It is a literary approaching to analyzing the relationship between hubris, assent, culture and childish intuitions of the absurdity of a society that treats the knowledge of how to make nuclear weapons as an absolute trans-cultural absolute definition of what it means to be a wise person ("a physicist", that one is a real "Einstein").

If you go the main centers of spiritual learning that supposedly come from the wise and learned, you know what they do there, right? At places like MIT and Stanford. They make weapons. And they say we should worship their science and call it a trans-cultural absolute definition of wisdom.

I think it is so foolish that it is worth writing like a child.

The fact that you cannot understand what I write does not make me a fool. I am not an obscurantist, everything I do, I do for a purpose. There is a lot of other stuff in there, a lot of symbolism, trying to rethink theology outside of the usual categories of holiness and sin and instead appreciating God's nature in itself, which is, independent of the context of scripture, not at all a polemic against evil but a self assured projection of a non-contingent being who eternally projects as his unwavering telos the good and pleasure of all things, according to their various natures and the sum of their natures.

I think to appreciate God, who cannot be perceived is like looking a child who experiences his parents independently of any linguistic categories or philosophical prejudice of their nature, but absorbs their character as pure pleasure, and instead of defining their parents on the basis of some sort of a priori rationalism defines his entire philosophical outlook on the more real properly basic beliefs of his parents. Perhaps through this, children learn what love is.

I am a mystic, I despise the foolishness of men that worship their petty materialistic schemes, who make a God out of their weapons and greed, and lack imagination, so it is always my pleasure to point out their arrogance and pride and ethnocentrism and lack of imagination and lack of fun, which I do with great eagerness and joy to please God, whose nature is not understood through weapons science but through love, as a child understands his father.

(March 21, 2013 at 3:05 am)jstrodel Wrote: The fact that you cannot understand what I write does not make me a fool. I am not an obscurantist, everything I do, I do for a purpose.

Wrong. I understand you just fine, it's when you mention your god that things go south. I don't know what fervor you enter while even thinking about the subject, but it obviously changes you, and not for the better. To patter 'little' and 'spirit child' on and on does not make you an intellectual with a message no human being with proper intelligence can't understand. It's an image for a grown man who is scared of the world and needs a security blanket for comfort , because the thought of not something watching over you is just too frightening.

And indeed, you are not a fool for me not 'understanding', but when the majority of the people you reached with your ramblings thought you were having a fit, it just might be a good idea to take a long look in the mirror.

If you want to learn more about properly basic beliefs and how they relate to mysticism, read Plantinga (Warranted Christian Belief as well as the more technical books on epistemology). He has written several thousand pages on them.

Mysticism is not snake oil. It is real. If you want to see God, you can. Read about what you have to do. Read all the verses in the Bible that talk about what conditions God reveals HaShem to people that seek God (e.g. blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God).

If you want to prove to me why a society is foolish if it is not able to manufacture nuclear weapons and does not have the sufficient scientific capabilities to do so, I welcome an easy debate.

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(March 21, 2013 at 3:18 am)Kayenneh Wrote:

(March 21, 2013 at 3:05 am)jstrodel Wrote: The fact that you cannot understand what I write does not make me a fool. I am not an obscurantist, everything I do, I do for a purpose.

Wrong. I understand you just fine, it's when you mention your god that things go south. I don't know what fervor you enter while even thinking about the subject, but it obviously changes you, and not for the better. To patter 'little' and 'spirit child' on and on does not make you an intellectual with a message no human being with proper intelligence can't understand. It's an image for a grown man who is scared of the world and needs a security blanket for comfort , because the thought of not something watching over you is just too frightening.

And indeed, you are not a fool for me not 'understanding', but when the majority of the people you reached with your ramblings thought you were having a fit, it just might be a good idea to take a long look in the mirror.

An intellectual is what I am trying to avoid, that should be clear enough. Look where the intellectuals have gotten us.
I am not afraid of people. I regularly minister to drug dealers (the kind you meet on the street that carry guns and sell crack). I do not feel any insecurity when posting on these forums or anywhere else, God delivered me from that. I used to be insecure though. My only desire here is to persuade others of the truth of Christianity.

Mysticism is not snake oil. It is real. If you want to see God, you can.

Mysticism does not involve belief or analysis, mysticism is seeing. There is no room for confirmation bias.

To even apply the category of "confirmation bias" to mysticism implies a deep misunderstanding about the nature of perception.

There is no confirmation bias to, upon seeing the color green, reporting "I am being appeared to greenly". So there is no confirmation to mysticism that is only a reporting of the tangible presence of God, the existence of visions, the experience of the spirit of God shining on people, etc.

There is no interpretation.

(March 21, 2013 at 3:21 am)jstrodel Wrote: If you want to learn more about properly basic beliefs and how they relate to mysticism, read Plantinga (Warranted Christian Belief as well as the more technical books on epistemology). He has written several thousand pages on them.

No thank you. I'll save my time and rather read something worthwhile.

Quote:If you want to prove to me why a society is foolish if it is not able to manufacture nuclear weapons and does not have the sufficient scientific capabilities to do so, I welcome an easy debate.

Once again, no thank you, and just how has nuclear weapons anything to do with you using two different styles of typing when posting?

Quote:I regularly minister to drug dealers.

And I regularly tell junkies that I won't sell them needles and syringes while sitting alone at the till. This is relevant how?

Quote:My only desire here is to persuade others of the truth of Christianity.

Feel free to pull your comforter over your eyes, at least it's warm and snug under there (and the monsters can't touch you).

But what about the truth of Islam, for instance? At least Muslim Scholar is putting a lot more effort into his feeble tries to persuade others to see the truth of his faith, unlike your opinionated scribble.

re: junkies - relevant how - fear. I don't feel any fear or insecurity in posting here. I was correcting your false pop psychology. It is dangerous to tell drug dealers they need to repent of their sins, but I do, because I care about them. So if I tell drug dealers they need to repent of their sins, that casts the question of whether my actions are motivated by fear into question. My own personal testimony is that God has delivered me from fear, and the thing that I fear now really is intellectual culture and intellectual arrogance, the same arrogance that proudly proclaims that it can build nuclear weapons and at the same time demands that everyone accept that its culture is a universal norm for assessing all truth claims, whether they have anything to do with their culture of weapon making or not.

Because intellectuals are so foolish they don't deserve a response in their own language. They teach people are basically good and foolish ideas like mutually assured destruction, and then they teach that there culture is superior.

If intellectual culture is so superior, why do they make nuclear weapons? That seems like an inferior culture to me.

I think that baby talk is superior to intellectual culture in a lot of ways. I have never seen a baby build a nuclear weapon and then argue that anyone who did not accept his methods of understanding the world was was a fool.

Obviously there is a clear connection between the post styles.

Quote:There is no confirmation bias to, upon seeing the color green, reporting "I am being appeared to greenly".

There is confirmation bias to reporting "God exists" in response to any event which cannot be independently confirmed. Where you see God, a Muslim sees Allah, a Zoroastrian sees Ahura Mazda, and they rely on precisely the same evidence, but obviously cannot all be true. What makes your experience knowledge and a Muslim's experience false or hallucinatory?

It is like the difference between saying "I am being appeared to greenly" and "I see a green snake in front of me" without being aware of whether what you see is a snake or a piece of grass.

Mystical experience which is clear does not demand that the interpretation or identification of the spirits is correct, there are different spirits and different religious systems associated with them, the only thing that must be certain is the clear perception of a supernatural event. This does not necessarily involve any interpretation, although some events could be misinterpreted.

I can promise you, and swear 100%, with everything that I am, that I have experienced mystical events that do not require an interpretation, that there is no other possible interpretation other than believing that a supernatural event happens, although that does not confirm all the details of the theological interpretation (such as that the source was the God of theism).


There is no confirmation bias associated with reporting on sense experience directly, it is only at the point of interpretation in which confirmation bias can enter.

jstrodel Wrote:I can promise you, and swear 100%, with everything that I am, that I have experienced mystical events that do not require an interpretation, that there is no other possible interpretation other than believing that a supernatural event happens, although that does not confirm all the details of the theological interpretation (such as that the source was the God of theism).

This isn't the first time I've seen you swear that you've had experiences that are infallible and the real deal. Unfortunately, the world doesn't work that way. Otherwise I would be a Hindu Zoroastrian Christian Muslim because they all swear on their mother's grave that their experiences are real. It doesn't work like that.