The people behind a great post...

Let me see if i understand this, please set me straight if i misunderstand so if the fundi believes in a worldwide flood, or cpt thier view might be perfectly valid, even though the belief bares no basis on reality? but its still valid? so you are making the claim that they don't have to change thier belief based on that fact that it defies reality?

Okay. First up I didn't use the term 'believe/belief' which you use throughout your response. In my post I used the term know. Quite a different thing. I know God exists but I believe (or if your prefer: have faith) that the flood happened.I believe the flood happened because know the Bible is Gods word and my (limited) knowledge of him and what he says leads me to believe that the flood happened. My belief might change but it would not be because of any scientific evidence presented - it would be because he led me to a belief otherwise.Knowing God exists has precisely the same quality as knowing I exist (which I think I've mentioned to you before). Such knowing stands above and completely out of reach of science or any other external-to-self way of coming to conclusions.I know also that salvation is by faith alone (what that is would require some expansion and although much is explainable, certain aspects are mystery). I know this not by any interpretation of the bible but simply because I went through it. That knowing too has the same quality as knowing I exist. Thats how I know I know - even if I'm not sure how he did it.Granted I maybe wrong. I may not exist at all, in which case neither might he.Edited to change believe the bible is Gods word to know it is Gods word. Slip caused by mucho interchanging of the similar but not same world "belief" and "know"This message has been edited by iano, 21-Apr-2006 01:26 PM

I agree that the sense "I Am" is the foundation. The question is to what it refers, what or who is this "I" that exists? What is existence? Or what is it that exists and how?My view is that the ego is a complex process of identifications and has only apparent existence. Who you think you are is not any more who you are than is an actor playing Hamlet a prince of Denmark.God is an object that you relate yourself to as another object. Who is the subject that is aware of this? That knows this? What can this subject know of itself?lfen

then i guess i contend that you can't know god, your bible says you can't know god - thus it is belief which is what it is so i guess the world and our understanding of it is meaningless to you then, even though god created it,so gods creation can't be taken as evidence then? if gods creation denies a world wide flood you would chose willful ignorance over the truth of gods creation? thats fine i'm not saying you can't believe in god, i never said that your experance maybe true for you , but what if someone elses was by a different way? the only way i see you defining it as only through faith is by learning it and believing it as dogma - in this case a lutheran interpretation that doesn't seem to fit what jesus said, or paul

That's impossible. You have to exist.

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"The whole of life goes like this. We seek repose by battling against difficulties, and once they are overcome, repose becomes unbearable because of the boredom it engenders."--Pascal

Oh what a morning! Summers well on the way. This motorcyclists winter is over. Warmth and sticky black tarmac lay ahead. Natures annual reminder of new birth following death is patent for all who would notice. And all to soon again the reminder that this life inevitably leads to death."As many as received him he gave them the right to become children of God". Whilst one can assemble a number of examples where a child doesn't know their parent it would seem curlish to do so. The picture is a simple and plain as can be. The relationship is to be very closest imaginable by an human. And it starts the day you become one. Eventually, the relationship will become even close - but He had no human analogy to give us which could evoke that in us. All that can be said is "No eye has seen no mind has concieved the wonderful things that God has prepared for those who love him""Behold I stand at the door and knock, whoever hears my voice and opens the door I will come in and dine with him and he with me" Whilst often used by way of evangelising the lost (for it does capture well Christs way of reaching the lost) this verse is acutally addressed at believers. Again the picture is one of close intimacy. Eating together was of far more intimate significance then than it is now.And it has always been like this between God and sinless man. Adam spiritually alive and receptive to God. God "walked" with him in the cool of the garden. And he talked to him too. Personal relationship was always the goal. The saddest thing is that people are so focussed on finding ways to deny that that they fail to stop and consider the very enormity of what that would be like. Knowing God personally. The engineer in me cannot wait to fully meet the engineer in him. Oh the fun we will have! Oh what a morning... There are many areas when my evaluation of the world around me hascome into conflict with what I understand of the bible. My general way of dealing with that is to seek to understand more fully what God might have meant. This has at times resulted in me seeing more clearly what he meant and seeing that there is no (or less) conflict than I originally imagined. Other times I come to see that he says what I thought he said and that it is my thinking which is skewed. My thinking changes to come into alignment with him.No sex before marriage would have been one example. "Ludicrous!" I thought in my early Christian days. "That was written for then. This is now. Obviously God doesn't want me sleeping around. But if I have a steady girlfriend then that would be okay" Now my thinking is aligned with his and I fully agree with no sex before marriage. I have come to understand the wisdom inherent in his way vs. my way. My trust grows in him as a result and I have all the more reason (though I frequently rebel) to trust him on other issuesThat is the way I approach it. To be honest the flood issue is not of all that much interest to me in my living in the world I don't worry to much about it. But if I did I would, like I say, turn to have him reconile it for me, not science. He might use the science as a tool to do so. But it would still have to be him instigating my interest and moving me down a path away from the belief I have attached myself to and towards the true belief he wants me to have. Suffice to say, what I know of him and his ways after 5 years of knowing him indicate to me that I am closer to truth in believing the flood than I am in believing man's efforts Again you lapse into applying a word to what I say that I don't use. I don't believe God exists. I know it. You would I hope accept that if God exists that it is possible for him to let a person know something that is 100% true. That they cannot prove what he has let them know to another doesn't in any way change the truth of it. He has said in his word and shown me in many ways that everyone is born under the sway and dominion of Satan. That they are blinded and in their blindness follow false Gods (his very first universal commandment to us as something not to do btw). He says the evil one is capable of deceit beyond our powers to discern it and to be capable of great signs and wonders. If someone else has some other experience that conflicts with what he says and what I now know then I have a fairly good idea from whence it came. This is not to say that everything I think or believe is true. There will be many gaps, incomplete knowledge and sheer error in my viewpoint. I am a sinner afterall and Satan lobs grenades over the wall which I catch and have explode in my face. But I am over the wall. He can never have me back however - for all his efforts.I know what I know. I cannot be wrong. Unless of course the Bible is actually the work of Satan and the experiences I find corroborated all over the Bible are placed thair by SatanOr some alien kid has been given the gift of a very elaborate Playstation II game.

Exist okay. But perhaps in a manner like I pointed out above in the last sentence to RdG. It is only those kinds of existance which hold out the potential for my Lord and God not to exist

You are one of the few who seem to agree with me. Whenever I bring it up there appears to occur some kind of quantum flutter in folk and before you know it they are off and away pulling all kinds of uncalibtrated-against-anything-objective scientific evidences out of their quantum hats. A question, for want of objective moorings, which seems to me to suffer from the same problems as I pointed out exist above. I gave a similar possibility when I posed we could be some alien brats very intricate Playstation game. I'm not sure that I see it as God the object and me the object. That implies a separation between us as one would find between a cup and a saucer no matter how closely they were together. This is not to say that I see it as a God is everything and everything is God gig. More like a child in a womb is an object but yet is connected to and totally dependent upon another object, its mother, for existance. The relationship is intimate in that dependancy sense (whether believer or no)I'm not sure what you mean by "who is the subject". Maybe you could clarify this a bit. Need for there to be one for instance. I've lost the point of what your trying to get at here.

Notationally, that is to say grammatically the subject is the "I" of "I am". The question "who" is asking who is aware of X. X being any element of awareness, or ideas, emotions, etc.An immediate example could be I say "I am". Who is it that is aware of this statement? Or more complexly I think about my self, my self image, or idea of who I am. That is a content. Who is aware of the content. Is it the content itself? The processes that we assign to our organism, our self, or others, the universe, perhaps to God. Who is aware of all that content?In the western philosophical tradition this is phenomenology.In the eastern tradition Buddha might be the earlist attribution of this method of inquiry into the very fundamental experience of being.That is we have models, ideological constructs of the world. These tell us about, or tell us what we think about. The phenomenological is asking what we experience, what our experience is, and looking this way can lead to the question "Who is the experiencer", "what is the experiencer". To put it into words is neccesarily to talk about it using ideological contructs, models. But the question itself is to point to our non verbal sense of being. It leads beyond language and models back to the present moment and what really is the core of who is conscious in this moment. (aside: and is there any other moment?)lfen

Sometimes, iano, you are rather incoherent. What is "it" in the above statement?This message has been edited by robinrohan, 04-21-2006 11:31 AM

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"A man with a good car doesn't have to be justified"---Flannery O'Connnor

I think the "it" refers to what Iano has called an alien brat playing with a playstation.This example is a parody of my postition though I didn't get the impression that Iano was offering it in that way.The analogy I would use is of a dream. Let's say a dream in which you are somewhat different that you are in waking let's say much older. And there are events in this dream perhaps there is an incredible attraction going on with a woman who has elven characteristics and there is also some drama, say people trapped in a burning car. And then you wake up.In the dream you felt you were. There was the sense of "I am". On waking you have the same feeling of "I am" only you are different. But who was the lady you were attracted to? Who were the people dying in the burning car? Who was the old old man you dreamed you were? And where are they now? Where were they? Should you go back and rescuse the people trapped in the car?The fundamental consistent element of the dreaming and waking experience is the sense of being, the sense of I am. That is what is irreducible. But any given form of that "Isness" is not fundamental. The forms change. There is being, but no beings. That is being is not bound by forms, or content. The notion of "things" is a pragmatic mode of interacting with processes. Things don't exist in and of themselves. We determine if our experience of cherrying is a budding, a blooming, a cherry, a seedling, an on and on.lfen

Only sometimes?I haven't thought through whether one must necessarily exist. I suppose I see problems with that one of which is how an 'it' decides whether 'it' exists or not and coming to that conclusion by 'it'self. The problem might be apparent in that last sentence. 'Its' are assumed before they have been verified to exist.The only way to verify ones existance I think, is to do so internally. For oneself. But this is circular reasoning. "I think therefore I am" is a case in point - the 'it' wondering whether 'it' exists defines the terms under which 'it' decides that 'it' does in fact exist. Self-verification: if only my tax-man would let me.Any attempt at relying on something external to verify 'its' existance suffers from the problem of the external it verifying its own existance first - so as to be in a position to commentMy underlying point with the Alien Kid? I know God exists. How do I know that. Well I know that I exist. How to I know that? Well I have decided that my knowing I exist is sufficient for me to know I exist. Circular? Of course it is. But that is the way I chose and no one is in a position to comment for or against my decision. Unless of course they (the external its) can verify their own existance without similar circular reasoning or arrival in the alternative: a dead-ended mystery.Not only do I know that I and God exist. I also know that the world around me is what we tend to describe as an 'objective reality'. But I may be wrong about any or all of this. I could be as real as the virtual character in a Playstation game. Which is a quite different kind of existance than the one I am applying to myself{AbE} where is the bible in all this? Well having come to the conclusion that God exists I find that his characteristics and the experience I have of him dealing with me - very profound and strange ones I had not yet even heard of in my baby-step Christianity - are described in this book with such detail sheer spot on-edness that my legs crumple on me and I fall on my knees. Only he or someone who knew of his similar dealing with them would be able to write this. It turns out that they both did it together.Curiously, about 10 years before becoming a Christian and without me knowing it was him doing it, God took me on a what can be best pictured as a train ride. I flashed along looking out the window and all there was to see was a white picket fence. All the same - mile after mile. My life to that date.Then totally unexpectedly the train flashed by a gap in the picket fence and before I could even begin to think about looking at what was beyond it, the white fence was back - as was my life.Although I didn't get a glimpse of what lay beyond, I did get a strong impression. An overwhelming, incredibly dense and and unimaginably soul-satisfying sense of Love.The train roared past the fence the day I turned to him for good. The desination its headed to. Eternal presence with that love."For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord."And so am I Paul, so am I.Good weekend EvC-ersThis message has been edited by iano, 21-Apr-2006 07:13 PM

Oh yeah...by the way. Any view on the OP data Lfen?

I don't think it's circular. How could you not exist if you're sitting there wondering if you exist or not? Of Course you exist. That is, your thinker does. Nothing else about you, such as your body, need exist. And I don't see how God jumps into the picture at all.

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"A man with a good car doesn't have to be justified"---Flannery O'Connnor

If you exist then the question of your existance won't result in a question mark. For that is the dead end mystery I talked of earlierYour thinker is sufficient to go on. How do you know/decide that it exists?PS: edited last message to youL8r