be very hard — agonizing! — but we’ll be here for you. You are not alone! In one way or another we all go through it.

No Garden of Eden. No Adam & Eve, no Serpent, no Exile, no Flood, no Ark, no
Exodus. All elaborate mythologies invented and elaborated by a priestly class.

[Immanuel Can]

But in those days, people used to believe in "miracles" - violations of the laws of nature.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrIvwPConv0

This is only 16 minutes long, but is excellently articulate and a brilliant summary of the reason why thinking that faith and science are opposites is a mistake. It's really worth your time.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Ok, OK, I'll watch it. But I'm not guaranteeing anything!

[iambiguous]

But in those days, people used to believe in "miracles" - violations of the laws of nature.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrIvwPConv0

This is only 16 minutes long, but is excellently articulate and a brilliant summary of the reason why thinking that faith and science are opposites is a mistake. It's really worth your time.

Next up: John Lennox connects the dots between science, God and this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_earthquakes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_l ... _eruptions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_t ... l_cyclones
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tsunamis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_landslides
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_floods
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fires
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_t ... ore_deaths
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_diseases
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinction_events

Finally, he provides us with definitive proof that this God is the Christian God and not one of these...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r ... traditions

...instead.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Preliminary notes. (This is so easy).

First, it is entirely conceivable that some divine power, some extraordinary consciousness, and events that are outside of the possibility of comprehension (existence), stands behind everything that exists. All peoples, all humanity, through one description conception or another has postulated something like this. Indeed there is much in Vedic metaphysics, the story narratives that they tell, and which were arrived at through *deep intuition* or revelation-processes, offer cosmological pictures that often seem to coincide with some of the more outlandish theories and speculation of modern physics. For example that which proposes discreet and simultaneously existing universes, or an infinity of them.

But to postulate that *God exists* is clearly an inference drawn from our observations of the unreal complexity, the *impossible* complexity and organization of things. It is simply beyond reckoning how any of this has come to be, and also that there is a *someone* (you and me) who is there, if only for a moment, who sees it all, who is driven to wonder what it all is and why it is. The problem with the postulate is that it remains just that: something intuited, proposed, but in no sense demonstrable -- unless one veers into the territory of mysticism.

The man speaking in the video speaks from his cultural position, and through the lens of a mind developed in the Occidental world. Is he right? is he wrong? That is not quite the question. He is *situated* within specific intellectual traditions and, within his situation, he draws on the theological proofs that are foundational to our culture.

As a rational man, and as a scientist, he cannot and I assume he does not attempt to propose that there was a *Garden of Eden* or any of the story-pictures that make up Genesis. Were he to do so, were he really to attempt such a thing, he would be laughed out of Oxford Union. Those are things that are now impossible to believe. So he does what he can: he focuses on the *design* angle to draw an inference to the existence of a supreme and evident design-power which he then boldly associates with the Christian mythological narrative, and especially with the reference to Jesus Christ as 'Savior'.

One can have all those grand and interesting speculations -- one can hold to them and propose them -- but the proposition, and this is Immanuel's sole and core proposition, that a given person must in some way surrender himself or turn his fate over to the Imago of the Divine Power that has been created and empowered by Judea-Christianity -- it is there that his theoretical speculations, his postulates, are seen as so very culturally specific and likely to a degree that he is unaware. It takes a "master metaphysician" to see our own metaphysical constructs which, inevitably, are projections.

So you can propose such a God as John Lennox believes exists, or which he is bound to propose exists -- since he cannot imagine existence without such a God -- and that is fine as far as it goes. That is also my own position: existence itself, as evidenced by itself, leads the mind that is sensitive to such way of understanding, to a postulate of a Divinity.

But what that divinity is, and why we are here in this domain, and why the domain is so unutterably strange, and why we must deal with life that is best understood as *tragic* and in that sense terrifying and weird -- none of this is addressed by his postulated speculation. Sure enough though, given his own predicates, what more reasonable or perhaps logical choice could he avail himself of than to hunker down into his own tradition? To refer to the Biblical material. And to carry on in accord with principles established by theology? It is all very reasonable indeed.

But there are a dozen different ways to respond to the intuition of the existence of a Divine originator.

What many object to -- specifically in the Hebrew and the Christian traditions -- is their terrifying absolutism, their terrifying possessiveness. Their terrifying judgmentalism and denial of other ways of being, seeing, acting and perceiving that *divinity*.

And this is, and for Immanuel it has always been, a terrible stumbling block. It would likely be the same, or very similar, if one were talking with a hard-headed and religiously-committed Orthodox Jew, or an Imam, or perhaps a Vedic priest.

Part of the Occidental process, if one considers certain relatively recent trends in our own Occidental traditions, is that what I am explaining here, these are all things that some intellectuals already went through. They already realized that *story* is not actuality nor reality. Story is story.

[attofishpi]

My question was, is the Christian concept of the One from a philosophical point of view true?

Yes.

Let's say Aristotle proved that the One, the Primary cause (or first uncaused cause) - is immaterial.

What are 'we' saying this for, EXACTLY?

The Apostle Thomas proved the materiality of Jesus by poking. And thus discovered the philosophical failure of the concept of the Christian God. For God is non-material from a philosophical point of view.

The One? Really? = many considerations, what precisely are you asserting by the statement of the thread title?

Christ if God incarnate is required to be made of the same substance as man, that is, matter.

If God in the Judaic scripture is considered of non-matter, immaterial then it still is within what I consider Pantheist God to be, the substrate to what WE consider matter. God exists and operates beyond what we can perceive, that is, God is the fundamental construct to matter, operating beyond the realm of sub-atomic matter that we can perceive, measure etc..

[promethean75]

Please see The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.

[attofishpi]

Please see The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.

What can I say, Spinoza as an atheist that should never have used the word 'God' to describe anything he stated...was wrong.

[Gary Childress]

Preliminary notes. (This is so easy).

First, it is entirely conceivable that some divine power, some extraordinary consciousness, and events that are outside of the possibility of comprehension (existence), stands behind everything that exists. All peoples, all humanity, through one description conception or another has postulated something like this. Indeed there is much in Vedic metaphysics, the story narratives that they tell, and which were arrived at through *deep intuition* or revelation-processes, offer cosmological pictures that often seem to coincide with some of the more outlandish theories and speculation of modern physics. For example that which proposes discreet and simultaneously existing universes, or an infinity of them.

But to postulate that *God exists* is clearly an inference drawn from our observations of the unreal complexity, the *impossible* complexity and organization of things. It is simply beyond reckoning how any of this has come to be, and also that there is a *someone* (you and me) who is there, if only for a moment, who sees it all, who is driven to wonder what it all is and why it is. The problem with the postulate is that it remains just that: something intuited, proposed, but in no sense demonstrable -- unless one veers into the territory of mysticism.

The man speaking in the video speaks from his cultural position, and through the lens of a mind developed in the Occidental world. Is he right? is he wrong? That is not quite the question. He is *situated* within specific intellectual traditions and, within his situation, he draws on the theological proofs that are foundational to our culture.

As a rational man, and as a scientist, he cannot and I assume he does not attempt to propose that there was a *Garden of Eden* or any of the story-pictures that make up Genesis. Were he to do so, were he really to attempt such a thing, he would be laughed out of Oxford Union. Those are things that are now impossible to believe. So he does what he can: he focuses on the *design* angle to draw an inference to the existence of a supreme and evident design-power which he then boldly associates with the Christian mythological narrative, and especially with the reference to Jesus Christ as 'Savior'.

One can have all those grand and interesting speculations -- one can hold to them and propose them -- but the proposition, and this is Immanuel's sole and core proposition, that a given person must in some way surrender himself or turn his fate over to the Imago of the Divine Power that has been created and empowered by Judea-Christianity -- it is there that his theoretical speculations, his postulates, are seen as so very culturally specific and likely to a degree that he is unaware. It takes a "master metaphysician" to see our own metaphysical constructs which, inevitably, are projections.

So you can propose such a God as John Lennox believes exists, or which he is bound to propose exists -- since he cannot imagine existence without such a God -- and that is fine as far as it goes. That is also my own position: existence itself, as evidenced by itself, leads the mind that is sensitive to such way of understanding, to a postulate of a Divinity.

But what that divinity is, and why we are here in this domain, and why the domain is so unutterably strange, and why we must deal with life that is best understood as *tragic* and in that sense terrifying and weird -- none of this is addressed by his postulated speculation. Sure enough though, given his own predicates, what more reasonable or perhaps logical choice could he avail himself of than to hunker down into his own tradition? To refer to the Biblical material. And to carry on in accord with principles established by theology? It is all very reasonable indeed.

But there are a dozen different ways to respond to the intuition of the existence of a Divine originator.

What many object to -- specifically in the Hebrew and the Christian traditions -- is their terrifying absolutism, their terrifying possessiveness. Their terrifying judgmentalism and denial of other ways of being, seeing, acting and perceiving that *divinity*.

And this is, and for Immanuel it has always been, a terrible stumbling block. It would likely be the same, or very similar, if one were talking with a hard-headed and religiously-committed Orthodox Jew, or an Imam, or perhaps a Vedic priest.

Part of the Occidental process, if one considers certain relatively recent trends in our own Occidental traditions, is that what I am explaining here, these are all things that some intellectuals already went through. They already realized that *story* is not actuality nor reality. Story is story.

The open question remains, what are mystics getting in touch with (as evidenced by the traditions that span the globe) and are the rest of us all doing what we ought to be doing? And that begs the question, what ought we to be doing? My first hunch is that we ought to be avoiding the mass destruction of the human race and every other living species on this planet. We are called upon by environmental science, by physics, and by every other discipline of knowledge to prevent disaster. WW2 was a disaster. We cannot afford to go through that again with weapons of massive destructive capability. Climate change could be a disaster for many species which are not able to adapt to the rapid changes.

[Alexis Jacobi]

The open question remains, what are mystics getting in touch with (as evidenced by the traditions that span the globe) and are the rest of us all doing what we ought to be doing? And that begs the question, what ought we to be doing?

I am uncertain if the question is ‘open’ since what you actually mean is that you don’t have even a slight idea of what ‘mystics’ deal in and you know nothing of the topic.

In regard to the question about “what we ought to be doing”, if I had to comment I’d say you are one without any base at all to offer an opinion or to suggest anything. You had best place yourself in an extreme humbled position of simply trying to form the best questions in relation to those topics of which you are ignorant.

One problem is in the democratic universalism in the question I quoted. There is no answer for what Mass Man should, as a unit, do. Mass Man does best when he finds a trustworthy authority and follows the advice and outlines provided. On his own — and you are a fairly good example — he flounders. He cannot guide himself. When he does he goes astray and fucks things up.

The actual question is what should or must more advanced men do with their conscious power.

I know it is harsh and in some sense I ‘apologize’, yet one definite thing I get from my time spent on this forum is the sense that intellectually stranded people populate it. Clueless really. Historically ignorant. Non-interested. But full of ‘passionate intensity’. I do not necessarily exclude myself from the basic problem as I often say.

The time we are in is one of clamorous confusion. The great mass will do as great masses always and can only do.

But if the question is what more conscious and prepared men might or could ‘do’, I think that is a very good question.

[Gary Childress]

The open question remains, what are mystics getting in touch with (as evidenced by the traditions that span the globe) and are the rest of us all doing what we ought to be doing? And that begs the question, what ought we to be doing?

I am uncertain if the question is ‘open’ since what you actually mean is that you don’t have even a slight idea of what ‘mystics’ deal in and you know nothing of the topic.

In regard to the question about “what we ought to be doing”, if I had to comment I’d say you are one without any base at all to offer an opinion or to suggest anything. You had best place yourself in an extreme humbled position of simply trying to form the best questions in relation to those topics of which you are ignorant.

One problem is in the democratic universalism in the question I quoted. There is no answer for what Mass Man should, as a unit, do. Mass Man does best when he finds a trustworthy authority and follows the advice and outlines provided. On his own — and you are a fairly good example — he flounders. He cannot guide himself. When he does he goes astray and fucks things up.

The actual question is what should or must more advanced men do with their conscious power.

I know it is harsh and in some sense I ‘apologize’, yet one definite thing I get from my time spent on this forum is the sense that intellectually stranded people populate it. Clueless really. Historically ignorant. Non-interested. But full of ‘passionate intensity’. I do not necessarily exclude myself from the basic problem as I often say.

The time we are in is one of clamorous confusion. The great mass will do as great masses always and can only do.

But if the question is what more conscious and prepared men might or could ‘do’, I think that is a very good question.

Are you a "mystic"? Do you know something about mysticism that I don't? If so please share the experience.

[Alexis Jacobi]

That’s the idiot’s response, Gary.

If you want to deal with the real content you’ll have to do more intellectual work.

If not, no hay problema!

[Gary Childress]

The open question remains, what are mystics getting in touch with (as evidenced by the traditions that span the globe) and are the rest of us all doing what we ought to be doing? And that begs the question, what ought we to be doing?

I am uncertain if the question is ‘open’ since what you actually mean is that you don’t have even a slight idea of what ‘mystics’ deal in and you know nothing of the topic.

To be fair to you, which I admit is difficult for me to be to someone who makes the claim that they are a "disinterested observer" in same the world many of us can't seem to help experience intimately and feel ourselves immersed in up to our very ability to survive by being required to eat food that doesn't magically appear on the plate that we eat from, but which requires the effort of another human being perhaps far removed from us to grow and harvest on our behalf, I was talking to those of "us" who are not privy to allegedly "verified" mystical experience.

Based on YOUR place in the world do you honestly percieve that there is no "open question" as to what people who have had "mystical" experiences are coming into contact with? By "open" I mean not definitively answered beyond even the most superficial skepticism on the part of us fellow "non-mystics".

So what are mystics coming into contact with, oh great one who is some how excluded from the narrow minded categories he casually lumps others into?

Do you disagree with my asserting that what one "ought" to do is an important theme present in most all religions that is worth asking ourselves?

Your worthless ego helps no one but yourself. If that's all your concerned about then go watch Oprah and Dr. Phil or something similar, champ. Some of us are less interested in vain pedantery.

Sorry if I sound "harsh"--to quote yet again from your own lexicon, but what are your thoughts on what those OTHERS who we call "mystics" are possibly channeling or drawing from in the world which the rest of us are perhaps not in as intimate contact with?

Is the question of what we ought to be doing or not doing something relavant in your "disinterested" observations of the world, which I can only assume you also live in with those of us who find ourselves more unable to fully disengage from?

[Gary Childress]

That’s the idiot’s response, Gary.

If you want to deal with the real content you’ll have to do more intellectual work.

If not, no hay problema!

Fucking retard. Go ride the short bus, pedant.