Bahá'í

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Servant19 said:
Pretty harsh 🙂

I tend to go the other way. Mistakes can be made, but I still stand that I may not have been mistaken…I tend to trust others more 🙂

There are many books I’ve read years ago where certain concepts stick in my mind, yet I can’t just get up and find the page straight away.

You must be supremely intelligent, can you quote from a book you read 10 years ago?
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I never make claims that an author said something that I cannot back up.
 
Servant19 said:
Have you read Summa Theologica PR?
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Yes, I have, Servant.

And I have read other things by Aquinas, too.
Please try to refrain from uncharitably posting ideas that you are trying to push onto me. I clearly stated that I may be MISTAKEN, you clearly tried to push that I was trying to google something AFTER the fact, which implies that I am lying.
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Please…I am not treating you the same way. I quote you clearly, not misquote you and imply sin upon your person. Thankyou 🙂
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No, Servant. You have said that you do not believe you are mistaken.

Which is your position then? You may be mistaken about Aquinas’ position, or you don’t believe you are? You have said both things in the period of about 10 minutes.
 
Servant19 said:
Well I look forward to your quotes from the ECFs that Jesus was ontologically God 🙂
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I already gave you that, and even asked you to respond. I referred you back to it twice more, and you have never responded.
 
Servant19 said:
The concept that the spirit is the ontological (there i can enjoy that word too it seems) essence of what it means to be human, as opposed to the physical body, is put on the canvas for you to look at.
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No, Servant. The essence of what it means to be human is that we are a body and a soul. The soul is not superior in any way to the body.
 
Servant19 said:
Hello???

🙂
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As I said, you are changing your premise.

You originally stated: Aquinas said “To say something has changed ontologically is manifest falsehood.”

Nothing the above website comes even remotely close to supporting that view.
 
PRmerger said:
As I said, you are changing your premise.

You originally stated: Aquinas said “To say something has changed ontologically is manifest falsehood.”

Nothing the above website comes even remotely close to supporting that view.
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“The ontological argument would be meaningful only to someone who understands the essence of God completely”

So it can be rationally concluded that when you understand the essence of something, you can use the ontological argument.

PR, do you understand the essence of marriage?
Do you understand the essence of the physical change a human being undergoes after the marriage sacrament?

Since no human being understands the essence of anything, I would say that it is completely rational to say that it is falsehood to use the ontological argument for “anything”
 
Bahaullah further emphasizes the futility of the ontological argument by exclaiming that the only reasons “attributes” such as omnipotence, omniscience, all-merciful, all-wise etc etc are assigned to God are so as to reject the idea that He is imperfect.

In reality, God is far far removed from the “attributes” human tongue can assign onto Him

The best we can hope for as humans is the epistemological Representatives of His Godhead from Age to Age

Personally, I find this awe-inspiring 🙂
 
Servant19 said:
“The ontological argument would be meaningful only to someone who understands the essence of God completely”
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True, that.

But that is completely different than what you proposed originally: “To say something has changed ontologically is manifest falsehood.”

Aquinas is arguing that we cannot use the ontological argument to understand God completely.

You argued that nothing can be ontologically changed, and that this was supported by Aquinas.

Of course things are changed ontologically! That is exactly what occurs during the sacraments, and if you believe Aquinas did not believe in ontological change you are arguing nonsense.
So it can be rationally concluded that when you understand the essence of something, you can use the ontological argument.
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Ok.
PR, do you understand the essence of marriage?
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Indeed, I do.
Do you understand the essence of the physical change a human being undergoes after the marriage sacrament?
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The change occurs ontologically. Not physically.
Since no human being understands the essence of anything, I would say that it is completely rational to say that it is falsehood to use the ontological argument for “anything”
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What a peculiar thing to say!

You may not understand the essence of anything, but I certainly do.
 
PRmerger said:
and if you believe Aquinas did not believe in ontological change you are arguing nonsense.
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And here’s an example of a scholar supporting Aquinas’ use of ontology to describe the sacraments bold mine):

The same God who made bread and wine from nothing and sustains them in existence from moment to moment, can transform the deepest** ontological **centers of those things into something else.

Then how do we explain the perdurance of the accidents, once their proper substances have been changed? Once again, **Thomas **invokes the divine power. Though God customarily sustains accidents through their proper substances, he can, for his own purposes, suspend the secondary causality and sustain them directly himself. Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) said that, at the Eucharistic change, the bread and wine lose their independence as creatures and become, through God’s power, pure signs of Christ’s presence. They no longer point to themselves in any relevant sense, for they have become utterly transparent to the Christ who makes himself manifest through them.
payingattentiontothesky.com/2011/03/25/the-eucharistic-theology-of-thomas-aquinas-%E2%80%93-fr-robert-barron/
 
Servant19 said:
No Ignatio, Mirza Hussain was none of those, but Baha’u’llah WAS that Person you worship who was physically embodied into Jesus of Nazareth…

Bahaullah WAS manifested in the body of Abraham, Buddha, Krishna, Zoroaster, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad.

Bahaullah DID die for my sins 2000 years ago, His name was Jesus then, His name is renewed for this Age.

Bahaullah IS the ONLY mediator. He is represented in many bodies over time, and He speaks the Word of God, and each time He comes with a new name, and He gives a Message suited to the Will of God for the people’s He wishes to address…SO…

…Yes…He was also Muhamnad and was asked by God to fight the infidels who worshipped idols and NOT the one true God

Bahaullah was all of those…Mirza Husayn was just a lowly man who chose to walk away from a life of nobility so that He could be Bahaullah and suffer a lifetime of torture and imprisonment for the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth, and the unification of the human race.

Ever wondered why the Bahai Faith is the only religion in history that has not suffered schismic division? The Kingdom of God is being built, we can argue over polygamy and marriage all you like, but the building will never stop until its done.

I’m honored to be a lowly servant offering a brick or two in the building process the likes if which mortal eyes have never witnessed 🙂
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So Mirza Hussain is not your prophet? Interesting, do bahais have their Nestorian idea? Of Mirza and the Baha’u’llah? That Baha’u’llah descended into the physical body of Mirza but just happened to inhabit it? Seriously I am asking that.

I deny your claim that I ever worshipped your prophet. For your prophet is a false prophet and Jesus rose into heaven with a Physical body and would come again in the same fashion. Jesus also has another body, that body is his church and it is his church I belong to, nothing more, nothing less.

Now what you are describing to me is an idea of incarnation of a specific person throuhgout all ages. There are not multiple manifestations it seems with their own individuality, their own person. Jesus cannot speak to mirza Hussain because he in of himself is Mirza hussain simply by another name. Many bahai have seemed to deny this idea, that is of incarnations, calling them instead manifestations. But It does make some interpretations odd for you. So when Jesus was promising the comforter, he should have really said “I must go so that I should return later when you are all dead. ciao.” After all since Jesus and Mirza Hussain are the same, he must be the comforter who had to leave for some reason only to come back agian with a completely different message.

And its interesting you say its the only religion not to have schismatics, I could have sworn there were some early schisms, small but still schisms nontheless. Or do they not count? Becuase the orthodox Bahai are uncomorfortable therefore they are to be ignored? Or that Mirza’s hussain’s claim wasn;'t immediately accepted by all? All this being said the JW seem unaffected by a widescale schism so maybe they are right. This isn’t a good criteria for anything.
 
Servant19 said:
Bahaullah further emphasizes the futility of the ontological argument by exclaiming that the only reasons “attributes” such as omnipotence, omniscience, all-merciful, all-wise etc etc are assigned to God are so as to reject the idea that He is imperfect.

In reality, God is far far removed from the “attributes” human tongue can assign onto Him

The best we can hope for as humans is the epistemological Representatives of His Godhead from Age to Age

Personally, I find this awe-inspiring 🙂
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You kind of contradicted yourself, either you describe him or you don’t. Either he has attributes which can be known to us mortal creatures or he doesn’t. Negative theology has its place but even those who use it will describe God in the end otherwise you have a problem of a God so far removed from reality that nothing about him can be conceived, nothing at all is relatable. He is like an alien that you cannot understand no matter how hard you try basically.
 
Servant19 said:
This reminds me of the fetus in the womb saying that it is all body, umbilical cord and placenta…until one day it realized that it was not reality in there at all…the womb was but a dream…
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I don’t understand the point you are trying to make. Are you trying to say we will shed this body and be spirits? Like we leave a mother’s womb? Yes we will be non coporeal for a time but not forever, the example of this is Christ Jesus who demonstrates that a ressurected body is physical when he eats fish and ascends into heaven with it. I know the bahai penchant for interpreting this text as a metaphore, a metaphore that comes out of nowhere that has absolutely no meaning that makes any sense in the bahai faith but a metaphore nontheless.
 
Servant19 said:
What you posted here Steve is beautiful and aligns greatly with Baha’i teaching.
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That may be true, but what you have posted below does not align with Christian teaching. That is fine, it doesn’t have to, but it brings up some questions in my mind concerning Baha’i beliefs (see below).
Servant19 said:
The reality is that Baha’u’llah teaches that we will interact with our loved ones (all of them) in the next world after death, and that intimacy, joy, love and light is significantly more potent than what we experience on our earthly plane of existence.
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Agreed.
Servant19 said:
In fact the power of the soul is described below:

The Prophets and Messengers of God have been sent down for the sole purpose underlying their revelation hath been to educate all men, that they may, at the hour of death, ascend, in the utmost purity and sanctity and with absolute detachment, to the throne of the Most High.
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Does your belief hold that our salvation is found within ourselves, if and when we reach the stage of “utmost purity and sanctity and with absolute detachment”, and that this is accomplished through education?
Servant19 said:
All things must needs have a cause, a motive power, an animating principle. These souls and symbols of detachment have provided, and will continue to provide, the supreme moving impulse in the world of being… —Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, pp. 155–157.
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(Emphasis mine)

We call the supreme mover of all things, God. Do you believe in some sort of collective consciousness, a multitude of souls, as being God?
Servant19 said:
This clearly states that there is an increased potency in the powers of the human being AFTER death when the human soul can walk and align itself with the Will of God with less impediments.
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Do you believe that divinity is a part of human nature; a potential waiting to be realized?
Servant19 said:
I would say, Steve, that the unions one experiences in this spiritual realm is very much “all-encompassing” however the union with our spouse is a unique one in this spiritual realm.
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Yes, it is not as if we will forget the relationships we have had on earth.
 
Steve wrote above:

We call the supreme mover of all things, God. Do you believe in some sort of collective consciousness, a multitude of souls, as being God?

My comment:

Probably the following would summarize our belief in God:

*“He is, and hath from everlasting been, one and alone, without peer or equal, eternal in the past, eternal in the future, detached from all things, ever-abiding, unchangeable, and self-subsisting.”

“A sprinkling from the unfathomed deep of His sovereign and all-pervasive Will hath, out of utter nothingness, called into being a creation which is infinite in its range and deathless in its duration. The wonders of His bounty can never cease, and the stream of His merciful grace can never be arrested. The process of His creation hath had no beginning, and can have no end.”

“…the worlds of God are countless in their number, and infinite in their range. None can reckon or comprehend them except God, the All-Knowing, the All-Wise.”
** “Regard thou the one true God as One Who is apart from, and immeasurably exalted above, all created things. The whole universe reflecteth His glory, while He is Himself independent of, and transcendeth His creatures…All existence is dependent upon Him, and from Him is derived the source of the sustenance of all things.”*

🙂
 
SteveVH said:
Does your belief hold that our salvation is found within ourselves, if and when we reach the stage of “utmost purity and sanctity and with absolute detachment”, and that this is accomplished through education?
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The Baha’i teachings are evry much tending towards a “process-driven” approach towards salvation. This naturally reflects very much the reality of life as we empirically observe.
The twin pillars of reward and punishment lie in the hands of God and God alone. When we align our lives more closely towards the Will of God as outlined by the teachings and utterances of His Manifestation, then naturally the rewards are reaped 🙂

Turn away from the teachings and the reqards are not there.

So it is with life on earth. Eat healthily, you get physical improvements. Start smoking and it makes physical health that much more difficult.

There are no “apocalyptic” tendencies in Baha’i theology (from my understanding). There is no “place” like hell that we are forever doomed to if we sin.

Just like the smoker, he is “physically” in hell, yet he can turn things around for himself if he aligns himself more closely towards the health education he has available to him. In similar vain, a sinner can be attracted to the light of the Sun of Truth and turn his life around from the allegorical “hell” and be a shining beacon of “heavenliness”…there is a"process" involved in there, I’m sure you will see.

Self-reflection is part of this process. In Dispensations of the past this was symbolised by the “confessing of sins”, however in this Day, Baha’u’llah has instilled in man a fresh vitality giving him the capacity to “take ownership for his own spiritual welfare”…this truly is the Age of Knowledge and the ability to know what is God’s Will for mankind can easily be discerned, and self-reflection against that Divine Standard is part of the process towards salvation.
SteveVH said:
We call the supreme mover of all things, God. Do you believe in some sort of collective consciousness, a multitude of souls, as being God?
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From the passage I quoted, it certainly seems that way, however I am certainly not in a position to make ontological statements about the “nature” of our lives in the spiritual realms. It truly is a mystery.

All I can say is that there is life beyond this one. Our physical bodies are not required at all to continue to progress throughout the “infinite worlds of God” and that a sample of this existence is provided for us in the world of dreams. We have no eyes, yet we can see, we have no ears, yet we can hear. Dreams are a wonderful example of what life in the next realm is like. We certainly are not “ghosts” or “spirits” when we dream, it simply is an avenue for the soul to “roam” unimpeded by the barriers of the body

If you are interested, I can provide some wonderful quotes on dreams from teh Baha’i Writings?
SteveVH said:
Do you believe that divinity is a part of human nature; a potential waiting to be realized?
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Yes, essentially. We are given the framework for the tapestry, and we weave our own patterns. Weave what God has asked us to weave and we have something eternally magical 🙂
SteveVH said:
Yes, it is not as if we will forget the relationships we have had on earth.
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Amen 👍
 
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