Confirmation through the spirit or feelings?

[mfbukowski]

4 minutes ago, Ahab said:

Truth is what really is or was or will be.

Either 1 or 2 or all 3 of those things in reality.

I am truth, or a part of what is true,  and if I were not then I would not be.

No clue what that means

Nice poetry though.

[Ahab]

4 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

No clue what that means

Nice poetry though.

And I am okay with that too.

[hope_for_things]

20 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

 If you understand rorty and don't understand me I'm in trouble. If you don't understand both of us I'm okay with it.

Rorty can also be hard to understand.

I attended a conference at USU a couple weeks back about BoM translation.  There were great guests and they had some very interesting discussions.  I was actually following much of these discussions fairly well, which was surprising to me because I'm sure if I had attended a few years ago most of it would have been way over my head.  I guess all the reading I've done on church history in the past few years has really helped.   

http://chass.usu.edu/stay-connected/news/translation-conference

https://www.faithmatters.org/

So, I think it will take time to continue learning, I haven't really even read any philosophical books yet, I have a couple on my wish list, but honestly these aren't at the top of my priority list.  I will get to them at some point, and I'm sure it will help.  

[Gray]

 

21 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

I have no trust in "foundational stories" whatsoever- I do not comprehend what that would be like.

Of course you get a million conflicting stories- that is called "education".  You go out of your way to FIND those stories so you can find what YOU BELIEVE YOURSELF.

I slogged through years of philosophical training looking for what seemed right to me, and I came up with my philosophical views because my own mind confirmed to me that those views were right

But it wasn't enough

In my heart I knew there was more out there, so I kept looking for a theology that fit with my beliefs.   I was still subjectively dissatisfied with the fullness of my beliefs- they were incomplete.

I found a theology which promotes the good of humanity and sees Man as the creator of the universe as we know it

It says we have always existed as individuals- a feeling I have had all my life.

It says that humans should be the best possible humans they can be and we must serve each other.   It says that God continues to teach us all every day of our lives and the only way we can know this is by continuing the search through our own study and experience- exactly what I had been doing for 30 years of my life before I found the theology

It is a materialist philosophy which does not confuse matter with spirit and vice-versa.   It is not dualistic

It affirms the reality of religious experience- many of which I have had in my life.  It affirms that if a belief "bears fruit" in your life- it can be justified as "true".

It is constructivist- that we as humans and God as a Human- organize reality from matter unorganized as we see it.  We create reality by knowing it.  We essentially create our own worlds as God has done.  We are born to be like him and it is our nature to be like Him and bloom like a silk worm into a butterfly.

Gold plates?  Sure why not?  Could God do that if he wanted to?  Why not?  It is not important to the philosophy of theistic humanism and materialism which promotes the idea that beliefs are true if they work in your life.  How that philosophy came about is irrelevant- it is the philosophy that matters.   I never worried about what discipline Kant did to come up with his philosophy or what it took to get him to sit at a table for hours and face the blank page and come up with something profound.

Seer stones?   I did some of my best thinking staring at waves on the ocean- if you want to contemplate the patterns on a rock or on papyri why not?

For me God is the Ideal Me- the ideal human, the best I can imagine.  I look into myself and see what I could do to become better and THAT ideal self is the being I communicate with.   Is it my unconscious?  No- it feels like it is outside me because it speaks things I do not know

I learn things as one does in meditation, by turning inward and listen to that person I hear who tells me all I need to know

As always, my way is my own, patched together from all those conflicting thoughts which make you so uncomfortable apparently and is purely subjective and my own world created from matter unorganized

Is it "subjective"?  I would hope so!  How else could I know it was true for me?

Thanks for your thoughts, MFB. I never REALLY disagree with you, but our minds process things differently. 

I maintain separate categories in my head that I don't think you maintain. For example, I evaluate scripture and stories from church history on two different levels

1)  Is it likely to have happened historically like that?

2)  Regardless of whether it happened that way, what's the spiritual lesson?

Take the nativity stories in the New Testament. They're likely invented from whole cloth. That's the conclusion from higher criticism, and I find that convincing based on available evidence. However, that does not mean that I do not also find profound spiritual meaning in the nativity stories. They have a beautiful spiritual message, more important to me than if events literally happened like that. 

So I'm trying to understand how you would process the same thing. I would guess that you don't care in the least whether or not it was historical, and don't care to form an opinion about it, and are probably highly skeptical of the the conclusions of historians to begin with. You find that believing in the story adds meaning and value to your life, therefore it's worth believing. Is that right? But, I'm not sure what you mean by believing in the story. What does that look like? It doesn't sound to me exactly like you're consciously maintaining some kind of mental division between literal and metaphorical? The only thing that matters is whether it adds value to your life?

Feel free to correct anything I've gotten wrong here. 

 

Edited April 5, 2017 by Gray

[Gray]

1 hour ago, Ahab said:

I can be a pretty good doubter when I want to be.  So much so that I could continually doubt everything without ever being sure of anything as long as I continued to doubt any and even every source of assurance.

Couldn't you do that, too?

Then all we would have is doubt.

Do you want to see how much fun that would be?  We could do a little experiment to show how far we could carry that and keep that up. 

I will begin by doubting everything you say from now on.

Doubt your own existence first. That's a great way to come to a firm testimony that you actually do exist. "Examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good."

Edited April 5, 2017 by Gray

[Gray]

2 hours ago, JLHPROF said:

Except that's the exact opposite of everything God and Christ ever said on the matter.

"Examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good"

[Ahab]

1 minute ago, Gray said:

Doubt your own existence first. That's a great way to come to a firm testimony that you actually do exist. "Examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good."

No I'd rather just doubt what you say, for now.  I exist, and I don't doubt that. And I also know that you exist as I continue to doubt what you say.

[JLHPROF]

19 minutes ago, Gray said:

"Examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good"

"Ask in faith, nothing doubting"

[Gray]

21 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

God is inside me not outside me.  The kingdom of heaven is within

Meditation tells you nothing about science, I cannot comprehend how you think it should.

I'm not trying to make it scientific exactly. But in trying to figure out what's really going on with prayer, I'm accepting data from outside of my own experience. I'm also taking into account the experiences of many, many other people who pray, to try to understand the nature of what's really happening. That's what makes me think that prayer is an internal meditative exercise, not literally a conversation with another being. 

21 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Why should you listen to some rabbi who knows no more than you do?

He expressed a formulation for God made instant sense to me. The traditional God as loving parent model was failing for me - I could no longer believe it. But I found that quite a number of people, both in Christianity and in Judaism, have found value in non-personal models for God. God is existence, God is a verb, etc. It instantly clicked with me. It's not about discovering that his model was objectively the right model. It was discovering a model that was meaningful for me. 

 

21 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

God does not send conflicting messages- the world does.  Conflicting messages are the matter unorganized we must organize into a world like unto the other worlds people have created for themselves as gods in embryo.

But people get conflicting messages in prayer. Every conversion story is largely the same story. "God told me that this is the right path, the only true path." But each time the path is a different path.

In a sense the revelation that most of them are getting is true, with the exception of the word "only". Most religious paths are true. But no particular path is the ONLY true path. So again, prayer works for subjective questions, not objective questions. 

 

21 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Some might seem God as their own unconscious but I see Him as an Other who teaches me, as you admit, "some good spiritual insights"

Why you would trust the philosophies of men above God within- your Best Self is incomprehensible to me, but thanks for the insight into another consciousness.

All philosophies are the philosophies of men. God doesn't have any philosophies at all. God just IS.  

 

21 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

It is a rare opportunity to step into another's consciousness- thanks.   Your consciousness is about as far from mine as can be comprehended - yours is totally external.  You even see your consciousness projected onto external reality so that God is existence itself- the external it self

For you to learn about externals is to learn about God.

For me God is learning about myself.

Very interesting and thank you for the discussion.  I think it is clear we will never understand each other fully in this area. 

I think we converge in some ways, but diverge in many other ways. That's okay. If we were all the same the world would be pretty boring. I have no illusions that there is one right way to approach spirituality. . 

Thanks MFB. 

[Gray]

20 hours ago, Ahab said:

You're speaking as if you have the right to speak for everybody, as if your own subjective reality experiences apply to their own subjective reality experiences, when in objective reality you are only projecting your own ideas onto them.

You don't have any real idea about what happens when I pray.  At most you only know what happens when you pray and it seems that you think that since that is what happens when you pray that it also must be what happens when I pray.  That everyone must experience the same things that you experience, if they experience it at all, and that it can be no other way.

Kinda funny, really. Or did I not understand you correctly?

Well, if we wanted to find out if you're really getting messages from God, we could do an experiment to confirm it, right? You could ask God for the answer to a difficult calculus problem, and test the answer you get. Then you would know for sure. But religious systems have been set up to making trying confirm whether or not the process is working an act of blasphemy. So no one tries. You're not supposed to test God. 

I just observe that when a thousand people ask God what the one true true religious path is, they get hundreds of conflicting answers. Either God is not literally giving them any answers, or the method is wildly unreliable for getting that kind of information for other reasons. 

Now, if a thousand people ask God what the right path for only for them is, I have no reason to question the answer they get, even if they get a thousand different answers. Prayer works for that kind of thing. 

 

[Gray]

20 hours ago, CV75 said:

How did the rabbi objectively prove that “God is Existence Itself?

He can't of course. It's just a model. Any model you have for God will be subjective. Existence is not subjective, but defining existence as God is subjective.

 

20 hours ago, CV75 said:

 

How is “God literally broadcasts messages into your brain” any different from the subjective processes and dynamics by which you sense anyone or anything else?

 

Why is it you believe that convergence the aim, but more to the point, why does it matter to you whether it comes by way of an objective or subjective process?

 

If God is literally broadcasting messages into our brains I think the results of prayer would look quite different what we actually see. If that's your model, you can often get into trouble, like when Elder Holland went the wrong way down the road at night because he believed that God was literally telling him which road to take. Prayer doesn't work for those kinds of questions.

If you understand what kinds of questions prayer is useful for, you'll get more out of it. 

[pogi]

17 hours ago, Ahab said:

Words are always inadequate to describe reality.

That is right but what about your perceptions?  Are they even capable of experiencing reality as it is?  Do you really experience reality as it is, or do you experience it as you are?  That is what MFB means when he says that truth cannot be verified outside of human experience. When you can find a way to tap into all extrasensory/perceptory experience, be sure and let us know what reality really is like.  Actually, don't bother trying to explain it to us, because we wont have any way to understand/perceive what the heck you are talking about.  It will sound like nonsense to us.

17 hours ago, Ahab said:

We see some of what is, in other words. To see all we must experience everything.

How do you know that you see some things as they are (see above)?  The more we see, the more our understanding of what is evolves.  Until you can experience everything, you can' know anything with certainty, because new learning/experience might alter our understanding of previous truths and our understanding of reality changes.

18 hours ago, Ahab said:

But it is not only to be found in sentences.  If the cars are real, then they are real cars and they really have what we refer to as color. 

One example of how new learning and experience can alter our understanding of reality:

We once thought that red cars actually are red, but we were wrong.  If it is accurate to say that a car has a color, it is more accurate to say that the car has every color but the red color we see.  Objects reflect the colors that we see and absorb all other colors.  The more we learn the more we realize how our concept of reality is fluid.  We see things as we are and not necessarily as they are. 

 

[Gray]

34 minutes ago, Ahab said:

No I'd rather just doubt what you say, for now.  I exist, and I don't doubt that. And I also know that you exist as I continue to doubt what you say.

Great. Test everything. 

If there's something you're afraid to test, though, doesn't that mean you're secretly afraid it isn't true?

Edited April 5, 2017 by Gray

[Gray]

19 minutes ago, JLHPROF said:

"Ask in faith, nothing doubting"

We've all tried that, and we've all seen it work sometimes, and fail most of the time. 

[Ahab]

11 minutes ago, Gray said:

I'm not trying to make it scientific exactly. But in trying to figure out what's really going on with prayer, I'm accepting data from outside of my own experience.

You mean from God or from what other people tell you about their own prayer experiences?  

First rule about prayer is to figure out WHO is giving you thoughts and feelings that you didn't have to begin with.  For me that is basically about distinguishing thoughts are good from thoughts that are bad/evil and giving credit to God for the good thoughts I am getting through prayer.

Second rule about prayer is to disregard any thoughts and feelings you get from anyone other than God.

 

11 minutes ago, Gray said:

I'm also taking into account the experiences of many, many other people who pray, to try to understand the nature of what's really happening. That's what makes me think that prayer is an internal meditative exercise, not literally a conversation with another being. 

Sounds like you're paying way too much attention to hearsay and not enough attention to determining whether or not you are getting any good thoughts or feelings through your own prayers.

 

[CV75]

53 minutes ago, Gray said:

I maintain separate categories in my head that I don't think you maintain. For example, I evaluate scripture and stories from church history on two different levels

1)  Is it likely to have happened historically like that?

2)  Regardless of whether it happened that way, what's the spiritual lesson?

Applying this to the “God is Existence Itself” belief:

1) Existence is 100% likely to be happening or to have happened, by some standard of historicity.

2) The spiritual lesson is that God is whatever happened or happens by that standard.

 

Then applying this to the “God does not broadcast messages into your brain” belief:

1) Existence is 100% unlikely to be messaged through your senses.

2) The spiritual lesson is that you perceive neither existence (present) nor history (past).

 

The two beliefs are contradictory, no?

11 minutes ago, Gray said:

If God is literally broadcasting messages into our brains I think the results of prayer would look quite different what we actually see. If that's your model, you can often get into trouble, like when Elder Holland went the wrong way down the road at night because he believed that God was literally telling him which road to take. Prayer doesn't work for those kinds of questions.

This isn't addressing my question, only repeating the assertion that prompted it.

What aspects of the world around you are not broadcasting messages into your brain (how else do you perceive anything or anyone, including yourself?)? How and why is it that two people say they see the same thing (or that they do not), and how is prayer any different?

[Ahab]

25 minutes ago, Gray said:

Well, if we wanted to find out if you're really getting messages from God, we could do an experiment to confirm it, right? You could ask God for the answer to a difficult calculus problem, and test the answer you get. Then you would know for sure. But religious systems have been set up to making trying confirm whether or not the process is working an act of blasphemy. So no one tries. You're not supposed to test God. 

I just observe that when a thousand people ask God what the one true true religious path is, they get hundreds of conflicting answers. Either God is not literally giving them any answers, or the method is wildly unreliable for getting that kind of information for other reasons. 

Now, if a thousand people ask God what the right path for only for them is, I have no reason to question the answer they get, even if they get a thousand different answers. Prayer works for that kind of thing. 

The opinions of other people do not matter one whit when it comes to personal prayer.

It is about what God tells you or how God inspires you to feel, personally.  Not what God tells other people or what other people say God told them in prayer.

Repeat after me now:

"What other people say God says doesn't amount to a hill of beans unless or until God tells me the same thing, personally."

If you don't understand that then you are not thinking about prayer as you should be.

Edited April 5, 2017 by Ahab

[Gray]

9 minutes ago, Ahab said:

You mean from God or from what other people tell you about their own prayer experiences?  

First rule about prayer is to figure out WHO is giving you thoughts and feelings that you didn't have to begin with.  For me that is basically about distinguishing thoughts are good from thoughts that are bad/evil and giving credit to God for the good thoughts I am getting through prayer.

Second rule about prayer is to disregard any thoughts and feelings you get from anyone other than God.

If it's so difficult to distinguish a message from God vs a message from Satan, then prayer is unreliable. Same result. 

 

9 minutes ago, Ahab said:

 

Sounds like you're paying way too much attention to hearsay and not enough attention to determining whether or not you are getting any good thoughts or feelings through your own prayers.

 

I'll add my own experience then. 10 years ago my prayers confirmed my orthodox Mormon views. Today my prayers confirm my very different, unorthodox views. Did God change his theology recently? Or is prayer not about getting discrete messages from God?

[Gray]

6 minutes ago, Ahab said:

The opinions of other people do not matter one whit when it comes to personal prayer.

It is about what God tells you or how God inspires you to feel, personally.  Not what God tells other people or what other people say God told them in prayer.

Repeat after me now:

"What other people say God says doesn't amount to a hill of beans unless or until God tells me the same thing, personally."

If you don't understand that then you are not thinking about prayer as you should be.

The experiences of other people when they pray are an important indicator of whether or not prayer is a reliable means of learning "objectively true" things. A sample size of one (yourself only) is not meaningful in trying to answer this question (unless you're willing to add strict controls to the experiment). 

Edited April 5, 2017 by Gray

[Gray]

13 minutes ago, CV75 said:

Applying this to the “God is Existence Itself” belief:

1) Existence is 100% likely to be happening or to have happened, by some standard of historicity.

2) The spiritual lesson is that God is whatever happened or happens by that standard.

Then applying this to the “God does not broadcast messages into your brain” belief:

1) Existence is 100% unlikely to be messaged through your senses.

2) The spiritual lesson is that you perceive neither existence (present) nor history (past).

The two beliefs are contradictory, no?

I'm sorry, I didn't follow most of that. That doesn't really represent my approach, from what I understood of it. There is no historical or scientific way to test the notion that God is existence, to begin with. But history has something to say about Nephites, or the life of Jesus. 

 

13 minutes ago, CV75 said:

This isn't addressing my question, only repeating the assertion that prompted it.

What aspects of the world around you are not broadcasting messages into your brain (how else do you perceive anything or anyone, including yourself?)? How and why is it that two people say they see the same thing (or that they do not), and how is prayer any different?

Prayer is different because prayer is entirely in the mind. You and I can use our eyes and both see the same rhino at the zoo. 

Our internal experiences are different. We self-generate thoughts and feelings all the time. Some people think that God intervenes and puts some of these feelings and thoughts into our brains directly. How do you confirm that? How would that even work? The kinds of answers people get to prayers suggest that it doesn't work like that at all. 

 

[Ahab]

24 minutes ago, pogi said:

That is right but what about your perceptions?  Are they even capable of experiencing reality as it is?  Do you really experience reality as it is, or do you experience it as you are?

Both. As it is through my own sensory perceptions, including the perceptions God gives me.

24 minutes ago, pogi said:

 That is what MFB means when he says that truth cannot be verified outside of human experience.

Verified, true, but it is still out there before we perceive it otherwise there would be nothing for us to perceive.

24 minutes ago, pogi said:

When you can find a way to tap into all extrasensory/perceptory experience, be sure and let us know what reality really is like.  Actually, don't bother trying to explain it to us, because we wont have any way to understand/perceive what the heck you are talking about.  It will sound like nonsense to us.

Yeah that is the impression I get sometimes too when my explanations and descriptions seem to fall on deaf ears and eyes that can't see.

24 minutes ago, pogi said:

How do you know that you see some things as they are (see above)?  The more we see, the more our understanding of what is evolves.  Until you can experience everything, you can' know anything with certainty, because new learning/experience might alter our understanding of previous truths and our understanding of reality changes.

One example of how new learning and experience can alter our understanding of reality:

We once thought that red cars actually are red, but we were wrong.  If it is accurate to say that a car has a color, it is more accurate to say that the car has every color but the red color we see.  Objects reflect the colors that we see and absorb all other colors.  The more we learn the more we realize how our concept of reality is fluid.  We see things as we are and not necessarily as they are. 

Language is inadequate to express all there is to truth (aka reality) and that will always be. Language just doesn't cut it. And to say that truth is dependent on language is just plain silly.

[Ahab]

13 minutes ago, Gray said:

If it's so difficult to distinguish a message from God vs a message from Satan, then prayer is unreliable. Same result. 

It's not that difficult and it keeps getting easier the better you know the difference between good from evil.

13 minutes ago, Gray said:

I'll add my own experience then. 10 years ago my prayers confirmed my orthodox Mormon views. Today my prayers confirm my very different, unorthodox views. Did God change his theology recently? Or is prayer not about getting discrete messages from God?

Why do you even ask me?  What point do you think that serves?

I trust what God tells me, regardless of what other people say, and I have never received any conflicting messages from him in the same contexts. But I have discarded some things that I once thought were true based on my own ideas in favor of what God later taught me. 

[Ahab]

19 minutes ago, Gray said:

The experiences of other people when they pray are an important indicator of whether or not prayer is a reliable means of learning "objectively true" things.

Not in my opinion.  Even the words of scripture mean nothing to me unless or until God says that same thing to me, personally.

19 minutes ago, Gray said:

A sample size of one (yourself only) is not meaningful in trying to answer this question (unless you're willing to add strict controls to the experiment). 

What question is this, exactly?

All I need is God's answer to me, personally, and it's just an added bonus when I perceive that God has also told other people the same thing.

[JLHPROF]

46 minutes ago, Gray said:

Quote

"Ask in faith, nothing doubting"

We've all tried that, and we've all seen it work sometimes, and fail most of the time. 

So God lied...or we are doing it wrong.  I know which I'd presume was happening.

Edited April 5, 2017 by JLHPROF

[Gray]

7 minutes ago, JLHPROF said:

So God lied...or we are doing it wrong.  I know which I'd presume was happening.

I've asked for things with, nothing doubting, and nothing happened. But there are always contingency explanations for these results. 

We can play dueling scripture passages all day, but I find this passage more reflective of the reality I experience:

"that ye may be the children of your Father who is in Heaven. For He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust."