There are many areas of life where you CANNOT devise a clinical test to prove/disprove a theory: criminal prosecution, civil litigation, history, or even solving an argument your kids had! Let's take the case of criminal prosecution. Do you say "Oh, I cannot put these annoying defendants into a laboratory setting, so therefore I cannot come to any reasonable conclusion?" Of course not! People can and do make decisions based on interviews, eye witness corroborations, etc. all the time. That's part of life. Yes, it's possible to make a wrong decision in a court of law. But overall the system works. Look - I admit that it's possible that just as I offered up the altar call the guy just happened to have an epileptic seizure and just happened to start foaming and writhing at the mouth like the New Testament. It's possible. But imo it's very unlikely. And it's possible that the husband of my coworker just happened to trip on the dog and went flying and hit his head and had a siezure from the fall. Anything is possible. But realize that by your criterion, Vhehn, there is NO way that there can be demons because you will rule out any manifestation of them as "imagination" or some weird "physical phenomenon". You force the rules to fit your paradigm. You allow only data from a clinical laboratory setting which isn't real life in any way. Think about it: you rule out every even reasonable possibility so that you can hold onto that which you hold dear - materialism - because it is safe and comfortable. There are no demons for you to deal with in that world, so everything is nice and safe and warm...
I can't seem to get my point across here. Maybe if I explain it this way: Have you ever had an argument with your significant other? You guys go on and on and then finally you realize you were both saying the same thing and actually agree. That's what I'm talking about here. God only cares that you have a relationship with Him. You can describe a relationship from many angles: repentance, works (proof there's a relationship), belief (trust), love, etc., etc. And the authors of the Bible hit that description from many angles. It's NOT that any of them are more right or more wrong. So the Catholics can say it's belief + works and have a relationship with Him and get to heaven. The Protestants can say it's sola fide and have a relationship with Him and get to heaven. The Evangelicals says its belief + repentance and have a relationship with Him and get to heaven. And here's my real point: they're all doing the same thing even though they don't think they are. Even though they're all arguing with each other, they're all doing belief + repentance + works and they're all going to heaven (as long as they have a relationship with Him). They just won't admit it until they get to heaven...
"they're all doing the same thing" yes, it's called self-delusion. Children have invisible friends and places. Adults should know better.
er, Shoeshineboy, What you are experiencing here is a mirror. People are having a hard time including your testimony into their reality because you are having such a hard time including the testimony of SO MANY PEOPLE into your reality, imo. At some point honesty becomes an issue. This is a signal to check the basis of your reality for more accurate alignments. Taking offense is a clue. In perfect alignment, it is not possible to take offense. Out of alignment, there is no end to offenses taken. Soon, cartoons start to offend, get the picture? This is not to say your alignments are all that bad. But by understanding the bigger picture, you could probably align even better. Here is the bigger picture as it relates to demons... First know this: There is nothing in existence except for Being and beingness. Everything that you cannot be as yourself surrounds and envelops your life with the remainder of whatever is needed to complete your context and reason for living. Problems arise because not all of the remainder is in harmonious alignment within itself or with you. Everything was created as BEING and beingness. As beingness multiplied itself into many beings, there came to be diversified awareness of expanded potential. From the many powers of beingness, all existence is manifested. At the heart of every aspect of existence is beingness, and it is pure in its alignment to the Source of all Being. Whenever beingness declares itself to be autonomous, and turns away from its Source, then disharmony and misalignments begin to occur. Degrees of separation begin to appear, along with an accumulation of physical barriers and material densities. Possibilities for fluid interaction and adjustment are lost except through the linear progressions of time. Consequently, the illusion of past and future begin to dominate a being's desire for change. Truthfully, there is only BEING, only Love, only alignment with Source, and that is a beings only HOME! A being who is far from his awareness of Home, whose perceptions are conditioned by layers of substance, rivers of time, and boundaries of control will feel plagued and trapped by seen and unseen beingness which permeate his existence and threatens his free will. A being that is far from home will attract (magnetize) others who are equally detatched or lost. Most often these attachments are unconscious. At times, such misaligned connections are simply destructive, and need to be cut with intercession. This is what Jesus did when he cast out demons. Demons are only lost souls who have drifted so far from their own true being that they will not easily respond to loving realignment. Instead, they attempt to subvert the positive potential that might otherwise provide support. Everything - even a "demon" - has the same Source. Any person who faces away from Source will experience disharmony. All attempts to make oneself into a new source of alignment for others - like JohnnyK - will fail dismally. Eventually, such misguided efforts will result in personal entrapment, pain, and further estrangment from the true Source. Any being's original covenant is written in the patterns of alignment with Source. Beingness does not evolve into something other than its intrinsic nature. It merely expands its reason for being through involvement with other beings and life. History is real in so far as it is the repository of experience, although you would be operating under a very strained illusion to believe that your personal history is the cause of who you are. This is why a person can reveal himself, in the quickness of a heartbeat, to be quite different than his personal history might suggest. Such startling manifestations are most likely to occur in the presence of rekindled purpose or the restoration of one's true state of love. Maybe this is what you refer to as "born again", but born again has another meaning that you don't understand, that I won't discuss now. Estrangment progresses through the time stream, irresponsibility and unconsciousness begin to mark a person's character. A being in this condition can no longer shape reality to meet his needs, and so he will invent it to match his delusions. For this reason, history only repeats it's lessons, challenges, and difficulties. The successes, victories, and achievments scattered throughout history are not the product of history, but rather are the result of elevating consciousness and actions above history. History is simply a repository of completed experiences which are held in memory along with your partially completed experiences held in suspension until appropriate conditions exist for reintegrating them with life. Either way, history is that part of your life which pertains the least to where you are now! It is that which -- for the moment -- you have released. Now consider this new perspective. It is vital that you reverse the world's view of time if you would recover your true nature of being. The world considers history and the momentum of time to be the FORCE and foundation behind present time experience. By that reasoning, you would certainly be what the past has made you. By contrast, the viewpoint of true being sees the past as a panorama of experience, education, goals, and desires that have finally been reduced to relative impotence. It is you who reduce the past -- not the past that produces you! Considering the timelessness of being, how could it be any other way? The future is the promise of completion which you remember and seek again. In that persuit, infinite potential will supply your needs, yearnings, lessons, and alignments until at last you realize that true completion has always been, and is reattained through liberation of desire as well as attachment. (continued with more "evil"...)
(continued from the past...) Evil is not innate to existence. Good and evil were not established as equal an opposite forces belonging to an eternal drama. Evil is simply disconnection from God and denial of the love that you are! The source of all evil is the denial of love which results in the ill-fated chaos of life unsupervised by love. When a person has denied the love that he is, he loses the power to command the affairs of his life. It its place he will use force or deception attempting to snatch control. Consumate evil is the intent or action of turning love against itself. That is a presence most beings, being love, never understand or magnetize. There is no basis of coherence between evil and love, unless love has been denied. The greatest protection you have is to simply be the love that you are. The only reason evil is present at all is that the one spirit includes even that. If you love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself - this is the antidote for evil. If evil approached, you could simply say, 'be gone' and it would leave. Like good and evil, Heaven is primary, while Hell is derivative. Heaven is anywhere that love prevails in the manifesting of existence. Hell, on the other hand, is the torment of a soul at war with itself, with God, and with existence. You can see now that heaven and hell is where you make it and any heaven or hell can be transformed by decisions of choice. There is always freedom to choose, and no choice needs to last forever. But we can never judge. You might even consider the possibility that those beings who have denied God and love have made the ultimate sacrifice to prove that the freedom to choose does exist. From a certain viewpoint this might even be considered a courageous act of love. For how can a being of love ever really be anything else? A thorough perception of that might end your dualistic thinking forever. There is no division of spirit. Now maybe you can understand the cross better. Who made the ultimate sacrifice? What is the ultimate sacrifice? The creation of an ego is the greatest sacrifice we could ever make, and it is what kills us. And an ego is the only thing that can be offended. An ego is basically a fictional self created when we deny we are love in the image of God. God can never be offended because God has never denied that He is love. When you create a God that can be offended, you've created a fiction! If you can be offended, then you have created a fiction! When you align yourself with the love that you are, and with the love that God is...there is no more offense. Offense is an illusion based on the upholding of fictional identies...which are all based on YOUR judgments about YOURSELF relative to God's self...not God's judgements about YOU in relation to HIMSELF. You can only be offended if you have separated yourself from God by judgments about yourself that are maintained in your mind. Judgements are the mental mechanics of separation, therefore they could be nothing but illusion. By comparison, the mental mechanics of involvment result in discernments based on reality. The consequences of denying love are very real. However, we must be careful not to judge what we see, because our judgement will be an illusion! Judgement pertains to illusion, while discernment based on involvment pertains to reality. People here in this thread are reacting to your struggle with reality. They are reacting because it potentially interferes with their rights, and the rights of those they love. Fundamentally, a struggle with reality is a struggle with God, because God is one with reality. And for one, your view of the cross is not real. By obsessing on suffering, you interfere with peoples right to seek blessings in life along a path of joy. In fact, your covenant with God is written in joy. This is the "new" covenant. But your alignments are all about the old covenant...the source of all suffering, pain, hurting, disappointment, confusion and depression. This dichotomy is most obvious in your diabolical opposition to the "new" age, in favor of what? Old age? In fact, the nails could not even hurt Jesus because his love was so great. And it is an assault to promote the cross in such a way. The only thing that caused Jesus grief was the feeling of separation from his Father...and it was intense. Nails and a cross were not necessary for him to separate or to feel the pain of separation. If anything, the nails felt good to him, so great was his love. Secondly, you deny people their right to know that they are immortal. Ultimately, this is all about force and control. First, it is a fiction. Second, by reducing others to mere mortals, you suppress them within the laws of limitation and structure. Its about control. Because when people know that they are immortal, they are simply too free to control, and can jump any fence the agendas of man can control. Your version of christianity is about regulating an unconditional gift, attempting to sell people their immortality in exchange for some kind of allegience and behavioural modification according to someones agenda...agendas based on fictional identities. People resent this to the core. Your emphasis on proving the resurrection is a diversion from the main truth about Jesus mission: not only to prove that we have free choice to separate from God as love, but also, after doing so, we have free choice to unseparate anytime, anyplace, anywhere...because separation is an illusion. Only when you know this can YOU transform the biology of your physicality into something that lives, and does not die. By diverting attention away from this truth to it's demonstration, Jesus resurrection, you are threatening the lives of everyone who potentially aligns with you. By pointing people in the direction of a God that can be offended, is simply to perpetuate all the evils you are noticing...and create more of the demons you notice. As a result, people are afraid to align themselves with such a monster, and who can blame them! And those who sacrifice them Selves to align with it, doom themselves to a life of strife, confusion, illusion and seclusion. What choice are you really giving anyone?! Your emphasis on miracles and phenomena can also reveal a struggle with the miracle of reality! And there is no greater miracle than love. Actually there are no miracles! There is only reality that we understand and reality we don't understand. There is reality we accept...and most often, reality we reject through judgments. Beware! God is one with reality, and the beginning of wisdom is respect for reality. Our covenant with God is in regard to reality and it is written in joy. You have learned to think of love as a commodity. YOu have learned to think of love as an action or an external thing. Such ideas of viewing love externally have led you to judgment and separation. Most significanly, it has led to separation from yourself. The truest way to know your love is not be reflectance but by the joy you feel in it's presence. That joy is the soul's pleasure in the presence of love. Whatever you experience as joy is the cup of your love overflowing. By your joy you will know your love, and your soul, as it casts your love upon the waters of life. JohnnyK
How is love "etc, etc..."? How can I BE a "works"? How can I BE a "repentance?" How can I BE a "belief"? How can God have a relationship with my "works"? How can God have a relationship with my "beliefs"? How can God have a relationship with my "repentance"? What happens if I just be the love that I AM? Three are about control. One is about freedom. JOhnnyK
Oh come on. You guys cannot be serious. Adults having relationships of work love, trust with non-entity special invisible friends called "Him" . That is just utterly weird.
I prefer Her actually. But that's just me. Male is in reference to love as a constant. Female is love in action. And that's the definition of life
There is one ( and just this single one) totally irrational belief in buddhism: The belief in the existence of dharma. That in this crappy world (1. noble truth) there actually is a way to behave morally and be happy at the same time, even if you personally are just too dumb to understand the trick. While there is definitely nothing in our normal daily lives that supports that, it definitely helps to stubbornly, religiously believe it. To believe in anything else, like God, an immortal soul or anything eternal strikes me as someone comforting himself artificially in an overextended manner.