Scientifically this would be impossible. Actually it has been proven impossible. The theory that the universe has always existed has been discarded in favour of the idea that at some point - The Big Bang - something created it.
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Yeshua_Adonai
Guest
Joe,
God to hear back from you my friend.
I stand by what I said; Yeshua was and is the perfect revelation of G-d as He is.
Now, in terms of there being one church, under one name, etc, etc;
The beauty of faith in the person of Yeshua is this; Unity, does not need be Uniformity. The Catholics, the Protestants, the Orthodox, the Messianics; they may have differing doctrines on the nature of G-d in his personage (trinity for example) or they worship in different ways (mass versus mainline worship), but these things do not mean that faith in Yeshua has to be so black and white at this time.
The thing that unites us all, is that we find faith and purpose in the person of Yeshua HaMashiach.
G-d, in the age to come, will reveal to every single man and woman, his Mashiach, Yeshua, and there will be a time where all will learn directly, who G-d is.
This will all come once Mashiach returns at the end of this age.
Shalom!
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Yeshua_Adonai
Guest
To everyone who was so kind,
To Bakmoon and notself,
Thank you for your time and our discussion, I really enjoyed it. I am afraid I don’t have much time to continue this though so I leave you with a few thoughts;
Keep searching for truth, take a fresh look at Yeshua, and G-d, without dogmas and doctrines. Find out who He is, and you will be set free. Yeshua was a member of the tribe of Judah, and thus an Israelite; begin by re-reading scripture from a Hebraic view point, and let it speak for itself, rather than bringing to it preconceived dogmas.
My thanks again for everything,
One more time,
Shalom to you!
And don’t forget the Love. May G-d be with you.
To Bakmoon and notself,
Thank you for your time and our discussion, I really enjoyed it. I am afraid I don’t have much time to continue this though so I leave you with a few thoughts;
Keep searching for truth, take a fresh look at Yeshua, and G-d, without dogmas and doctrines. Find out who He is, and you will be set free. Yeshua was a member of the tribe of Judah, and thus an Israelite; begin by re-reading scripture from a Hebraic view point, and let it speak for itself, rather than bringing to it preconceived dogmas.
My thanks again for everything,
One more time,
Shalom to you!
And don’t forget the Love. May G-d be with you.
J
JoeBowen7
Guest
It does seem impossible to me and to you. However, there is a book out: A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing by Lawrence M. Krauss and Richard Dawkins (Jan 10, 2012). The book claims that the universe could have started from a quantum fluctuation. But when you think about it, a quantum fluctuation is not nothing. It is something. So if there is any logic to human reason and understanding of causality, there would have to be a Supreme Power that enabled the quantum fluctuation in the first place. However, as I understand the Buddhist poster, the Buddhist idea is that the universe comes and goes in cycles, big bang and then big crunch. The problem with that is that I don;t think that such a cycle could have been going on forever in the past. The Borde Guth Vilenkin Theorem has been interpreted to say that there must have been an beginning.
Video: youtube.com/watch?v=XMI-K__I4vo
Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0110012v2.pdf
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notself
Guest
“Our whole universe was in a hot dense state,
Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started. Wait…” -Theme from the Big Bang Theory.
Science does not know how long the hot dense state existed before it started to expand.
Science does not know why it started to expand.
Science has a thousand questions and darn few answers. Faith has no questions and all the answers. It’s best not to mix them up.
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Bakmoon
Guest
But the Big Crunch model is certainly within the realm of posibility. Not to mention some of the other interesting theories out there, such as the theory that the universe resulted from a black hole in another universe, which originated from the black hole in yet another universe, ad infinitum.
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Bakmoon
Guest
May you be well and happy and may you find true peace, happiness, and freedom from suffering, my friend!
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InJesusItrust
Guest
I will try again to explain why an infinite regress is impossible, without analogies this time. May I succeed in explaining why I think that.
You claim that the universe had no beginning, that it is a series of expansions and contractions. But clearly for the universe to exist in such a series it must have existed in the past (eg without a past there is no present). Each event depends on the one before. But if the universe had no beginning it never had a past, so that no event should be occurring in the present. Clearly the universe exists now, so it had a beginning. This is why I chose recursion or dominoes.
Many other regressive claims that are inductive or recursive in nature suffer from the same flaw. The universe can be an infinite progression, but never an infinite regression (only a finite one), because clearly it exists now.
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farpinho
Guest
… And science doesn’t know exactly what will happen after the universe “contracts”…“Our whole universe was in a hot dense state,
Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started. Wait…” -Theme from the Big Bang Theory.
Science does not know how long the hot dense state existed before it started to expand.
Science does not know why it started to expand.
Science has a thousand questions and darn few answers. Faith has no questions and all the answers. It’s best not to mix them up.
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rossum
Guest
And peace to you as well.
I see you have observed my sig.
I am a Mahayana Buddhist. The differences from Theravada Buddhism are not major, and are mostly in the philosophical approach. Our practice is similar.
My sig refers to the work of Nagarjuna, a major Mahayana philosopher. He is pretty much central to the Mahayana, since after him everyone ether agreed or disagreed with him. It was impossible to ignore him.
The original source of the quote is not Nagarjuna himself, but Mark Siderits, “Thinking on Empty: Madhyamika Anti-Realism and Canons of Rationality” in S Biderman and B.A. Schaufstein, eds, Rationality In Question (1989). Dordrecht: Brill.
I have not read Siderits but saw the quote in a piece on Nagarjuna. The “Madhyamika” in Siderits’ title refers to the religious and philosophical school of Mahayana Buddhism that Nagarjuna founded. I have seen the same quote again in other places in reference to the Madhyamika and Nagarjuna – it seems quite popular. The quote is intentionally paradoxical; paradox is necessary to remind us that words are insufficient when trying to describe the fundamental nature of reality.
For a philosophical discussion of Nagarjuna and reality see the web article Nagarjuna and the Limits of Thought. The Siderits quote is at the end of section four of the article:
There is, then, no escape. Nagarjuna’s view is contradictory. The contradiction is, clearly a paradox of expressibility. Nagarjuna succeeds in saying the unsayable, just as much as the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. We can think (and characterize) reality only subject to language, which is conventional, so the ontology of that reality is all conventional. It follows that the conventional objects of reality do not ultimately (non-conventionally) exist. It also follows that nothing we say of them is ultimately true. That is, all things are empty of ultimate existence; and this is their ultimate nature, and is an ultimate truth about them. They hence cannot be thought to have that nature; nor can we say that they do. But we have just done so. As Mark Siderits (1989) has put it, “the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth.”
Western philosophy tends to work in very different ways to Buddhist philosophy; this especially true where Nagarjuna is concerned. He was prepared to challenge a lot of commonly held concepts that had not been thought through thoroughly. Concepts like causation, change and others are treated very differently by Nagarjuna.
rossum
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Bakmoon
Guest
Can this be demonstrated?
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InJesusItrust
Guest
Event B cannot happen without Event A, which also cannot happen before a prior event. Clearly if no event occurred, none of the events occur, because they each depend on the previous to occur. The very fact that the events are presently occurring show that at least one prior event occurred. If no such event occurred, no event should be presently occurring. Claiming there is no prior event is logically impossible.
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JoeBowen7
Guest
According to the BVG theorem referenced above:“The intuitive reason why de Sitter inflation cannot be
past-eternal is that, in the full de Sitter space, exponential
expansion is preceded by exponential contraction.
Such a contracting phase is not part of standard inflationary
models, and does not appear to be consistent with
the physics of inflation. If thermalized regions were able
to form all the way to past infinity in the contracting
spacetime, the whole universe would have been thermalized
before inflationary expansion could begin. In our
analysis we will exclude the possibility of such a contracting
phase by considering spacetimes for which the
past region obeys an averaged expansion condition, by
which we mean that the average expansion rate in the
past is greater than zero:
Hav > 0. (1)
With a suitable definition of H and the region over which
the average is to be taken, we will show that the averaged
expansion condition implies past-incompleteness.”
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rinnie
Guest
Okay I did indeed see the rewrite you did on the Metta Sutta. By the way it was beautiful. Thank-you.Welcome back!
I agree the world isn’t easy, But by practice of metta one controls irritation, fear and anger. Controlling these things leads to more equanimity. More equanimity in one’s life leads to more loving kindness so it becomes a feed back loop.
My mother used to find equanimity while saying the rosary but she couldn’t carry that feeling to all parts of her life. I think she would have been able to do that if she had known about metta.
Rinnie did you see the rewrite of the Metta Sutta and the short metta phrases I did for you? It’s on the first thread that was closed. It’s near the last page.
Now I have a few questions. To begin with let me say that as a Christian there is no such thing as a one type of prayer. My Mother for example does not do traditional prayers but talks to Jesus everyday. Thats prayer.
That is what I feel you have wrote, and have no problem what soever with it. You are asking God to help you and help others. We call that intercession prayer by the way.
Now from what I have read on the internet on Metta. Med you cannot use this on someone you are sexually attracted to, or the dead
Okay now if this info. is true. Why Not?I pray everday for my Bro, my Papa who are hopefully in heaven or headed there. And my husband who is here today, And while I won’t let him know
there is indeed still much sexual atttraction. Or did I get bad info. If not why?
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notself
Guest
Metta is for the living. I’ll try to find a “prayer” for the dead.
Now from what I have read on the internet on Metta. Med you cannot use this on someone you are sexually attracted to, or the dead
I pray everday for my Bro, my Papa who are hopefully in heaven or headed there. And my husband who is here today, And while I won’t let him know
The idea of not using it on someone you are sexually attracted to is to avoid the arising of lust instead of loving kindness. Of course the sexual attraction you feel for your husband is not the same as what may arise if you focus you attention on a good looking neighbor that you are sexually attracted to. Your feelings towards you husband are wholesome. Those towards a hunky neighbor might not be.
In my personal life, I found Metta to be most effective when I “pray” it towards myself and towards people who irritate me. I become more calm, and understanding of others and certainly less judgmental.
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notself
Guest
I found a “prayer” for the dead but it needs some background. People who have lead kind and moral lives go to the heavenly realms. Those who have led less than exemplary lives but have done nothing seriously unskillful go to the realm of Hungry Ghosts. The were caught up in sensual pleasure in life so the end up continuously hungry in their next life. Those in the heavenly realms don’t need prayers. So the prayers for the dead are for the ease of those in the realms of Hungry Ghosts.
The first part of these sutta speaks of offerings at meal time in memory of the dead. The offering could be your standard grace with a line remembering your dead loved ones.
In Asia, people pour a little milk at cross roads in memory of all dead while reciting the sutta.
The first part of these sutta speaks of offerings at meal time in memory of the dead. The offering could be your standard grace with a line remembering your dead loved ones.
In Asia, people pour a little milk at cross roads in memory of all dead while reciting the sutta.
Theravada monks own nothing but the robes they stand up in. They are not allowed to store food or handle money. They are not allowed to raise crops or pick fruit or vegetables. They are totally dependent on laypeople giving them food on a daily basis. The laypeople give the monks lengths of cloth for their robes once a year. This dependence on laypeople keeps the monks humble and gives the monks an opportunity to teach laypeople the dhamma on a daily basis. Laypeople gain merit through their generosity. Laypeople can share this merit with the dead with this. You could say this prayer when making an offering in Church and share your merit with you dead.
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rinnie
Guest
notself, I need to ask you a honest question. Do you feel that you are indeed praying? And do you feel that you are somehow still praying to God the Father?Metta is for the living. I’ll try to find a “prayer” for the dead.
The idea of not using it on someone you are sexually attracted to is to avoid the arising of lust instead of loving kindness. Of course the sexual attraction you feel for your husband is not the same as what may arise if you focus you attention on a good looking neighbor that you are sexually attracted to. Your feelings towards you husband are wholesome. Those towards a hunky neighbor might not be.
In my personal life, I found Metta to be most effective when I “pray” it towards myself and towards people who irritate me. I become more calm, and understanding of others and certainly less judgmental.
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rinnie
Guest
What is the hungry ghosts?
I just can’t get past the idea that you believe the universe never had a beginning?
Why do you believe that?
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notself
Guest
When I recite a sutta like Metta or the one to Hungry Ghosts, I feel warmth of heart. I feel energy expanding from my heart out to the world. I don’t feel a god or divine being. God is just a word to me.
People who have been caught up in greed, gossip, anger…those who have led less than exemplary lives but have done nothing seriously unskillful go to the realm of Hungry Ghosts. The were caught up in sensual pleasure and greed in their human life so the end up continuously hungry in their next life. However, they don’t wander around scaring people like Halloween ghosts.
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