The first 200 years of the Church, was very Jewish. Believers were devout Jews who remained in their Judaic Faith, but believed and accepted Rabbi Yeshua HaMashiach as the promised Messiah. They were zealous for The Torah, as Yeshua was, and taught them to be. He full-filled all The Torah and he came to full-fill it. "If you love me, keep my commandments." You wont be able to keep all of them. You will fall, but the point is out of your faith you will naturally want to do so. Faith first, then works. Not works first, then faith. You can never make it on your own, or on your own works.
As a believer, a long time Christian (I fell away classic Prodigal Son, guilt, and then came back, repented, asked forgiveness, and now once again forgiven), learned of Messianic Judaism, asked myself the question "Do I have Jewish ancestry?" Got my DNA tested this past summer, learned yep I have about 5% or more Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. Not a total surprise. My mother's mother looked Jewish but never talked about it.
I've now been attending a Messianic Judaic Synagogue. I'm learning leaps and bounds beyond what I ever knew and learned in traditional Christendom. Nothing like going to the chosen people and learning the deep mysteries of G-d. They have been carrying the water for G-d for thousands of years.
Messianic Judaism is for all believers, in Yeshua HaMashiach, no matter if you're a Jew or Gentile. All you need to have is a desire to go. We all are one in Yeshua. We all have a Jewish heart when you come to believe in Yeshua. I feel like I'm home. If you want to know what the first century Church was like, it was Synagogue, but they came to know the real Messiah, they found the last piece of the puzzle, and worshiped G-d the father Hashem Adonai Elohim, and his son Yeshua HaMashaich, in the spirit of G-d The Ruach HaKodesh. 3 in 1. The Lord is One.
They all know better'n you mate - every last person in this thread, probably yourself included.
Ha-ha. Perfect.
This is a great example of the problems that one gets into when one only relies upon logic, concepts, or even reason. At some point, they break or cannot go further.
DMT makes a reasonable criticism which must, perforce, end up including himself and his declarations. To wit, we come to the position that he, too, must believe that he knows better. It makes his own statement (reasonable statement that it is) questionable.
It would seem that there must be positions that cannot be reached or achieved through mental-rational means.
The arguing can be just a device to get some idea of what the other person is thinking or feeling.
Largo is contrary and no surprise if he is or was a follower of the Rinzai school of hard knocks. His own viewpoint is hardly set in concrete, though.
from his recent posts:
"If you actually read my earlier post, I did say you can freeze frame the flow or qualia"
"Actually Ed, I totally believe that science can explain how the machine can process information."
Now, the brain is not like any machine we have built, but if you substitute brain for machine in the above sentence, then these quotes are bold predictions for progress in neuroscience. If we do ever truly understand how the brain processes information and we don't find any self-awareness or consciousness, it would be rather like finding that the matter and energy physics has understood make up only a minor part of the universe.
edit:
MikeL,
What are mental-rational means? Logic? What about intuitive leaps? We all make those.
Also an interesting use of the word "actually" in those quotes, given the overall context. One simple word that automatically confers an unassailable high ground.
Largo is contrary and no surprise if he is or was a follower of the Rinzai school of hard knocks. His own viewpoint is hardly set in concrete, though.
Good catch. I grew up at the Baldy Center. Renzai all the way. Unfortunately, a lot of alchoholism as well.
from his recent posts:
"If you actually read my earlier post, I did say you can freeze frame the flow or qualia"
"Actually Ed, I totally believe that science can explain how the machine can process information."
Now, the brain is not like any machine we have built, but if you substitute brain for machine in the above sentence, then these quotes are bold predictions for progress in neuroscience. If we do ever truly understand how the brain processes information and we don't find any self-awareness or consciousness, it would be rather like finding that the matter and energy physics has understood make up only a minor part of the universe.
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I have said all along that the measurable aspects of reality do not tell the entire story. Likewise, our rational thinking only constitutes a portion of our mental prowess and powers.
Ed uses the word "intuition" to denote anything other than logical, discursive, inductive thinking, but this is mistaken IME. The mind can know things in much more profound ways through immediate insight, which is not a kind of guess or hunch or whimsy. Unfortunately it takes enormous discipline to keep your discursive grinding mind still enough to where these insights can arise. They also tend not to be about the things of the world, but the context in which things appear and operate, and so they don't have the inductive chain of reasoning attached.
You might not find out that gravity is not a thing but an inherent quality in the world through this kind of non-thinking, but you might understand what your mind is and how it works. In all bottom-up thinking you reach a great divide which people believe with all their hearts is spanable via new data. I have said repeatedly that anyone believing this should talk to me about some real estate I have on Mars. I'll let it go - cheap.
cintune - Midvale School for the Gifted
Oct 11, 2012 - 07:08am PT
Also an interesting use of the word "actually" in those quotes, given the overall context. One simple word that automatically confers an unassailable high ground.
The strange and unconscious thing about this stab is that I have all along said that there are certain aspects of reality that are totally ungraspable and not quantifable - namely, I am freely admitting that we and our systems have limitations. Scientism says, no. No real thing is without aspects and we can measure these and understand "everything." And what's more, this is the only real and true "knowing."
I get attacked for mentioning this, accused of setting this up like a straw dog for the sheer pleasure of tearing it down. But who else out there has said there is any phenomenon in reality that we cannot measure, and if so, what is it?
So it would seem that my "high ground" was not earned from admitting our limitations, rather that I would impune that measuring itself is limited. This is not a popular notion - we can easily see why. People have their entire world view built on the impunity and primacy of measuring and induction. The idea that there are aspects of reality closed to this approach is a non-starter, and while I am the one accused of not budging in two years, note how many materialists have made any serious efforts to probe the subjective frontiers by any other methods but - induction. It's not that other insights are closed to people, but rather, they are convinced that there is only one valid technique, and that alone leads to the solid truth. We can see the unwillingness to take another route, or the claim by some that that have done so and came back empty handed.
It takes massive effort to see things differently, and we are all prone to simply do what we have done all along.
the induction is that the increase of scientific understanding decreases the need to seek an explanation in God/gods... they become irrelevant in the limit that we understand everything...
Huh?
I suppose that what I was getting at was precisely (or imprecisely)how the process of induction would look like in producing the general conclusion that God does not exist.
The increase in scientific understanding is quite outside of the answer I was looking for.
Although I am in general agreement with the provisional irrelevance of God in the explanation of why and how water boils, or neutrinos behave the way they do.
Science reasons from particulars to general conclusions, in most cases.
That God does not play a role in the outcome of an experiment, or of many experiments is where your rubber hits the road, if I may be so bold.
This outcome -of God representing 0 as a factor in scientific discovery- can only have 2 possibilities :
1) God does not exist
2) The current state of detection is too primitive to reveal God in these experiments or observations.
I was originally interested in why you personally have chosen number 1.
huh?
the more we know, the less we need to appeal to God/gods for explanation. The "induction" is that we don't need God/gods at all.
on intuition, I have it, I use it, I don't understand it, sometimes its good, sometimes its bad... why does Largo like to put words "in my mouth"? He does it all the time... I suspect because if I'm not being too stereotyped he has to amp it up, so he makes up things which he presumes I believe.
I liked his scientism list, but I don't see myself in that list.
First off, science likes to appeal to what is real. It is a reason why we quantify things, so we can test them... make a prediction, then test it... read your horoscope today? it makes a prediction for your day/week/month/year... how good is that prediction?
We can argue over that, a simple test was done in some class where the instructor asked everyone to take a "horoscope" prediction depending on their sign contained in the envelopes at the front of the class... the students opened them, read them and were asked if they thought it described them... a large number raised their hands, then the professor had the students pass the horoscope to their neighbors, of course they were all the same...
obviously language is a relatively imprecise way to predict anything... words have a way of being interpreted by one reader perhaps differently from the next, etc... further, the process of arriving at a lot of words might not be rigorous, either... take my story above, some of you will believe it, some not, but I'm not even sure if it's correct, though I remember having read it somewhere.
The rigor of the argument is also somewhat difficult to establish, history has a lot of challenges in this way...
We do something entirely simplifying by resorting to mathematical logic, physical logic, and the quantification of the things we're puzzling through. I can't prove that this works, it does work amazingly well, we've learned an incredible amount since science became a discipline, modern science isn't much more than 500 years old.
Certainly it is an approach to understanding, and we know it is a powerful approach.
I can totally see why Largo might balk at the scientific approach to understanding mind, consciousness, experience and all that. But I also think he has a rather simplistic view of science and scientific understanding. Science provides additional information that can be valuable in making decisions, creating policy, looking into the future, and even understanding human behavior.
Why this could be objectionable is beyond me... and fortunately the science will go on even if there is no established philosophical agreement that science "works" or that the goal is achievable.
The Turing Test... Largo's still out cogitating on this, he knows its bunk, but he doesn't know why...
actually, we are all involved in a large game similar to the Turing Test right here on SuperTopoForum... all we know about each other, for the most part, is what we read here... and we make many conclusions regarding each other by what is typed into the threads.
Vegasclimber was surprised to find that I'm actually a quiet person... we met at the Facelift in Yellow Pines, I'm sure he had a different view of me from these posts...
While Largo and I grew up within 5 miles of each other, we don't know if we ever met, but our mutual recollections (which we've subjected you others to from time to time) establish that we probably are from the San Gabriel Valley circa 1960's... just from communicating.
And while Largo will resist, I'd say he depends a lot more on verbal communication and response in his assessment of what is conscious and what is not... I would bet he believes there is no way he could be "fooled" by a machine in the Turing Test...
...now, from our point of view if we were to be fooled then we might believe that the machine is "human" in some manner. Believing that to be impossible, we'd say that there is something more that is going on. To not believe that is to deny that we are anything but an elaborate biochemiphysical machine...
...somehow we "know" we are not just that... don't we?
it is true that our measurements are imprecise and inaccurate at some level. However, they become more precise and more accurate with time... at some point the "theory" of God/gods must contend with the fact that the domain in which they become important to explaining our measurements becomes smaller and smaller.
Of course, you can counter and say that we didn't know about Dark Matter or Dark Energy precisely because they were very small effects happening just outside of our ability to detect them for a long time... and you would be right, together they form 97% of the stuff the universe is made out of, and we don't know what they are yet...
...on the other hand, they are describable in a scientific manner, and I have no doubt that eventually we'll figure it out.
As for God/gods, I suspect that they will never be needed.
We then are confronted with a choice, to believe or disbelieve, it's our choice, and we can construct a God/gods with attributes to satisfy all the many constraints on that construction to make it consistent with the body of observations and measurements. That is an involved task which, in the end, becomes unnecessary if one choses "disbelieve."
That choice has little need for complicated justifications as everything works out fine without the need to resort to a God/gods construction.
Okay . Thanks for answering.
I've gotta go now but will address some of your points later.
What do we miss in our disbelief?
Perhaps you should free yourself of the baggage associated with this subject. When you seriously consider the possibility of an intelligent origin of the universe act as if you were the first person to ever think in this way.
Your first response might be "and what is there to think about ?"
If you exercise intuition and imagination there may be plenty.
Then how come only people who are believers see any of it?
The argument is repeated so much that it sucks to say it again but if I tell you that I see unicorns behind every tree because I believe it and that you don't see them because you don't believe it, you would call me crazy. Why? Maybe you need to seek out and believe and then they will be revealed to you. What gives your argument more weight than mine?
Really, the followers, not even believers in my mind any more, seem to repeat the same argument over and over that I cannot see God because I do not believe in God and that God is real just because God is real.
There won't be proof so no true scientists will believe it but at least the scientist is open to accepting any proof that did show up. The scientists does not say that there is or is not a God because their mom or priest or cult leader told them so.
Then how come only people who are believers see any of it?
You see it, too, Dave. You may interpret it otherwise and feel differently about it, though. For me, it's mostly curiosity about why what I experience carries such significance. God is a convenient shorthand for that. No one knows for sure.
Let us know!