Passage ...... Where do you go after you die

Hi terry, good to read you again.Your question can be answered with one simple question .... does the spirit survive the body or is it vice versa?

Omar had a handle on it when he wrote
XLIV
Why, if the Soul can fling the Dust aside,
And naked on the Air of Heaven ride,
Were't not a Shame--were't not a Shame for him
In this clay carcase crippled to abide?


XLV
'Tis but a Tent where takes his one day's rest
A Sultan to the realm of Death addrest;
The Sultan rises, and the dark Ferrash
Strikes, and prepares it for another Guest.


We are not 'trapped' by our human host, we are trapped by the delisciousness (is that a word?) of the human senses. I doubt if spirits reproduce sexually or if at all. Those special moments when both participants in sex sense the approaching climax and are joined, so to speak, are those moments orchestrated by the human aspect of our totality, or the spiritual ...... keep in mind the soul or spirit has no sexual equipment, no way of appreciating a human union .... that is except for emotions, one primarily ..... the one that ties it all together, the hardest to define .... LOVE

Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Amen, and pass the psilocybin.

No thank you ..... but to each his own.

Doug, my guess is that the spirit is produced by the brain/body and does not survive death. If it does, why would anyone choose to suffer in this life rather than abandon the carcass and take the ride to paradise?

Of course it is possible that spirits exist independently and choose to possess bodies in order to experience the pleasures of the flesh. Sex is a rather odd way to go about establishing a spiritual union, in my opinion. But I suppose many people equate sex with love. There are other sensations to enjoy as well. :wink:

Today was the kind of day that makes life worthwhile. I was off today so I slept in, puttered around the house and took my dog for a walk along a lake lined with the pastel greens and reds of trees just leafing out, dogwoods and crabapples in bloom, the spicy scent of phlox, clumps of bluets scattered in the meadows, a tiger swallowtail sipping from honeysuckle, a pair of geese with five goslings swimming between them, a path through the woods edged with golden wildflowers (hawkweed, probably), blissful peace, and even a pine tree by the lake that would have been perfect for bread, wine and reading verses with someone who sees the beauty in nature. (OK, so my husband always declines to walk with us and doesn't care for picnics or poetry. And I kept thinking of the tornado victims and wondering why I got such perfect weather and they got devastation. No one said life is fair.) My son came home to pick up his car, and I stir fried chicken with fresh asparagus, baby bella mushrooms, onions, and lemon pepper seasoning served on leftover basmati rice with cilantro. It was a day any spirit could appreciate.

A spirit would not be able to enjoy any of these things if it had no way to interact with the physical universe. I don't even see how it could think or know anything without some sort of memory storage and processing apparatus.

Where did spirits come from in the first place? Are they made of energy, magic, some unknown substance, nothing at all? Can more than one spirit inhabit a body? Can a spirit inhabit multiple bodies? Does every person who is born get a spirit, even those who die as infants? Why would a spirit choose to inhabit a body that lacked one or more senses or was prone to painful disease?

Why do some people break out of their prisons, while others huddle in a dank corner or terrorize their fellow inmates? Are all spirits created equal or are some better than others? Do they grow, mature, and remember previous experiences? Given that many people are ill-bred ignorant scum, are their spirits "bad" or are they simply unable to control the pathological impulses of the flesh?

Drawn like a moth to flame
awareness is to blame
once learned
never to be
the same

The physical or base aspect is nothing compared to the spiritual that is shared in love. Masturbation will achieve organism.
There is one emotion, shared by the physical senses and experienced by body and soul. I LOVE that sunset, Mozart is one of my great LOVEs .... Hitler LOVEd to kill Jews. Had he known or been aware of the nature of love????? Who knows... Love is the power that drives us be the stimulus base or intellectual in origin. unfortunately love is often confused in it's intention.

There is an intelligence in every atom of our universe, to whatever infinite degree. An intelligence that by nature attracts intelligence building intelligence to the point of an awareness that a purpose can be served .... enter, the spirit. A good definition of a human would be .... a spirit without purpose, without love to guide him.

I hope this is not too hard to read, most of the time I write as I think, jumping from one theme to another, sometimes to the point of incoherence as pointed out by my good friends Frank and Snood.

I'm a ramblin' man, ramblin', ramblin' ramblin'.....

Snood, obviousy I respect and value your opinion or I would not ask, what is your take on my premise, as you understand it?

Gel, you seem to me to be going through Kansas, California and Bali just to get from New York to Jersey.

Simply put, you (and others here) seem to go to great lengths to miss the obvious.

You obviously give credence to the concepts of spirit and love, but cannot countenance the notion of a creator/God.

It's puzzling to me, because in my estimation, science itself more proves than disproves the existence of God. If you believe that existence as humans comes as an end result of the Big Bang together with evolution, that's like saying "Nothing+The Impersonal+Time+Chance = everything in existence today" Science will not support the idea that something comes from nothing. In a book Called The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century, the author talks about a question put to a high powered computer: "Beginning with chaos at any acceptable amount of time up to 8 billion years ago, could the present complexity of the universe come about by chance?" The answer was absolutely NO.
A British mathmetician and astronomer named Hoyle recently calculated that it would take ten to the forty thousandth power years for CHANCE to produce even the simplest cell. That is an unimaginable length of time - it's longer than 8 billion years, and few scientists will tell you that the universe is any older than that.

I don't go down that road of contention very often with people, because in the final analysis, for those who don't believe in God no explanation will suffice, and for those who do, none is necessary.

Perhaps I haven't here addressed your ideas as you would've preferred. Forgive me, but I think my prejudice in favor of an omnipotent intelligence makes it hard for me to focus sufficiently to navigate some of the finer points I'm sure you're trying to make.

Snood

I enjoyed reading your excellent last post, but...

...one of the reasons I am so adamant about acknowledging my agnosticism is to avoid the kind of illogical reasoning that Hoyle and the author of "The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century" make.

They are assuming that this is all there is and ever has been. If they are not making that assumption -- which is an invalid assumption to make -- they would not arrive at the conclusions they have espoused.

Let me try to explain:

Suppose that the UNIVERSE is more than what we presently call the universe -- a supposition that is every bit as valid as supposing what we call the universe is all there is.

And suppose that the UNIVERSE is eternal -- always has been and always will be -- a supposition that is every bit as valid as supposing what we call the universe is finite in time. (This is not negated by Big Bang theorists -- since they seldom if ever deal with what WAS before the Big Bang)

And suppose that the UNIVERSE is unbounded in any way -- that space has no end -- a supposition that is every bit as valid as supposing that the universe has outer limits.

Then it is possible that the UNIVERSE has always been and has always been creating these mini universes that seem like complete universes.

To say "Beginning with chaos at any acceptable amount of time up to 8 billion years ago, could the present complexity of the universe come about by chance?" The answer was absolutely NO."

...makes no sense.

8 billion years is a drop in the bucket if eternity reigns -- and we do not know if eternity reigns. 800 billion years is also a drop in the bucket. And 800 billion years times 800 billion years is laughably tiny also -- if eternity is the standard.

And if infinity is the reality -- for all we know, universes such as we now live in have been forming and being destroyed over a gazillion bazillion years (that is a lot of time, but also merely a drop in the bucket) -- and maybe only one in a gazillion bazillion to a factor of a gazillion bazillion universes ever forms that initial cell. And only one in a gazillion bazillion to a factor of a gazillion bazillion of the universes that form an initial cell -- ever evolves to true life.

But that all would be nothing but a drop in the bucket if eternity and infinity exist.


WE DO NOT KNOW IF THE WORLD IS A CREATION -- WHICH DEMANDS THE EXISTENCE FO AN UNCREATED CREATOR -- OR IF IT IS AN UNCREATED THING ITSELF.

And nothing that science KNOWS right now favors one side or the other.

By the way, Snood:

You wrote:



If that were so, wouldn't you think more scientists would be theists? 93% of noted scientists consider themselves atheists or agnostics -- with only 7% considering themselves theists.

That truly is puzzling if science proves more than disproves the existence of God.

I'll make a deal with you, and everyone else ...

Don't use statistics to support your points unless you provide a verifying link, and I'll do likewise.

Jeez!

http://www.freethought-web.org/ctrl/news/file002.html

You'd rather I accept your figures about what scientists believe on... faith?

No.

I'd expect you to simply say: "Can you provide me a link so I can check the stats."

You sounded rather "put off" -- and I know that you are a stickler for courtesies.

No big deal. Don't let your shorts get twisted.

BTW

Now that you have the stats, I hope you deal with the issues I raised.

In due time, if I so choose, I might. If I have no urgency to rush to answer your always challenging "issues", it may be because IMO I have come to the conclusion that our exchanges aren't that productive, and in any case, I wan't addressing you to start with.

Snood, thanks for the reply, it helped me to see the basis of our disagreement. In one sentence you pointed out what most men overlook in thier quest for truth.
You stated :

"You obviously give credence to the concepts of spirit and love, but cannot countenance the notion of a creator/God."

Herein lies the gristle, I can and do 'countenance the notion of a creator/God.' With one distinct difference, my God is a personal God that is as close as my own heartbeat.

What quality would differentiate between a Spirit ..... and a God. What sets them apart?

Doug, it is not as simple as that. Lots of things drive us (hierarchy of needs) and romantic love is usually a driving force for only a small fraction of our lives. Love can range from the biological urge for reproduction to feelings of goodwill for all creation. All kinds of love are of value, but IMO not the driving force of existence.

Poetry aside, I do not agree that atoms are intelligent to ANY degree, nor are rocks, trees, or anything else that lacks the equivalent of a mammalian brain. My guess is that they are created and driven by the laws of nature and neither love nor hate, they just ARE.

I do not know if there is a god, loving or otherwise. All I know is that no creator seems to have been required, I have no personal experience of any god, and if I were God, things would be a lot different and this earth WOULD be paradise for everyone living on it.

Snood, many non-scientists refer to Hoyle's old calculation for the probability of the first cell occurring by random chance without any understanding of how he came up with the number. No, you can't "ask" a computer a question like that! All computers can do is crunch the numbers they are given, and as we all know, GIGO. What Hoyle did was to calculate the odds that every atom in a modern cell's DNA would happen to assemble into exactly the required position by random chance. Since that's not how anyone thinks that it happened, his calculation is meaningless. (The first cells were much simpler and probably did not use DNA at all but relied on an RNA precursor. They made use of spontaneously existing molecules rather than starting from scratch, and the most important point is that you do not have to end up with any specific sequence. Most of the amino acids in a protein chain merely provide structure and determine its folding, and since there are myriad ways that you can build a protein that will perform the same function, the exact structure is not critical as long as the right bits stick out.)

I have the same problem with those who calculate the odds that this universe would have exactly the right parameters to support life. The usual procedure is to think up as many parameters as you can that might have some bearing on the problem, guess at the odds for each one being in the required range, and neglect to consider whether every constant is really independent of the others (for instance, the speed of light is fixed by other parameters) or equally likely to have any value.

And as Frank says, if the multiverse is infinite it really doesn't matter how unlikely any of this was.

Here is more info on the subject:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/cosmo.html

I always have to wonder at people who:

1. Calculate the improbability of the universe and/or intelligent life arising from chance, but never calculate how unlikely it is that an intelligent creator with the knowledge and ability to create life, the universe, and everything "just happened" to have existed.

2. Assert that "something" absolutely could not have come from "nothing," but never question where God got the "stuff" from which he made the universe.

3. Never ask what God really intends to do with the billions of souls he collects.

In any case, even knowing that the universe was designed would tell us nothing about whether we have souls that survive death. The designer of the universe may not care about human beings or even know that we exist. (It is hard to believe that a god would create zillions of planets in billions of galaxies for the sake of life on just one of them!) The creator may no longer even exist or may have moved on to other universes. It may not have had any reason to design souls that could survive death. We just don't know.

Agnosticism may seem like the most honest way for some to live, and intellectually I have no problem with that. But it is not for me, and I need the latitude to have my faith without derision from those who might think me ignorant.

It's funny - I have more in common with atheists - for it takes just as much faith to believe chance and physics created life as it does to believe God did.

Honestly, the only trouble I have in these discussions originates, I think, from a genuine compassion for humans I have inside me. If you live as if there is a God, and it ends up there is not, you've lost nothing. But if the opposite is the case, the loss would be immeasurable, IMO.

The important thing for the maintenance of these boards is that we posit our thoughts here with as little rancor as possible, even if you feel yours is the ultimate truth. Honesty without love can be brutal.