All things seen came from the unseen....

Proving God Physically

Does away with Faith Spiritually 

If someone cannot believe the Jonah story, then how do they believe the resurrection story? If they only believe something easy to believe, or explained by history, or even logic; how do they believe at all? Of course, an unfriendly and incorrect view of the Jonah story includes cartoons of Jonah playing poker over the long weekend with an octopus. 

Jonah was suffocated and digested. He died, just like Jesus died on the Cross. So, the story requires a greater belief than that, since Jonah died in the whale and came alive on the beach. Jesus even mentions Jonah, as a precursor to Himself in the New Testament. Another test is whether one believes in mountain moving faith faithfully or figuratively. 

Playing Church

Testing My Faith

From the time I was deciding whether Santa Claus existed or not, the adults in church made me wonder the same about Jesus Christ. I eventually learned everything from the adults, who I concluded, were in with God. The verdict was the adults were pretending for the benefit of the children. 

This lesson of pretense was drummed into me, in the church I was born into, to the Christian high school I graduated from, to the religious college I attended where I finally decided I was an avowed atheist. After seven years I became tired of that crowd. The extent of their awareness seemed to be all rejoicing when a church burned down. 

Playing Church

From the church I was born into, to the church I was married in, to the church where they normally put on a celebration when one dies, religion was either for the "benefit of the children" or for "clicks". 

Pretending Church

It was well known, since I heard it often enough from the adults, about pulpit talk. It was just for the children, the adults put no stock in it. All this even as far as my 12th grade in high school where I was told, literally now, it was all for the benefit of the children. 

Easter in
Stained Glass

Jesus said, if you love me, you will obey my commandments. In my experience, few in church prominence even know or give any recognition of what the commandments are. Many in churches I attended, the lay people preached or taught from books they read. They never said what they themselves believed or mentioned how they came to believe in Jesus. 

If the great doubter cannot shake anyone from their belief in Jesus, he will settle for shaking their belief in the power of Jesus. 

One can only imagine how many fourteen old boys graduate from the coloring books of church and enter college. There they are told, by professors in college, and they agree with what they are told, if you are educated you do not believe in God.

Does God allow sin?

Some Cannot Distinguish the Spirit 

I eventually focused into my mind the only desirable state is to be one with Jesus and the spirit as He has revealed, the Holy Spirit, all one with God the Father. 

Another time, when I was more or less watching my life go by like a movie, at a favorable moment for it, someone came to the door asking if he could explain to me about the Trinity. My curiosity about a subject I never gave much thought to allowed him in. When he finished, I thanked him for his presentation and said I'd never before thought the Trinity as so important and interesting. He, surprised, had argued the opposite, emphasizing that the word Trinity was not even in the entire Bible.

In that view is the admission he had no idea of the spirit at all, only of the flesh. Later I found John 17 revealed the Trinity in the spirit where we are all one with Jesus. The spirit is not bound by words which are merely signals better suited for the ideas of the flesh rather than the spirit. 

Eventually my belief grew around Jesus who is my first touchstone, the cornerstone so to speak, if that is correct for me to say. He became my Paraclete before God, verifying my accepting my sins, that I believed, were forgiven by Him on the Cross, as God had instructed. All this is required because God will not allow any sin whatever to be permitted in His presence. Sin enters by the freewill of anyone who decides to favor sin. God has nothing to do with it.

Our flesh cannot help us.. . .

Holding to the Spirit 

More Tightly than the Flesh? 

Our flesh sees flesh, now briefly, and our spirit sees spirit forever in due time. Our flesh will be strong, perhaps, if our spirit is strong. But, according to Jesus, the flesh cannot help us. 

First the flesh is born, then the spirit is born. The act of being "born" is "again" not the flesh or the spirit. The implication is the flesh changes and in change, dies when its' function is no longer active. We will be faced forever with our spirit eternally. 

Does holding onto the flesh weaken the spirit?

Eventually one could more greatly love the flesh or totally love the spirit. This is the big contention struggling for a decision within. Seems like I should be more willing to lose my flesh, in order to gain my spirit. This, of course, has been pointed out before. But sometimes I think one can slip over it.  

Definitions defined

Money is stored labor and words are stored ideas. Money is like art. Art is a verb, not a subject. Like the Benny Goodman song says in the title, It, is not "what" you do, it, is the "way" that you do it. Finally, politics is gossip. Gossip is merely hearsay to everyone who did not hear it originally. Called rumor in the market, 70% of rumor, it has been said, often turns out to be true. Rumor, like gossip, is people said. People said reflects people spirit. This blog talks to issues spirit, not to people said. This is only what I say. Everyone else believes what they say. Everyone is on their own nickel.                                                                  From the BigCyranose.

Issues that set the stage

 Growth is the only evidence of life.

John Henry Newman

What the "ring true" of this quote means to me: Change is continuing. Everything in this life has a course that will be concluded. Once completed we will go on to another completion. Whether we will grow, when we are a born again as a spirit, is not clear at this stage, at least to me. Right now we are changing, in appearance, in everything. Ahead may well be the same, or not. But we just cannot die and everything stop, I was going to say, dead. I suspect we will experience what we believed. We will be our own judges in a sense. We can only hope the Paraclete will be our judge. I am groping in the dark, but we should see it clearer in the spirit, according to the Saints.

Here is a neat trick if I ever saw one

The forever loop

When the opportunity for knowledge presented itself to the human race, guess what? Knowledge included knowledge of ignorance. Ignorance of what? Knowledge of questions to be answered. 

So what? The answers to questions of knowledge contained more questions. Watch out! Change is in the wind. In the dynamics of the conundrum we learn answers revealing more questions. So the bald state of things now is that we learn we are in a loop. We are enlarging our knowledge that we are aware of our ignorance.

And we will never get out of the loop? No? So if not, how will we ever be able to answer the question of whether there is a God, or not? So now we are looking for a different answer to a different question.

The bottom line

John 17

After all the logic and the reasoning, the proving, all that thinking, it all contains not one wit of faith. Is that true? I can sense a decision or a resolution approaching in the doorway. But I am not sure of what it is really going to be. Maybe it will be just believing, as believing in one, like believing in John 17.

The perils of logic in....

The Tangle of Reason? 

Anyone who can explain how any difficult event could be believable, is in some quarters, considered launching an atheistic attack on the body of Christ by certain believers. First, one viewpoint maintains that the stories in the Bible are not true, only the meaning is true, then we have the opposite "believable" view considered as also not acceptable either.

God Tips the Scales for Believers

The idea that God Himself has any say in whether the "bush is burning" or is not burning, is a gap in the considerations of this view. This, I am tempted to say, may be another tack that God has set up to force believers to "believe" rather than "prove" by my albeit hasty conclusion in this apparent conundrum. 

Changing
Reflections

In any event it looks like all those proving that God exists are on the edge of the cliff in this struggle. Once again, atheism seems to have the day. Unclear thinkers, I suspect, may have assumed the mantle of the seen world, and abandoned the spiritual world at a critical stage in their thinking.

The Slippery Slope

It is hard to get our minds out of the seen world, which is after all, an extension of the unseen world no matter whether one was to project a positive God's view existent forever or whether they predict an "altogether" nonexistent view after death. Beware is my operative word.  

Jesus

It is the Spirit which gives life. The flesh will not help you. The things which I have told you are spiritual and are life. But some of you will not believe me. Jesus

Avoiding the obvious...

God Cannot be Denied

 If someone does not believe in any logically dignified definition of God, then they are forced to believe in themselves in God's stead. They therefore become their own God. And not, by all appearances it seems to me at least, a rather unformed God in the process. 

However, it does appear to be a solid embrace of seen factors only. The inability to recognize anything of the unseen stands out as a complete ignorance of even known facts given in any picture. 

It helps to know what and how much to leave out.