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No, I believe that part because I have experienced it as a reality....I have faith in the Reality.
Biblical definition of faith: Heb 11:1 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.
The "hoped for" part is belief. The substance and evidence is confirmation of belief, aka proof, aka knowledge by direct experience.
I was brought up in the military and ended up spending high school in Michigan. My mother made me go to a church where I use to look out on the winter Michigan tundra and wonder what was more dead and lifeless, the outside or the church I was in. I would also go outside to smoke a cigarette and wonder how on earth there could be a God with an ice cold wind blowing.
I believe that everything came together with energy and light and that there are three varieties...
Natural E/c2... The sun is E/c2 in the form of plasma... The Earth is cooled E/c2.
Mental E/c2... Our ability to think comes from E/c2
Spiritual E/c2... Energy (Motivation, Warmth, Love) / c2 (Faith, Hope, Charity, Joy)
so... Lets take the opposite of all that...
The opposite of m = E/c2 is n = z/d
Nothing (n) - That which outer space is made of between the celestial objects.
Absolute Zero (z) - The coldest it can get!
Darkness (d) - That which is devoid of light.
Natural z/d - Nothing! Space! Null and Void!
Mental z/d - Nothing!
Spiritual... z (Laziness, Cold, Apathy, Hate) / d (Fear, Despair, Greed, Sorrow).
It is my conviction that there are three spiritual extremes…
Spiritual light – Love, warmth, faith, hope, charity joy, goodness, peace…
Spiritual darkness – Hate, cold, fear, depression, sorrow, greed, evil, war…
The Flesh – Ego, perverted sex, filth, witchcraft, anger, strife, divisions, mysticism… Where does that fit? It is neither light or darkness!
I have heard that the flesh and the devil are so akin that it is hard to discern between the two of them. There is a path I believe to perfect spiritual light, or Caritas (Latin for pure love)... Things that cannot be taught for virtue is not knowledge!
1. Hope - All things begin with a hope
2. Faith - Motivation is a child of faith and hope
3. Charis - Grace - A powerful neighbor of caritas
4. Dynamos - Greek for virtue and motivation
5. Eucharisteo - Much grace... Gratitude
6. Charisomai - Well favored - A lucky kind of feeling
7. Euchrestos - Greek for profitable
8. Chairo - Greek for cheer - "Cheerio mate!"
9. Chara - Greek for joy
10. Chrestotes - An 'Aunt Bee' kind of Goodness
11. Charisma - Heavenly Graciousness
12. Chrisma - Heavenly Anointing - The Holy Grail!
Finally I came to God because I met him on a spiritual basis and by seeing its effects as on the individual below... The older gentlemen in the Pentecostal Holiness church would sit on the front pew weeping as the Holy Spirit would fall. And if they ever made eye contact with you they would point to the altar, as souls were being laid out in the spirit, and declare, "The Holy Ghost! The Holy Ghost!"
After experiencing a revival one late summer, I felt a voice speak to my heart as I lay there listening to the kady dids sing outside the door. The voice said, "Put the book down" in which on doing so the voice speaks again... "Where is all that hatred and strife?" On examining my spiritual man there was noting there but pure beauty. A well of spiritual E/c2 flowing out from my inside spiritual man.
From that point on I took an interest in the word of God. But it was not the word of God that saved or converted me, but a God encounter that changed the spiritual man.
So I do not believe that we can penetrate the atheist mind on these issues. They will be converted if they feel God's Spirit enter their heart. They will take interest in the word of God because that is where God's Spirit will lead them. I doubt no intellectual argument will do it.
Ok, so there are some parts you believe, because they line up with your own personal experience.
Ok, so there are some parts you believe, because they line up with your own personal experience.
Ok, so there are some parts you believe, because they line up with your own personal experience.
that looks to be the definition of religion.
In my own head, yes the experience is real for me and me alone, unless I can show (with objective evidence) this experience should apply to others.
that was very interesting, i appreciate it.Here's something fun =)
The etymology of religion is indeed disputed. This is not, of course, the case when it comes to English, which clearly inherited the word from Latin religio. Rather it applies to Latin itself, in which it is not clear what the component parts of the noun religio are or mean. The ancient Romans disagreed about this. Cicero, for example, thought that religio derived from the verb relegere in its sense of to re-read or go over a text, religion being a body of custom and law that demands study and transmission.
On the other hand, the Christian writer Lactantius, writing in the early fourth century, opted for religare, a verb meaning to fasten or bind. We are, he said in his book Divinae Institutiones, tied to God and bound to him [religati] by the bond of piety, and it is from this, and not, as Cicero holds, from careful study [relegendo], that religion has received its name. Lactantiuss greater contemporary, Augustine, preferred this etymology to Ciceros while suggesting yet another possibility: re-eligere, to choose again, religion being the recovery of the link with God that sin has sundered.
It may be that Lactantius and Augustine rejected Ciceros etymology because it made religio seem too close to such Jewish terms as torah, mishnah and talmud, all Hebrew words having to do with teaching and studying. Since unlike the practice of Judaism, the Christian religion, as they saw it, was a matter of binding faith and commitment rather than of accumulated knowledge, the religare etymology may have appealed to them for the opposite reason than that proposed by Rappaport: as a way of distancing Christianity from Jewish concepts rather than of adopting them.
...
To return to the word religion, it is a curious fact that, although all the ancestors of todays Europeans had (like the ancestors of all the worlds inhabitants) what we would call religions, no ancient Indo-European language had a specific word for religion, Latin having been the first which is why the great majority of modern European languages have some version of religio as their term for it. Probably this was because, precisely since religion was everywhere in the ancient world and no activity was divorced from it, it never struck anyone as a distinct aspect of life calling for a name of its own. There were names for specific gods, ceremonies, rituals, forms of worship, cults, sects, etc., because all these were discrete things; religion itself was the unnamed totality of them all, the forest that couldnt be seen for all its trees.
It took the Romans, who in conquering the world were forced to become its first anthropologists, to realize that behind all this multifariousness was something about which it was possible to generalize. From its original meaning of punctilious respect for the sacred, religio came to denote any comprehensive human system of organizing and expressing such respect. Religio was, Cicero wrote, cultus deorum, the worship of the gods. Whether he was also right about where the word came from would appear to be anyones guess.
Read more: Roots of âReligionâ â Forward.com
In my own head, yes the experience is real for me and me alone, unless I can show (with objective evidence) this experience should apply to others.
this is why faith/religion is largely subjective. there is no verifiable, objective evidence to support the existence of a god.
This evidence people seem to want is usually physical evidence. How can we use physical evidence to prove the metaphysical or interdimensional?
This evidence people seem to want is usually physical evidence. How can we use physical evidence to prove the metaphysical or interdimensional?
You say that you'd have to be able to show why this experience should apply to others with objective evidence, but why would you need to do that? Why does it need to be shown that way? Can't it just "happen"? If you cut your hand with a knife and you experience pain, do you need to show objective evidence to someone else (a young child is a good example) why your experience should apply to them? How would you go about that? The child would have to pretty much take your word for it. There's no way you could apply your experience to someone else that way.
You don't have to show anything to anyone else, for yourself to believe.
I'm glad to see you finally understand.
well if god wanted people in heaven,would he not show himself to people who need physical evidence and objective evidence like bhsmte?
But only for yourself to believe. Religion doesn't stay private though, it seeks to recruit others to it often through fear of something bad happening if the person doesn't believe that the other person's experience should also be theirs.
If you believe that Jesus Christ is Lord, that's fine. Telling me that I should believe it too, is wrong.
Because Jesus said that those who believe in Him must believe through faith, not through sight.
well if god wanted people in heaven,would he not show himself to people who need physical evidence and objective evidence like bhsmte?
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