DavidD

I don't know anything of how, "I am the way, the truth and the life," sounds in Greek, what ideas it came from or how it sounded to those in the first century. I just know how it sounds to me. It sounds secure. It reminds me of the narrow way being better than the broad way. "This is the way," sounds like someone has been there before. "Approach" sounds less sure. "Approach" is like landing an airplane, where one has to be constantly on guard for wind shifts. It might be the right way. It might be a dead end. It might be disasterous. I have found that flexibility in coming to God is important. There is no theology that substitutes for a living God. There is no historical figure that can do that, either. I don't think that God living in us is meant to be an abstraction. But how does one get there? All religions give prescriptions for this. All are flawed, include Christianity, which one can confirm by looking at those who follow such prescriptions. I don't think a warning about that needs to be given in every sentence. Their ways are not worthless, but there is more to it than following a path, where God is like some statue at the end. I don't know what the best image is. Is it a courtship? Is it a spiritual awakening, but one where my beloved awakens me, with a shake, with a kiss, with some desperate alarm? Whatever it is, I'm not alone in it. God is with me in it. I'm not sure how, but I like the aspect of Christianity that has me following someone who went before. Whether He is Lord, brother, my friend Jesus, even my son as any person in need is my son, that is a matter of personal preference. Knowing all that, is it so hard just to see Jesus as someone I follow to God, to the cross in some sense, too? Some of that might be lost in using "approach". Of course the obvious reason to use "approach" is to deny that Christianity is the only way to God. OK, so there are others. Is Christianity worth following or not? If it's only one approach, if maybe it's worthwhile, but maybe not, why go this way? I'm not sure how someone who can't say "way", whether that's "a way", "the way" or "the one and only way" can paint a picture that makes me want to try that way.

I haven't seen that anyone looks to the details of science to say who God is in terms of power, knowledge, love, and goodness. I was surprised to see how much in the scientific mainstream the director of the Vatican Observatory, George Coyne, is when I saw him speak a few years ago. He is both a Jesuit priest and research astronomer, who lectured about stellar evolution in a thoroughly mainstream way. He referred to Genesis as "stories". He allowed the possibility that God is not the Creator, but uses the universe as an opportunity for whatever His purposes are. If God is the Creator, it's fine with Father Coyne, too. Unless one insists there is only one possible truth, it's hard to be dogmatic about what that truth is. Twenty years ago, I was at my peak of enthusiasm about believing both in theistic evolution and that God is love, that both represented a position that many people could embrace. That's not the way it is, though. Even just to admit that evolution is a fact is difficult for so many people. Then to admit God is a fact, even if the atheists are right that my experiences of God are just a better part of me, is difficult for so many other people. Then for those who can be certain about evoution, what is God's role in that? Does He nudge it? Does He wait knowing that while many aspects of our body plan are utterly arbitrary, intelligent life was a niche to be filled eventually? Would God have been just as happy having fellowship with an octupus? Maybe He did. Likewise, what is love? Is the greatest love defined by being unconditional or by being interdependent, including God being dependent on His beloved? Personally, I don't find it helps me at all in relating to God to decide that He is Creator or not. The Bible is based on Him being Creator. I don't find it trustworthy. I also don't know about all these attributes - God seems more intuitive than knowledgeable to me. I'm sure my favorite definition of God will always be that God is the one who answers when I pray, "God help me!". No one else likes that. It's a pity. It's one way to start with something real instead of something like the ultimate creation, which is obscure to everyone.

I hadn't read this thread before, but skimmed enough of it this morning to realize now the first part of the above is a quote. So that's two more people who don't see God as traditionalists do, as the source of all power, knowledge, love, and goodness that there is. That seems obvious to me from looking at this world, but those who believe in a traditional God are so sure of themselves. I am not impressed with those who say suffering should be accepted, as if it were divinely ordained, as if people bring it on themselves, whether through sin or through delusions and attachments. As with so many things religious, religious people have grossly oversimplified the meaning in suffering, or lack thereof. Some people can experience some growth from some of their suffering. That doesn't explain suffering or say that excessive suffering is a good thing. I like two things Borg did in this book. I like his chapter about how faith is not the same as belief. I like how he describes the transformation that is indeed at the heart of Christianity. Suffering is part of that, but to say that's what suffering is for is like saying the internet exists just for me. Yet so much of religion is about making leaps like that. Even Borg goes on in the rest of this book to focus on beliefs. Some of it is tunnel vision, such as presenting only two possibilities for God, panentheism and something more traditional. In fact the possibilities are countless, and the reality is just one, no matter what anyone believes.

It is curious how those who claim that the Bible is everything get only half of the Bible's messages. Some take the idea that disease is due to sin as TRUTH, and miss that even the Bible says that's not always the case. How much farther someone would have to go to accept the modern knowledge that no disease is directly due to sin, that, "Arise and walk!" and "Your sins are forgiven!" do not mean the same thing, even if the gospels quote Jesus as saying so. God in life and God in words are two different things. I'm grateful to traditional Christianity for giving me a way to discover the difference. It is not words that gets someone from an understanding like that to living one's life to end poverty or to end conflict or to help people in other ways, including oneself.

To quote the author of the linked article, "A real Christian who doesn't believe in God?" He does a reasonable job of explaining that he sees his Christianity as a moral and political statement rather than a faith in Jesus as Lord and Savior. I'm not sure why anyone who is convinced of his or her atheism would be a Christian. Atheistic morality such as that of Bertrand Russell is much simpler and rational than any religion. That would be my choice if I didn't need God for more than morality. I also like how evolutionary psychologists account for morality with no need of God. The author does refer to the possibility of there being more than we know rationally. I applaud any atheist who can explore that. I'm happy for anyone to label themselves any way they want as long as they're not trying to mislead others. I've been told I'm too liberal to be a Christian. Of course any Christian has someone saying his or her faith is in vain, because they don't worship on Saturday, because they don't belong to the one, true church, one of many seen that way by their exclusively minded followers. So everyone has to decide what is real faith and what isn't. I like The Heart of Christianity for the chapter on how faith is not just a matter of beliefs and on describing the transformation at the center of Christianity in a liberal way. Still Borg seems to see this transformation in spiritual terms, not something that's just up to us to do naturally. People can label themselves any way they want, but those who deny spirituality aren't going to have the same transformation, I would think. Non-traditional Christianity is never going to have the conformity defined by seeing the Bible as the Word of God. I'd rather have God than the Bible. That I can have the God of my understanding and still find the Bible to be useful as the work of men is even better. I'm not sure if God is dispensible, though. Time will tell.

The charity where I volunteer uses "helping people help themselves" as their slogan: http://www.interfaithservices.org I know people like that more than helping people who can't help themselves, just as success stories generate more donations than stories of failures. There's a lot to say about why that is and how best to manage one's own charitable donations. I think it's best to be flexible about what God wants me to do.

This gets especially fanciful with #18. The mathematics of wave mechanics has been around at least 70 years. The mathematical representation of both light and particles in that shows no duality. It amazes me how many know-it-alls know nothing about this. There is a frequency that attenuates with distance, a "wave packet", something with no sharp edge to measure, even if one could. It explains experimental results of subatomic physics wonderfully, with no need for mysticism, yet I'm sure this author would label it "dull and boring" as he does with so many things that he doesn't understand as well as he must think he does. 2 + 2 = 4 has much more meaning than simply counting. How does it apply to a number line? How does it apply to vectors? Why is that different? So many people find reality boring, whether they prefer 3000 year-old myths or pseudoscientific myths from the past hundred years. The thing is that reality doesn't care what people think. It just is. Everyone alive today will die. Their beliefs will die with them. Reality will not. We can adapt to that today like never before, but many would rather not. Why should I take anyone seriously about who Christ is if he or she can't even get 70 year-old physics right?

The first one that comes to my mind is The Last Temptation of Christ. While some voice of fundamentalism was going off within my mind as I watched it, complaining about all the liberties it takes with the gospel story, I thought the ideas in it were interesting. The devil doesn't necessarily come as one would expect. I suspect being Jesus wasn't the confident walk that many Bible-believers imagine it to be. All's well that ends well. There were a lot of ideas. I don't know if they properly can be called progressive, but the movie is an example to me of where ideas can go if one isn't stuck in seeing the gospels as transcripts of what happened.

I agree, wayfarer. I still talk with fundamentalists from time to time, just to see if I ever find any who think another Christianity could even possibly be valid, not "another gospel" in the sense of being false, but a truth that people in the past weren't ready to see. One exchange on something like whether one can be a Christian and not believe in a substitutionary atonement usually blows that up. The thing I wish fundamentalists could understand is that I am not a liberal to avoid believing in substitutionary atonement, the virgin birth, that God can do utterly anything at any time or any such belief. I would have believed the Bible to be the Word of God if that's how it read to me, but it didn't. And in my discouragement over a false Bible, false rituals, false church, and hypocritical believers, I gave up on Christianity as a teenager. Then in my thirties, I needed something of God. I needed direction, strength and hope, and found them not just in a renewed prayer life, but in some elements of Christianity, about love, about transformation. I would believe in substitutionary atonement if the traditional view of sin made any sense, if all disease really were due to sin, so it made sense to see "arise and walk" and "your sins are forgiven" as synonymous. Experience has taught me otherwise. Experience has changed how much of society sees Christianity. I still don't know how to get that across to someone who hasn't traveled there for himself or herself, that there is a valuable truth between atheism and fundamentalism, whether one summarizes that as "love" or something else. If someone were to complain to me that liberal Christianity is right about valuing love, but confused about what to do beyond that, I would agree, as a liberal Christian. Few stop there, though. They want to belittle liberal Christianity into nonexistence, both theists and atheists. I don't think they'll ever succeed. Maybe that's the best there is right now.

Well, the Orthodox position isn't that Jesus is half human and half divine, where humanity and divinity are quantifiable ingredients one mixes together in equal proportions. It's that Jesus is completely and utterly human in every essential sense of the word, and that precisely as such he participates fully in the nature of God. No tomatoes, please, I'm just stating what the Orthodox view is. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Fred, I can’t tell if you’re denying that the orthodox position (generically, not Eastern Orthodox) is that Jesus is fully man and fully God or if you’re trying to illustrate how Jesus is fully God by saying that Jesus participates in God. “Participates” seems so vague to me that I don’t think it adds anything to “fully God”. I’m sure some would say “participates” is less than fully God, and therefore heresy, but my belief is not so exacting. I believe God is whoever and whatever God is, likewise for Jesus. Perhaps you were trying to point a way past the conflict I mentioned that Jesus in the gospels doesn’t read like fully God to me. I don’t think there’s a simple way to do that. Atheists have versions of the Bible online that list objections to almost every verse. The things that contributed to my impression are in there somewhere. Apologists also have their defenses posted or published verse by verse. Anyone can decide for himself or herself whether the best apologists can do is good enough. I find that it doesn’t matter exactly what it means theologically to say that Jesus Christ is my Lord and my Savior. I am committed to God through Jesus Christ. I experience faith as a charismatic gift, something that is much more about trust and devotion than precise beliefs. I experience the trust and devotion that God has toward me. One does not have to deny conflicts in theology to have faith, even if one once did to keep from being burned. As I said the first time, one can’t put a percentage on how much Jesus is like God. One could try, but whatever number one came up with wouldn’t relate to the real world, certainly not in the way ancient people saw it. Reviewing all these heresies at once made that more clear to me. There isn’t a heresy about Jesus being a 50:50 mix of God and man. It’s all or nothing, God or man. There is something about the orthodox position that to me is just a defense against all this sort of speculation, that Jesus is all man and all God, not all things to all people, but like that, a way to make Jesus everything He needs to be for other doctrines. It’s not responding to all ways one might think of Jesus, just the ways He was thought of then. It needed to be strong to fight off divisions in the church. It didn’t need to be true to do that. While absolute, it’s vague as to how that relates to other things. What was Jesus biologically? Did He have cuts because He was man? Were they instantly healed because He was God, even though a man’s cuts wouldn’t heal like that? Whatever answer one gets from logic and theology is not the right answer. It’s just one answer of many possible answers from what “fully man and fully God” means to someone in position to decide. As much as I’d like to pull God or Jesus out from behind a pillar and say, “See, here’s how He really is,” there’s no way to confirm any answer as true. I do experience God for myself, but not enough to answer everything, and others experience Him differently, if at all. Yet I see the appeal of “fully man and fully God”. The concept of it is clear, though it’s not clear how to relate that to the real world, where God is so abstractly defined. It is definitely concise as to who Jesus is. Anyone accepting this phrase can be as dogmatic about all these little questions as conservative Christians are. It has utility. It has stability. But is it true? Does it work? Many heretics have said “no”, and modern heretics potentially have so much more ammunition behind that than their ancient predecessors did. And the possibilities for who Jesus is are so many more than just a man, just God or both. There are so many possibilities even for who God is. People look at many things and say they don’t work. Some people look at science and say it doesn’t work. They’re wrong. I’ve seen how science works. People who are discouraged with it don’t understand enough of it. It could be that theology is the same way. If God, Jesus and whatever else were just as theology says, all heresy might be just ignorance and pride. I’ve looked for that a lot. Eventually I admitted defeat. I can’t master spirituality the way I did science. There’s too much hidden with the former. So I turned to God directly. God tells me orthodoxy is illusion, and science is not. It’s good enough for me.

Flow, as I said, every feeling we have is a real feeling, but to say that this feeling is behind all of religion is a mistake. You don't have to believe me. You're entitled to believe what you believe, but so am I. You didn't say it explicitly, but I have heard many people talk about helping people in terms of our connectedness to others. That ignores how many ways we are disconnected. As I was saying, the reality of helping others is much tougher than seeing the beauty in all people. All the traditional ways of seeing the problem of poverty and suffering have not fixed the problem. I don't write about that to slap at you. I write about that because I want to write about it. I would write much more about it. I'm sorry for whatever hurt you felt at what I wrote. Of course experience shapes one's perspective. It can even negate another's perspective. I don't see the virtue in keeping quiet about that, maybe if the subject were only which is the best restaurant in town, but not about how the needy are neglected. My clients are suffering. It is a big deal. It is a big deal that many people find excuses to justify such suffering and make priorities that ensure further suffering. We have the intellectual, material and spiritual resources to end poverty and to end conflict, but we don't use them that way. I'm not sure how God sees that, but it's not good. It's worth talking about. If I discuss it with you again, I'll try harder to be clear that I'm not picking on you personally.

I guess when I have some time I can go through them and see if any organize them in a meaningful way! <{POST_SNAPBACK}> When I followed the schedule in the back of my Bible, I would read topically at other times, too. It's actually not all that much reading when it's everyday. I understand what you write about wanting to be able to make comparisons at a single sitting, but it is amazing how you can make those comparisons over years instead. One reason I quit reading the Old Testament each year was that the same issues would come up for me each year, driving me to books on apologetics, driving me to ask God about it. Eventually I got my answer - to my mind even God has problems with the Bible. I wouldn't have felt like that in a day. In the New Testament it is also interesting to deal with the same issue one day each year. Every May 17 for many years I read about the resurrection of condemnation in John 5:29. My reactions to that fermented for a long time, knowing each time I read it was the same as the year before. Then popped out what I shared here on January 1. Not everyone values such a thing, but I did. The reading schedule gave me time to process what my reading of the Bible really is. I wish I knew how to help people see that the words of the Bible are the words of men, not God. There is no perfect way to learn that, no perfect way to read the Bible to understand that, that it is contradictory, that it is artificial. Atheists make such long lists of problems with the Bible. One could just sit down with one of those that attack the Bible verse by verse and a book of apologetics that defend the Bible verse by verse, then see what one decides. That would take at least a year to do comprehensively. I didn't do that much, just what came to me, repetitively. There are many ways to do it.

That's a lot to read into a feeling, flow. I believe every feeling we have is a real feeling, but we mislabel our feelings all the time. I think this one could use some scrutiny. I don't mean to change the direction of this discussion, but if no one minds, maybe it is important to discuss why anyone wants to do good works. I valued helping people before I saw it as a religious/spiritual activity. I was better at it than I was at research. Bad results from experiments and good feedback from people told me so. But as I was becoming more religious, helping people became a tangible focus for that. I was helped in that by Christian traditions such as the Prayer of St. Francis and Matthew 25: 31-46, at the same time being chhallenged by how hypocritical the church is about this. There was much to explore in this, such as what it means to give love and receive love. Eventually I find that what I do is not part of some great plan ordained by God. There is no way that what I do individually will make any difference in the big picture at all. Even what it does for individual clients is limited. They are still on their own in their lives in so many ways. God tells me that if it were just up to Her, She doesn't need me to help people at all. She'd rather I spent even more time with Her. But I need to stay connected, not to some great cosmic plan, but to the depressed young woman I saw yesterday who needed some one to tell her how to file for state disability, how to use the county's health care for the homeless program and to give her food from our pantry. Was this cosmic? Absolutely not. It was a little bit of love between us, something I know how to do, something a lot of people could do, but don't. Many people find excuses not to help others in their suffering. They have bigger priorities. God has often told me to do what I know how to do. I do that well enough that I don't hear it so much any more. It's not about being noble. It's not that my clients are so wonderful. There are some I wouldn't turn my back on in a parking lot. If someone is looking for some great orgasmic union with God from doing good works, they will find reality is different than that. I learned about love from helping people, from relationships, from raising children, and from God. It was all useful, but only God's love accepts me just as I am. That's the love that is vital for me. Loving people actively helped me to understand that, both from the existential joys of loving people and the shortcomings of it. People always want to simplify a process like charity to a single thing. It is not that. It's just something I do, no matter how many reasons there are.

Many years ago I heard Baba Ram Das speak about what happens to his mind when he meditates. He described these concentric spheres. He could feel a transition from one to the next as if a balloon pops. Then there is a larger balloon around him. That metaphor came back to me as I meditated. I had these waves of relaxation around my face. The first one was especially strong and was always a welcome friend to signal that I was leaving this awkwardly expectant moment of just having closed my eyes and entering whatever meditation really is. I noticed it this way many times before I realized there was something asymmetric about it. My left eye especially relaxed, even though I felt something all over my face, just like that balloon popping I had heard about. Eventually I realized what this was. I have an esophoria I didn’t realize I had. My eyes point in the same direction only with some effort. It’s a much more common condition than people realize, much more common than when people’s eyes are a little crossed all the time. People in coma routinely have eyes pointing in different directions. Sometimes that’s because of brain damage, but more often it’s because people are very relaxed and are no longer compensating for this common imbalance in their eye muscles. When awake, it usually requires no conscious effort to straighten our eyes, any more than we think about back muscles to maintain our posture. Our body just does it automatically. So here I had discovered something tangible from meditation. My left eye turns in when I’m very relaxed. I meditated in front of a mirror at least once to confirm that this transition I had noticed was indeed that. It was. I opened my eyes a little after this sentinel sensation, and that’s exactly what it was. It is strange what a widespread sensation it is. I’ve learned to feel the one small muscle that relaxes, as subtle as that is. The much broader sense of warmth and lightness is harder to explain in detail. It’s like someone putting down suitcases from both arms and feeling it all over his or her body. Our sensations are imprecise like that. Intellectually I know I have no way of knowing if the balloon popping that Baba Ram Das described was anything like this. I don’t remember his saying that it was a physical feeling for him, but he was clear that there was some sense of transition. I can’t help but think that if it isn’t this common, though obscure condition, the feeling he felt must be something equally meaningless. One can feel such a relaxation repeatedly. The first one is strongest, but then one drifts back a little toward the fully awake state and relaxes again. Maybe it’s not concentric spheres at all. Maybe it’s just one transition, experienced over and over and over again, mischaracterized as well. That would be a very different universe from what Baba Ram Das described. Physical correlates of consciousness come up all the time, from autonomic measurements to EEG to PET scans. What advocates of higher consciousness say about these make me even more suspicious than my personal experience. It impresses those who want to be impressed, but it’s all easily attacked. In recent years I’ve heard many mentions of radiologist Andrew Newberg studying meditation with SPECT scans, even in Newsweek. Yet it never comes up that Dr. Newberg isn’t able to publish his results in a peer-reviewed journal, where those mean old scientists won’t let someone say whatever they want, as Newberg can in his books. If the scans he presents are even beyond normal variation, which is not established in his books, the explanation might be as trivial as an altered focus of attention during meditation compared to wakefulness, nothing as involved as the explanation Newberg invents despite his lack of expertise in cerebral neurophysiology. Then there are other equally fringe researchers that contradict him about something as basic as whether parietal lobe activity goes up or down with meditation. It’s strange because I don’t care directly if meditation has physical effects. It’s the spiritual effects or at least the mental ones I’m interested in. But if advocates of meditation can’t tell the difference between good science and junk, why should I believe them about anything? It’s a question that comes up a lot for me in religion. If people are willing to believe nonsense about what can be known, why believe them about more mysterious things? Eventually my meditating turned to prayer. I would prayer the Lord’s Prayer or something else scripted. Then I would pray whatever else came to me. Then I would wait, sometimes for a long time. 17 years ago God started speaking to me in words during those times. Before then the Spirit was doing something, bringing prayers to me that I had no idea were in me, things like that. I became aware of a presence in my prayers long before I was sure it was God. That might have even started when I was just meditating. I don’t remember. It was a similar state. I remember that much. What I remember best is learning that I had an esophoria, and maybe Baba Ram Das did, too. People are so willing to follow religions of the past, as if ancient people knew what they were doing. They didn’t. Still it’s not completely useless. If there hadn’t been religion, I never would have discovered even that I have an esophoria, much less all these things about God that are much more important to me. Yet all religions are false, even if they have some truth. If something’s true show me. If you can only show me indirectly, then show me how you live your life to end poverty. Show me how you live your life to end conflict. That’s what God is willing to do for me. Many people are less demanding. I think that’s a pity.

Thanks for reading more of Jung than I have. I remember reading about his psychosis, how he was changed by seeing so many ghosts and things. My memory for other thhings about him is vague. I understand the desire to have more inputs to our consciousness than our senses. I act like I can communicate with God in a way that is beyond my senses, but I do wonder sometimes what that really is. I don't think it's quantum mechanics, as the scale of entanglement or any other feature of quantum mechanics is so tiny, much smaller than a neuron as well as smaller than me. It occurs to me that in addition to physicists using the word “energy” differently than many people do, they see it in ways that escape other people, too. One can see energy related to gravity in any falling object. One can even see energy in an object that isn’t moving if one knows what one is seeing. Why don’t I fall through my chair as I’m writing this? It’s natural to say the chair holds me up, but why? If the chair were just the molecules within it, gravity would pull me through it as if it were air. The chair is more than matter. It is also all the electromagnetic energy between atoms that keeps it the shape it is. This holds up the electrons on the surface of the seat of the chair against the electrons on the back of my pants. Gravity causes me to sink into the chair until the electrostatic force of electrons repelling electrons just balances gravity. At that point I stay put. Physics is much more about energy than about matter. Energy does things. Matter is just building material. It is curious that I’m sure most people would see energy as invisible and mysterious. All physical forces can be seen in their effects on things. I’m sure it’s natural to see them as needing to be something beyond these effects, as ancient people thought there must be gods to explain them. Yet our mathematical descriptions of all these forces are very good without any term for God. There is experimental evidence that both special relativity and general relativity are exactly right. That’s not true for string theory, but perhaps only because no one has figured out how to test string theory. People want there to be more to it than that. Why should it be? Can you think of an example of energy that can’t be seen? I can’t. It may take experimenting to demonstrate, but I can’t think of any energy that can’t be seen similarly to the above. Even the two newest forces, the ones related to the accelerated expansion of the universe, two more beyond the 20th-century quartet, can be seen because the universe is expanding more than it could be without them. One of them is the Higgs force, which was already proposed as a reason for massive objects not to all be whizzing around at the speed of light. So if I reach out with my arm, and it doesn’t go at the speed of light, I’m seeing the Higgs force as surely as if I were in water and moving even more slowly. I would sense the water just because of that, actually the electromagnetic energy that makes water as viscous as it is. Physicists haven’t decided they’re sure about the Higgs field. More experiments are needed. Yet one can see it if one knows what one is seeing, just like anything we see. And if it turns out to be a mirage, then we’ll see it differently. I believe one can learn from spiritual experiences as well as science, but I’m not sure why anyone in the 21st century has trouble seeing science as real. Science is expanding, but it’s never completely rewritten. I wouldn’t trade scientific truth for any mystical speculation. I haven’t fallen through my chair yet. I suspect human beings have suffered from a similar delusion repeatedly, that there must be a spirit giving us life instead of life being the dynamic material process that it is, that energy must be more than the action that it is, such as the action of holding a chair in its shape. I don’t know but consciousness might be the same way, a single brain-generated virtual reality for each of us instead of some profound revelation into our mind, whether collective or individual. God might be the same way, a simple quality like love or goodness instead of an iceberg-like being who is so much more than we can experience on the surface. Maybe God is more within us than He ever was without us. It is interesting how people are put off by the complexity of science. With enough experience science becomes simple in its principles, even though still complex in its details. People don’t wait for the real simplicity, though. They reach for fantasy, the same way science fiction tries to tear up every limit physics and biology describe. Even good scientists can do that. That’s how quantum mechanics became so much more fanciful than it really is. But only reality is real and persists. Everything else dies with the mind of the believer. Experience shows the difference, that life is simple, that energy is simple. Maybe consciousness and God are just as simple, maybe not. Experience is the only way I know to tell the difference. It lets us see things differently, outside of us or inside of us.

I don't remember when I first heard that Jesus is fully man and fully God, at the same time. I remember having conflict between that and reading the gospels, where Jesus seems more human than divine to me. The thing is that there's no way to quantify such a thing, as if He's 70% human or something. I think the orthodox position is more about fighting off all these heresies addressed by this test than some great truth. All these positions are so black and white, that Jesus was fully man and not God or that He wasn't a man at all. I don't even know that I'm fully man. I'm just glad they don't burn heretics any more. I think I'd be very orthodox if they did.

Strokes in different parts of the brain change consciousness differently, depending on the size and location of the stroke, both according to people who have suffered strokes and people who study those who have had strokes. Now if someone wants to explain that without consciousness being at least partially in the brain, he or she can try, but I don't think it will make any sense.

I'd love to share stories from my volunteer work, how the needy continue to be neglected in 2006, how this is something real about God compared to abstractions people like to talk about. I don't see any insurmountable problem to using this forum for that. People just need to know that you want a thread to be about a particular type of discussion. I was disappointed to read the economic justice section at christianalliance.org. It's just about increasing government spending for the poor. Even if I thought that might happen, I don't think it's enough. People are on their own in so many ways in our society unless they're willing to believe what some cult-like organization believes. I think social and economic justice would be an excellent thing to talk about.

I haven't read Searle. Jung isn't necessarily as mystical as some think. He was still a psychoanalyst. Freud was quite concrete in his theory of the mind, having trained to be a neurologist. To Freud the unconscious was in the brain and while I don't know that he wrote about the collective unconsciousness, I would think he would see that as a biologically shared "background" much as evolutionary psychologists do. One can interpret Jung as deviating far from that, but I don't know that he did. Physicists have an easy time with the concept of energy because they talk about energy with a clear definition in mind. Energy is something that can do work. Work is a force applied over a distance. Force is something that can accelerate an object just as Newton said. The only energy that physicists encounter is related to one of the known forces, gravity, electromagnetism, or the weak or strong nuclear forces or is energy related to the creation or annihilation of matter as in an accelerator. The energy of gravity is as easy as falling off a log. The energy of electromagnetism is almost everything else we encounter. The only place where energy and matter are converted as a practical matter is where physicists are smashing particles and from the annihilation energy of those particles other particles come to exist, if only fleetingly. It's all very concrete stuff. In contrast, we use "energy" in English to mean many things. If I talk about feeling energetic, I'm talking about alertness or something else that depends on my neurochemical state, not anything that a physicist would call energy. Mystical uses of the word "energy" can be even more vague. "Entity" might be a better word, maybe "will", "direction". I like "thing" if I don't know something more specific. I suppose the unknown is vague no matter what someone calls it.

I stick to a neuroscience definition of consciousness, that consciousness is our subjective experience of the world around us, the world within us, imagination, abstraction, everything like that. I would think "conscious mind" is the same thing. I considered it a significant moment when I broke from my colleagues to even consider that we might have a mind beyond what the brain can explain. How much of that might be us? How much might be something from the spiritual universe reaching into us? Do we have our own spirit or only a representation of us within Spirit? Who can know? I like how evolutionary psychologists approach all this. They start from an assumption I disagree with, that there is no God no matter how much it looks like there is a God-shaped void within us. But they approach the question of why we believe in God so empirically, like academic anthropologist Pascal Boyer does in his 2001 book Religion Explained. He isn't like some atheist on a debate board saying religion is wishful thinking. His presents all sorts of data from cultures around the world and cognitive psychology to present God as a side effect evolution gave us from giving us things like our tendency to see hidden things in the bushes around us instead of just focusing on obvious objects. We are suckers for beleving in hidden causes. We adore inside information. We treasure powerful friends. We like a justification for our innate morality. All this winds up sounding like a God-shaped void to me, yet I've never found an evolutionary psychologist who uses that phrase. They believe all of religion is based in biological and cultural evolution, just as neuroscientists believe consciousness is entirely physical. Their arguments are good enough that I find I can only imagine consciousness in a way where atheists might be right. It may be that my communication with God goes no further than some better part of me, instead of out into some spiritual existence that I can't picture at all. I can live with that. I better be able to. They might be right. I think there is more to spirituality than the physical, but it is possible even to explain things like the collective unconsconscious physically. To say that it is not possible is simply being dogmatic. People do that anyway, and they do it for things much more abstract than consciousness. At least there is something certainly real about consciousness, even if it is subjective. The existence of completely abstract things beyond that is so speculative. I sometimes have images about parts of me that reach into the spiritual universe, but I think what they are is beyond anyone. So I stick with the simpler meaning of consciousness.

http://quizfarm.com/test.php?q_id=131773 I like this test. I'm sure it's flawed, but I appreciate it for coming up with a label for me I've never heard before. Now if I can only find a test that says I'm right. You are a Pelagian. You reject ideas about man's fallen human nature and believe that as a result we are able to fully obey God. You are the first Briton to contribute significantly to Christian thought, but you're still excommunicated in 417. Pelagianism 100% Monarchianism 67% Socinianism 58% Adoptionist 33% Nestorianism 33% Gnosticism 25% Modalism 25% Albigensianism 25% Chalcedon compliant 17% Apollanarian 17% Monophysitism 8% Donatism 0% Docetism 0% Arianism 0%

I definitely agree with you, BOE, about the one person from a New Thought church who has talked to me on this subject. There were so many other proud things he was saying, like his church taught what Jesus really taught, but mainline churches don't. It made me not feel like figuring out if there was anything he was saying that made sense. I've always found it hard to know what someone is saying on this subject. What does it mean that you are God, if that's what someone believes? I take it's more than just being in communication with God. Can you do miracles, if only you can believe enough that you are God? OK, prove it. At the same time, I find there is truth to God being in me in a traditional Christian way, that Christians become home not only to the Spirit, but to the Father and Jesus as well. I don't know if that is only metaphor or if there is a greater spiritual truth than that. I do know that there were times in my life when I was helping people and felt like I was a conduit for God's love, not something I was generating all by myself. I do think the Spirit helps the willing to do God's will, maybe even some who are unwilling. I also believe Matthhew 25 that Jesus is in the needy somehow. Again whether that is purely metaphorical or something more than that, I don't know. It doesn't matter as a practical matter. Somehow in helping people there can be God on one side helping someone to be helpful and God on the other, in the needy, whether that's just to comfort the needy or what. It's fine with me if that's all metaphor, and God is actually at a considerable distance from the action. If it's more than that, it's fine with me, too. What that doesn't mean is God is not only in the needy, but in everyone the same way. I don't know why that should be true.

Yes, that is a problem. Listening to someone like Kurzweil makes me think about all the things missing from his model of consciousness. I wish more people would realize that there isn't just a single seat of consciousness to duplicate, like the cartoon of some little guy pulling levers, but a huge system including all these touch receptors in our skin which we feel, but almost never think about how. The virtual reality our brain generates is so good, we can take all sorts of things for granted, as if we saw things directly, felt them directly, moved things simply as a matter of our will, not to mention all the things that are completely within our mind. Simple models are looking to duplicate just some abstract aspect of consciousness. They might think about how to reproduce the entire virtual reality experience that mainstream scientists think the brain can manage all by itself. It's not something we can get from any spike in the back of the head as in The Matrix. People like Roger Penrose, though, push me back toward the mainstream. Saying the brain can't manage some aspect of consciousness is like the intelligent design people saying life is too complicated for evolution. It's easy to say, but very difficult to be convincing about unless someone just wants to abandon known physics for something new. There are many features one could wonder about. Can the brain truly store all the long-term memory it seems to? What is will, desire, imagination, ... Now that there is neuroimaging to correlate objective features of the brain with the subjective experience of a human being inside the machine, there will either be progress this way, or the difficulties of the mind being purely physical will be more apparent. Either way, that's better. It will take waiting through some overblown claims like those of Andrew Newberg in his meditating subjects where mostly there's no change in the brain, just some little change that could relate to where one is focusing one's attention. If the real experiments don't do better than that, that will be interesting. I suspect that by 2020 both the genetics and neuroscience revolutions will be duplicating what medicine has found about life and death, that life is complicated, but not exotic. I wonder how far that will get before the next century.

I came across someone who speaks clearly about consciousness. Unfortunately I doubt he's right. Ray Kurzweil has written another book in his series that looks at trends in information processing and concludes that the sky's the limit in many ways. His latest book apparently includes predictions that around 2020, a $1000 computer will have as much computer power as a human brain, however he's measuring that. He also predicts a computer will pass a Turing test by then, one way of deciding that something is conscious, or at least can fake consciousness well enough to fool a human being. I saw him saying this on CSPAN2's BookTV over the weekend. After reading reviews about the book not being written well, which I can imagine from his oral style, I don't feel like reading the book, but I like how testable his prediction is. Mainstream neuroscience and some others would like consciousness to be that trivial, that all you need is a complicated enough map of the world, including feedback from our actions, including enough of oneself in the map, and presto, that's all consciousness is, a virtual reality generated by our brain, somehow much better than any computer or devices could do now, even using our senses to build on. I'm torn about what I wish to be the truth. I was impressed in my career just how different our biological existence is than what ancient people could have possibly imagined. There is so much going on in our heart, lungs, brain, blood, and metabolism keeping us alive, so many places in there where poisons and pathogens can kill us, yet it's all the same sort of thing, all the same chemistry and physics that can be understood in the same way. In the end there is no need for a spirit to keep us alive, something that exits our body with our last breath. One might say that ancient people had it metaphorically right in seeing life and death this way, but what a stretch to say that was even metaphorically true, that such a living "spirit" represented the dynamics of all these physical processes that collapse when we die. Not really. Those dynamics don't continue on with their own life beyond the body. They could only exist in a living body, one that slowly built up from conception, not with any bolt of electricity like Frankenstein. Once the bubble pops, it's stays popped. It's hard to be as dogmatic about consciousness. Some part of our mind continuing on after death is still possible, who knows where or how. It depends what consciousness is. Can it be reproduced in a machine, as so many science fiction writers were expecting in the fifties? Kurzweil says yes, as many have before, but his math says that it was silly to expect this before 2020. It would be quite something if he's right. Then again, might the consciousness of a lesser ape be apparent in a machine before then, like right now? To my knowledge there is nothing like any biological consciousness in a machine now. I think I'll make it to 2020, so I wait for the more substantial prediction. Then if that's not right, what is consciousness anyway? Many words have been written about that, but do any of them have more reality than that life-giving spirit people used to explain life and death long ago? It has impressed me that the reality of life and death is both tremendously more complex, but also simpler than when ancient people had only words, raw observations, and their imagination to understand it. The details of all the physiology and chemistry, all those places where poisons and pathogens attack are immense. It's amazing how much more medicine is known in the past 100 years than was ever known before. Yet all this is no different from studying rocks and metals, from working on any manufacturing process. Who could have guessed thousands of years ago that this is what life is? Who could have guessed that life or even the universe doesn't require God to shepard every little process, but that all sorts of things happen because of the constancy of a few physical forces? Part of me would like consciousness to be something spiritual, something that is utterly different than physical reality. What a continuation of the story of discovery if it's not, though. Maybe there could still be afterlife and resurrection somehow. If consciousness is purely physical, it doesn't mean there isn't something spiritual. Spirituality would just be that much removed from our ordinary existence. And it still wouldn't be found in sci-fi fantasies about "life force" and such imaginary things. If spirits reach into the physical universe at all, I don't think any of us has imagined how yet. It might not have anything to do with how we are conscious. There's still going to be all kinds of words about consciousness. I can wait for some kind of test of them at this point. I don't think words alone have served us well in the past, even the most evocative ones.

My undergraduate degree was in physics, and I got the highest grade in my class in quantum mechanics. The professor for my class in freshman psychology happened to have gotten his undergraduate degree in physics, and he had two pet peeves. One was how journalists and others use "schizophrenic" to mean being of two minds, when the technical meaning of the word is not that at all. The "schism" is not down the middle of a schizophrenic's head, but between fantasy and reality. His second pet peeve was how people get the uncertainty principle all wrong, which they did from the beginning, including physicists, but even at that time, he thought it was time for all this mystical nonsense attached to quantum mechanics to stop. It's only gotten worse. Despite that I liked this professor and am happy to carry on trying to explain that quantum mechanics says nothing like the above quote. The problem is that men like Bohr, Schrodinger and Heisenberg, even Einstein, were all mystified by how certain experiments showed that the subatomic world is very different from the macroscopic world. Electron diffraction was one of these. If you send a stream of electrons toward two tiny slits, they don't act like ball bearings. If the slits are narrowly enough separated, an interference pattern results just as it would for light, as if the electrons go through both slits at once. So there was a lot of speculation about how an electron "chooses" which slit to go through, a lot of talk that preceded the experimentalists and theoreticians getting together to build an understanding of what's really going on. Electrons are not ball bearings. They have no precise position and momentum, but rather a range of position and momentum within a very tiny limit, defined by the inequality that is the uncertainty principle. In Heisenberg's original paper he discusses the idea of this in terms of how one would measure such a tiny object and therefore disturb it, but it is not a principle about measurement. Matter at a subatomic level really is fuzzy, yet the fuzziness is so small that it makes no difference at all when massive quantities of matter are in an object large enough for us to touch. The uncertainty principle means absolutely nothing to the existence of human beings, except as something for human beings to talk about. When people send a spacecraft to Mars with incredible precision, it takes knowledge of neither quantum mechanics nor relativity to do that. If that doesn't make someone rethink this idea that nothing is objective, I don't know what will. To quote Heisenberg from 1927 is like creationists quoting Darwin. You can argue anything from picking out something foolish that the smartest person in the world once said. Time has changed how people understand things. It's true that some speculations that legitimate physicists started, like parallel universes is still legitimately speculated about, but there is nothing to say that such things are more than speculations. Quantum mechanics textbooks begin with the idea that energy is quantized, that only certain levels of energy are possible in the world of the tiny. At our level of existence those levels are so close, they might as well be continuous. So quantum mechanics should have no implications at all for religion. Yet it's invoked all the time. It's curious how people do this. It's about magic words, I think, but in this case one can go and learn the truth of it. It's such hard work if all one has is a quantum mechanics text that would be used in a full-fledged physics class, but with so much mythology about what quantum mechanics says, maybe that's what it takes. If only everyone who wanted to know could ask God, "God, does quantum mechanics have any implications for religion?" Then God could say, "No." Then everyone could move on. It doesn't seem God intervenes that way, does it? Maybe even He doesn't want to do the math.