"Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, openness-- an act of trust in the unknown". -Alan Watts
'What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him?' James 2:14 'You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that-and shudder.' James 2:19 'Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.' Hebrews 11:1 'By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.' Hebrews 11:3
Biblical faith is trusting in the objectively revealed truth of God's recorded acts in human history. (See 1 Cor. 15)
So biblical faith supercedes openness to God's immediate creation? You do not bring the word into reality, you bring reality into the word? Are you referring to 1 Corinthians chapter 15?
faith is the catalyst of spiritual destruction because one calls on it at will... they recite the verses and memorize the text, but to live as it commands... is asking the unspeakable...semms to me that to serve a diety cold be done so without faith... secondly what is the purpose of faith? to live by hope that all you do is close enough to right that you may find a place in heaven? malarky! faith is nothing more than a means of enforcing the masses to the will of the mass manipulator!
No. As I said on the "Native Americans" thread, general revelation and special revelation complement one another. That's not at all what I said. The word is the benchmark by which to judge spiritual and moral truth claims. Yes. Paul insists that the hope of all Christians hinges on the truth of a particular historical event: the bodily resurrection of Christ, established by the testimony of numerous eyewitnesses, many of whom were still living at the time.
Yes, reality is made to fit the word. There is no openness to God's creation, no trust in the unknown. That which does not make it through the filter of the word is no longer considered. verse 31: Paul says, "I die every day --I mean that brothers--" Death and resurrection are allegorical. Resurrection is a metaphor for spiritual rebirth. Jesus ascended into heaven. The denotation would seem to be that somebody ascended into the sky. That's literally what is being said. But there would have been no place for Jesus to literally go. We know that Jesus could not have ascended into heaven because there is no physical heaven anywhere in the universe. But if you read "Jesus ascended into heaven" in terms of it's metaphoric connotation, you see that he has gone inward-- not into outer space but into inward space, to the place from which all being comes, into the conciousness that is the source of all things, the kingdom of heaven within. These images are outward but their reflection is inward. The point is that we should ascend with him by going inward. It is a metaphor of returning to the source, alpha and omega, of leaving the fixation on the body behind and going to the body's dynamic source. All of these wonderful poetic images are referring to something in you. When your mind is simply trapped by the image out there so that you never make reference to yourself, you have misread the image. -Joseph Campbell
This is when the robot starts flailing his arms, screaming "Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!" Been reading this thread with much interest, due to the many interesting, and deep, things being said by everyone. In specifics, you make great sense, Mother_Nature's_Son. When the Word says things that do not match with the observed world (what seems to have been labeled "general revelation") problems arise and one must consider what is more likely: that the Word is right but somehow the whole world is being decieved before their eyes, or that the Word is wrong (at least in part...which means it might be wrong in whole. either way, an examination of it is required). Seems to me that old words in a book are more likely to be wrong than the physical world. Now, I agree with that Joseph Campbell quote; in a related quote, Alan Watts says that to hold a symbol up as Truth is to climb a road sign rather than follow the road it points down, for all symbols are good for is pointing somewhere else. That's a paraphrase, because I'm too lazy right now to find that book and direct-quote it. The interesting thing is...ALL words are symbols. They are not Truth in themselves, they point elsewhere.
Why don't you give some examples? That completely ignores the context of the entire chapter, which is all about the future bodily resurrection that awaits all who are united with Christ by faith. Such Gnostic heresy was thoroughly refuted by Irenaeus in the 2nd century: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf01.ix.i.html Here's a much shorter and more recent critique of Gnosticism: http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/cri/cri-jrnl/web/crj0040a.html and Joseph Campbell: http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/cri/cri-jrnl/web/crj0036a.html
my problem with it all is that hardly anyone in the known world knew of such a god until he was introduced to them.... why do not other cultures have the same god if the ir is only one creator... why do so know there to be other goods.... how come the story changes fom religion to religion? and furthermore how is it possible to take the bible in a literall sense when convienant, and then say it is up for interpretation... i believe jesus may have been the son of god, but nomore than any other devoted christian is to their beliefs...miracles are what we call positive unexplainable events! as far as bodily ressurections... aint going happen... so it is best that we take the lessons of good will and attempt to apply them in our everyday existence... the only thing about heaven or hell is noone ever seems to come back from either to tell about it!
Science. The peoples of all the great civilizations everywhere have been prone to interpret their own symbolic figures literally, and so to regard themselves as favored in a special way, in direct contact with the Absolute. For not only has it always been this way, but such literally read symbols have always been -and still are- the supports of these civilizations. With the loss of literal symbols there follows uncertainty and disequilibrium. The same is happening to us today. With our old mythologically founded taboos unsettled by our modern sciences, there is everywhere in the civilized world rapidly rising incidences of vice and crime, mental disorders, suicides and drug addictions, shattered homes, impudent children, violence, murder, and despair. They give point to the cries of preachers for repentance, conversion, and return to the old religion. It can be seen how this grand discord could have been avoided had science and religion never been posed against each other. However, the function of religion to literally interpret its symbols never allowed space for science to fulfill its necessary role. The balance between religion and science has not existed throughout history, and today it is glaringly obvious that this dynamic must be established, if our equilibrium is to be restored. We must now ask whether it is not possible to arrive scientifically at such an understanding of the life-supporting nature of myths that, in criticizing their archaic features, we do not misrepresent and disqualify their necessity– throwing out, so to say, the baby with the bath. The context of the chapter need not be ignored when the death of the body is interpreted as a symbolic death. That is, the death of a worldly being, followed by a subsequent rise into spiritual being. This transformation need not be limited to some life and realm ‘to come’-- an idea which defeats a function of spirituality -here and now-. Some would even argue that this idea defeats the entire purpose of spirituality because anything beyond now is uncertain and not to be depended upon. I do not contend that it would be ‘wrong’ to interpret 1 Corinthians 15 as reference to literal physic death; but what I do contend is that- for those who find theirs in the now and do not choose to wait for the uncertainty of death, it is here. These separate interpretations held in difference between east and west have reconcilable values. Allow me quote Joseph Campbell in regard to ‘The Garden’: Let us regard a little more closely the Biblical image of the garden. Its name, Eden, signifies in Hebrew "a place of delight", and our own English word, Paradise, which from the Persian, pairi-, "around", daeza, "a wall", means properly "a walled enclosure". Apparently, then, Eden is a walled garden of delight, and in its center stands the great tree; or rather, in its center stand two trees, the one of knowledge of good and evil, the other of immortal life. An when our first parents, having eaten the fruit, were driven forth, two cherubim were stationed (as we have heard) at its eastern gate, to guard the way of return. [This is an important idea] Taken as referring not to any geographical scene, but to a landscape of the soul, the Garden of Eden would have to be within us. Yet our conscious minds are unable to enter it and enjoy there the taste of eternal life, since we have already tasted the knowledge of good and evil. That, in fact, must then be the knowledge that has thrown us out of the garden, pitched us away from our own center, so that we now judge things in those terms and experience only good and evil instead of eternal life– which, since the enclosed garden is within us, must already be ours, even though unknown to our conscious personalities. That would seem to be the meaning of the myth when read, not as prehistory, but as referring to man’s inward spiritual state. Let us turn now from this Bible legend, by which the West has been enchanted, to the Indian, of the Buddha, which has enspelled the entire East; for there too is the mythic image of the tree of immortal life defended by two terrifying guards. That tree is the one beneath which Siddhartha was sitting, facing east, when he wakened to the light of his own immortality in truth and was known thereafter as the Buddha, the Wakened One. The tree beneath which the Buddha sat corresponds, thus, to the second of the Garden of Eden, the tree of life, which is situated in the garden of the soul. And so what keeps us from returning to it and sitting like the Buddha beneath it? Who or what are those two cherubim? Do the Buddhists know of such a pair? One of the most important Buddhist centers in the world today is the holy city of Nara, Japan, where there is a great temple sheltering a prodigious bronze image, 53 feet high, of the Buddha seated cross-legged on a great lotus, holding his right hand lifted in the "fear not" posture; and as one approaches the precincts of the temple, one passes through a gate that is guarded, left and right, by two gigantic, marvelously threatening military figures flourishing swords. These are the Buddhist counterparts of the cherubim stationed by Yahweh at the garden gate. However, here we are not to be intimidated and held off. The fear of death and desire for life that these threatening guardsmen arouse in us are to be left behind as we pass between. In the Buddhist view, that is to say, what is keeping us out of the garden is not the jealousy or wrath of any god, but our own instinctive attachment to what we take to be our lives. Our senses, outward-directed to the world of space and time, have attached us to that world and our mortal bodies within it. We are loath to give up what we take to be the good and pleasures of the physical life, and this attachment is the great fact, the great circumstance or barrier, which keeps us out of the garden. This, and this alone, is preventing us from recognizing within ourselves that immortal and universal consciousness of which our physical senses, outward-turned, are but the agents. According to this teaching, no actual cherub with a flaming sword is required to keep us out of our inward garden since we are keeping ourselves out, through our avid interest in the outward, mortal aspects both of ourselves and of our world. What is symbolized in our passage of the guarded gate is our abandonment of both the world so known and ourselves so known within it: the phenomenal, mere appearance of things seen as born and dying, experienced either as good or as evil, are regarded, consequently, with desire or fear. Of the two big Buddhist cherubim, one has the mouth open, the other, the mouth closed– in token (I have been told) of the way we experience things in this temporal world, in terms always of pairs-of-opposites. Passing between, we are to leave such thinking behind. But is that not the lesson, finally, of the Bible story as well? Eve and then Adam ate the fruit of the knowledge of good an evil, which is to say, of the pairs-of-opposites, and immediately experienced themselves as different from each other and immediately felt shame. God, therefore, no more than confirmed what already had been accomplished when he drove them from the garden to experience the pains of death and birth and of toil for the goods of this world. Furthermore, they were experiencing God himself now as totally "other", wrathful and dangerous to their purposes, and the cherubim at the garden gate were representations of this way –now theirs– of experiencing both God and themselves. But as we are also told in the Bible legend, it would have actually been possible for Adam to "put forth his hand and take also of the tree life, and eat, and live forever". And in the Christian image of the crucified redeemer that is exactly what we are being asked to do. The teaching here is that Christ restored man to immortality. His cross, throughout the Middle Ages, was equated with the tree of immortal life; and that fruit of that tree was the crucified Savior himself. He himself had boldly walked, so to say, right on through the guarded gate without fear of the cherubim and that flaming sword. And just as the Buddha, five hundred years before, had left behind all ego-oriented desires and fears to come to know himself as the pure, immortal Void, so the Western Savior left his body nailed to the tree and passed in spirit to atonement –at-one-ment– with the Father: to be followed now by ourselves.
I asked a little old lady whether I should join a religion, 20 years ago, and she said no. She was a Christian, but in her spare time she would respond when people called her over to remove their ghosts. I feel the openness is why I have seen so much freaky stuff in my life. I know what I have seen, and it requires no faith, though for years I just ignored it. I cannot see ever agreeing with the dogma of any one church, though I enjoy bits of all of them, and truly feel that all religions are full of good people.
post your prayer request here and the person under you will pray for you and so on and so on..... Please pray for me for I am trying to come back to God after a long stray. thank you.
[size=-1]How can we be expected to cross the bridge, to begin to grasp a reality that cannot be seen our touched or quantified? [/size][size=-1]The answer is: Through faith alone. By faith alone, we are held up...by the embrace of an unseen God, whom we will someday meet face to face. The implications of faith reach far beyond the intellect, involving all of our lives and even our eternal destiny. Faith will never make sense to you unless you have true passionate faith.[/size]
Faith is personal. My faith cannot be the same as anothers, as we all have a different reality from which to base our faith on. It is all okay. My deepest faith is that good will always be stronger than evil. Those who say there is no such thing as good and evil would obviously not agree.
