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One Love
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Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 7/15/2011 10:28 AM (GMT -6) |   | Tom:
T: What do you think about the resurrection and glorification of the body? What do you think about John's vision of a fully redeemed and differentiated material creation? It is pure gnosticism to view salvation as escaping embodiment because materiality is adverse to our truest purpose.
What IS the body, Tom? What is it made of? Is it made up of matter which is, as Nesteruk says, "condescensations" of the Logos? The idea is not to get away from materiality. The idea is to see material for what it truly is. When we talk it terms of the uncreated light, ALL reality is ultimately of the same reality in different configurations and patterns: God Himself working on our behalf in the midst of our own no-thingness.
We "escape" materiality in order to SPIRITUALIZE the material.
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Tom:
But then one subjectivity isn't defined entirely as pure and undifferentiated awareness, is it? If you have to walk down the street, cook rice, flush the toilet, etc., you have to perceive these things. You don't live in the world apart from making the conceptual distinctions necessary to getting on in the world. So whatever inner stillness one achieves, it doesn't amount to an escaping of material distinctions.
Ok. Maybe this is the best way I can describe this. Let's say that you have Neo's "Matrix-vision", ok? Now, you can see distinctions in the configuration/patterns of Matrix code. Distinctions between solids, gases, liquids. At the same time, it would ALL be of the same Matrix code in the "void". God Himself working on our behalf ala the Logos/logoi IS the "Matrix code" of Creation.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 7/15/2011 10:35:21 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 7/16/2011 4:20 PM (GMT -6) | | Tom:
Exactly. I needed to hear you say that. ;o)
Ha! 
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Tom:
the point is there doesn't seem to be anything in Vedic schools of thought that corresponds to Christianity's insistence upon the full contingency of creation and God's freedom from it.
Actually, there is, I think. The idea of lila says that creation was an act of creative freedom or "play", not any necessary movement or emergence of the divine.
Brahman is full of all perfections. And to say that Brahman has some purpose in creating the world will mean that it wants to attain through the process of creation something which it has not. And that is impossible. Hence, there can be no purpose of Brahman in creating the world. The world is a mere spontaneous creation of Brahman. It is a Lila, or sport, of Brahman. It is created out of Bliss, by Bliss and for Bliss. Lila indicates a spontaneous sportive activity of Brahman as distinguished from a self-conscious volitional effort. The concept of Lila signifies freedom as distinguished from necessity.
—Ram Shanker Misra
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
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| Posted 7/16/2011 4:24 PM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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Tom
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 7/16/2011 4:28 PM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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One Love
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Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 7/16/2011 4:31 PM (GMT -6) | | Was reading this on pandeism...and I think this states Advaita Hinduism VERY well...
To the Hindu, for example, God didn't create the universe, but God became the universe. Then he forgot that he became the universe. Why would God do this? Basically, for entertainment. You create a universe, and that in itself is very exciting. But then what? Should you sit back and watch this universe of yours having all the fun? No, you should have all the fun yourself. To accomplish this, God transformed into the whole universe. God is the Universe, and everything in it. But the universe doesn't know that because that would ruin the suspense. The universe is God's great drama, and God is the stage, the actors, and the audience all at once. The title of this epic drama is "The Great Unknown Outcome". Throw in potent elements like passion, love, hate, good, evil, free will; and who knows what will happen? No one knows, and that is what keeps the universe interesting. But everyone will have a good time. And there is never really any danger, because everyone is really God, and God is really just playing around.
That really IS it...in a nutshell.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 7/16/2011 4:42 PM (GMT -6) | | | Now, something funny. I WOULD agree with the idea that God (in his energies, Grace) is "the universe and everything in it." God doesn't "become" the universe...more than God personally communicates actuality to the universe from within it. I do believe the universe is "God's great drama" where at the end God is shown and believed to be "all in all." With this realization, a normal view of the universe is impossible.
One can imagine that when human beings reintegrate their personhood in God, so that their hypostatic constitution will no longer resemble the divisions in creation, human apprehension will change fundamentally. The vision of the universe, it's articulation in space and in time, will cease to function at all, resembling more and more the hypostatic "apprehension" of the universe by the Logos himself, for whom the whole universe in its spatial and temporal span exists as an instant of truth, as the "eighth" boundless day, the aeon with no duration.
Alexei Nesteruk
Light from the East
Page 248
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 7/16/2011 4:45:59 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 7/16/2011 4:58 PM (GMT -6) | | Tom:
Although we have good reason to believe it's true, I don't think we can comprehend the creation of the universe as the effect of an act of will, an effect which results in concrete realities which can be perceived as non-God realities when all the truth about them be known.
Dude, I really think we can now. We have categories. REALLY. Just think of Creation as a big "waking lucid dream-thought" of God the Son. And think of the context of this dream-thought was like unto a Matrix-like situation where the "Matrix code" making up everything that existed was God the Son (as Logos) acting immanently in that dream-thought.
You can't imagine that? Really?
Somehow it makes total sense to me. 
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 7/16/2011 5:01:35 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 7/17/2011 9:19 AM (GMT -6) | | I would have to say that I agree with a lot of what Harris says, actually. I mean, sure, we do have a transcendent agency of choice that USES the brain. But still the condition and conditioning of the brain used is a legitimate consideration in so-called moral behavior and that can't be ignored. He's right. For example...looking at this...what if it came out that Levi Aron DID kill the little boy...but also had multiple mental health issues as well as neurological issues? Would that be factored in to mitigate his responsibility for his deeds? Of course. Harris is suggesting that this kind of understanding must be taken more globally. Or just look at ourselves. If any of us here no this board were to have a bad accident, sustain brain injury, and end up becoming an amnesiatic atheist or indescribably immortal, there's not much that much our self-transcendent agency could do about that at all. And surely God would understand that...right?
If anything, it demands more compassion and willingness to understand and forgive in our systems of justice.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 7/17/2011 9:24:19 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Similitude
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Total Posts : 4968
| Posted 7/17/2011 9:51 AM (GMT -6) | | Where little is given, little is required. And this includes properly functioning brains--granted. But Harris can't even get to the concept of "properly-functioning." Harris is saying nothing is given. But then, does he say nothing is required? In one sense, he does. But he still agrees with the deprivation of liberty and property for SOME people. And yet he has no non-relativistic normative criteria to render government deprivation of life and liberty KNOWINGLY worse than any other deprivations by humans. And a person who sanctions such deprivations arbitrarily (i.e., groundlessly) is not discernably different, morally, than what society will call those who commit "theft" or "voluntary homicide."
Sam's approach to depriving others of liberty and property is UTTERLY arbitrary and a-rational. He thinks it's not. But it is. Indeed, since, per his epistemology, nothing is divinely given, it is not possible to even non-arbitrarily distinguish between illusion and non-illusion or true and false memories or 3-dimensional entities and non-3-D entities.
ALL rationality requires that something that is intuitive to us is both true and useable for competent discursive inferring. The atheists explicitly deny that this can be known, intuitively or otherwise. But then they turn right around and start talking as dogmatically as the Pope. They're ARBITRARY. And this is what I mean when I say we're all theists in that sense. Because if they actually know without having anything "given" to them, then they have what the rest of us call "divine" knowledge--it is utterly inexplicable and unanalyzable. And therefore, it can not be argued with.
Atheists are essentially claiming to BE divine--at least intellectually.
Post Edited (Similitude) : 7/17/2011 11:12:19 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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