MarkostheGnostic said:

I'm not saying you have "emotional problems," I'm saying you have emotional reactions to ideas that you were taught, like the "reactive mind" that Dianetics talks about. Getting hammered as a child about Augustine's doctrine of 'Original Sin' and what a bad child you are, who must repent and be saved, blah, blah, blah, has created LOTS of resentment towards whatever brand of Christianity one came up in. Just ask Icelander! Augustine took the Pauline "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" - Romans 3:23, and made Christ absolutely indispensable for 'salvation,' even though Iesous recognized righteous men both Jew and Gentile. Paul had his own ideas about the workings of 'salvation,' and became the number one authority.

If one uses one's god-given intellect to explore the Hebrew idea of evil, one will find that we are said to have a Yetzer Hara Tov and a Yetzer Hara - a Good and and Evil inclination. This is WAY different from Original Sin which says that we are 'depraved from birth,' and inherit the rebellious sinfulness of our Primal Parents - the mythic Adam and Eve. All of Christian fanaticism hinges on this one point. Reject this Augustinian doctrine and Christianity resumes its nurturing, patient, accepting, original implications. Doctrines were not all-important, and many methodologies for entering into Christ [Consciousness] were acceptable. These were the Ante-Nicean years, before Nicaea, where and when Christian doctrine was codified. THIS is where I like to put my roots down and draw up early Christianity, especially the Gnostics, NOT the later developments which caused more harm than good.

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AngryPhil said:

Forget the definitions you have formed about these four words: God, The Father, The Son, The Holy Spirit. While reading, be conscious of the fact that this is for the purpose of redefining words, not the purpose of explaining the universe, and not for the purpose of supporting any other Christian concept. The purpose is to explain the God Trinity as something that can be incorporated into one's understanding without having to adopt any beliefs.

God: Everything; consists of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
Holy Spirit: That which is experienced
Son: You; The Relative Center; The Experiencer
Father: Everything else; the cause/means; that which science describes

So that's it. All there is is you, your experience, and everything else.  That's something everyone can relate to to some degree, I believe. You can debate whether any one of these things is actually 'real', but I find that irrelevant. It is the nature of each of these things, however, that will probably always be the subject of debate, but this is my understand of the nature of each thing as of yet:



The Holy Spirit is the experience, the Light that surrounds you. It is the only knowable, conceivable thing. The Holy Spirit takes the form of all that is imaginable and realizable: light, sound, emotion, thought, feeling, etc.

The Son is you. You are located at the center of the experience; you are the center. You are the thing that the Holy Spirit seems to be surrounding.

The Father, by deduction, is everything that is not The Son or the Holy Spirit, so explaining The Father gets a little more complicated. It is, among many things, everything going on behind the curtains. You and your experiences are able to exist, apparently, because of your body. Your body is able to exist because of the way that the universe exists, specifically the universe’s property of containing your body. The Father is the cause of the way things are, but realize that that statement is defining the term ‘The Father’, not defining the cause of the way things are. That needs to be emphasized. I’ll explain the best I can.

The Fa•ther [th uh fah-ther]
n. The cause of existence existing the way it exists

That definition in itself doesn’t tell you anything or propose an alternative/contradiction to any view. I’m just defining the term “The Father”. No other word defines the conglomeration of every single cause that has lead to things being this way right now. Science covers a lot, but doesn’t touch the initial Why that was the cause of the Big Bang. Science only works with the observable, and the Big Bang can’t, or can’t yet, be observed. You could say physics is the entire cause of existence existing the way it does, and it may well be, but nobody knows that for a fact. If, hypothetically, physics is the entire cause behind all of it, I have done nothing other than define The Father as a synonym for physics. Science is the further elaboration of this definition of The Father.

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Noteworthy said:

What is you? you talk as if the experiences you are having are surrounding 'you'. But can an experience occur without you? Isnt a perciever inherent in any experience? For you to experience something is merely for that experience to happen, for your 'experience' IS 'you having a particular experience

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Quote:

I still wonder - what is the whole xtian connxion?

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MarkostheGnostic said:

The unfortunate tendency throughout history has been to anthropomorphize God, yet the opposite may be true

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That's a big 'OH!' I had a few weeks ago. How humans are the only personified things. I almost feel like that realization gave me 'permission' to believe in God because I didn't have to look at him like the irrational idea of a huge invisible person. The word God, the way I see it, is simply defined as "that which is", which makes it a word with a definition, not a thing I have to believe in.