The Sainthood and Martyrdom of St. Paul

Originally Posted by BigJohn

What?

You claimed the person WAS a man.
I said the person WAS a woman.

You made an assumption.


As for the rest of your rhetoric..........

IDU, is she dead now?

[BigJohn]

Originally Posted by ketzer

IDU, is she dead now?

As far as I know, the woman is still alive.

Originally Posted by BigJohn

As far as I know, the woman is still alive.

Well that is just confusing then as you keep typing WAS, perhaps you meant to type WOMAN.

[inavalan]

Maybe I can bring light to this argument: women live longer than men!

Originally Posted by inavalan

Maybe I can bring light to this argument: women live longer than men!

Time is an illusion.

Sorry, I meant TIME is and illusion.

[BigJohn]

Originally Posted by Morpheus

There is among the Gnostic perspective and teachings a condemnation of St. Paul.
Which is confounding from what we know of him.

We know that St. Paul grew up in the Temple and was extremely zealous for the faith.

When he heard these new teachings about the supposed messiah, he went about rousting and persecuting those people involved.
These new "Christians".

It was on one of these exursions to the city of Damascus when suddenly he was knocked off his donkey, on the ground, and there met Christ.

Paul is a fantastic example for all of us.

No matter what we may have done in the past,
there is forgiveness and in some cases, a special 'place'.

[inavalan]

Originally Posted by ketzer

Time is an illusion.

Sorry, I meant TIME is and illusion.

No just TIME, most main stream media is fake news ...

Never thought to call "illusion" the fake news; too kind a word.

By the way, I believe that physical time is multi-dimensional, and the clock-time we know is just half of one dimension, and even that restricted in flow.

Originally Posted by inavalan

No just TIME, most main stream media is fake news ...

Never thought to call "illusion" the fake news; too kind a word.

By the way, I believe that physical time is multi-dimensional, and the clock-time we know is just half of one dimension, and even that restricted in flow.

Well, not sure what you mean by multi-dimensional, but it does seem to me that behind the illusion of time we experience in this life, there is another ...ok, dimension works.. of time, probably also of a illusory nature as well, but don't know. Just know that time, illusory as it seems, cannot easily be don away with. It is perhaps similar to how when one is reading a book, and completely engrossed in the story, several years may to pass in the story, while on the watch of the readers wrist, perhaps only several hours may pass. It would seem we have our own perceived flow of time that depends on our mind alone, our own spacetime, and also a shared spacetime, that all us co-creators use to stay in sync. Kind of like dreaming while asleep and dreaming while awake.

Of course we are not really in syc as general relativity shows us, all observers have their own flow of time, and their own experience of space for that matter, but we are relatively in syc, enough for the purposes of having a common experience anyway. Hmmmm.... one wonders if one of the differences between the dream while asleep and the shared dream while awake is the entanglement and codependency of our personal spacetimes. Another aspect of that surrendering of degrees of freedom for degrees of interconnection and common/shared experience. Perhaps then, we only have our one spacetime, and it is the dimension that our mind is focused on that affects its flow. Perception creating reality in the most literal of senses.

It would seem that fake news is for most the news that does not agree with the truths they already hold inside. Kind of like ones interpretation of the theology and doctrines of St. Paul. People see in it a reflection of their own perception of it. Saul the evil persecutor, or Paul, the one who was redeemed by, and now promotes redemption through, love.

[inavalan]

Originally Posted by ketzer

Well, not sure what you mean by multi-dimensional, but it does seem to me that behind the illusion of time we experience in this life, there is another ...ok, dimension works.. of time, probably also of a illusory nature as well, but don't know. Just know that time, illusory as it seems, cannot easily be don away with. It is perhaps similar to how when one is reading a book, and completely engrossed in the story, several years may to pass in the story, while on the watch of the readers wrist, perhaps only several hours may pass. It would seem we have our own perceived flow of time that depends on our mind alone, our own spacetime, and also a shared spacetime, that all us co-creators use to stay in sync. Kind of like dreaming while asleep and dreaming while awake.

Of course we are not really in syc as general relativity shows us, all observers have their own flow of time, and their own experience of space for that matter, but we are relatively in syc, enough for the purposes of having a common experience anyway. Hmmmm.... one wonders if one of the differences between the dream while asleep and the shared dream while awake is the entanglement and codependency of our personal spacetimes. Another aspect of that surrendering of degrees of freedom for degrees of interconnection and common/shared experience. Perhaps then, we only have our one spacetime, and it is the dimension that our mind is focused on that affects its flow. Perception creating reality in the most literal of senses.

It would seem that fake news is for most the news that does not agree with the truths they already hold inside. Kind of like ones interpretation of the theology and doctrines of St. Paul. People see in it a reflection of their own perception of it. Saul the evil persecutor, or Paul, the one who was redeemed by, and now promotes redemption through, love.

As always, what you wrote makes sense. Surely you made a few assumptions, as we all do. And because we differ a little in that respect, I differ a little in my views about time, reality, and fake news.

The problem with the news is that they shape public opinion, and that's too much power. I give the benefit of the doubt to many news people that they're honest; obviously not all. But they should know that they could be wrong, and that they have an enormous power, and should act accordingly. When they don't, there should be checks and balances to hold them responsible. The argument that "I thought so", or even "any reasonable person would've believed that", aren't valid excuses. Most news people see themselves as opinion shapers. Shouldn't be.

Any kind of reality is out there, we can perceive it only by converting it in the language of our five senses. This doesn't mean that what we perceive is so.

Regarding time, I believe that whatever happens in this moment has ripples not only toward the future, but toward the past too. This means the past changes all the time: near past and ancient past too. Difficult to prove, but difficult to disprove too. Ripples also happen toward the other multi-directions, which represent probabilities.

The comparison with the time in the book isn't that good. A better one is to compare awake time with the time from our dreams. Dreams and imagination (especially guided imagination) are different.

Originally Posted by inavalan

As always, what you wrote makes sense. Surely you made a few assumptions, as we all do. And because we differ a little in that respect, I differ a little in my views about time, reality, and fake news.

The problem with the news is that they shape public opinion, and that's too much power. I give the benefit of the doubt to many news people that they're honest; obviously not all. But they should know that they could be wrong, and that they have an enormous power, and should act accordingly. When they don't, there should be checks and balances to hold them responsible. The argument that "I thought so", or even "any reasonable person would've believed that", aren't valid excuses. Most news people see themselves as opinion shapers. Shouldn't be.

Any kind of reality is out there, we can perceive it only by converting it in the language of our five senses. This doesn't mean that what we perceive is so.

Regarding time, I believe that whatever happens in this moment has ripples not only toward the future, but toward the past too. This means the past changes all the time: near past and ancient past too. Difficult to prove, but difficult to disprove too. Ripples also happen toward the other multi-directions, which represent probabilities.

The comparison with the time in the book isn't that good. A better one is to compare awake time with the time from our dreams. Dreams and imagination (especially guided imagination) are different.

Yes, the press, the news, has it seems to me to have gone downhill, but I don't know if that is my perspective or reality. In any case it is hard to know who to blame. We as consumers of media vote for who will be the successful and "mainstream media" with dollars, clicks, and eyeballs. They have the power we give them. The problem with holding them accountable for misusing that power is that at least in the US, polarization in society has lead to polarization in what constitutes abusing that power. Dramatic differences in who needs to be checked and what fair and balanced mean. Most want the other side held accountable for fake news, but are appalled at suppressing freedom of the press to tell the truth on their side. I suppose at one point in time all of these stories in the Bible were new news (the "Good News"). People did eventually put checks on that news and balanced it in the way they wanted it balanced, and in time, those news stories bestowed a great deal of power on those who controlled them. Those who did not have that control, found their stories suppressed through threat and force. And so today millions and billions have the beliefs they do based in no small part on that accountability.

Still, there are some checks. That info-wars guy lost his civil suit for denying the Sandy Hook grade school massacre and promoting the idea that it was all staged with paid actors to create an excuse to take peoples guns away. A lot of his followers believed it and the parents of the slain children ended up being subjected to death threats and campaigns of harassment. IDK, I just don't remember the world being this way when I was younger. I can't imagine what that must have been like.

I have a hunch that reality is not really "out there", but rather a construct of the mind. Of course if it is "out there", the reality we live in is still a construct of the mind, but I suspect it goes deeper then that. Anyway, I do like the dream vs awake time comparison as well and in fact just recently used it in some post...somewhere. But what occurred to me about halfway through that paragraph was that since we really all have an individual spacetime based on our inertial reference frame (as translated between us with those Lorentz transformation equations), perhaps it is not two different time frames between dream and awake (or reading a book), but instead is just our personal spacetime, as constructed by our minds, adjusting to its different frames of reference. Which if so, would lend even more credence to the idea that there is nothing "out there", just what we create "in side" our minds/consciousness/awareness.

Anyway, the thread is about St. Paul so we probably shouldn't be drifting too far into our own separate little reality. To try and stretch back there, I might point out that Saul had one separate reality that he had created in his mind, and Paul had another that he created, in that same mind, as do each of us as we look at it and try to figure out what the story means.

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