Exactly Where is Jesus Located
I got to thinking about "heaven" when I read an article about outer space. The article says if aliens received a message from earth, it would be 3,000 years after the message was sent.
I have read on Christian sites a person who dies will find him/herself in "heaven" the next day. So where is this place if it can be reached in a day. It takes a day or more to reach space where the satellites are. No one who has visited space has ever seen heaven. It must be further away. They have seen a lot of cast off garbage from other space projects floating around up there but no heaven.
The fiction of Christianity used to say a person was bodily moved to heaven. Later, after corpses were seen rotting in graves the story was changed to souls. Thus now heaven is supposedly inhabited by souls, not bodies.
Yet the "second coming" is to be of Jesus, body and all. So it has to be Jesus, body and all, is located somewhere and will have to pass through the death defying cold to reach earth. Is he closer than the aliens who will require 3,000 years just for a message to arrive?
I have recited the Apostle's Creed a few thousand time in my life. It has been so many years since I did it but if memory serves it says Jesus is seated on the right hand of God. Probably for many there is a phrase that follows in the mind, "metaphorically speaking." But since it is treated as a fact God and Jesus have assigned seating we just have to take it as that. My question remains, where are these chairs?
I know there are Christians who roll their eyes at such a question. "Taking the Bible or Church teachings literally is foolish. There are some things we can take literally, others not. You just have to have training to decide which passages to take literally."
The problem with this disclaimer is those who say such things do not agree with each other. That means everything in the Bible is fair game to either take literally or take metaphorically. It also allows the same preacher or church to change views whenever it fits their purposes. And, they do just that.
Try to consider a spiritual realm to complement the physical realm. Anyone who has a basic concept of religion understands the 2 realms. You are now free to make fun and light of the spiritual realm as I know you will.
ReplyDeleteIt is very basic. Love and hate are not physical elements. One cannot bottle love or hate. One cannot measure love or hate. One can only infer love and hate from outward signs of affection, of cruelty, etc. Reconcile your ideas that everything is of the physical realm. If you make fun of the spiritual, you make fun of love.
Matt-- re: love and hate are not measurable but are real so a god is just as real.
DeleteI suppose the first sermon I heard making this case was 40 years ago. It is a false dichotomy. One's feeling toward another person is something akin to gods and spirits floating about or a Bible written by a god or a life after one is dead? As our excellent President Biden likes to say, "C'mon!"
The assertion that "love" and "hate" cannot be measured is false. These emotions accompany chemical and electric responses in our brains which can, indeed, be quantitatively measured.
DeletePrior to our ability to record these brain activities, we still had the ability to measure things like heart rate and body temperature to quantify emotions.
And even if we were unable to measure them, we are still able to observe them.
Bryan: No, the measurements you speak of don't measure love or hate. I can be completely in REM sleep and love my wife, my kids, etc. My love doesn't stop when I am shopping, sleeping, driving, etc. Measure all your electrical and chemical responses at ALL times, and then get back to me.
DeleteEven liberals are agreeing with conservatives that Biden needs to resign. Father Time has not been kind to Joe Biden. History will not be kind to Joe Biden.
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DeleteMatt "Even liberals are agreeing with conservatives Biden needs to resign."
DeleteJust like it was with Trump. And, like it is almost all the time with every President. Review again Nixon's thoughts on this. It is wisdom for all times. Decades ago when I started reading regularly the Wall Street Journal I noticed the front page always had a litany of people, often from the same party as the President of the time, bitching about their or the other party's. Then, I notice it had almost nothing to do with how the next election came out.
The old rule still applies. Presidents perceived to be likeable, and perceived to like "me" as a member of the public, are almost unbeatable. W. Bush was like that. He made the biggest public blunder of all time, weapons of mass destruction. Got reelected. Now, this rule is altered by who the opponent is. Matchups also play a role.
First of all, thank you, John, for not posting my previous reply That was me shooting my mouth before I really understood what was being said, and there was a pretty good reason why I didn't understand.
DeleteMatt: You are saying that you are feeling the emotion of love even when you are asleep, and I'm not sure I agree that's possible as cognitive awareness is a necessary part of feeling love. Either that, or we're defining love in two different ways.
If you are saying that love exists even when you're not cognitively aware, my response is that the only way that could be true is if you are defining love in a metaphorical sense.
Therefore, your analogy only makes sense if you are talking about both parts of the analogy in a metaphorical sense.
Which really doesn't help you at all.
Bryan K: You see what I write but you intentionally lie about what I write. In other words, like Jon, you are not a serious person. You are a clown with an ability to type and string words together.
DeleteYour argument about chemistry and electricity only makes sense when talking about stimulation. You make the argument because you can't imagine life where a person can love another and not even be thinking about them. I go to work. I still love my kids. I am in deep prayer. I still love my wife. I watch a soccer game and get engrossed in the play. I didn't stop loving my wife, my kids, my faith, etc. while watching the soccer game.
God exists even if you can't physically see him, hear him, smell him, taste him, feel him, or measure him in any physical sense. He is a spirit. Twenty centuries ago, he lived as a man.
Afghanistan mothers are throwing their babies over razor wire to military troops hoping the babies will survive Joe Biden's Taliban strategy. Men jumping on the wheel wells of USAF transport planes flying out of Kabul, only to die moments or minutes later. Biden says he is doing a great job. But please bring up Nixon again as some sort of argument.
DeleteThat comment was my bad, and I apologize for it. It was the comment I was alluding to in my previous comment, as I thought Jon had neglected to approve it. I have removed the comment.
DeleteAs far as love goes, there are lots of possible definitions that fit this context. It can be a feeling (emotion) of deep affection. It can be an extreme love of doing something, which is again measurable by the feeling of deep affection one feels while doing that task. It can be a state of being where one feels this deep affection whenever thinking of someone/something which is again measurable.
All of this is measurable. I have no idea what your comment about not being able to measure when it when it doesn't exist is even supposed to mean.
And regarding Afghanistan, my biggest frustration there is the fact that we've been warning people for 20 years that this was going to happen. This was a trade off for the invasion. We knew with 100% certainty that the war would have one of two conclusions. Either we would be there forever, which is a commitment we had to make before invading (and we failed), or we would have a roughshod pullout equivalent to Vietnam.
Biden's mistake was announcing that our surrender was unconditional. Everything else that is happening would have happened regardless of how we pulled this off.
And I'll tell you right now my biggest frustration with American politics in general is the following use case. Side A says we shouldn't so something because it will make a negative outcome inevitable. Side B does it anyway. The negative outcome happens. Side B blames Side A for the negative outcome when the only way to prevent that negative outcome was to follow Side A's recommendations in the first place.
I've known for 20 years that this was coming. It's unfathomable to me that the rest of American still hasn't figured it out.
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ReplyDeleteLove is measurable when we are feeling it. I offered three possible definitions of love that fit the context of this conversation above. All three are quantitatively measurable given the proper stimulus. To give an analogy, I could say that a ball is going to fly in a certain direction to a certain distance if I hit it with a bat. From an analogous standpoint, your stance would be that we can't measure that while we are not hitting the ball. While that is technically correct, a burden of proof now falls on the person making that argument that states that the direction of the ball *should* be measurable even if it's not being hit.
DeleteThe tricky part of that argument is that we *can* measure that. We just need to define the variables. And love falls into that same category. If we know all of the variables going into the emotion, we can accurately predict the strength of that emotion when it sets in.
The other part of the argument is that you also have a burden of proof to fulfill when you say that the emotion of love can't be measured when it is not being felt. I would be willing to wager with a fair degree of certainty that if we had the proper scientific understanding, we would be able to measure such a state; therefore, the analogy fails on that level as well.
The bottom line is that you are saying that love and god are one identical in that we can know that they exist even when we have no observational data to show that they exist. My counter is that love does indeed have observational data to prove that exists. God does not. I'm not making an argument against love, which is where your and Matt's rebuttals seem to lie (red herring). I'm making an argument against god.
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DeleteTSM: It wasn't my argument. I'm rebutting an argument that I view to be a pretty bad one. All of what you just explained can be measured and/or observed. The existence of god cannot be measured and/or observed. That makes the analogy flawed.
DeleteBryan, please tell me, in precise, quantitative terms how you would measure my love for my wife. or my kids. or my grandchildren.
Deletequantitative criteria for measuring emotions include brain waves, heart rate, and pupil dilation, to name a few. I would imagine if you would let someone poke a needle into your blood, you could also measure emotions by it's chemical composition.
DeleteMatt says, “You are a clown with an ability to type and string words together.”
ReplyDeleteAh! There’s life in old Noah. He can still muster a piloerection and bark out an ad hominem. No worries Bryan. Matt snarls but his love never stops. It’s a spooky kind of love.
It's no worries. I understand that the ad hominem attack is the last refuge for someone who is losing an argument.
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