Jan Van Ysslestyne, Why Shamans Don’t Do iPhones |395|

Have their cake and eat it too, as Larkin mentioned, seems a bit shallow.

Sure, if that is what you base your faith upon as a Christian (God created favorable laws of nature for man's development) its a bit of cake and eat it too. That said there are many Christians who's faith stems from other sources. For them it isn't a convenient logic, its just logic. A God the Creator, by definition, is responsible for the laws and conditions that would allow evolution to occur. I mean what else could a Christian believe on that point? That God missed a step somewhere and some other source (random or otherwise) is responsible for Darwinian processes?

The issue I see is anthropomorphism. Typical Abrahamists project the human experience of their localised individuality onto a similar, albeit much more powerful entity that essentially experiences in much the same way as they do. They model its "creative" ability on their own creative ability, but since a creator is imagined as omnipotent and omniscient, there is nothing it can't create if it wishes. There's only logic involved in this (to make it a consistent hypothesis), if indeed God is an immeasurably more powerful version of themselves.

But then there's the problem of evil to explain. If they see themselves as having good intentions, then why doesn't God seem much more benevolent? Why is there suffering and injustice? It becomes almost de rigueur to invent another powerful entity, the devil, who opposes God. But God has to have created the devil, and we get into myths of fallen angels. It's all perfectly logical once one accepts the basic premise that God made us in his own image and likeness: as much watered-down versions of himself.

In such a scenario, why would God have created us? Possibly for entertainment, to wile away an eternity of otherwise complete boredom. Just as we like to entertain ourselves, so God entertains himself with the drama happening on the universal stage he has putatively also created. I think it's a profoundly naive and dualistic view that's complete poppycock.

I suspect that God can't be omnipotent/omniscient in the way those terms are usually understood. There could be something that primal consciousness or MAL/TWE (Mind At Large/That Which Experiences -- terms I much prefer to "God") doesn't know and wants to learn, but maybe it doesn't possess self-awareness in the same was as we do. I see its "desire" to come to know as a primal, inbuilt urge. And what can it come to know? Only itself, since there is nothing else. Put another way, it's constantly exploring its own potential.

I think its "desire" seems to become, to our perception at least, concretised in what we think of as living entities, which could be seen as analogous to "organs" for exploring itself. It's feeling its way, so to speak, and its ideas, of which we are one, don't have an easy task precisely because it doesn't know exactly how to achieve its aim. So we make "mistakes" because it makes "mistakes" and that is what we think of as "evil". It can do anything that can be done, but there are things that can't be done even by it (try to imagine a square circle as a trivial example). If there were, then there'd be no need for evolution, for coming to know anything; everything would already be known. IOW, evolution could be seen as evidence for MAL's lack of complete self-knowledge, which it's constantly striving to complete.

So to reiterate, as I tentatively see it, MAL/TWE only possesses the ability for self-reflective experience through what we think of as living organisms, especially man (on what we think of as) earth, but also to some extent through what we think of as less evolved organisms. It's taken it quite some "time" (a.k.a. effort) to navigate its way through less self-reflective states, and there's no a priori reason to think it can't go yet further, indeed might have already done so "elsewhere" or in some "other realm".

Things like ETs and various other apparent beings may be non-actualised potential ideas in MALs consciousness. Though they aren't actualised, we may under certain conditions be able to subliminally sense them. Perhaps at some stage they may become actualised, who knows. Perhaps that's how organismal evolution occurs; at some stage, MAL may have been playing around with unactualised potentials based on its prior learning, and when circumstances became conducive, they actualised. That is to say, they became available to the perception of already actualised beings (which we are an example of), and able to take part in what we think of as consensual reality.

I'm thinking here of consensual reality as that which is reliably and repeatably perceptible/experienceable by us. Potential reality on the other hand is that which is on the edges of perception and sensed sporadically in atypical circumstances by only small subsets of people. After all, If our being subsists in MAL, it wouldn't be that surprising if we could occasionally sense its "speculative thought processes" if I might put it that way. Just as it can experience itself through our self-reflective ability, we can maybe at least sometimes experience its musings through its non-self-reflective omnipresence. The interpretation we place on such experiences could be anything from extreme skepticism to full-blown acceptance of ETs, angels, faeries, elves, gnomes, and all the rest.
 
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There is no God out there religion is just a filtering mechanism siphoning our power to feed the system
It leaves people powerless and in fear handing our essences to fake authority figures. Jesus is not coming kids I'm sorry, go wait around all you want. Your life is 100 percent your responsibility, you need a savior? Look in the mirror and figure it out
 
I think the trinity conception can be useful here:

It is fascinating how the trinity idea crops up with such regularity. We can start with the Kabbalistic supernal triad and move in any direction to find matching thought. The Christian trinity is a come lately rendition. Look at Ernesto Sirolli's TED talks on YouTube - the holy trinity of enterprise development. I work with the 'holy trinity' of running a Disability Employee Network (DEN).

On a less mundane theme we have the Hindu theme of create, preserve, destroy., the trinity of ancient Egypt (Osiris, Isis, Horus -m colonised by Christians according to some), the triple Goddess, and a bunch more.

The trinity is a fundamental idea we should cherish and employ often.
 
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