A little common sense is required. Take 100 pounds of earth from your back yard. And take it to the lab. Ask the scientists to make it conscious and walk around. Mud will never become conscious. This will never happen in a million years. Although the body rots in the grave, total composting processā¦ā¦..the soul is eternal. This means: āI am not this body.ā As long as we identify with the material body as āmeā, we try find satisfaction and pleasure by gratifying our material senses. And all the Catholic saints in the history books have shown by their lives, that the more their spiritual pleasure increases, the less they are concerned about the desires of the material senses. No more concerns about hot and cold, fancy foods, fancy clothesā¦ā¦no more sex desire. Because they have learned how to be spiritually satisfied by having a direct relationship of loving reciprocation with God. This is called āself-realizationā. One baby emerges from the womb full of life. Another is stillbornā¦ā¦ā¦no soul inside. The body is merely a vehicle. without the ādriverā inside, the symptoms of life are absent. No one loves a dead body. Even if it was the body of a beauty queen. No soul. Spirit and matter are two different energies of God. One is conscious, alive and eternal. The other is dead matter, never conscious, and its forms are temporary. Jesus says that the truth will set us free. Free of what? Free of the demands of the senses, free of competition for acquiring the things of this earth, and free of the fear of death. This is kindergarten.
Death is simply a transition.
This is nonsense! Simply the blind following the blind. Besides, the scriptures have been translated and re-translated, altered, and re-interpreted, to suite āKing Jamesā, and similar politically motivated persons, both inside and outside the church. God does not have to breathe life into our nostrils. He puts us into the combination of the sperm cell and the womanās egg at the moment of conception. The cells divide, and body takes shape, according to the dictates of the genetic āprogrammingā of the mother and father. The soul inside that little body endures this, comes out of the womb when the body is ready to eat and digest and breath on its own. Then the body grows, then matures, then becomes old, then diseasedā¦..then the eternal soul departs to heaven or hell, and the body becomes a lump of dead meat, fit for three possible destinations: 1) buried and eaten by worms and molds, and again becomes earth; 2) burnt and turned into ashes; 3) thrown to the dogs and vultures (natureās clean-up crew) who eat it and excrete it as fecal matter. That is the destination of the material body: earth, ashes or stool. Anyone who has seen a dead body will not say, āHere is a living soul.ā
If by āre-translatedā you mean translated into one language and from that translated into a third language, it has happenedāfor example, St. Jerome translated the Scriptures into Latin, because it had become the everyday language of so many people, and the English Douay version was translated from St. Jeromeās Latin. However, many other translations (including, I think, all the main ones in use today) were new translations from the original languages. The King James version was a new translation from the Greek and Hebrew. And it was also called the Authorized Version because he authorized the translation. I donāt think he had to approve the translated text. English changes, but the Scriptures donāt; the King James version is the oldest translation still in wide use today, because it was done so well.
The translations since thenāfor example, the New American Bible, the Jerusalem Bible, the Revised Standard Version, the New International VersionāIāve worked with all of those as a book editor, though the only one I have read cover to cover is the New American Bible. Except that some of them donāt contain the Apocrypha, the differences, in my estimation, are small (though important to people). Pardon the generalization, but the content of all of them is pretty much the same. Some churches did not approve certain versions. A lot of people did not like the Revised Standard Version, and my understanding is that the New International Version was an Evangelical reaction to that.
But which politically motivated persons are you talking about whose approval was needed? I daresay that these versions I mentioned are substantially the same. If the King James version was done to suit King James, what other differences were politically motivated? Iām not saying there are no politically motivated differences, I just donāt know what they are.
Literalman! I was thinking of you yesterday, when I made my brash statements. While on the site, I read some of your comments. And I thought to myself, āSteve is a real gentleman.ā Then I thought, āIf we take the. meaning of the word āgentlemanā literally, Steve is really a gentle man.ā You always speak kindly, and gently. Then I thought to myself, āI can learn from this man.ā
I was not raised with religion, and was raised in a tough way. So sometimes the chip on my shoulder makes an appearance.
I have read descriptions by scientists and doctors, that even when new findings are realized, the old guard simply wonāt accept them. I think they put the doctor (who first postulated the concept of bacteria) into a mental institution.
In the same way people in general donāt think for themselves, as much as they go along (religiously) with the things they have grown up with.
For example, I recently asked AI on my computer why the people in the southeast of the U.S. have hatred for black people. And AI said, it is mostly a question of the values they are taught as children.
Soā¦ā¦what was happening, in my little mind, yesterday, was that I saw that someone posted that the body is not different from the soul, and he quoted Genesis 2.7 to make his point. And I guess I became somewhat indignant (or ignorant). And I began ranting to a degree.
But you are correct in making the point that if I make strong assertions, about motivated interpretations of the Bible, I should be able to back up what I am saying.
When I read about the history of āthe Inquisitionā, which was implemented under the leadership of the Catholic Church, all in the name of being pleasing to Jesusā¦ā¦..I become emotionally reactive. Then I become a little less careful about the things I say.
At the same time, I recently received a reply, from a Catholic Talk participent, telling me that Thomas Aquinas encouraged the acceptance of scientific findings in the place of some of the concepts put forward in the Bible.
Soā¦. sometimes I am more of a fundamentalistā¦..and sometimes I am inclined to use what I consider to be my common senseā¦ā¦e.g., that the chemical elements of the periodic chart do not have consciousnessā¦ that spirit is consciousā¦ā¦and that therefore when the spirit soul resides within the material body, the material body expresses the symptoms of lifeā¦.only as long as the spirit soul inhabits it. I think someone was posting the idea that God ābreathedā life into the material body, and concluded that this means there is no difference between the body and the soul.
We know that when a person dies, the soul goes to heaven or hell, or perhaps purgatory. And the body is completely destroyed, by decay, or fire, or by ingestion by animalsā¦ā¦.So to say that the body and soul are oneā¦ā¦ā¦I guess I have to take a few deep breaths, be more patient, more humbleā¦ā¦I confess that I am a āwork in progress.ā
But againā¦..thank you for your sweet and gentle nature. I am truly grateful to you Steve for being a teacher for meā¦ā¦by your patient example. Peter
Thank you for your kind words. You must be referring to my good twin. (Just kidding. By the way, I thought that Robert Louis Stevensonās book about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was good. In the novel, Dr. Jekyll concocted a drug or something that would let one side of his personality dominate. Eventually the bad side, Mr. Hyde, dominated and the good side couldnāt appear at all.)
As for the unity of body and soul, I think that they are united in this life. My body never goes anywhere without my soul. At death they will be separated until the resurrection. I think that the point of the Genesis story about the creation of humans is to show that God made the material and spiritual parts of us and that they are united as God intended, that His plan didnāt include death for us.
Germs were seen under microscopes in the 1600s. I donāt know of anyone who was considered insane for saying that germs exist, but it took a while for their existence to be accepted. By the late 1700s, Dr. Boylston had discovered how to inoculate people against smallpox, and he pretty much stopped an epidemic of it. A lot of New England towns have a Boylston Street named for him.
āSweet and gentle,ā taking deep breaths, reminds me of a friend at work; I was editing something she had written, and in shaping the manuscript, she said to go with my early instincts. I said that my early instincts were to cry and yell till I got what I wanted, and that seemed to work, so I still do it. (Again, just kidding.)
The answer you got from AI is a good example of Artificial Ignorance at work. It is true that in the Southeast U.S. there used to be widespread hatred of blacks by many whites. In the 1950s and 1960s, Virginia and other states had a āmassive resistanceā campaign in which they closed schools rather than racially integrate them. At the time, I was a kid in New York and New Jersey, and there was bigotry there, but not so much, and my parents taught us to treat everyone the same.
By the time I moved to Virginia in 1991 (and I lived there till 2022) it was very different. My neighborhood had houses owned by white, black, and brown people, and people got along. Among the friends I made in Virginia, some were white, some black. There were still some people with animosity toward people who were different from themselves, but widespread hatred I didnāt see.
This is nice to hear! The need to āfind faultā with others, to feel superior by seeing others as inferiorā¦ā¦.this is the symptom of having no sense of a living connection with God. There is one Vedic aphorism in the Sanskrit language: āatmavan manyate jagat.ā It means that one sees or perceives the world in terms of the condition of oneās own mind. Contemporary psychology refers to this as āprojectionā. And ānew ageā people say that the world is our mirror.
If āthe devilā influences our way of thinking, this indicates that we are not in communion with God. Thatās when he creeps in to do his work.
To see spiritually means to see each other in terms of our spiritual potential. This is how Jesus sees all of us. And he tries to fan that flame in us. The doctor doesnāt hate the patient for being ill. He sees the patient in terms of his healthy potential, and tries to bring that into focus.
A person who is drawing closer to God, will remain humble, but begins to see his own divinity as a child of God. And, as he sees himself in this way, he spontaneously extends this vision to everyone he meets.
The KKK consider themselves to be good Christians. They hold a āwhite supremacistā point of view. At the same time we have golfers like Tiger Woods, basketball players like Michael Jordan, musicians like John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, and Wynton Marcellis, who won the prize for best jazz and classical trumpet in the same year. Then there are brilliant black intellectuals, and black inventors as well.
We simply have to try, with all our heart, to come closer to God. Then all of these anomalies ike xenophobia begin to evaporate.
When I was a university student, I moved into a black area of Montreal and shared an apartment with a few black people. Their ability to celebrate and life, and their joyful spirituality was a teaching to me.
Peter
Greetings dear Stephen! May our hearts be filled with Godās presence!