What is your opinion about the Holy Spirit?

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Awe. Kazantzakis is one of my favourite authors.

As the Dervishes always say, it takes all kinds to make us whirl.

Well, does anyone else wish either to glorify or to blaspheme the Holy Spirit?

I am content to do my best to listen.

Glad you did not call it a "ghost"!

"Distilled Ghosts" has less marketing appeal.

The specialization of "ghost" to "spirit of a dead person" is an innovation we may attribute to the Normans giving us "sprite" plus the infiltration of "spirit" from the Latin of the church. Thanks to upper class learned talk you get "spirit" replacing "ghost" as the generic [still occupied in German by "Geist"], while the original generic, "ghost" with the meaning we now associate with "spirit"

This is almost precisely the opposite of "sheep" / "mutton", where the Norman term has the specialized sense. Of course, learned high class people talk about spirit, low class illiterates take care of cattle.

At the time of the KJV and the Cranmer prayer book, "ghost" was still operating as a generic. As a result those used to King James and the Book of Common Prayer, like those of us bbrought up Episcopalian, are perfectly comfortable - in some cases more comfortable - with "Holy Ghost" Those from other traditions used to other translations may legitimately find this puzzling or archaic.

I think that one may call him either a ghost or a spirit without blaspheming.

I wonder why God is so sensitive about the Holy Ghost/Spirit? You can't even say anything that is less than laudatory about him without suffering eternal damnation.

When a man refuses to get into "the spirit" of something, he robs his own self of "salvation" from his own boredom or inherent state of whatever kind ... and then later at his time of "judgment", even he then already knows he has thereby selected his own fate. So, I allege God is not "so sensitive" in the manner here suggested ... as in "pissed" or whatever and then bent toward striking out at a man by pronouncing an already-known "damnation".

Are you saying that one is damned merely for the crime of being bored in church?

I think calling it a 'spirit' is an attempt to make it seem less menacing since most people these days consider spirits to be good but ghosts can be either good or bad... thus scary.

I grew up calling it the Holy Ghost. Huzzah for the LDS church... :-\

If anything like that were true, I would have been dead long ago!

I am saying I believe the thought of God being "so sensitive" that he then later reaches out and damns people for not getting "into the spirit of things" is foolishness. Rather, men end up there all on their very own. For example ...

I used to play a lot of softball ... and the ball-field "stage was set" beforehand for any one of us to either "get into the spirit" of things there and "profit" from the experience or not ... and no ump ever later determined that for me.

The issue, guys and others, is not that God gets mad.

Damnation is not God getting in a tizzy and slapping you down [a lot of the people who do thsat apologize later and will drive you to the hospital]. It is you choosing to opt out of the alternative.

Rather, it is that the Spirit - der Heilige Geist - is the principal channel of communication. Call the Holy Ghost names all you want - sticks and stones may violate the Decalogue, but words are blasphemy only to uptight humans.

But if you are flying a jet and you switch off or ignore radio, radar and all, yoiu are going to crash.

'Sin against' - here, it's something more like 'go against the nature of'. Not insult or harm, but simply act counter to. Classic definition in Catholicism is that it's the sin of final despair - of pushing God away up until, and including, that last moment of life. (Which is why questions like the one TheKing put forward a while ago, of why God would create him just to send him to Hell, are non-applicable: we all have the rest of our lives still.)

Amen

Quoting Matthew 12 once more:

All you have to do is speak against the Holy Spirit once, and you're doomed.