nikki630 said:
Paranormal Packrat said:
Not even Christians can agree.
Keeping in mind that some Christians don't consider all those other denominations REAL Christians
Religious arguments are so much fun to watch. You are doing a great job holding your own, Nikki. Keep it up. ;-)
As for the idea of spirit, Spirit, and the definition of God:
The idea of God (or gods) is the basic concept of Creation. The development of the monotheistic God is one where someone did some thinking and thought: "Well, if the various gods created various things, then what created the gods themselves?" The answer they came up with was the One True God that is omnipotent. Much like a Star Trek script, where bad paradoxes can be 'repaired' by writing in a time-travel episode, humanity created the self-creating God to explain this question. If you WANT to believe in the self-creating universe and excuse the disagreement with the law of cause and effect, then you are pretty much bound to either God or Time Travel.
Scientifically, however, if you truly use objective means to evaluate paranormal occurances, then you simply investigate with the tools available, and the data that doesn't fit your tools is left until you have better tools. Just because 'spirit' cannot be explained by current science doesn't mean it is supernatural. I submit that there is nothing that can be 'super' natural because Nature includes everything in the universe. Even the vaguely useful hypothesis of other universes and dimensions is still part of one universe, and saying something is 'outside' our universe is simply a way of putting a box around what we WANT to be our universe and saying anything outside that box is 'extra'-ordinary.
Maybe there
are energy beings in multiple dimensions, but that doesn't make them omnipotent. It only makes them appear that way in our box.
Just as any true environmentalist would commit suicide, so should any true believer in the Afterlife. The fact of the matter is, however, that you AREN'T so sure as you pretend to be, and you wonder, somewhere in your mind, whether the rules that govern getting into 'heaven' aren't just made up to control people and keep them producing for the benefit of the controllers.
All life has one motive force and right: the impetus to Try to live. It is the basic energy that drives every living thing to 'more': more grass on the other side of the fence, more life after today, more Life after this one. Of the choices humans make, 90% are not consciously done, but driven by emotional inputs and then rationalized later to explain them. We are at the mercy of our connections to the environment, whether we acknowledge this or not. Religion is just one more way we try to separate humans from nature so that we can justify the havoc we spread as we entrench ourselves in our protected little comfort zone of 'modern life' and 'normalcy'.
We should never have stopped eating the missionaries or the salesmen that followed them.
