Whole thread

Post Edited (One Love) : 5/28/2010 1:50:28 PM (GMT-5)

Freedom is INSEPARABLE from knowledge of the Truth...and personal knowledge of Truth is impossible to obtain with the self-referential power of "spirit."

John 17:3

----------------------------------------------------------

 When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.  I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.

 “I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world. Yours they were, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything that you have given me is from you.  For I have given them the words that you gave me, and they have received them and have come to know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. I am praying for them. I am not praying for the world but for those whom you have given me, for they are yours.  All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I am glorified in them. And I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one. While I was with them, I kept them in your name, which you have given me. I have guarded them, and not one of them has been lost except the son of destruction, that the Scripture might be fulfilled. But now I am coming to you, and these things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy fulfilled in themselves.  I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.  I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth.

“I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word (OL's Note: That's everyone on this board!), that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.  Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.  O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me.  I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”

Post Edited (One Love) : 5/28/2010 1:49:53 PM (GMT-5)

Logos-Vision repost...

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thought:

As I think about it, perhaps that's why loving theocentricity is the only real human perspective to have. Creation testifies to God by its very nature...and to separate Creation from God in the mind just leads to EGO-centricity and life in negation (suffering, loneliness, hopelessness, hatred, etc).

That's why we are so crazy.

Saying we are sinners is just saying that we are neurotically addicted to sensory things and self-referential "world-composition" that we can't perceive reality AS IT IS in God...even though we have the natural equipment to do so go God himself.  We are so busy thinking about who we THINK we are...that we don't spend enough energy perceiving God, who will REVEAL who we are.  So we live in darkness and ignorance, doing obviously egocentric, self-destructive behavior that is totally out of sorts with Truth.   

"Father, forgive them...because they do not know what they are doing." --Incarnate God on the Cross.

Yeah...

To the extent that we 1) separate ourselves from Creation in our own minds and 2) separate God from Creation in our own minds [particularity in our self-referential activity, which GROUNDS identity formation], we will begin to misapprehend reality and go crazy, being sinners.

Post Edited (One Love) : 5/28/2010 1:59:53 PM (GMT-5)

"Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection! Over such the second death has no power..."

Do people who humble themselves lovingly before God NOW have to fear the "second death"? Hint...

Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God.  So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world.  There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.

And please note...that goes for UNIVERSALISTS TOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Post Edited (One Love) : 5/28/2010 2:06:17 PM (GMT-5)

Love never fails.

Watch.

Post Edited (One Love) : 5/28/2010 2:45:34 PM (GMT-5)

Fighting gangs with 'boundless compassion'

As a Jesuit priest in a gang-ridden neighborhood in Los Angeles, Father Gregory Boyle has seen his share of violence and unnecessary death. The jobs and education program he created offers youth a different path from gang life.

Guests

Resources

• Homeboy Industries

Listening music...

Post Edited (One Love) : 5/28/2010 3:01:34 PM (GMT-5)

Get realer than that.

-----------------------------------------

Release from the cave
Socrates next introduces something new to this scenario. Suppose that a prisoner is freed and permitted to stand up. If someone were to show him the things that had cast the shadows, he would not recognize them for what they were and could not name them; he would believe the shadows on the wall to be more real than what he sees.

"Suppose further," Socrates says, "that the man was compelled to look at the fire: wouldn't he be struck blind and try to turn his gaze back toward the shadows, as toward what he can see clearly and hold to be real? What if someone forcibly dragged such a man upward, out of the cave: wouldn't the man be angry at the one doing this to him? And if dragged all the way out into the sunlight, wouldn't he be distressed and unable to see "even one of the things now said to be true," viz. the shadows on the wall (516a)?

After some time on the surface, however, Socrates suggests that the freed prisoner would acclimate. He would see more and more things around him, until he could look upon the Sun. He would understand that the Sun is the "source of the seasons and the years, and is the steward of all things in the visible place, and is in a certain way the cause of all those things he and his companions had been seeing" (516b–c). (See also Plato's metaphor of the Sun, which occurs near the end of The Republic, Book VI)[3]

[edit] Return to the cave
Socrates next asks Glaucon to consider the condition of this man. "Wouldn't he remember his first home, what passed for wisdom there, and his fellow prisoners, and consider himself happy and them pitiable? And wouldn't he disdain whatever honors, praises, and prizes were awarded there to the ones who guessed best which shadows followed which?

Post Edited (One Love) : 5/28/2010 8:27:41 PM (GMT-5)

Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away.  But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.  None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.  But, as it is written,

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the heart of man imagined,
what God has prepared for those who love him”—

these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.  For who knows a person's thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.  Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God.  And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.

The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.  The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one.  “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.

Post Edited (One Love) : 5/28/2010 8:34:29 PM (GMT-5)

Basically, biblically speaking, Satan has IRREVOCABLE "FREEDOM" to "percieve and enjoy God" because of the irrevocable presence of the Lord via the Holy Spirit within him, as a creaturely "spirit" being.  One has to demonstrate how Satan can irrevocably destroy his ability to "perceive and enjoy God" by sinful self-determination/misuse of his libertarian freedom such that there is no further possibility at all for a future loving relationship to God and himself.

Where the Spirit of the Lord is...potential for eleutheros exists.

Speaking from Walls standpoint, it has to be said that creaturely "spirit" beings can so self-deceive themselves about themselves and God that it is literally impossible for the Holy Spirit to bring any further Truth to the being unto saving effect...such that there is no further possibility at all for the misrelating creaturely beings to have a future loving relationship with God and themselves  Then there is ECT or annihilationism.  Endless suffering or eternal destruction via some form of "terminal self-deceit."

We will argue the "terminal self-deceit" (concerning God being their own highest good) is impossible if it is in fact the case that the Uncreated Spirit of Truth is the necessary ground and highest good of all created "selves" such that genuine self-referential activity HAS to take Divine Presence into account. 

---------------------

In Greek Patristic literature, it was a prevailing view that the state of human being as it exists in the natural environment includes the body, soul (including the dianoia as an analytical part of the soul), and spirit, which had never been dissociated from the Holy Spirit. Human spirit stands here for the nous (spiritual intellect, the organ of faith), linking the human person to its dynamic relationship to God and to the world. It is natural congeniality with God, which is articulated by the presence of the Holy Spirit in human being. But the Holy Spirit is the creator of both body and soul, whose unity forms a particular human person. The presence of the Holy Spirit in human constitution thus makes the human person open upward through it's calling to the Divine as its destiny. Without the Spirit, the Greek Fathers assert, the human being is incomplete and imprisoned through the conditions of the created nature. V. Lossky reaffirms this point by saying that "the distinction between person and nature reproduces in humanity the order of divine life, expressed by the dogma of the Trinity."
 
Alexei Nesteruk, Light from the East, page 266, note 33.

Post Edited (One Love) : 5/28/2010 9:17:01 PM (GMT-5)