Feeling of truth and spiritual substance

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Or exhibiting insanity.

ruveyn

I never looked at it that way before...

Oops...made a slight omission there, but I think you got my point. I meant to say "Jesus did NOT tell a disciple not to call Him good..." Sorry about that. My post has been corrected.

Which blows a big hole in the idea that Jesus was "just a wise teacher." Either He was crazy or He really was and is the Messiah. People in ancient times might not have understood the brain chemistry behind, say, schizophrenia, but they knew depravity when they saw it. That Jesus had loyal supporters who could attest to His state of mind is evidence that He likely wasn't insane. Which leaves the whole Messiah thing...

It's cool, I knew what you meant. I checked one of my bibles and you are right, Jesus did just ask why the rich man was calling him good, he never said this was wrong. It's been a while since I've read through the gospels, been going through the epistles and OT prophets lately.

This two alternative is a caricature. Moreover you suppose that the Messiah means something, i.e, you suppose a jewish belief. If you do not take this into account, if he was not crazy, it leaves... many possibilities, such as, it was not what Jesus said on the cross, or Jesus did not even exist. Or Jesus wanted to make people think that he had forseen what would happen to him, or was believing it himself because of the Concorde fallacy. Or Jesus was never crucified, it was invented later on. It's been a long time, you know.


Or that.

Anyway, the subject was about how would christian people react if we tell them the word Jesus doesn't mean anything, that it is just a shape for the spiritual substance, but that it can be anything else.

It reminds me of the video where Dawkins interviews father Goerge Coyne : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po0ZMfkSNxc

...But in that case Jesus would mean the spiritual substance, so to say it doesn't mean anything is erroneous.

Well, no, Jesus is the name of a men with cross etc. It is a particular shape.

A particular shape for what?

And the concept of Jesus transcends the image of a man being crucified. That's what I was trying to say in my first post but I apparently did a pretty crappy job.

I would rather say that some believers transcend the image of a man being crucified. And it's a good thing. It means that some believers understand that whatever the truth is, it is not that shape.

The claim is that everything has consciousness. You could say that the difference between human consciousness, bear consciousness, raccoon consciousness, plant consciousness, mineral consciousness, electron or proton, quark consciousness is all a matter of degrees but essentially made of the same stuff.

As for consciousness delegeting roles to consciousness - that's a question for someone else. I don't even think the best and brightest necessarily have an answer for that, perhaps a few mediums might claim to albeit their accuracy tends to be somewhat dodgy.


I missed your problem of continuity but I don't buy solipsism either. I only brought it up to contrast what this set of ideas is as contrasted against solopsism. With this set of beliefs for instance, its just as true that the earth was round and revolved around the sun even when we believed it was a flat sheet with the heavens revolving around it - specifically because human consciousness does not hold the pendulum (or at least on that level).

To add another wild aspect to throw out there for context - the 'us' we know on earth isn't even 1/10,000th of the real us. The real us is focusing to create our sense of living in a body with five or six integrated senses, also acting as spirit guide for several other souls incarnate at the same time, also somewhere else sitting on the steps of some celestial meeting place - the ego that we experience as self in the materialistic sense is barely a blip. I bring that concept up because the 'greater selves' of seven billion people have a lot more to do with holding this all together, as well as beings that aren't incarnating and who may just as well never incarnate.


Admittedly these answers don't come from scientific experiment or studies. They come from other sources such as those who've had vivid NDE's, those who've been seemingly uncanny accurate mediums, channelers, eastern religious leaders even; ie. I don't think we really have any means to test such assertions yet scientifically because I agree that its very difficult for us to even understand what to expect of....pfff.....refrigerator or couch consciousness? To us they're inanimate objects and yes, we would need some type of claim as to how that consciousness would make itself manifest in order for us to test for its presence.

I don't see any reason to believe someone else's subjective point of view in such case.

But well, this principle of consciousness being the base of everything is contradictory, because there would be two consciousnesses, one that is under the matter, and one that emerge from matter. I think it is just not necessary to postulate this base consciousness to understand spirituality. It is equivalent to say that from globality emerge a kind of global consciousness.

And I would say that in regards to the "Spiritual substance" as you call it as felt by Christians, most would call this aspect of divinity the Holy Ghost, which is not given an image.

I think you are making a mistake in disregarding the differences in different religions as purely cultural and not of importance as religion is people's understanding of what this "spiritual substance" is and what it's importance is.

Now do the narratives of different religions conflict with one another? Yes. And do members of different religions all still claim to have spiritual experiences? Yes. But you have no way of proving that just because they are reporting something that they describe as spiritual that they are reporting the same "spiritual substance" or that it is all coming from the same source. this complicates things.

Yes, maybe it's what has less shape in christianity. But The holy ghost is about spreading christian dogma, no other religion, so it is still bound to that shape.


If different people have a different understanding of the same thing, then these understanding must be compatible in some way. This must be true for this spiritual substance too. So in what way religions are compatible ? Otherwise, it is only a way of feeling this substance, not a description of it. Hence, a shape and not the substance itself.


I don't think so. If there is something spiritual, the claim that it is of different nature depending on the religion, i.e. culture, is not acceptable without a full explanation of this because the spirit is not of different nature depending on the culture.

You don't know that.

The only problem with your last part is its not a concept arrived at from postulation. If this was something someone dreamed up as a theory to plug some gaps this would throw that theory out the window. What you have instead of postulation is a bunch of prolific NDE'ers, including neuroscientists, claiming this exact thing, same thing many prolific mediums claim, that channeled messages claim, etc.. With that sort of bulk experience its something that people (who believe any of this to begin with) would probe by trying to answer those specific kinds of questions via deeper examination rather than throwing it out or trying to solve it by molesting Occam. Additionally if one's a reductive materialist they have none of these problems to worry about to begin with, ie. it might as well be a debate about proper enunciation when speaking a particular dialect of Klingon.