Personal spiritual experience. Not only did it open a new direction for me but I knew I couldn't have come to this realization from my ordinary emotions and thought process. Sometimes if our need is deep and genuine, a connection is opened and we get help from above.

many who have came here have shared some personal experiences ...and even though it may not sway who we are or our own thinking...it is nice to better understand the person we share thoughts with....

you say spiritual experience opened a new direction..can you share what was the other direction and what about the expierience do you feel awakend you to your now direction of thought/knowing...


what kind of thoughts and emotions does one need...if not ordinary...


.What validates a need as genuine

and what is above...it is a true place you feel God exsists in or is it a word used in just.....

i am very interested where your coming from and how you have ended up with your knowing...and as i said..most or least many here that i have been reading shed light on how they are at the spot they are in life....

That can also be diagnosed as mental defect. Be careful.

I had a few comments to make..

You could probably take most historical religions that have been around for say more than five hundred years and argue various things about them.. but being an "arm chair" student of history there are almost always exceptions in the religion that would say undermine most hypotheses one could make.

As an example someone commented above that Western religions were maybe flawed because they lacked an identification with God say in a more mystical sense as in Eastern religions... but what we overlook is that while that may be the case in much of Western religion it's also true that there were some mystics in the Western tradition who were very much comparable to Eastern sages and wisdom...i.e., such as Meister Eckhart and others .. maybe some in the Quaker tradition.

And there are some Eastern traditions and thinkers who were dualists and would not accept a union with the Divine.

Using for lack of a better term "common sense" and applying to history is usually not very helpful or instructive.

Also while some associate Christianity with maybe fundamentalism it is not necessarily the predominant movement historically in that religion overall..there are large exceptions to that thinking...such as Eastern Orthodoxy and Pietists and so on.

- Art

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"it benefits us to be thoughtful, not of the glory of our minds, but rather, above all else, of the glory of God."
- Johannes Kepler

If it is indeed "personal spiritual experience," then it applies personally and individually, not generally. Do not mistake your own "experiences" for a mandate for anyone else.

I would make the same remark about Simone Weil, too. Her "personal spiritual experiences" are her own. She cannot, and you cannot, make them a condition for salvation for a single other soul in the universe.

__________________
evangelicalhumanist: Greek "eu"=good and "angelos"=messenger. Spreading the good news of Humanism.

My experience was the experience of vertical levels of inner reality. The ancients referred to this as the line of being or the relative quality of "NOW."

If this is true it pertains to everyone. If not, then it is useless fantasy

While I can agree with the generality of your statement, the Church actively pursued a path of eliminating the mystical orders and discouraging them, same goes for the Sufi masters. On the other side of the street, although many of the Eastern traditions did allow people the opportunity for higher study, they did discriminate who would be allowed to do such. My point was not that one had it "all right" and the other had it "all wrong". My point was that any spiritual tradition benefits itself when it allows for and makes room for spiritual progression while not implementing its own barriers. The model for such progression is more easily discerned in the Eastern models because they did not dogmatically attach the idea of a mythical mediary so closely to spiritual development. Certainly, Eastern ideas have their problems with caste systems applied to cultural norms and the idea of "untouchables" and so forth. But the model for mystical development is much more pronounced there than it is in the West. People are just now beginning to relearn and study the mystical paths of individuals such as Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, etc., but it is not common place and has few recognized "masters" within its ranks actively teaching within Christian organizations. Its looked at as more of a quasi-acceptable experimentation.

Just because most Christians are in love with the mythical mediator idea isn't the same thing as labeling them all fundamentalist. If you believe that the only road to salvation in Christianity is accepting that Jesus Christ died for your sins, that's a mythical concept. Not many Christians, even those that don't consider themselves fundamentalist, view this concept in a more mytical/archetypical sense. They believe it happened and that that sacrifice opens the way to salvation for them. They don't believe its just a metaphore for dying to one's own egoic sense of self to embrace one's higher spiritual self. So, being a former history major myself, I don't think the description is that far off. No general description will ever encompass all exceptions, all deviations, but I believe that this is generally true, and also one of the true sources of terrorism in Islamic fundamentalism today.

-TC

TC


Don't be so sure. We are so concerned with quality of life that we've lost the conception of what the quality of death means. The conscious quality of Jesus death was exceptional and IMO it was this quality that brought the Spirit that could enable the awakening of those sensitive to it.

False. The Hebrew word here is châdâsh (Strong no. 2319) and it generally means a new thing. Renew is châdash. Here are some biblical examples of châdâsh:





2319 means new, otherwise we should say the house and cart were not new, rather they were rebuilt. That would be completely in violation to the command in I Sam. 6:7 to carry the Ark of the Covenant.


Firstly, there was no strict Judaism prior to the second century. In the Second Temple period there were competing religious factions that evolved from the primitive Israelite religions. The original religion was the Yahwehist religion in the Southern Kingdom that held Yahweh as God, and the Northern Kingdom in Galilee and Samaria that held Elohim as God. After the Second Temple period, the Pharisee religion won out against its competitors, and that in a nutshell is how Judaism evolved.

Originally, prior to when Solomon built the first temple, the Israelites used a Tabernacle. If the Pharisees wanted to, they could have continued to use a Tabernacle to keep the whole Mosaic law. But by this time religion had evolved beyond the primitive nationalistic religion of the early Iron age, and therefore the young Judaism religion wisely choose to end temple sacrifice.

As for the 613 laws, I honor the orthodox Jews who feel they are still required by God to have a certain kind of haircut, or circumcise their penises, etc., but for the modern mind I wonder how anyone can think that the God of a Darwinian universe 13.7 billion years old, could think of God on the same terms that the primitive religion of the early Iron age could conceive of God.

Christianity early on realized the need to elevate our understanding of God to a much higher level, without divorcing itself from its rich history. Whether one is Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, etc., I would hope that God is seen as a God that is reasonable given what we know of the world. Of course, there are fundamentalists in each religion, but I think even fundamentalists realize that the modern mind pays little attention to these primitive conceptions of the world.

Then christianity should probably rid itself of archaic and misleading concepts such as :
-you live only once and if you become a christian you will go to heaven when you die;
-you need Jesus as your personal Lord and savior if you don't want to be tortured in hell forever;
-you need to believe that God was born of a virgin and became a man just as us;
-sins are only made right via a blood sacrifice;
-that there is any people who are somehow more special than any others before God;
to name the most harmful lies.