A loving god????

[JackMcThorn]

I spent my life searching beyond my strict catholic upbringing. Back then I was only aware of Judaism partly from a parochial education and driving by a synagogue on the way to school. I really had no idea of other faiths and denominations until u.s. navy boot camp where we marched to the chapel for a different service every sunday for a couple months of training. But I was frustrated with catholicism from the get go especially after I was confirmed. I could not understand pain and suffering children in particular endure at the hand of figureheads of God among other evils. I was dormant in my faith for a long while. Searching but clueless. But in retrospect, I was still learning and growing even though.

So after a lot of change over those years from being dormant, to a different christian denomination, to just a regular plain old deist, I settled on a spirituality based on nature with multiple deities in 2o16 and I find this to be the best option for me. The universe is too big for just one deity, in my opinion of course. This spirituality is cyclical much like life and nature itself. With this option, it is more interesting, my belief system is more in my control, and I do not have to practice with anyone, nor have some overlord guidance system or leadership. It is just myself and my belief system. There are no arguments over it, there is no discussion required. It can be practiced with others but I choose not to. This idea is several thousand years old and no stranger to persecution by the mainstream.

Being a solitaire has been ideal thus far. Now that it has been 9 years I feel more grounded in my faith. The thing about nature is that it is a cycle best described in geometry as a circle. No one or thing in nature is immune to this cycle. The ebbing and flowing in everything that is natural. Pain is not permanent and neither its opposite.

Somewhere back in 2o11 I had my office in the mudroom of my house at the other front door. It was a cozy little room and we used a different door to enter the house. There was a big window to the outside behind the garage. Well one late morning I heard this screaming creature outside the window and I saw a squirrel on the garage roof screaming at a stray cat in the alley and all I could think of is what is this about? So a little later I checked the mail outside the other door and the stray cat left a squirrel carcus near my other front door and I immediately realized the squirrel on the roof lost a family member that morning. The creature was overwhelmed with grief at their loss. I think this to be a rare event in nature for people to witness as I had not in all my years seen an animal struck with this kind of loss and pain and its expression of grief. Pain is not exclusive in nature.

I am also reminded of the old fashioned prayer and actions regarding gratitude for a meal from older times when a meal might be harder to come by. In this modern era, it is easier to prepare and have a meal without too much thought of where the next one will happen. These times indeed were cyclical as well.

So I guess the point is depending on your belief system and how you conduct your faith; a deity doesn't have to be crushing, or loving; however, the way nature works is a cycle and one in which balances itself out in ways perhaps seemingly unequal depending on the perspective but nonetheless in a design as simple as a circle. I am also reminded of a saying that 'this too shall pass'. Indeed it does, whether good or bad. A deity designed by a system of governance is going to be confusing to those who practice or those whom observe. This is why I settled on nature; it is easier for me to deal with it -especially regarding my pain and goodness.

[Raskolnikov]

Now Pam, you and I both know the simple answer here is “We are Devo.” It’s difficult to have a conversation about God’s intentions without getting caught up in religious dogma. I have no particular religious affiliation because my mother had a strict religious upbringing and made the firm decision not to impose such rigidity upon my brother and I, to let us choose for ourselves. Children being abused by religious “father” figures is absolutely atrocious, but it was the middle man, not God. Middle men are often nothing more than used car salesmen, grifters assuming positions of respect and power while ultimately having neither, nothing more than modern day snake oil salesmen. In short, they’re only human, not true representatives of God.

The devolution of mankind began long before our current historical record even begins. It always takes me back to the Emerald Tablets of Thoth which tells of earth man, long before Atlantis existed, using black magic to call forth dark spirits for the purpose of gaining great power, spirits like shadows of another vibration, existing unseen by the children of men. "Only through blood could they form being, only through man could they live in the world.” How these spirits crept into the councils and ultimately became the chiefs of the kingdoms. Is that not what we’re dealing with today? It seems to explain the missing children, the blood rituals, and rulers who are completely psychotic in their lust for power and control.

But the point is that with free will things have gone astray. Sometimes I think all those grand structures were built in a more etheric world, when we were still in a higher vibration, and the fall was a traumatic event in which things suddenly transformed, in essence dropped, into a more solid state, denser and heavier, resulting in a sudden need for physical sustenance whereas before the fall, in the higher vibrations, there was not. I can’t prove this of course, just a feeling in my gut, no middle man required.

Great to see you back Pam. Nice thread full of thought-provoking and insightful responses.

[shaberon]

Posted by Jeksey (here)
Making a business out of it isn't necessarily the point though. It's not in harmony with the creative forces around us, that's for sure. And neither is killing animals "not for business".

Every culture has its own process of development. Just because someone is doing something is no justification for us to do the same and shouldn't even be considered when we reflect upon our path. When Buddhists build temples they are very aware and careful to all the little life around them.

Buddhists get someone else to kill things so they can eat it.

It's an issue in Bhutan since Indian fishermen bring stuff over the border, lots of money flows out of the country for this. The issue is the cash, not the basic relationship.

[shaberon]

Is this an Atavistic argument?

Posted by Jad (here)
Think about it: every single day, billions of people willingly wake up, commute to jobs they dislike, and devote the majority of their waking hours in exchange for little pieces of paper, just numbers on a screen, that another human authority issues. This system only functions because people agree, consciously or unconsciously, to participate in it. If tomorrow, humanity collectively refused to play along, the entire structure would collapse overnight.

I think we need to question Industrialization.

Its deletrious effects were noticed as soon as it happened (particularly by the British Army).

Peak Oil is not exactly imaginary, but somewhat unpredictable.

I have a relatively low-tech vision. The rolling description is Unreformed Neo-Luddite. It's not a terribly different idea from Fidel Castro telling everyone to grow food gardens in their yard.

And so if we look at everything that has been invented, and go how much of that does anyone really need, the proportion is low.

The area I am in was able to fight for "independence" in the 1700s. It basically was independent -- self-sufficient -- on most of the basic levels. Could we come anywhere close to repeating that scenario? No, I think the normal ability of those pioneers has vanished.

What's strange is that people like those colleagues you mentioned are imaginary to me. That is, even presuming I know people who would be described the same way, it doesn't mean anything to me. Just a bunch of words. All my experience comes from doing things. That is all I know.

I would prefer a curve that returns us to sustainable agriculture, sort of like in Russia. You can buy a lot the size of a plantation there for like five bucks, and the nearest road will be thirty miles away. Siberia is like four early Americas.

Nature is harsh, and yet it is true that beings can become happy, and I think being a lot more physical and using nature responsibly is a better idea than building a robotic future with energy and technical needs that are, at best, finite.

Philosophically, I find the problem of challenges vs. the ideal to be very profound, in the dreadful presence of evil and hatred how do we maintain our integrity.

Sometimes we say the most difficult thing to do is stand where you are.

Sometimes what we try to do to help will fail.

In that regard, I tend to live with a maxim by Vasubandhu:


Because of You, I am going to become a Buddha and liberate countless world systems.

Because of Me, You are going to go to Hell and endure unceasing agonies.


Despite lacking the theology of religion, Heaven and Hell are a highly important part of what I do. Accordingly, I appreciate everything dark and shadowy and testimonies from others who are able to draw catharsis from it. Lotus grows in mud. It is only because I personally know there is something good to be experienced, which does not come from electronics or any artificial means, I can say this is serious.

To round this out, again I already know the view of my generic Orthodox friend. One of the main issues in the religion is:


How do we build Heaven on Earth?

The first constraint is, he has to be non-denominational. That means he has to agree to offer equal rights to my kind of person. Does he? Yes, that's correct, It's not a trick. He can't ask for anything special, and he can't deny anything to anyone due to their non-membership. Then, he cannot exercise temporal power. That is, in an official capacity as a priest of the church, he can exercise influence and attempt to persuade the rulership in his area. He cannot stamp any pre-determined form of government, monarchy or otherwise.

He is supposed to be in a middleman role such that that rulership truly knows the will of its people.

In turn, towards the laity he is supposed to have functions like secular professions such as sociologist, psychologist, teacher, and so on, and in any and all cases the requirement is to do the best you can.

Despite being Emperors, some of the Paleologues seem to have taken this up, which sometimes may be called Byzantine Humanism. It has never used Revelations as a reading so it is impossible to have any leanings towards Millennialism or Zionism. I think this is important, because, despite not really having any theological common ground, in our application of it we are very similar.

The schismatic jumble we know is imaginary there.

[shaberon]

Posted by JackMcThorn (here)
I settled on a spirituality based on nature with multiple deities in 2o16 and I find this to be the best option for me. The universe is too big for just one deity, in my opinion of course. This spirituality is cyclical much like life and nature itself. With this option, it is more interesting, my belief system is more in my control, and I do not have to practice with anyone, nor have some overlord guidance system or leadership. It is just myself and my belief system. There are no arguments over it, there is no discussion required. It can be practiced with others but I choose not to. This idea is several thousand years old and no stranger to persecution by the mainstream.

I would have made the same statement...a little over thirty years before that...and that same nature sculpted a Buddhist out of me.

Here's how. I perhaps had some exposure to Buddhism slightly earlier due to martial arts. But I did not "get it". My attention wandered elsewhere until under the rubric "eastern wisdom" was still again "Buddhism". Some of it was kind of interesting, but it still did not grab me. So after a few years of various pagan deities and philosophies, I developed a straight up fascination with death. That was when I started noticing things in the eastern section more heavily. And then it was the appearance of reincarnation in Buddhism that really landed my attention.

Over time, it simply replaced most of the other ideas, since it actually is a living tradition you can join.

It has a mentality similar to Orthodoxy in that it is an urbanizing discipline. It seeks to provide a harmonious social order based from very similar principles, without a pre-destined form of government or arbitrary legal code, it is the same do your best. Most of the ruins of what appear to be massive monasteries were university and trade schools; you were required to have a business. So yes along with specialized training, those centers offered everything in medieval India and had as full worldly knowledge as anyone.

This is supposed to be a main part of it:

I am also reminded of the old fashioned prayer and actions regarding gratitude for a meal from older times when a meal might be harder to come by.

There is an ancient flame from Hingula Mata in Balochistan that was taken to Orissa in southeast India in about the 500s. It was used to establish the Mahaprasad or "great cooking fire" which is a community feast that runs to this day, on the scale of feeding hundreds. That's on a human level which isn't specifically Buddhist, but it turns out one of our oldest and most powerful lineages of King Indrabhuti venerates the Jaganath of this festival or feast and associated shrine and cult, etc., and it is immediately transparent that our school is taking in whatever local pagan deities may be appropriate. That's generally considered as when met, they accept the teaching of the Buddha.

I've learned hundreds of deities, and only some of them are of Buddhist origin.

It played a huge reverse on my mythological inquisitive nature. For all intents and purposes, the best translation of what it is, is Deity Yoga.

Not much else is really its own exclusive property.

It just isn't English. Buddhist sadhanas are Sanskrit. Some of it is classical but it is also a hybrid. Consequently, after what I just said, it is also based in Bengali folk music. At the time, Bengal was a foreign country.

To try to describe it, I could copy the table of contents from the Dharani Samgraha, and, it wouldn't make a drop of sense to anyone, but I can see the whole thing because I understand how it works from the inside.

There are still people who give it as a series of Deity Empowerments. This takes thirty days. If asked for how many books like a Bible I have, it's "84,000". The Buddhist corpus is simply staggering. And so, yes, I relinquished any alternative way of doing things and stick to this.

It's something like the language I was looking for since before I could talk.

Comparatively, I would guess that the Egyptian "Book of the Dead" is probably a big meditation system, but their entire language went extinct.

In actuality the most archaic writings from prior to 3,000 B. C. E. involve Wisdom Literature:

Another common genre is existential works that deal with the relationship between man and God, divine reward and punishment, theodicy, the problem of evil, and why bad things happen to good people. The protagonist is a "just sufferer" – a good person beset by tragedy, who tries to understand his lot in life.

Going to the bi-lingual version of Vizier Ptahotep ca. 2,350 B. C. E., I might believe I was listening to Buddha or Zoroaster:



14 (Papyrus Prisse column 7, lines 9-10)

Sms ib.k tr n wnn.k
m ir HAw Hr mddwt
m xb tr n Sms ib
bwt kA pw HDt At.f
m HAw n grg-pr
xpr xt Sms ib
nn km n xt iw sfA.f

Follow your heart as long as you live.
Do not make a loss on what is said,
do not subtract time from following the heart.
Harming its time is an offence to the ka.
Do not deflect the moment of every day
beyond establishing your heart.
As things happen, follow (your) heart.
There is no profit in things if it is stifled.



In other areas, you find much value in silence, the dangers of poverty, and the importance of having a noble character. Ptahotep lived to 96; which is significant with the maxim that one is not born with wisdom, you obtain it from experience.

[Tintin]

Posted by Raskolnikov (here)
But the point is that with free will things have gone astray. Sometimes I think all those grand structures were built in a more etheric world, when we were still in a higher vibration, and the fall was a traumatic event in which things suddenly transformed, in essence dropped, into a more solid state, denser and heavier, resulting in a sudden need for physical sustenance whereas before the fall, in the higher vibrations, there was not. I can’t prove this of course, just a feeling in my gut, no middle man required.

100% - chimes absolutely with my instincts, and dare I say it, knowledge

[Ernie Nemeth]

Don't anthropomorphize God.

God isn't a loving God or a wrathful God, or a vengeful God.

God is love. He doesn't "do" love. We "do" the loving. That's because we don't understand what love is. Why? Because Love is God and we don't understand God.

Love is perfect. God is perfect. We, in our present state, are otherwise.

What we call love is anything but: our love falls far short of the mark.
You cannot "do" what you are...

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

Posted by Tintin (here)

Posted by Raskolnikov (here)
But the point is that with free will things have gone astray. Sometimes I think all those grand structures were built in a more etheric world, when we were still in a higher vibration, and the fall was a traumatic event in which things suddenly transformed, in essence dropped, into a more solid state, denser and heavier, resulting in a sudden need for physical sustenance whereas before the fall, in the higher vibrations, there was not. I can’t prove this of course, just a feeling in my gut, no middle man required.

100% - chimes absolutely with my instincts, and dare I say it, knowledge

Correct. I was waiting for someone to go there (to save me the trouble), but this, basically, is the sum solution to the question in the OP.

We began as perfect beings. Created indeed by a loving God. Pure, though knowledgeless, we lived in a pristine, balanced and perfectly blissful reality. It was a playground for spirits to enjoy and experience physicality without losing their awareness or vibration. The 'Garden of Eden' parable is a loose, faint, mythologised version of an ancient truth. It was so delightful here, we began staying for longer and longer periods. The incarnation cycle began. Then, we formed a desire to leave our personal marks behind -- to shape and create a 'human reality' within this physical reality. This spawned human will, and a desire for free will. The wish was granted. The human ego was born, and with it, the beginning, or the end, of utopia, or the Garden of Eden -- or Lemuria.

There may have been other factors, like external interference, either from space or other dimensions. In one school of thought, a meteor or asteroid hit the earth long ago. It not only wrought widespread physical damage but it carried harmful biological agents and diseases to the surface that corrupted the harmonious balance of nature, and by extension, us.

[thepainterdoug]

Free will cannot go astray. it already is astray.

in my mind, there has never been a time when biological beings were in a perfectly pristine reality. Are there any examples or evidence of that beyond myth?

The movie Forbidden Planet presents the idea of THE KRELL, a very advanced civilization that had everything to perfection and were wiped out in a moment by "monsters of the ID".

[thepainterdoug]

Jad I agree pretty much with your summation

There was a great old movie CLASH OF THE TITANS! 1981 , where they showed the gods up above, the typical Greek looking guy with beard and Toga and the Gal lounging in the clouds with harps playing etc, where they were all looking down on earth and the trials THE HUMAN HERO , as he had to manuver thru the dangerous rocky straights in a turbulent ocean as Neptune arose and tried to crash Jason and his ship on the rocks.
i remember the woman God saying to God as they looked down , ohh please, we must help him. and the male god said, no wait, give him a chance, he has to fight thru this etc. And he did!

So God could intervene, but often doesnt because we dont see all the outcome variations that are so called good or bad . Like children. Sometimes the loss and the suffering IS the point.

Hey I get it, it all seems insane, but I have seen many times in my life where Im happy things didnt work out as I so desperately wanted.

thanks Pam and I appreciate everyones comment here.
pd

[Raskolnikov]

Posted by Mark (Star Mariner) (here)

Posted by Tintin (here)

Posted by Raskolnikov (here)
But the point is that with free will things have gone astray. Sometimes I think all those grand structures were built in a more etheric world, when we were still in a higher vibration, and the fall was a traumatic event in which things suddenly transformed, in essence dropped, into a more solid state, denser and heavier, resulting in a sudden need for physical sustenance whereas before the fall, in the higher vibrations, there was not. I can’t prove this of course, just a feeling in my gut, no middle man required.

100% - chimes absolutely with my instincts, and dare I say it, knowledge

Correct. I was waiting for someone to go there (to save me the trouble), but this, basically, is the sum solution to the question in the OP.

We began as perfect beings. Created indeed by a loving God. Pure, though knowledgeless, we lived in a pristine, balanced and perfectly blissful reality. It was a playground for spirits to enjoy and experience physicality without losing their awareness or vibration. The 'Garden of Eden' parable is a loose, faint, mythologised version of an ancient truth. It was so delightful here, we began staying for longer and longer periods. The incarnation cycle began. Then, we formed a desire to leave our personal marks behind -- to shape and create a 'human reality' within this physical reality. This spawned human will, and a desire for free will. The wish was granted. The human ego was born, and with it, the beginning, or the end, of utopia, or the Garden of Eden -- or Lemuria.

There may have been other factors, like external interference, either from space or other dimensions. In one school of thought, a meteor or asteroid hit the earth long ago. It not only wrought widespread physical damage but it carried harmful biological agents and diseases to the surface that corrupted the harmonious balance of nature, and by extension, us.

This could be a key to unlocking this whole predicament. We now know they were lying about the existence of the aether, that it is in fact the primordial substance throughout the cosmos, the body of God?, and that these ancient structures were constructed, possibly manifested, to utilize this freely available energy in both their sacred geometrical forms as well as what many are now callling the "antiquitech" set up to harness this energy for immediate use by all. Supposedly Atlantis itself was a series of concentric rings of land and water with the city located in the center which would have literally been a very powerful city, though Atlantis was more than a city, most likely it stretched to all the places where you find these colossal structures said to be built in the Greco-Roman style, while today we're supposed to believe that some were constructed in 1-2 years, with horse and buggy, and then were either demolished or destroyed in the great fires that were so pervasive in the late 18-to-early-19th centuries.

So the aether exists, it's what Tesla was working with and what Richard P. Feyman was talking about when he said, "There is enough energy in a single cubic meter of space to boil all the oceans in the world" in his studies of quantum electrodynamics, whether he expressly stated it or not. So the key here is, how do we once again unlock and tap into this unlimited source of energy? We know the technology exists and is being hidden from us, that they put a meter on it to enslave us, and we know they're hiding our TRUE history. Regaining such knowledge would put an end to the clown world because we wouldn't need their system anymore. They would lose all control in an instant. Anyone else thinking this might be an excellent job for AI, taking back the knowledge that is rightfully ours. Watch how fast that system gets shut down.

[Wind]

Posted by Jeksey (here)
No book or writing will truly give you an answer though - the only answer is through yourself.

Ain't that the truth. This post and thread put me on a writing mood for once.

Now, what is the opposite to being omnipontent, all-knowing? To be limited. That is to say, to be a human. To imagine that you are just a human, but you're not. You're not just a human, it's just what you tell yourself to be. You have all the seeming features of a human surely, but that's not all that you are. Yet our human condition makes us limited to a point. The human body being an animal body is subject to the material world.

The age old question people have is how could there be evil and suffering. How could God allow it? To have one thing requires the opposite, it's contrast. How would you know night without day? Good without evil? Love without hate? Hot without cold? Love without the lack of it? Lots of people experience lack of love and are deeply shaped by it. Not the romantic love, but love as it is. To be accepted and cherished as they are. That is the true parental embrace and we are the children of God. Yet why aren't we naturally feeling that love and the world often feels so cold and devoid of love? As Rumi said; "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."

What stops you from feeling it in your own being and in the world around you? This is still an ongoing adventure for me too as all my life I've been on the journey in finding the love in myself, when it always seemed that world somehow was hiding it from me. I can't convince anyone else of the Love that binds us all and holds all the planets and stars in order, the Love that has made us all and that is us all, but it's there. The real question is why have we veiled it from ourselves? We have so deeply become ingrained in our beliefs that we are individual separate beings instead of being part of the larger whole.

I am not really familiar with the Catholic version of Christianity, but if it teaches that animals have no value or even souls then it is not only false, but idiotic. This would I suppose tie in with the dogmatic beliefs in souls needing to be "saved" which is also part of the nonsensical dogma. Some Christians still believe that this is some kind of a "fallen" world, which is a misunderstanding. Humanity is only fallen in the sense that it has descended into a very dense form of material reality from it's original state of pure innocence, consciousness and bliss. That process is known as involution. Spirit, consciousness descends deeper and deeper into material world, forgettery and ingorance until over time it ascends back to spirit, to even higher realms. That's what we really are, consciousness, but now we are putting on big play. We are so encaptured by this drama that we really believe that it's true and we are the characters that we imagine ourselves to be.

Many people see this world as a dog eat dog world and that breeds competition which is bound to create even more suffering. Everything is energy and energy flows, it is never destroyed. Forms are, constantly. Why do we get attached to forms? The rule is that in this material world everything is transient. There are physical organisms and even non-physical which feed on each other. It's part of the ecosystem. We as humans have a choice and that makes us different. That also makes evil possible. I never could kill any animals and even if I could, I wouldn't.

Perhaps it would have been nice to have only a herbivore world with no killing and I'm sure there are those too, but it's not how it is here. Is it part of nature's circulation possibly. Like all the small creatures eating away the all the carcasses and bodies, they're nature's cleaning department. It's a bit grim, but all of our bodies are going to eventually be worm food unless you'll be cremated. The good news is that you are not your body, you're a soul!

God is not outside the Creation, God is both the Creator and the Creation. The animal eating and the animal being eated. The victim and the perpetrator. This paradox might be hard to reconcile, yet it would be no less true even if one doesn't accept it.

In it's "natural" form suffering is an evolutionary tool for molding and evolving consciousness and empathy. Although animals certainly feel, pain is still different when there is a mental component and reasoning to it. Animals don't think, they are. Human beings make up theories and belief systems. I don't think God necessarily "intends" any suffering, but it's part and parcel of the natural world and the evolutionary process. Although we are (particles of) God, often mankind makes God in it's own image.

Try to realise it's all within yourself
No one else can make you change
And to see you're really only very small
And life flows on within you and without you
We were talking about the love that's gone so cold
And the people who gain the world and lose their soul
They don't know
They can't see

When you've seen beyond yourself then you may find
Peace of mind is waiting there
And the time will come when you see we're all one
And life flows on within you and without you

[s7e6e]

Even if satan rules this world, it's not satan who destroys the Earth, it's the wicked people who are choosing decadence instead of empathy. Knowledge was never provided to destroy but to enlighten, in my opinion.

[grapevine]

Posted by Johan (Keyholder) (here)
About the nature of god/God, entire libraries have been written.

My background (as a child/adolescent) has been Roman-Catholic, but even when I was 12 years old. The question you ask "Why would a loving God, a god who could create any form of energy exchange make a world that requires us to kill each something else to live?", I asked at that time too.

And I went searching for a more "sensible" explanation. It has been a real "odyssey". It would indeed be an interesting discussion that we can have here.

At this time, the best explanation I found is in the following book, there is a thread about it on the forum here:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...=1#post1066804

plus another longer thread started by George on August 6th 2020.

I'm getting a 404 on this link Johan. Could you please repost as I'd like to read it.

[Johan (Keyholder)]

Strange, the same goes for me Grapevine, that link does not work for some reason.

Most info is on the thread that George started on August 6th 2020.

The link does not work for me either, but you can find it by searching on the thread by Adem "Souls born as humans: where do they all come from?" and go to Pueblo's post #33 on that thread.

Mod note from Bill:
It was a truncated link (i.e. it was incomplete, so the long and detailed middle part was missing). Here's the post:
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?90345-Souls-born-as-humans-where-do-they-all-come-from&p=1066804&viewfull=1#post1066804

[shaberon]

Posted by thepainterdoug (here)
in my mind, there has never been a time when biological beings were in a perfectly pristine reality. Are there any examples or evidence of that beyond myth?

Perhaps.

If you look at an era of very low populations, how would they know war?

Also on the plus side, there were epochs when currently uninhabitable regions were quite fertile.

On this, I am mainly referring to the last Ice Age around 12,000 - 10,000 B. C. E., when everyone lived in refugia, that were generally in the foothills of mountains. I'm not sure if that was "pristine", but it must have been survivable. The main exception was Central Asia towards the Gobi, where Himalayan glacier melt rendered this into prime country.

As conditions began to improve in other areas, there was vast migration, although nothing really says we are talking about a large number of people. And so we can take the remains of a 3,000 B. C. E. Botai from Kazakhstan, and find they had (partial) ancestry from Lithuania. Although genetics of any recent times is phenomenally complicated, in the "Stone Age" range it is much simpler and fairly easy to track. That means we actually do have relatively decent records about humans on a physical level. This, I would say, tends to show that ancient legends are not true in the remotest fashion.


Instead, what it looks like is several millennia of co-operative efforts to milk this pristine perfect abundance.

I would say it was achieved in many cases and that the normal world order was peaceful trade.


You can read this exemplified as the exchange of Hathor from Egypt with Qadush of Byblos, Lebanon. These two distant cultures were practically "married" by 3,000 B. C. E. with records of continuity extending into the New Kingdom. In other words, something was "built" for over 2,000 years, before it was removed.

As to how "good" it was, I'm not talking about much more than the development of hand tools to apply oneself to agriculture in a favorable place.

On the other hand, I would suggest most myth cycles follow the model of the Sumerian Kings List. This has a likely valid, objective history of about two hundred years, and then it adds some kind of material on top of this which is of a different nature. The same technique appears with the Greek Olympians, Genesis, the Indian Puranas, Pahlavi Zoroastrianism, they all have something people would know and remember as real, and then there is some kind of "explanation" about the whole beginning of the world.

Look at the eruption of Thera in Crete. Most analysis by geology supports the occurrence of an event of truly cataclysmic proportions somewhere in a 100-200 year range. Then we discover a kind of "dark age" in Greek or Cretan writing. But of course this event did not occur in isolation.

Is there any period-appropriate text that records any memory of the disaster?

Has anyone noticed how inappropriate and arbitrary or make-believe that Minos would be as a historical figure?

Yes, we could understand it would have interrupted the scribes that were working right there on Crete at the time, but...later writings seem particularly uninformed...

[Raskolnikov]

Posted by Wind (here)

Posted by Jeksey (here)
No book or writing will truly give you an answer though - the only answer is through yourself.

Ain't that the truth. This post and thread put me on a writing mood for once.

Now, what is the opposite to being omnipontent, all-knowing? To be limited. That is to say, to be a human. To imagine that you are just a human, but you're not. You're not just a human, it's just what you tell yourself to be. You have all the seeming features of a human surely, but that's not all that you are. Yet our human condition makes us limited to a point. The human body being an animal body is subject to the material world.

The age old question people have is how could there be evil and suffering. How could God allow it? To have one thing requires the opposite, it's contrast. How would you know night without day? Good without evil? Love without hate? Hot without cold? Love without the lack of it? Lots of people experience lack of love and are deeply shaped by it. Not the romantic love, but love as it is. To be accepted and cherished as they are. That is the true parental embrace and we are the children of God. Yet why aren't we naturally feeling that love and the world often feels so cold and devoid of love? As Rumi said; "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."

What stops you from feeling it in your own being and in the world around you? This is still an ongoing adventure for me too as all my life I've been on the journey in finding the love in myself, when it always seemed that world somehow was hiding it from me. I can't convince anyone else of the Love that binds us all and holds all the planets and stars in order, the Love that has made us all and that is us all, but it's there. The real question is why have we veiled it from ourselves? We have so deeply become ingrained in our beliefs that we are individual separate beings instead of being part of the larger whole.

I am not really familiar with the Catholic version of Christianity, but if it teaches that animals have no value or even souls then it is not only false, but idiotic. This would I suppose tie in with the dogmatic beliefs in souls needing to be "saved" which is also part of the nonsensical dogma. Some Christians still believe that this is some kind of a "fallen" world, which is a misunderstanding. Humanity is only fallen in the sense that it has descended into a very dense form of material reality from it's original state of pure innocence, consciousness and bliss. That process is known as involution. Spirit, consciousness descends deeper and deeper into material world, forgettery and ingorance until over time it ascends back to spirit, to even higher realms. That's what we really are, consciousness, but now we are putting on big play. We are so encaptured by this drama that we really believe that it's true and we are the characters that we imagine ourselves to be.

Many people see this world as a dog eat dog world and that breeds competition which is bound to create even more suffering. Everything is energy and energy flows, it is never destroyed. Forms are, constantly. Why do we get attached to forms? The rule is that in this material world everything is transient. There are physical organisms and even non-physical which feed on each other. It's part of the ecosystem. We as humans have a choice and that makes us different. That also makes evil possible. I never could kill any animals and even if I could, I wouldn't.

Perhaps it would have been nice to have only a herbivore world with no killing and I'm sure there are those too, but it's not how it is here. Is it part of nature's circulation possibly. Like all the small creatures eating away the all the carcasses and bodies, they're nature's cleaning department. It's a bit grim, but all of our bodies are going to eventually be worm food unless you'll be cremated. The good news is that you are not your body, you're a soul!

God is not outside the Creation, God is both the Creator and the Creation. The animal eating and the animal being eated. The victim and the perpetrator. This paradox might be hard to reconcile, yet it would be no less true even if one doesn't accept it.

In it's "natural" form suffering is an evolutionary tool for molding and evolving consciousness and empathy. Although animals certainly feel, pain is still different when there is a mental component and reasoning to it. Animals don't think, they are. Human beings make up theories and belief systems. I don't think God necessarily "intends" any suffering, but it's part and parcel of the natural world and the evolutionary process. Although we are (particles of) God, often mankind makes God in it's own image.

Try to realise it's all within yourself
No one else can make you change
And to see you're really only very small
And life flows on within you and without you
We were talking about the love that's gone so cold
And the people who gain the world and lose their soul
They don't know
They can't see

When you've seen beyond yourself then you may find
Peace of mind is waiting there
And the time will come when you see we're all one
And life flows on within you and without you

Hey Wind, just wanted to say thank you for the excellent contribution, a real pleasure to read. I resonated and wholeheartedly agreed with almost everything you said. It's about realizing our connection with God, not as some abstract concept of an overseeing diety outside and separate from ourselves but as the very power that's giving us life and is as near as the breath.

Not sure what happened to Pam, I know sometimes she likes to shop at Walmart, let's hope she didn't buy the shrimp...