Quote:
Originally Posted by OBW
I don't get the meaning of the discourse on chemistry. It has no obvious parallel. Maybe he meant that we don't need to understand how it is made. But what he said was we couldn't drink if we had to make it. Mostly true. But hydrogen, oxygen, and a spark do quite fine. Just difficult to deal with the resulting explosion.
The chemistry in your body is irrelevant to making water. Water is water. once inside, your body does its thing.
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Not what I meant to say - of course, we can make water from H and O--- I meant, what if we had to consciously control the absorption of water by our body, like a very complicated game of Tetris, rather than, as you said, the body just doing its thing? Or more complicated yet, what if we actually had to synthesis our own H and O from nothing but energy and first principles before we could combine them to make the water molecule in the first place? I meant we couldn't drink it not because it would be undrinkable but because it would take forever to make it, we'd die of thirst first. But of course, we don't need to do all this, we have water, we drink it, and, as you said, the body just does its thing.
Ok chemistry discourse II over
The parallel was this, and the point is open to debate, but this is what I believe: the divine is exactly the same. The "body" does its thing. The divine is in us no matter we understand it, know it, believe it, disbelieve it, whether we sin or repent or just go about a humdrum existence. The divine is in murderers, prostitutes and evil lying pastors, just as it is in bearbear, OBW and me.
Being human, having this fruit of knowledge, is a barrier to the divine. "Sin" and "guilt" are distractions - if I am lusting after a woman on the street, I am missing the eternal truth of the beauty and cosmic "whatever you call it" around me, because I am stuck in petty human knowledge and desire, most of it driven by ego. If I steal to get a better life, or am jealous, or envy, or any of those ten commandments, I am missing a point somewhere. If I do not love, I am missing the divine within me. It's not that these are sins to be judged, they are barriers to seeing what is already in us. A sin is a barrier.
We are made in God's image, that part is evident with or without biblical authority, we can create, we can contemplate, think, destroy, love. We don't need to go to all these intellectual lengths or jump through repentance hoops to be "saved", or seek this eternal kingdom or whatever doctrine you follow. It's all a distraction - the "eternal life" is here and now.
Forget "near death experiences", have a "near life experience"! Or even better, a genuine life experience--- wake up and see that eternity is running in you, "God" doing its thing, and not just on those who read a certain book or call it a certain name or believe a particular story. God, like water, is working in all humans, and the path to liberation and eternal bliss is merely removing the barriers to seeing this. Religion can help remove those barriers, but when it becomes so cumbersome and prescriptive, it builds more barriers than it removes.