🚀 go-pugleaf

Steve O wrote:
> 
> 
> "BuddyThunder" <nospam@paradise.net.nz> wrote in message 
> news:486c4bcc$1@clear.net.nz...
>> rbwinn wrote:
> 
>>>
>>> God has eternal life, something atheists do not believe in and do not
>>> want.  The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints teaches that
>>> members will inherit all that the Father hath if they are faithful,
>>> which means that members of the church will also inherit eternal
>>> life.  So members of the church can become like God, something that
>>> was commanded also in the New Testament.   Be ye therefore perfect,
>>> even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect.  So there is
>>> nothing new in any of these doctrines.  They were taught by Jesus
>>> Christ in his lifetime.
>>
>> We would probably want it if it could be shown to be anything other 
>> than wishful thinking.
> 
> I wouldn't want it at all.
> What the hell are going to do on your 
> 1000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th 
> day in eternity that you haven't already done a million times already?
> Good grief, you'd be bored shitless, if not driven insane by the sheer, 
> mind-numbing boredom.
> 
Ah, but its eternity. It's timeless.

Actually this stuff all makes perfect sense to me, but not in the 
context of a supernatural being..unless you want to call the Universe such.

The original philosophers and shamans who tried to describe the world 
were not stupid: they just lacked the vocabulary.

For stupidity, you have to come down past the political religions like 
Christianity, to the mere followers like our Robbo, who hasn't really 
got a clue about the philosophy and mysticism that underlies the belief 
set and worldview he so desperately clings to.

Religious texts are well worthy of study as long as you throw away the 
interpretations of *churches*.

I've skimmed most of the worlds esoteric knowledge base..I eschewed 
Christianity because it was so blatantly stupid, until last. Then I 
found that it had much in common with other world religions: There is in 
all a basic structure that pertains to something. Its just that 
Christianity, and Islam, have both overlaid it with a huge amount of 
utter rubbish that they insist is the pure literal truth.

You will get a far more interesting slant on religion from an atheist: 
who may have actually stuidied the subject dispassionately: with a 
Christian or Muslim (excluding the Dervish movement) its a package deal, 
by and large, Buy it or not. There is no room for understanding: Just FAITH.

But Faith is just a small tool on one step of a ladder of understanding. 
Not the be all and end all of it.

Its like science, where people want to be told 'whatever is the case' 
(Wittgenstein). The truth is no one knows. We are also operating in 
ultimate ignorance, using a set of rules and tools that produce results, 
without any real confirmation that those rules and tools have any real 
correlation with the underlying reality (if indeed there is such) of the 
universe.

It gets worse. Largely reality is *what you think it is* because so much 
of it is interpreted into your worldview and belief system: enough so 
that an Epiphany CAN totally change someones subjective life: that 
little trick is traded on by every priest there ever has been..to 
demonstrate the reality of their particular brand of snake oil.

I can levitate certain objects. Sounds impressive, and so it would be to 
a stone age man. You would instantly spot the remote control devices in 
my hand...;-) HOWEVER I could in principle use that as the basis of a 
system to impress hunter gatherers that I had direct access to whatever 
power they believed existed already, and thereby create a religion and 
my own position in it.

Its been done so many times..

Don't throw out babies with bathwater: Religious material has matter of 
interest. Just bypass the interpretations of the Faithful, and make up 
your own mind.

Eternity is a state of mind in which the faculty to organise things in 
an event stream is not operating. You can by one or more of various 
approaches experience this yourself. To the practitioner this leads to a 
possible conclusions that time itself is a anthropocentric issue: it is 
not an absolute. Remove life, and you remove time. Ergo after death 
there is eternity.  In a sense.

Or to say it in another way, the totality of the experience of life can 
be transformed via something akin to  Fourier transform, in which the 
time element is transmuted into a position in some other dimension 
somewhat like 'frequency' or 'colour'. .. a co-ordinate system that 
encapsulates the totality of a lifetime as a single pattern in which the 
time element is not present in terms of linear progression of events.

We don't normally operate in that mode: but many people will assure you 
that we CAN. "my whole life passed before my eyes in an instant" says 
the drowning man..its from experiences such as this that the concepts of 
the old shamans were born, transmuted and corrupted by years of 
translation and repetition into the utter garbage you find in the Bible.