romansh

I can't see why not. Can you?

That could very well be me.

It would appear Hillary could turned into a divine vessel as easily as Trump. So there we have it, it does not matter who we vote for ... god will (or not) fill that person with divinity. But yet we seem to have to place our bets on someone now. The flotsam of the media circus that passes politics in the US has not washed up anything about Stein and the Green Party on popular Canadian news.

To whom? Malcolm X, is not undeniably obvious to me.

Yeah ... I can't say I am overly infected by those addictions. It's a game and we think we freely choose to participate. For me the topic of "free will" is a far greater addiction ... but that is OK too. Just is. I too am wondering what to replace work with, in my retirement. Addiction to enjoying myself perhaps? :-)

So is this a panentheistic or a pantheistic interpretation/like?

Steve ... I tend to agree with you, but it is not just politics and religion that are addictions. Going to work is one (but I am planning on giving that one up), love, thought, ideas, gardening, pride, breathing, life itself can be seen as an addiction. Some can be seen as more fun than others. And even that is in the eye of the beholder.

So when you decree Trump (or anyone else) as divine that is undeniable proof?

So how will we ever know whether Trump will ever be a divine vessel? I suppose you will be able to tell me?

You make him sound of the immaterial ... And there aspects of Trump that are transcendent ... in the sense of beyond all categories of thought.

And what answer does it assume?

Do you mean inspired by the divine? Or they are some god's instrument? If it is the latter ... then I would argue your any lists we make are equally arbitrary. But then you missed the point I was trying to make .... which is summarized at the bottom of my previous post.

Some divine vessels of the twentieth century: Enver Pasha Kim Il Sung Ho Chi Minh Pol Pot Saddam Hussein Yahya Khan Hideki Tojo Vladimir Lenin Hirohito Chiang Kai-shek Adolf Hitler Joseph Stalin Mao Zedong But then it could be argued we are all divine vessels except when we are not.

I found this in my local paper today ... What other differences are there?

Martin Thanks I thought your comments were insightful. First on your Maugham quote, regardless of what he did write I would add something like this: ...life can be viewed as deterministic in retrospect, but must be LIVED as though we have free will; but ,it can be understood it will be deterministic. And regarding fatalism ... while a belief in free will might drop one into the despair of fatalism, it should at 'worst' give a sense of nihilism, but with careful thought it allow you to take on a monistic view and help dispel the illusion of dualism. And regarding the tapestry metaphor ... I think a cosmic cloth might be more accurate where all the weft and warp threads are connected. rom

Thank you Joseph ... you know us seniors take longer to get our thoughts together.

I would be appreciate if we could extend the editing time back to at least an hour. Other fora can have editing times that last days without issue.

I can to some degree sympathize with this point of view. I don't worry about whether I have free will or not when I get out of bed in the morning but it is a classic moment [William James] to throw doubt on free will in our lives. It is moments like these (in fact writing is another) that allow us moments introspection that can help guide our free will beliefs. Sam Harris who apparently commented on this video suggested that we don't use our capabilities of introspection deeply enough to disabuse ourselves of the belief in free will. For me it is mostly a rational position. Having lost my belief in free will, I have certain trigger words like good/bad, evil/angelic, virtue, intrinsic, independent, free etc. When I find myself or others using these words I try and understand what is causing myself or others to have these thoughts. Sometimes these words are descriptive to the duality embedded in our [societal] mores.

John Searle of the Chinese Room thought experiment on the subject of free will: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rZfSTpjGl8

Came across this recently an ancient letter to the Times (of London) regarding intercessory prayer. Quite amusing I thought. http://www.lettersofnote.com/2016/07/prayers-for-rain.html

Welcome from the Kootenays

I agree here whole heartedly. But another way to look at it is: nouns are actually verbs. Take a tree for example ... when we say a tree we are describing a myriad of processes from the quantum level to the meso, to eventually to the universal. It is only because we draw an arbitrary stagnant line around what we call a tree do we enter into dualism. The universe has, is and will shape the tree. And it, in its way, is shaping the universe,

Oh I don't mind being a heretic, but in my present state do you think I am one with Christ?

Not as explicit as John 10:30 I think it would be a heresy for me to say Christ and I are one, regardless of my beliefs and my actions?

So to manipulate people, well some people, (and here I use manipulate in an neutral sense) we have to engage their emotions to get them to move in the direction we want. It sounds cold and manipulative (in its negative sense). Reason and logic I think tells us that reason and logic is incomplete, I have no problem with this. If we decide to live our lives on some emotional level, that is fine but I can't help thinking reason and logic should point in vaguely the same direction for some sort of guidance to our emotion? As we have seen in these threads we can't argue or discuss our individual perceptions of faith, because these are highly internal. But we can discuss our internal assumptions (axioms) and how we have applied logic to those assumptions. Here we have a way of reviewing our direction. Those that rely on faith (as described in the other thread) simply either agree with one another, or if like me on the outside looking in, wonder what g on. I have friends who are YEC, and when sufficient evidence is provided, they simply pull out the "faith" card and assert an inerrant Biblical old Earth .