Metacrock

I have a spell checker but Grace is using it.

hahahahahahahhahahahahahaahha

-DM-

This is, in the absence of convincing evidence and/or argument, just another empty claim of Christianity.

--Don--

Metacrock

Meta =>Hey Toto, back in Kansas? Just a litle levity. Good to see you too man!

Meta =>I can appreiciate how it might appear that way, but we in the Theological rackett are not satisfied with that. If one is a theoloigan one must have such things nailed down. Believe me, they do care that a system be coherent and self consistant. It's one thing to go hear a UMC preacher on Sunday, and quite another to try and make a real theological proposal in academic circles. You really should read Tillich or someone, Schubert Ogden or Hartshorne to see exactly how rigorus one must be.


Meta =>Why I would love to. First, there are two things you have to keep in mind: 1) liberal theology is very diverse, there are many subdisciplines and many theologians, so it's not that easy because some of them might actually draw upon buddhism (although most don't). 2) There are degrees of liberalism. So I'll use Paul Tillich as my frame of reference since he is my favorite.


1) The basic difference in Tillich and Buddhism is this; for Buddhism the basic human problematic is one of desire which leads to pain because it myeres us in the physical world and causes us to forget that we are not indivduated beings seperate and apart from the rest of the cosmos, but all of reality is one undifferentiated unity. The resolution to this problematic is to give up desire throgh "right thinking" in the nobel eight fold path and thus we are able to remember our undifferentiated unity with all things. Notice the similarity to the Platonic theory of knowledge. So this means that everything can seem similar if you look for simiarlities.


Tillich is different in that he works within a Christian framewrok. He was a Luthern, he's influenced by Martin Luther and also mystics such as Nicholos of Cuza and the existentialists. He says nothing about giving up desire and he doesn't push the notion of undifferentated unity. Although he does have a simialrity in his concept of the God beyond God, which is basically a mystical notion and thus it does cross paths with Buddhism but is not directly influenced by it.

As with Tillich and with my own theology major differences are thus:

a) Buddhism has it that life is an illusion, the world illusion of mya. Tillich and I think life is real.

b) Buddhism would argue for trasncending categroies such as good and evil. Tillich and I would push the notion that there is no transcendence of the Good and that evil is, in the view of Agustuine, the absense of the good.

c) Tillich and I would not push the notion that giving up desire ends suffering, that would be outside of our framework.

d) no reincarnation for Tillich or myself. One life is all you get.

e) I believe that Christ is the embodyment of God on earth and the example to us of how to know God, redemption form sin is the goal and that gives us a personal relationship with God, that is all very anti-thetical to Buddism.


Now as for gnosticism, modern liberal theology is mainly influenced by the enlightenment.It has a lot in common with the English Diesm of the 17th and 18th centuries, I don't know of any similarity to Gnsoticism.

First century Gnosticism mainly pushed the notion that the universe of matter is a tragic mistake. Most liberal theologians tend to be pro life, not in the anti-abortion sense but in the sense of affirming a materialist secular existence and the goodness of life in the world. That is very anti-thetical to the Gnostics who thought that matter was evil and the world was a mistake and something to get out of and avoid. Gnostics pushed the notion of secret knowledge, the spark of divinity in certain chosen people which would enable them to escape the bonds of their material existence. As good modernist and enlightened liberals, liberal theologians tend to think that it is not secret knoweldge, but openly understood and intellecutally reasoned knowledge which will help up.

Are those distinctions clear enough for you?

RyanS2

Hmm... supernatural miracles? But how can we discuss this without talking about magick? Let's discuss how magick has cured people and provided real life miracles!

(Please forgive the long ramble)

The first person known in Western history that developed a scientific model of “life energy”, (chi, ki, and a variety of other names. We could basically call this “psychic energy”, or any number of other things. There is a very fine line between real chi and energy, and fake showmanship stunts. Real chi doesn’t set things on fire, it is an internal fire that heals, restores, and rejuvenates. Think of it like an internal source of energy, not some super-wondrous “set it on fire with my brain” type of energy), was Franz Anton Mesmer. The name he coined for it was "animal magnetism." (He later regretted the name because he felt it put excessively large amounts of emphasis on magnetism). He then went and developed methods to magnetize ("mesmerize") people for healing. He also set up devices that seemed to have a healing effect on the people who used them. These devices were primarily wooden barrels that he had filled with iron filings, and they had iron rods sticking out. People who wanted a healing held these rods in their hands.

His cure of Maria Theresa Paradis, mentioned in Chapter 11 of The Principles , occurred when he was 43, but the repercussions of this cure made it necessary to move from Vienna to Paris, which was to be the scene of his greatest fame. There he met ready acceptance from the populace, but an equally strong skepticism from the medical profession, who attributed the effects he produced to the imagination of the patients rather than to his supposed new force.

There were so many poor people coming to him for treatments that he had to resort to various methods for curing multiple clients. His first innovation in this regards was designing a magnetic baquet, a wooden tub nearly five feet across, and one foot deep, filled with water, patterns of bottles and iron filings. Out of this tub there were iron rods protruding, which were held by the patients. Later he "magnetized" a tree, so that patients could be healed by holding ropes hanging from its branches. The most noticeable effect of these devices was to induce a "crisis": convulsions. Nowadays, we refer to this as catharsis.

After the attack by the Royal Commission into Mesmerism, and the continuing opposition of the medical profession, Mesmer chose another means to promote his ideas and support himself. This was by setting up an organization - the Society of Honour - which consisted of a clinic, a teaching establishment, and a register of qualified members who had received his training, and who paid for the privilege. In time, as is the nature of these things, there arose a division in this organization also, when other members disagreed with Mesmer.

Following him was Dr. Karl, Baron Karl von Reichenbach. His work is entitled, “Researches on Magnetism, Electricity, Heat, Light, Crystallization, and Chemical Attractions in their relations to the Vital Force”, which was published in 1845 CE. This book has been described as one of the great pieces of scientific literature that has been lost over time. Dr. Reichenbach was nothing if not meticulous. His work spanned over 20 years experimenting with a force he called “Od”. He was highly respected in several fields, including chemistry, developing technology, metallurgy, and meteorology. Although initially highly respected, his work started running counter to the orthodoxy of that time, and was then ridiculed, suppressed, and eventually forgotten.
(Note here: Electromagnetic radiation is now recognized by scientists and the public as a frequency pollution of the environment -- yet another health hazard everyone has to deal with. Recent research indicates that regular or chronic exposure to electromagnetic fields (EMF) can adversely impact your health, well-being and that of other biological systems in the environment. Electromagnetic radiation can impact physiology and create/aggravate chronic conditions that yield symptoms which include fatigue, headache, dizziness, concentration and vision problems, short term memory loss, sleep disturbances, confusion, ringing in the ears and irritability. These and other symptoms of exposure to electromagnetic radiation have been identified in an ever-growing body of scientific research, including research done by eminent scientists like Dr. Robert Beck, Professor Robert Becker, M.D, (in his book Cross Currents ), Andreas Puharich and others. In 1993, Ellen Sugarman wrote the popular introduction to the problem in her Electricity Around You May Be Dangerous To Your Health. Other researchers have contributed major articles which have broken new ground, informing the general public that there is a problem. One such researcher is Paul Brodeur, who wrote a seminal piece on EMR published in 1992 in New Yorker Magazine.

“The human brain produces a complex, multi-dimensional, pulsating, electromagnetic field resulting from the electrochemical behaviour of masses of neurons acting in small to very large groups" (Rosenboom, D. 1990. "Extended Musical Interface with the Human Nervous System.")

His most important discovery was that he detected and demonstrated that this force depended upon sensitive individuals, who were regular people from virtually any walk of life. He experiments showed people who responded to the “Od” related to polarity, (right-handed versus left), sympathetic to blue and anti-pathetic towards yellow, had particular food preferences, were affected by certain metals, and were unpleasantly affected by mirrors. Mr. Shepard believed that elaborate personal rules dictated by some religions are related to the polarities and reactions of sensitives. I think that personal religion, particularly from early age, causes hyper-reaction in proximity to certain stimuli, and thus might be a bit on the further end of the food chain than is suspected by some. I think that this hyper-reactiveness is based also upon how diametrically opposed the rigidity of the rules, and how diametrically opposed they are to the actual person with whom they are embedded.
Another discovery by Dr. Reichenbach was that these sensitive people could “see” the emanations from crystals and magnets in total darkness, and could detect alternations of electrical currents. They could also perceive the aura surrounding human bodies. Several of his studies drew the same conclusion as Dr. Mesmer, that negative and positive polar effects could be charged through the use of the “Od”, into liquids and solids, by people who are sensitive to these charges, and pass the effect on. He believed that these were manifested in forms of electricity, magnetism, and chemistry.
Another thing he did was describe that a field surrounds magnets containing “Od”, and that it relates to a spectrum of color frequencies. These colors in the magnetic orientation are according to the magnetic fields of the Earth, in correspondance to the specific degrees about the circumference of the circle. They always start off red, and end with violent, then renew the process originating at red to violet again. These are the same colors and orientations that are used by people who practice Radionic Medicine.

The first school to be examined is the parapsychological school of thought. They believe that our minds basically act as receivers and transmitters, that produce vibrations on an electromagnetic level, and that these signals are picked up by others. You’ve probably felt this before, like if you’ve ever known someone was staring a hole in the back of your head. Through the use of “transmitting” our thoughts, we can influence someone else, and in fact, we can even change their mood. This may sound very baseless, but it has scientific collaboration.

This is from Dr. Larry Dosser:

"There are easily 130 studies that show that if you take prayer into the laboratory under controlled situations, it does something remarkable, NOT JUST to human beings but to bacteria, fungi, germinating seeds, rats, mice and baby gerbils. One of the things that intrigued me about the studies was how this material has been marginalized. You certainly don't hear anything about these studies in medical school. But after considering the evidence, I decided to incorporate prayer rituals into my medical practice."

"It's true we don't have a clue about how prayer works, either. All I'm saying is that it's time we looked at the data. I was fascinated by the clarity of a lot of these 130 studies. Some of them were extremely clean, well designed, and very precise. And well over half of these 130 studies show statistical significance that something major is going on with prayer. A lot of physicians would like to write it off as placebo effect, but that's difficult to do considering that bacteria, fungi, and germinating seeds aren't generally considered to be susceptible to suggestion.

The fact that prayer is nonlocal--that it functions at a distance and that spatial separation doesn't diminish the affect--means that it doesn't have to be intrusive. You don't have to visit your own religious or spiritual views on the patient. In fact, you don't even have to be in the presence of the patient

First let me tell you what I think prayer is not. I object to the way that we have defined Prayer in this Western, Christianized culture as somehow talking out loud to a male cosmic parent figure, who basically prefers being addressed in English. That definition is extremely limiting. If you go to the Orient and look at what goes on in the Buddhist cultures, you find that Buddhists pray like nuts. They go through their lives twirling prayer wheels. Buddhism, however, is not a theistic religion; they don't even believe in God, but they believe that their prayers are answered.

So right away I think there's cross-cultural evidence that you need to rethink the presence of a personal God in the prayer loop. I think what is important are qualities of consciousness like caring, compassion, empathy, and love. That's what seems to make the studies work. When you take them away, the studies don't work. In fact, if you flip these empathic, warm feelings in the prayer experiments to the negative, frequently the subject is affected. In experiments bacteria died and plants withered.

One of the things that causes me immense concern about this so-called New Age we're supposed to be living in is the formula approach. You find a lot of books by well-meaning people who get very specific about strategies and imagery. But I think that if you try to get prayer technique out of a book you're asking for big trouble. A person's prayer strategies should be in synch with their innate temperament. Extroverts are much more at home with the graphic go-get-em in-your-face type aggressive prayer imagery. Introverts are more comfortable with a let-it-be, Thy-will-be-done, may the best-thing-happen approach. If you try to get an introverted individual to pray according to an extroverted standard, they will very likely become discouraged. Where this really gets to be a problem is when they start to feel guilty and think there's something wrong with them because they don't fit the authority's formula. To me this is metaphysical malpractice in action.

My personal feeling is that it's okay to use imagery, visualization, and prayer for a specific goal. That's what petitionary prayer is all about--praying for something for yourself. If the cancer goes away, if the AIDS is cured, that's a blessing. We should be thankful for that. But the potential payoff for prayer is far more glorious. It allows us to reach out, independent of spatial separation. Studies have shown that prayer can range back and forth into the past and the future. This says that there's something about who we are that's nonlocal in space and time, which means that something about us must be omnipresent, infinite, immortal, and eternal. In other words, prayer is the big cure for the big disease; it cuts through the superiority of death. The lesson of prayer is that there's something more. The benefit of this recognition dwarfs whether or not your particular physical problem gets better or not. I hope it does, but if that doesn't happen, you just may have to settle for immortality.

If I get locked up in the loony bin for anything in this book, it's going to be that. There are actually laboratory experiments that show if an event happens at the quantum level, and if that event is not observed by a living being, then it's not fixed, even though we presume that it's already happened. What they indicate is that if an event is not fixed, then an observer may later be able to use his consciousness to influence the outcome of the event when it is observed. This sounds like witchcraft--the ability of the mind to reach back into the past and influence events that are already supposed to have happened.

The experiments involve random event generator(REG) and they've been done by physicist Helmut Schmidt and Robert Jahn's group at Princeton, among others. I don't want to get too esoteric here but let me give you an example: The random event generator is spitting out events, half of them are above a certain line and half are below. This is random distribution of whatever you're trying to measure, let's say radioactive decay. So you've got the random event generator going and its events are being recorded on a magnetic tape of some sort. If not otherwise influenced, half of the events are in the positive direction and half are in the negative direction. The way the experiment is set up is that after the REG has already done its thing, a so-called operator tries to influence the distribution of the events by pushing them either in the positive or negative direction. The experiments show that, statistically speaking, the operator can will a change in direction. Remember, this is done after the fact but before the record is examined. The experiments also show that if somebody looks at the tape before the operator tries to skew the information, there is no statistical affect."

Now, if you wanted to explain all that rambling without using God, parapsychologists tell us that our brain works like a transmitter, constantly receiving external stimulus, some without our knowledge, and that by actually thinking certain things, in tone with some form of externalized projection, we can make it happen, at least on a sub-atomic level. We can use our brains to fry little critters, by transmitting electroneurochemical magnetic impulses and causing subatomic influences that reach across time and space.....

Or, we can say that thousands of "miracles" have been attested throughout the World, but one finds that when examined under a critical, rationalistic frame of mind, most of these "miracles" quickly fade away.....

lpetrich

I've seen Metacrock's views, and too many of them fit the "take what I like and leave what I don't like" profile. And he also has crudely unhistorical views of Paul's statements and activities, such as Paul's misunderstanding of the Unknown God altar in the Areopagus.

Which is to be demonstrated, not assumed.

Metacrock would have made a great Stalinist history-book writer.

That's because fundamentalist views have been common over the centuries.

Consider what happened to Copernicus and Galileo. Both leading Catholics and leading Protestants waved the parts of the Bible which describe the fixity of the Earth and the motion of the Sun. If Martin Luther thought it allegorical that Joshua told the Sun and not the Earth to stop moving, he had not indicated that; also, the Catholic Church does not seem to have considered that part of the Bible allegorical when it found Galileo guilty of maintaining views contrary to it.

And when Tom Paine described a variety of Biblical discrepancies in his book Age of Reason, one of his clerical critics conceded that some of the first five books had not been written by Moses and some of the Psalms had not been written by David. He got in deep trouble for conceding that, sad to say.

In early modern times, a Jesuit in South America came across sloths, which are very slow animals that live in trees and eat leaves. He wondered how such slow animals could have come all the way from Mt. Ararat after Noah's Flood, which he did not seem to consider very allegorical. Leaving none behind in trees near Mt. Ararat, I must add.

And in the early 19th century, geologist Hugh Miller agonized over fossils of animals that appeared well-adapted to killing other animals and eating them; they were hard to reconcile with his view that before Adam and Eve committed that great sin, all animals were vegetarians -- something he considered literal and not allegorical. One does have to respect Hugh Miller for his intellectual honesty, it must be said.

Whatever the alternatives are. And the "businessman dictating a letter to a secretary" model does have a certain simplicity, it must be said. Muslims believe that about the Koran, and IIRC, some Hindus believe that about the Vedas.

If the whole thing is one big allegory, then why isn't it stated clearly? And why get bent out of shape when anyone argues that Jesus Christ had been a myth?

Does this include willingness to accept deficiencies in the text?

Which God?

People have encountered all sorts of deities and saints and angels and demons and ghosts and elves and fairies and jinn and other such fun beings.

Very ingenious. Now why are we supposed to treat some carefully-selected subset of such supposed experiences as literal truth?

So suddenly JC's resurrection is literal history.

However, history can be distorted in the retelling.

Grace Shmace, whatever that is supposed to be.

Which is what the Biblical God is depicted as being.

The Biblical God does that all the time in the Bible. As does Jesus Christ.

Then who needs a Bible?

But why are we to be tied town to it, and why are we supposed to act as if it is literal truth?

Tell that to some fundamentalists some time.

lpetrich

Why not some real miracles, such instantaneously rebuilding the World Trade Center, complete with an air-defense system? Or giving everybody's computer HAL-scale Artificial Intelligence?

Seemingly miraculous recoveries simply don't cut it as "real" miracles.

Vorkosigan

Metacrock, none of these "miracles" will work. How do you know that they are not the result of Hindu medititative practices randomly curing people? Or Buddhist prayers randomly curing people? Please rule out all other forms of telekinesis, alien intervention and other forms of power, before turning to divine forms. And then show that no other god "cured" the alleged sick.

BTW, you know that the Vatican eased the rules for miracles, and did away with the Devil's Advocate in 1983, right? The standards are low indeed.

Drexel:
Since the cause of the "deafness" of the baby was never known, the "cure" cannot be said to be miraculous. Doctors do misdiagnose, you know. My father has been a speech path for 45 years specializing in child language acquisition, and has seen cases of doctors making diagnoses like this, but the kid later turning out to be normal.

BTW, there is no evidence of Katherine Drexel even being involved in either cure. She died in 1955; the two cases you list took place twenty years later. Even assuming it is a miracle, how do you know that it wasn't some Buddhist or Hindu friend or colleage that did the trick?

1976 Carmelite sister Concepcion Boullon Rubio was at the point of death when she was suddenlyand completely cured of a rare disease called lipomatosis after members of her family prayed to God for a cure through the intercession of Blessed Josemaria.

Lipomatosis -- fat deposits -- is a common disease, and rarely fatal, though often ugly. Note that we are not told what form the disease took. Simple surgery often does the trick, you know.

"Padre Pio, a humble Capuchin priest from San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy, was blessed by God in many wonderful and mysterious ways. The most dramatic was the stigmata. Padre Pio bore the wounds of Christ for fifty years!

A boy dreams of Padre Pio and wakes up from a coma, and this is a miracle? Causal link, please.

One reportedly happened in the United States, where a French woman who broke several ribs in a car accident miraculously healed when she wore a Mother Teresa medallion.

Oh please. She was wearing clothing too. Why wasn't it Christian Dior who cured her? This is beyond ridiculous. Millions upon millions of people all over the world wear crosses and other religious items and are not saved. Why didn't the medallion stop her from having the accident?

In the other, a Palestinian girl suffering from cancer was cured after Mother Teresa appeared in her dreams and said, "Child, you are cured."

HOw many cancer victims have died praying to Mother Teresa? How many people have died in her hospital, in her arms? Don't you think that if she had any power, these people would have recovered?

All of these people were totally healed of incurrable or terminal states. The one commonality they all have is that they were at some point prayed for by the same person, Kulhman.

Um, no. They were also prayed for by people in dozens of faith systems the world over. Please rule out their intervention.

"A month after the first operation, the same surgeons made a last-ditch effort to remove the rest of the tumor. But when they went into Elizabeth's brain, they couldn't find the lesion. As planned, they removed a section of the nerve that the cancer had invaded, knowing that it would leave her blind in her right eye but agreeing that it represented her best hope of surviving. When the tissue was examined, the pathologist could not find any cancer. Regular cat scans since then have revealed no evidence of a tumor. The medical community calls what happened "spontaneous resolution." The family call it a miracle. Even a resurrection."

Nonsense. It was clearly a case of spontaneous remission. Happens from time to time. To atheist too.

Why no other miracles? I am sure many prayed on the aircraft at the WTC prayed that the plane would miss. I am sure many prayed at Stalingrad, and Omaha Beach. Where is the cure for AIDS that so many are praying for? Your god is a niggard, working retail cures when what we need is wholesale healing.

Michael

Reactor

Can you please define "real" miracles for us then?

Reactor

And uh, turtonm, do we need wholesale healing, or do you simply want wholesale healing?

RyanS2

Now that's a good one. I figure it's because Christians are not obeying the Word of God.

Numbers: 18: 17-19

"But the firstling of a cow, or the firstling of a sheep, or the firstling of a goat, thou shalt not redeem; they are holy: thou shalt sprinkle their blood upon the altar, and shalt burn their fat for an offering made by fire, for a sweet savour unto the LORD.

And the flesh of them shall be thine, as the wave breast and as the right shoulder are thine.

All the heave offerings of the holy things, which the children of Israel offer unto the LORD, have I given thee, and thy sons and thy daughters with thee, by a statute for ever: it is a covenant of salt FOREVER before the LORD unto thee and to thy seed with thee."

Christians should take God more seriously when he says "forever" and maybe he'd get around to resurrecting dead soldiers, (Ezekiel), and things of that nature. It's those liberal Christians that make God so angry.