Judeo-Christian God intended as metaphor?

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Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order

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CosmicJoke
happy mutant

Registered: 04/05/00
Posts: 10,848
Loc: Portland, OR

Re: Judeo-Christian God intended as metaphor?

[Re: WhiskeyClone]
#4238780 - 05/31/05 01:38 AM (21 years, 4 months ago)

In terms of the melodrama presented in The Gospel of Mark, we as a reader know that the Kingdom which Jesus speaks of is not the Jerusalem which his followers believed He would claim as their home. One experiences partial insight that Jesus is more than what they thought him to be when he witnesses a miracle of healing a blind man's eyes, but is ultimately more concerned with securing a kingdom on earth than in spirit.

I thnk the author of The Gospel of Mark is definately creates a dramatic scenerio in which there's a sad condition of man to be driven to put all one's eggs in one basket for securing a materially successful future. Even awa-inspiring miracles that we as readers would lose are bearings over if having witnessed (how small our worlds would seem in light of such a greater reality) only seem to stir more mania for those to jump in on Christ's bandwagon and get their hands on the upcoming wealth. I find this to be really dramatic, moving literature with lessons to learn and live by.

However, by believing that this is the "true" version of how things happened as opposed to say the "false" messages given by the author of The Gospel of Matthew, in which we as readers and His followers know that he is the Savior from the very beginning (not only is his birthright traced back to Abraham, but also his birth is the fulfillment of several Jewish prophecies) woould be a premature closing of one's account with the deeper realities.

Although there is a lot of appeal in your belief, since we currently have no way to go back in time and see excatly what the relationship of Jesus and his Apostles were, consider the possibility of leaving how his actual life played out as indeterminite while letting the metaphor within the Gospel live.

I remember once talking to a preacher on campus when i was majoring in philosophy and our conversation turned towards the virgin birth. I told her a controversial idea about its origins (as it's not mentioned once in the Gospel of Mark) and I had end the conversation as it quickly became meaningless when she argued that believing in the virgin birth was essential in christian spiritual life. While we could have argued until time travel was invented to see if Jesus was really born to a Virgin, I can still find no conceivable way to test whether or not believing in the virgin birth is a crux in living a spiritual life.

While there may be good potential to get into some of the deeper realities that are revealed within the Gospel of Matthew (Markos can tell you a lot about what Jewish forms of story telling reveals about the culture which these texts came arose from) I hope that for now you think awhile on what it is safe to think of as true, false, indeterminate, and meaningless as your investigations continue.

--------------------
Everything is better than it was the last time. I'm good.

If we could look into each others hearts, and understand the unique challenges each of us faces, I think we would treat each other much more gently, with more love, patience, tolerance, and care.

It takes a lot of courage to go out there and radiate your essence.

I know you scared, you should ask us if we scared too. If you was there, and we just knew you cared too.

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eve69
--=..Did Adam and ...?=--

Registered: 04/30/03
Posts: 3,932
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Re: Judeo-Christian God intended as metaphor?

[Re: CosmicJoke]
#4456426 - 07/26/05 04:30 PM (21 years, 2 months ago)

I like the theme of God as Mother Nature. I think that deep in many of the Eastern traditions one can find that the essential five elements are considered the absolute root of existance and their permutations are the self-same intelligence which is when manifested all that we really know.

In many of these religions like Taoism, Vedaism, Tantra, etc... knowledge of God is considered the same as knowledge of the power of healing in which case the search for God is the search for restoration of balance of the subtle, and thence gross elements.

Often, acknowledgement of the expansiveness of the space element is alone close enough to the finest space-time intelligence to manifest healing for all the elements. It's said that space element controls the others.

Therefore learning of oneself as the self-same spaciousness as the basic space of all phenomena is said to be the experience of oneness with God.

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...or something

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Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order

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