inner growth

Heaven is not just for Christians

The Lord’s kingdom is a kingdom of love. Love trumps faith, that is, love trumps Christian knowledge. The reason is that love is the spiritual means by which the Lord God forms an intimate relationship with each of us.

The knowledge of God or belief in God only makes God present with us. But love, which is faith put into action, is how the Lord enters into our very lives – not just nearby.

God seeks a dwelling place in our hearts. Love is how the Lord enters into a covenant with us.

When we love the neighbor as ourselves we apply the Golden Rule, whether we attend a church, a temple, a mosque, or a baseball game. True worship is true love.

The mercy of the Lord is Infinite and cannot be limited to any one country, race, or belief-system. This is contrary to Divine Love and mercy.

People who believe that those who do not share their belief system will perish in hell overlook the fact that religion involves being good – not being right.

Furthermore, how can Christians even claim to be “right” when disdain for others, greed, and adultery is so prevalent among its ranks? This is the horrible outcome of the doctrine of salvation by faith alone, which separates religion from how we actually behave in the world.

It is also the disastrous outcome of interpreting Scripture merely as a literal account of history, which describes God as being “pissed-off,” promoting wars between countries, allowing slavery, polygamy, and depicting women as second class citizens.

God is infinite love. We are made in God’s image not by having ten fingers and ten toes, but by having spiritual love.

It is only through sincere mutual love for each other that the world can be saved. Can the process of saving the world be different from the process of saving our souls?

This spiritual process of exalting love is open to all men and women on earth.

Otherwise, the Creator would be extremely inefficient in perfecting the heavenly kingdom and sharing eternal blessings.

Posted on September 8, 2008by thegodguy

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Take That, Stephen Hawking!

2011 MONTAIGNE MEDAL WINNER honored as one of the most thought-provoking books of the year

2011 ERIC HOFFER AWARD FINALIST recognizing salient writing and independent spirit

2011 SILVER NAUTILUS AWARD WINNER awarded to books that stimulate the imagination and offer the world new possibilities for a better life and a better world

Posted on May 16, 2011by

http://www.ProvingGod.com

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God’s Word was written for angels too

One might assume that because angels live in heaven that they do not need to learn any more about God. But, if God is Infinite Love and Wisdom, you would think that the Creator would offer angels the ability to continue exercise their minds over the long haul of eternal existence.

Even we terrestrial beings of the planet earth would find it quite boring on this temporal plane if we could not learn something new each day.

Since the Lord God instructs through the Holy Word, and the Word existed prior to creation (John 1:1-3), we can assume that angels have access to the Word. However, do angels interpret its stories and narratives the same way we do?

The reason why I ask this silly question is that angels do not live in the physical world of time and space. Yet, all the stories in Scripture take place in time and space. How could they understand physical events when living in a non-material realm?

Mystic and theologian, Emanuel Swedenborg, suggested that angels interpret Scripture differently – by removing its stories from any involvement with time and space. How would they accomplish this theological feat?

Angels turn the literal sense of each word in Scripture to its psycho-spiritual equivalent. So, instead of seeing the Holy Word as a mere literal and historical account of things, they distill higher, spiritual meanings from its stories.

Angels do not interpret the seven-day Creation Story found in Genesis as an unfolding of physical events. They interpret this story as the seven steps that an individual’s heart and mind goes through in acquiring an “inner” paradise (epigenesis) from God.

Here is a brief overview of the Angelic take on the Creation Story:

LET THERE BE LIGHT – In the beginning, the human heart and mind starts off in spiritual darkness and in a complete void concerning God. God moves to enlighten us from this darkness (day one).

SEPARATING THE WATERS – Once God is recognized we can begin to separate spiritual knowledge from worldly knowledge (day two).

DRY LAND & PLANTS – By separating this information we can put our feet on firm ground, that is, on solid faith in God. From this faith grounded in the mind, new spiritual thoughts take root, grow, flower, fruit, and yield seeds (day three).

GREAT LUMIINARIES – Now humans have, from God, a faith that can serve as a beacon in times of darkness, and serve as a more powerful light when the warmth of love is added to faith (day four).

CREEPING THINGS – Our faith now becomes more animated by love, which is symbolized in the biblical story by animals that move (day five).

MAMMALS, MAN & WOMAN, DOMINION – Love increases and is exalted through the representation of warm-blooded animals appearing. True “humanness” now emerges onto the scene. God commands us through our faith to gain dominion over all the various qualities of thoughts and feelings that live in our hearts and minds. Our inner reality has now become a garden, where everything in it has been arranged according to God’s wisdom and order (day six).

REST – God’s work is finished (day seven).

So angels remove the aspects of time and space from the biblical narratives by interpreting them as symbolically addressing things taking place within the human heart and mind (which is a person’s spirit). These higher symbolic meanings allow angels to learn deeper concepts about faith throughout an eternity.

The Sacred Word would not be sacred unless it contained God’s Divine Holiness, which is infinite. Therefore, God’s Infinite nature can only be expressed in a Holy Document that contains deeper levels of meaning!

The significance for each of us about all this is that since we humans are inwardly spirits, we too, have the capacity to interpret these higher meanings from the Holy Word.

In fact, this is one of the biggest secrets concerning the Second Coming. REVELATION is the Lord’s coming back to reveal these deeper things to us!

Are you ready?

Posted on September 7, 2008by thegodguy

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Multiply Yourself – Everywhere!

Be honest. Don’t you wish everyone would think and be like you? If you could turn everyone else into “you,” the world would be six billion times better. I am not kidding.

Furthermore, you actually have the power to do so.

Not only would it be a good thing to turn everyone else into copies of “you,” God wants you to do precisely just that! In fact, it is actually one of God’s great commandments. The commandment is to love thy neighbor as oneself.

Confused? Let me explain.

God really does want us to look at others and see ourselves. But this is not to be understood as a spreading out of one’s self-centeredness in all directions. It is an act of humility.

When one person loves another as him or herself, he or she will then see the other in oneself, and oneself in the other. This spiritual love and consciousness is called empathy.

It is not the multiplication or the forcing of one’s will upon everyone else, either. It is the harmonious unification of the wills of many.

This unites one person with another. And even better, unites one society with another.

This union does not superimpose our likeness upon another person. Rather, it allows us all to take on the likeness of the Lord God, who is Divine Love.

Heaven is a likeness of the Lord because it consists of those who live in spiritual love and unity. Heaven on earth is the adoption of neighborly love by all its terrestrial citizens.

This is the deeper meaning within God’s command to be “fruitful and multiply.” God wants us each to increase the good in the world.

That would indeed make the world six billion times better.

Posted on September 5, 2008by thegodguy

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God wants to be loved, too!

I am not trying to imply that God has joined a lonely-hearts club or has a pitiful existence. It is simply a divine necessity for a God of Infinite Love.

Love needs a subject. This is clear to all of us when we reflect that our desires, passions, and intentions must be focused on something real – something that exists outside of us.

God created the external world as a focus for divine love. This does not mean that God creates matter so that quarks, atoms, and molecules could be “admired.” Rather, God focused divine love in a way that allowed its spiritual force to take form in concrete physical things.

In other words, all matter is a recipient form of God’s influence.

The Infinite occupies finite things according to reception. This is why nature displays a profound endeavor toward self-organization and complexity. Nature organizes itself into new levels of order as an increased response to God’s love.

The essence of love is to unite. Even a physicist will admit that the universe is obviously unified. There is no physical principle for why nature becomes so rationally ordered and coherent. Going a step further, there is no reason why the laws of the physical universe are so fine-tuned towards bio-friendliness.

Nature goes beyond the organization of galaxies and solar systems. Nature creates bio-structure, culminating in the profound structure of the human brain. What is not taken into consideration by the physical sciences is that this process of creation and evolution is the exaltation of love.

God’s love in the universe increases as structure becomes more complex. Everything is organized for cooperation and utility – which expresses God’s goodness. It is God’s love that attaches usefulness to various combinations of matter and their increasing complexity.

But ultimately, love needs more than a subject. Love is perfected and exalted when it is reciprocal.

Love wants to love and be loved in return.

This is the reason why evolution has led to the emergence of the human race. Humans have the cognitive ability to recognize the Creator and love God back – by applying spiritual values to their lives. Religious tenets are the means by which humankind becomes the ultimate recipient form of God’s love. Thus humankind indeed becomes an image and likeness of God.

Humans have an inner reality not shared by other creatures, called first person phenomenal experience. This inner psycho-reality allows evolution and bio-complexity to continue into a non-physical realm.

How?

The arrangement and ordering of human experience in the human heart and mind is a real organic process that creates real non-physical bio-structure, or spiritual body. This innermost body of the spirit is formed from one’s life choices and values, and, can survive physical death and the tyranny of time. (One’s choices and values are one’s spirit and are derivatives of love.)

Heaven is not to be thought of as simply a place that one goes to for being “good.” Heaven is beyond time, space, and physical law. It is something you become – inwardly. Heaven is a state of love – and the non-material organic form it takes from the quality of our personal response to God’s divine love.

This is the real purpose behind religion – to create a covenant between God and the human race through love finding its ultimate fulfillment.

God needs us to bring this wonderful plan to fruition.

Posted on September 3, 2008by thegodguy

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Conscience and Armageddon

 

Conscience is the battleground where our various proclivities and compulsions fight it out with the things we know to be true and proper.

If religion and God’s tenets form our conscience, then the stakes are raised. It not only becomes a personal conflict over civil rules or ethical standards but it rises to the level of spiritual warfare – the battle between good and evil.

Anyone who reflects on the issues of living a spiritual life, according to God’s tenets, will realize that these are issues pertaining to the human heart and mind. God, through religion, wishes to win over our minds and hearts. Similarly, maleficent influences seek to rule hearts and minds.

Victory on this level means complete victory. Principles of life obtained by the human heart and mind, through conscience (or the lack of it), cannot be quashed by physical threats or by brute force.

If the ultimate battleground between good and evil is played out on the psycho-turf of the human heart and mind, why then, do people still believe God will return to earth to “kick butt?”

God compels no one towards having religious faith or belief, otherwise he would have come down from the cross and asserted his divinity and authority, right there and then. Compelling belief accomplishes the opposite, for it destroys free will, which is a gift from God and a derivative of love. God wants to be accepted from the principle of love not from the tip of a sword, unless that sword symbolizes the power of divine truth (as opposed to polished steel).

I have maintained throughout many posts that the Sacred Word contains deeper levels of meaning by which physical things can communicate higher, spiritual qualities. When these deeper meanings are applied to the “end times” as recorded in Revelation, including the great battle of Armageddon, we will find that these scenes pertain to events taking place within the inner lives of people. This is where God makes His ultimate and final stand. This is the only “place” where true spiritual warfare can take place and allow the Lord to make all things new – from the inside out.

Even a careful reading of the literal meanings of the words used in the New Testament back this up this thesis. When the Lord speaks about the end times, he states that the current generation will not pass until all these things are fulfilled (Matt. 24:34). Well, the generation the Lord addressed has long passed. Elsewhere, the Lord states that “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation” (Luke, 17:20). One will not point to anything unusual and say, “Look here,” or “Look there” (Luke, 17:21). So, what gives here?

The only place left to look is WITHIN us. This new wrinkle on biblical interpretation certainly allows God to fulfill his promise within a generation – anyone’s generation. The caveat is we have to take part in the fight.

Posted on August 27, 2008 by thegodguy

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Sexual Intercourse In Heaven

Heaven would not be heaven unless one could continue to partake in all the enjoyments and pleasures of life after the death of the physical body. This includes marriage and sexual intercourse.

To grasp this we have to take into account that heaven is not in time and space. Therefore, if individuals are enjoying life in the spiritual world, without a physical body, they must have spiritual bodies. Without the appropriate organic form, pleasure has no substantive subject by which it can really exist.

However, since spiritual bodies are non-physical, their organic forms, whether we are talking about a penis or vagina, can only be understood as the embodiment of the qualities of one’s heart and mind (which is one’s true spirit).

All spiritual bio-complexity consists of one’s true inner reality given real substantive and non-physical organic form. In other words, in the spiritual world non-material organs are generated out of all the aspects of our heart and understanding. All organic structure in heaven is psycho-topological.

A spiritual penis or vagina is therefore a more perfect embodiment of one’s love, values, and ideas as well.

A penis in the spiritual world reflects a male spirit’s ability and potency to probe the subject of his passion from his understanding. A spiritual vagina represents a woman’s receptivity and will to accept these qualities and potencies of her suitor by becoming the ultimate focus of his love.

This receptivity is the inner essence of a woman’s attractiveness and beauty in the spiritual world. A woman in heaven becomes more beautiful as she becomes the life and love of her husband’s spiritual understanding. A woman becomes a wife in this manner and is the only way two partners can be wedded in heaven.

The man becomes a more perfect husband and increasingly handsome as his spiritual knowledge increases. So the husband becomes the embodiment of his wife’s understanding and wisdom. The male and female genitals are the spiritual analog, and represent, the dynamics of this profound union.

This level of bonding is not generally known in on earth. But there is no way for two partners to become increasingly intimate with each other if they could not take on the intimacy that is found between a united understanding and its will. This increased intimacy allows a heavenly marriage to be perfected through eternity.

Sexual intercourse in heaven mirrors this dynamic as the spiritual act of a husband’s understanding seeking union with the wife’s love. Wives in heaven are spiritually formed so that they can be impregnated by the ideas of their husband’s understanding (his ideas are his spiritual seed).

The husband’s ideas gestate in the wife’s heart. She brings them to life in the spiritual world as new qualities of love and wisdom that are shared by both partners (because they always act as one spirit). Spiritual offspring are the things generated from this holy union – increased love and service for the heavenly community.

Rather than a multiplication of people, spiritual progeny are the multiplication of usefulness and goodness.

In God’s scheme, whether on earth or in the spiritual world, all intercourse is for the sake of impregnation and creation. All creation has origins in the marriage of God’s love and truth. All sexual intercourse follows this Holy pattern to promote and give birth to something fruitful in the universe.

Those in heaven do not engage in anal intercourse or make use of dildos. In the spiritual world, these things represent corporeal pleasures excluded from spiritual principles and their prolific power.

Have I rained on anyone’s parade?

Posted on August 24, 2008by thegodguy

Website: http://www.provinggod.com

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How does God squeeze infinite knowledge into a finite book?

The Bible is a ponderous book. But in no way can its 1,000+ pages contain God’s Infinite Wisdom.

Why is this an issue?

Because, everything God does, must be done from an infinite and eternal perspective. Otherwise, divine action would be dissimilar to God’s actual infinite character and nature. Dissimilarity means imperfection.

If God is the ultimate author of Scripture then it must somehow contain infinite knowledge within its numbered pages. This would also give us a more effective way to verify the sanctity, authority, and inerrancy of the Holy Word – beyond our having unshakable faith or some corroborating archeological evidence.

Even if we were to find archeological evidence for every story in Scripture this would only prove that God was accurate with the historical facts.

Accurate time lines do not portray Infinite Wisdom. Furthermore, the accuracy of biblical events, like the creation story and the age of the universe, are called into serious question by scientific discovery. So how are we to take seriously the claim that all things in the created universe were created from the Word? (John, 1:1-3) That would mean the Holy Word contains scientific as well as moral laws!

Does Scripture give any reference to relativity theory, quantum physics, or superstring theory?

And, what are we to think of God being depicted as angry, starting wars between nations, supporting slavery and polygamy?

Theologian Emanuel Swedenborg had an answer to these problems. He discovered that the Holy Word was a multi-dimensional document. This gave Scripture the depth to contain God’s Infinite Wisdom through levels that contained deeper meanings and revelations within its narratives.

Once this scaffolding of the biblical architecture is recognized and grasped, the mysteries of faith become accessible to the human rational mind – especially concerning the dynamics of salvation and the secret behind the Lord’s return. And more. Much more.

Universal patterns will begin to emerge out from our careful reading of the biblical stories, displaying God’s design in scientific matters as well. Because hidden within the sacred narratives are the patterning principles for holistic process in the universe. By elevating our minds above the literal meaning of the words, Scripture addresses quantum discontinuity, top-down causality, and reveals how every detail of its stories is non-locally connected simultaneously, that is, perfectly oriented to God’s eternal goal and Infinite Wisdom.

These are a few of the issues I will be addressing in my next book, Proving God.

Do these ideas seem strange to you? Does this possibility shake up your current world-view?

Well then, my friend, welcome to the Lord’s Second Coming!

Posted on August 22, 2008by thegodguy

Website: http://www.provinggod.com

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Faith or Good Works?

There has been a long, ongoing battle between Christians as to whether one is saved by faith alone or with the augmentation of good works. Something as important as eternal salvation needs resolution.

An effective means for throwing light on a particular subject is through the use of analogy. Analogy lets us tie together something unknown with something known and experienced. So I would like to use the power of analogy to help us get to the bottom of this most important issue and settle the debate over faith and good works.

The difference between faith and good works is analogous to the difference between sowing seed and growing seed. Having faith and belief (along with its religious doctrine) is like God sowing spiritual seed in our mind – which is the soil of our spirit. But only having faith and belief in the Lord as savior is like leaving seeds sitting on top of the soil.

It is a scientific fact that the seeds of nature’s plant kingdom will not take root and grow until the soil conditions are favorable. Same thing with the seeds of faith, which remain as mere data in one’s memory, until the conditions of the heart and mind become favorable.

The “perfect” conditions that allow for faith to take root and grow have to do with spiritual love. It is a desire to be helpful to others from a spiritual principle. This state of the human spirit is called loving God and loving the neighbor (which are the two principles of religion that all the commandments hang on).

Love (like the vernal warmth of Spring) provides the spiritual warmth that releases the productive principle within the seeds of faith, allowing God’s lessons to take root and in our hearts and mind, where it then grows into living activity.

Growth is action. Likewise, faith must grow, blossom, and bear fruit. Faith has no life unless it grows and is productive. In other words, faith cannot reach its potentials without good works. Good works (spiritual love) are the very life and living activity of faith.

Love is faith put into action.

This is why the Lord said to “judge them by their fruits.” The Lord did not say to “judge them by their faith.” Good works are one’s faith manifested in the world, that is, finding concrete reality in action.

However, there is a caveat. Good works must be carried out with humility, be aligned to a true love of the Lord God, and an acknowledgment that God is the Gardener. Otherwise, we take merit for our charitable actions and good deeds.

What say you?

Posted on August 17, 2008by thegodguy

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Can the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost sit on three different chairs?

This cannot be answered without a rational discussion of the Holy Trinity. This theological topic, more than any other, confuses the heck out of serious and religious thinking people.

Orthodox Christianity describes the Holy Trinity as three divine persons. Although they attempt to recover and restore the notion of one God (Christianity is supposed to be monotheistic) by saying that the three divine Persons of Trinitarian doctrine consist of one unified substance, still, one is left with the notion that these three Gods could sit in three different chairs.

When I have pointed to the illogicality of such an ambiguous notion of God, its defenders (including those with Ph.Ds) say that it is a “Great Mystery” and warn me that my mind should not even be going into such directions.

My answer to that is “zc@#$%*&>?+<#x<!”

Now that I have gotten that off my chest I can put my emotions aside and return to a more pragmatic discussion of this matter. When I say my prayers at night, I want to know exactly to whom I am addressing (and not have to guess whether I am focusing on the correct chair or the proper Deity).

I know that Jesus said that the only way to the Father was through Him (the Son) but then Jesus does an about face by teaching the Lord’s Prayer which completely bypasses the Son and allows us to pray directly to the Father.

So, with the Lord’s Prayer in hand, who needs Jesus?

But Orthodox Christianity, which embraces the sacred Trinity as three Persons, insists we are first to put our faith in Jesus. In this way the righteousness of the Son can be imputed to us humans by the Father, then the Holy Spirit shows up to set into motion the operation of justification, which magically wipes all our sins away, renews our spirit, and completes our salvation.

In other words, each Divine Person cannot claim to be fully God, as each does something that the other two don’t. If it takes three Persons to give us an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent God, well, to be frank, that is not my idea of monotheism.

I prefer Emanuel Swedenborg’s version of the Divine Trinity as ONE GOD manifesting three distinct operations and functions. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit represent not three persons but the three operations of Divine Love, Divine Truth, and Divine Activity.

Truth makes love visible. That is why the Lord came into the world – to make the Love of the Father visible to us by taking on a human form. Jesus is Jehovah!

One might wonder how God could take on an imperfect and gross human body. According to Swedenborg, that was God’s precise strategy for salvation. The purpose of coming into the world was to make His human form perfectly divine by doing the will of the Father (the Father was His Divine Soul) and combating the worldly desires of the flesh and worldly temptations.

Why did God have to implore such a strategy instead of fighting evil straight on?

Without taking on a human body an Infinite God cannot be realistically attacked by any evil. A human body provided the medium by which the Lord was vulnerable to attack by both people on earth and by the entire powers of hell. The appearance of the Holy Spirit (as a dove) when Jesus was baptized was a sign from heaven that the operation of harmonizing his human side by means of the higher influence of His Divine Nature was about to begin.

This process of overcoming the flesh and its proclivities (especially love of self and the world) involved profound humiliation before the Father (which represented His Divine Spirit and its ultimate dictates).

The Lord’s biggest challenge on the cross was not enduring physical pain or physical death but His not giving in to the human part of His nature – which tempted Him to get off the cross as a show of absolute strength to men and women and compel belief. By resisting this final temptation and achieving profound humility He united His human nature with the Divine Nature and made them one (the Alpha and Omega). What died on the cross were all His human imperfections.

This complete victory over the flesh gave the Lord full power over hell, which was increasing its deadly influence in the world at the time of His Advent. We were not saved by this event but the door to salvation was kept open. When we approach the Lord to change our lives His Divine Heavenly Spirit (not a dove) starts a similar process of renewal and regeneration within us. The Lord will help us combat our negative nature and find true humility.

If God chose to sit in three chairs we would see the same person (the Lord) on all three.

How does that sit with you? Did I pull a chair right out from under your faith-system?

Posted on August 15, 2008by thegodguy

http://www.provinggod.com

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The Origin Of Evil

According to most traditional religions, evil originated in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve disobeyed God by ingesting the forbidden fruit.

What is not made clear in current religion doctrine is whether eating the forbidden fruit was a great sin because it challenged a divine dictate or if they had actually eaten something poisonous.

The “big clue” in answering this question is hinted at in Genesis, by Adam and Eve’s being convinced (by the serpent) that they would gain their own knowledge of good and evil and become gods themselves.

Such a false sense of self-importance seems much more grievous than the childlike disobedience of wanting to eat something that was off-limits. Even a parent will put a limit on a child eating candy because it can be lead to future health problems (not because the parent is testing for obedience).

Like all true crimes, transgressions of law need to be qualified by a motive. The motive of Adam and Eve was for power, rather than to expand their desert menu. They desired to place their own importance above that of God’s.

Evil is the reversal of order.

Within the Divine scheme of order we are to place the love of God and the love of the neighbor above our own worldly and temporal needs. However, when we put ourselves first, we turn God’s scheme upside down and on its head. All evil originates from the belief that we are better than others, and that their only value is to serve our needs.

Evil has no fundamental basis in reality. Evil is a contingency and choice.

When we put ourselves above others have we not “swallowed whole” a horrendous idea about ourselves? Under the principle of such a false image of ourselves, do we not seek the sweetness and fruitfulness of being numero uno?

Trees in the Garden of Eden represented belief systems. The Tree of Life represented a belief system based on God’s tenets. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is a belief system based on one’s own sagacity and self worth.

The Lord said to judge people by their fruit.

What tree grows inside your heart and mind? What ideas branch out, blossom, and bear fruit from the principles you have chosen in life?

What is the sweetest and delicious thing you could experience in your life?

Posted on July 30, 2008by thegodguy

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Love and Science

When the Lord stated in the Apostolic Gospels that we are to “love God and the neighbor,” He was not just responding to a question from a Pharisee who wanted to know what was the greatest commandment. He was unifying religion with science!

How can that be? Well, love can act as a powerful antibody. Love can promote physical health and psychological wellbeing. Therefore, love is more than a romantic notion or an act of goodness. Love is of scientific importance to science itself.

Research has shown that love somehow creates chemicals that strengthen the immune system. Laughing, singing, being around friends, marriage, and even going to church creates positive emotional states that can lower blood pressure, reduce stress, and generally help people to liver longer, fuller lives.

Brain scientists are starting to look at neurotransmitters (amino acids, hormones, and peptides) as “molecules of emotion.” There is even a book out with that exact title and written by a professor of biophysics. Beyond that, emotion is now being looked at as being a key component of human cognitive function. It is believed by some that emotions (derivatives of love) are what focus our attention and arrange human experience into coherent and personal belief systems. (This is non-physical, self-organization, folks!)

Pioneering neuroscientists suspect that the way to create a comprehensive theory of the human cognitive architecture and its neural substrates is through the framework of a multi-dimensional model of emotion.

This kind of framework is exactly what Emanuel Swedenborg (who was the father of neuron theory) had accomplished over 250 years ago! He developed a multi-dimensional model of the human brain (and mind) consisting of layered networks, each under the agency of some distinct principle of love – from corporeal or worldly love to spiritual love. This hierarchical arrangement showed that the human brain and mind had its neural basis in a non-physical, theological realm.

I predict that more and more scientists (heck, theologians too) will begin to look at the universe and nature not just from a computational or intellectual perspective, but from a volitional perspective as well. (There is already a philosophical theory out there that defines substance as a dispositional property or endeavor – called dispositional essentialism.)

Love is the ultimate disposition. That is why I have chosen to write a book that will attempt to show that love is the fundamental principle behind gravitational order and self-organization in the universe. All structure and existence is relationship. In other words, love is the reason why the universe consists of laws that are fine-tuned to be bio-friendly.

Love is the secret to the principle of agency in the universe. And according to the Lord’s words in Scripture, true love is also the key to eternal life and happiness.

Posted on July 27, 2008by thegodguy

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The next great religion will have science agreeing with faith

       God has been working to share with the human race a new, unifying paradigm between   science and religion for more than two hundred years now. The problem with this new heavenly revelation is that it is anti-intuitive and will catch most people by complete surprise—because it will challenge both current scientific and theological models of reality.

Rather than people widely embracing this new heavenly dispensation, God’s divine effort to correct humankind’s flawed ideas of fundamental reality will be seen as a threat by most of those who have a vested interest in defending contemporary institutions. This defensive thinking will have to be pushed to the wayside in order to make room for new ideas coming from heaven. And that will cause an intense battle over entrenched worldviews (reputations and careers will be on the line).

Most scientists shun religion because they despise any kind of “truth system” which simply requires mere belief rather than rigorous testing and rational discernment (blind faith). Theologians, on the other hand, believe that there is an invisible, spiritual and metaphysical element to the design of the cosmos.

This division means that both approaches to reality have flaws.

In order for there to be a rational system for uniting science and theology together, all new universal laws have to be discovered in which both truth systems can share an inner consistency. In other words, both systems will have to point to similar first causal principles.

Scientist/theologian Emanuel Swedenborg made a lifelong search for these inner consistencies. He discovered that universal scientific truth contained and reflected doctrinal and theological concepts—like a mirror. In terms of causal links between heaven and earth, spiritual truth flows into and terminates into scientific/natural law (one is prior and the other posterior). In other words, correct scientific constructs correspond perfectly to spiritual constructs. Swedenborg called this unifying model of top-down causal reality the science of correspondences.

This is not only a difficult notion to sell to contemporary thinkers but it has also caused some confusion among many Swedenborgian academicians. The reason is, that although these scholars accept Swedenborg’s theological discoveries as superior to other faith systems, many feel his science is dated. They will point to the fact that Swedenborg only had 18th century ideas and calculus to work with rather than the New Paradigm mathematics of quantum mechanics or multi-dimensional string theory.

Wrong!

In my award-winning book Proving God I challenge this notion because Swedenborg was not satisfied with the scientific thinking of his era and developed some of his own new scientific doctrines to help him find a causal link between the physical human body and the human soul (who is trying to do that today?). To accomplish this great feat, he took the mathematics of his time (calculus of fluxions) and elevated it through ever-new analyses of infinities. This brilliant and primogenital approach to multi-level fluxions and kinetics allowed him to lawfully remove spacetime limitations to various processes and trajectories until they became non-material! This orderly approach is how he discovered the dynamics of correspondences and the inner consistencies between physical, mental and divine activity.

All process obeys the same rules!

Swedenborg claimed to have had God’s help and guidance throughout his life. This amazing claim, while counter-intuitive to our terrestrial sensitivities, cannot be easily dismissed when you consider that he put all these ideas into a wide bookshelf’s worth of publications for everyone to carefully scrutinize. He also cannot be easily dismissed because he designed the first true fixed-wing aircraft as a young man and later contributed important discoveries in brain science, including the first brain cell (neuron) theory.

He had even anticipated the newest leanings in modern neuroscience that emotion and feeling (loves) drove the human mind and that the human brain and neuron has even deeper levels of structure, where the higher operations of abstract thought and reasoning take place. As I hinted earlier, Swedenborg didn’t stop there. He provided a multi-level model of neural substrates in the cerebrum that continued into the non-physical domain of spiritual process!

Then he was chosen by the Lord God to make actual observations of the spiritual world. These unprecedented observations took place for almost three decades and were recorded in dozens of books!

His approach to theology later in life was always as a critical scientist and offered lots of rational evidence that God’s Holy Word also contained a multi-level architecture that provided the template for top-down causation in the human mind and the created universe—as well as new revelations concerning God’s continuous efforts at human salvation.

Studying his ideas will change the course of your life!

Posted on August 30, 2012by

http://www.provinggod.com

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Did God Create An Imperfect World?

The evidence seems overwhelming. The world is anything but perfect. This has led some to believe that a God of perfect love could not have been the author of such a flawed plan. But if we contemplate this notion a bit, we will see that to do otherwise would rule out God’s having to create a world of time and space.

God created the earth with a finite size, taking up a finite space. Was this a mistake? The imperfection of this finite design is that everything that will ever live cannot possibly occupy this limited space at the same time. So life forms come and go. They die but they reproduce to keep things going.

The only way to change this apparent “wasteful” situation would be to allow everything to live forever, and on a planet that kept getting bigger and bigger. This would also mean that one life form could never eat another.

But this would throw all organic process out the window – since the main function of internal organs is to process food and make it available to every cell in the body. Cells would no longer have to process anything for the body, either. (We certainly would not need an immune system in a world of perfect health.)

So, it would be no sense keeping our internal organs unless they were allowed to remain inside our bodies in order to “pantomime” the functions of life. Is it not within God’s Infinite power to keep us alive even with hollow bodies?

Why stop there? Plants would no longer have to turn the energy of the sun into starches. Earthworms would not have to labor to keep the soil fertile, etc., etc.

So what would everything be alive for in a perfect world if what they were designed to do became irrelevant? Idealists might respond by saying that everything in a perfect world would be alive to share the world in peaceful coexistence and happiness – people, bugs and bacteria.

But could a worm find happiness in not being a human? Therefore, in a perfect world, there would be no hierarchy. Evolution (and species extinction) would not be necessary if God simply created only humans – right off the bat.

But that would not make things perfect unless all humans were created as loving angels.

Furthermore, we would all have to look equally beautiful or handsome, and be equally intelligent, in order for the world to be a place of true equality and justice.

Unfortunately, in such a perfect cookie-cutter world, how would we maintain our unique personalities without enjoying first-person phenomenal experience? How would we be interesting to others?

I believe a true God of love would give us the capacity to choose what we love, good or bad, because this is the drive belt of who we are.

Think about that. Human free will and human disposition is founded on love itself. God protects this freedom of the human spirit above everything else. Heaven is a choice. And there is nothing that could prevent us from making that choice but ourselves.

The physical world of time and space was created in such a way as to offer us a full spectrum of influences so that we could prepare ourselves for a non-material afterlife. In God’s eternal, spiritual realm, we will find ourselves in a non-physical environment whose topological features, flora and fauna, reflect the qualities of our heart and mind.

What could be more perfect than a world tailor-made for each of us, and our personal proclivities?

Perhaps, in my next post, I will provide more detail concerning the nature of the biosphere that makes up the unique ecology of the spiritual world. Then I would like to address the issue of evil in God’s universe.

Stay tuned.

Posted on July 26, 2008by thegodguy

Website: http://www.staircasepress.com

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Atheists and Quantum Theory

 

While I personally do not believe that quantum theory is yet a complete theory, as a philosopher/theologian, I derive some satisfaction in that its implications challenge the ideas of material realists who find no need for there to be a Creator-God.

Quantum theory holds that fundamental reality consists not of actual “stuff” but of possibilities or tendencies to exist. In other words, before something becomes an actual, non-reversible physical event, it first existed in strange mixed state of occupying multiple locations simultaneously (called the superposition principle).

Staunch materialists are obliged to live with the uneasy idea that fundamental reality is non-material and its activity is non-local, that is, the domain of quantum potentials is not in spacetime. So the ordered universe of classical measurement does not have its origins in a physical cause.

This has led some (brave) physicists to suspect that mind or consciousness is fundamental to the material universe, its laws, and forces.

Furthermore, there is a problem of figuring out how the world of classical (Newtonian) mechanics, that we directly experience, can be governed by fundamental randomness at the quantum microscopic scale. There is a real contradiction between the physics of the very small and the physics of the very large. However, since the universe is a unified whole, one must be the logical outcome of the other.

I believe this can only be resolved if there is a non-material organizing principle already operating on the quantum level. That is, potentials are not to be understood as random but as deterministic. Consciousness and mind are the only operations I know of that cannot be pinpointed in space, yet, as principles of agency, they always work with possibilities and seek to determine these possibilities into concrete forms.

Consciousness and mind are the only operations non-physically complex enough to explain nature’s incessant drive for self-organization and bio-complexity as emerging from a realm of mere potentials.

Here is where theology can now enter into the equation. What non-material principle of consciousness and mind has the aptitude and drive to create a unified and coherent universe? What non-material principle would tell us that it came from God?

The answer is LOVE. The essence of love is to unite. Nothing is more apparent in the observable universe than its profound capacity to create structure by forming relationships.

I predict the next upheaval in science will come from the recognition that love is more than a romantic notion. Love is the ultimate substance and non-material principle of agency in the universe.

Love is also the fabric of our spirit and life. What we love and intend governs how we choose to turn the inner realm of possibility into the concrete activities of our physical bodies.

Posted on July 24, 2008 by thegodguy

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