There are also sects of Buddhism that advocate torture, execution and public humiliation (The former Tibetan ruling class springing firmly to mind). Sadly it seems even the most peaceful of philosophies can still be trumped by psychotic self righteousness & mindless tradition .

I'm not aware of any specific Sufi sects having executed or tortured people for blasphemy, adultery etc. but I fear such groups likely exist somewhere if one were to go looking for them.

In general I have a healthy degree of respect for "Sufism" because it follows the same kind of esoteric approach to religion/spirituality/knowledge as it's western (Gnostic) and far eastern (Tao, Hindu*, Buddhist etc.) counterparts.

Very roughly "Esoteric religion" is based around looking inwards for knowledge and lends itself naturally to scientific enquiry, considered ethics, critical thinking etc.
When they speak of a higher power it is almost always in terms of something fundamentally connected to and embodied by yourself.
They almost never suggest one need feel threatened by divine judgement, or that some should be privileged over others (*hence the Hindu caste system being not being truly esoteric)

"Exoteric religion" (most of Islam, Judaism, Christianity etc.) is by contrast based around looking outside oneself for knowledge. Truth is revealed by outside agents, divinity and true power always lie outside of oneself. etc. etc. (I'm sure I don't need to further elucidate the negative qualities of such belief systems )


In truth all of the major denominations appear to have at least some some esoteric and exoteric variations even if most fall mostly into one or the other. There are bad Buddhists & Gnostics and there are good Muslims and Christians the only difference really is whether or not they are genuinely applying their own minds and judgement, or hopelessly enslaved to another's.
Or in "someone" else's terms Logos and Mythos.

Back on topic: Bill Maher is Mythos masquerading as Logos.

I understand now why you garner such hostility from other Sifters . Still at least your trying to engage me intellectually, in that respect at least you may consider yourself light years ahead of most of your brethren.

I garner hostility here because most of the sifters here grew up in Christian households and they've rebelled against their parents and God and they don't want to hear anything about Him. This is their sanctuary where they enjoy mocking God and Christians without any dissenting voices. I'm here because I care but I wouldn't be here unless God told me to be here. I've tried to leave a few times and He keeps sending me back. Although not so much lately.

There appear to be two fundamental points of disagreement/misunderstanding here.

...Instead we apply Hegel's Dialectic:

Thesis- all statements are false

Antithesis- therefore the above statement must be false and some statements must be true

Synthesis- statements can be both true and false simultaneously!!!!!!!!!!!!

There are two ways, and only two ways, to know truth. Either you are omnipotent, or an omnipotent being reveals it to you. Since humans are not omnipotent it is impossible to know truth unless it is revealed to us by an omnipotent being, ie God. If you think there is another way to know truth, name it. Otherwise what is there to debate? If you don't think it's possible to know truth then you don't know anything. If you don't know anything then you have nothing to talk about.

"Nothing is true" is mere expression. It is a poetic sounding mantra which contains therein a deeper wisdom about the foundations of all human knowledge. You are not specially equipped to break the problem of "under-determination" as outlined by Philosophers like David Hume. God himself could appear to you and say/do anything he liked, it would not change the fundamental limits of the human condition.

Could God reveal Himself to you in a way that you could be absolutely certain of it? It doesn't matter what we can prove to one another; God could sufficiently prove Himself to me (He has) or to you and it would transcend every piece of rationale you've offered.

How could you possibly know for certain that it was not Satan out to trick you? Satan is a deeply powerful being after all, powerful enough to fabricate a profound spiritual experience don't you think? How could you ever prove that the God you worship is not the greatest impostor in the cosmos beyond all doubt?

I know it for certain because God has made me certain. I've seen things only an omnipotent God could do, such as arranging and timing circumstances which would require Him to be in complete and precise control of everything and everyone. Satan certainly can generate profound spiritual experiences (and blindness), which is why he is able to deceive the whole world.

I ask this because the God you worship DEMANDS that you do in fact worship him (and only him) on threat of divine punishment. No true God would ever require worship, let alone demand it! What kind of sick egotist are we dealing with? (the changes in the system related to that whole Jesus thing don;t make a difference here. Either This "God" started perfect or it is not what it claims to be! Past crimes count no matter what token amends were made later on)

God doesn't need us, woo. He had perfect love within His Trinity relationships before He created anything. He doesn't demand that we worship Him because He is egotistical, He commands us to worship Him to put us in right relationship with Him as the supreme good and sustainer of all things. He is the only appropiate object for our adoration, which also puts us in right relationship with other people. Human beings are built to worship; that is why the world is littered with the carcasses of false idols. I don't just mean pagan deities, I mean power, money, fame and all of the other things human beings lust and pine away for. The thing man most likes to worship is himself. Humanists worship the intellect, and the accomplishments of human civilization. These too are idols. Everyone has something they worship, when God is the only appropiate object of our worship. The love that we have to give to all of those things comes from Him, and that is why we return it to Him, which in turn leads to greater love for all people and things. Every other kind of worship is selfish and ultimately spiritual dead(and destructive). Thus this command to worship Him alone (we were created to be in relationship with Him) is for our growth, our protection, and so that we can be who He created us to be.

Your not the only one to have experienced encounters with things you might call "Gods" or "Angels/Daemons". But the God I found lies entirely within and demands/threatens ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, and sets ABSOLUTELY NO CONDITIONS. It knows that all Monads (souls) will inevitably make their way back to it, and that it has the patience of eternity with which to wait.

How do you know that?

The fundamental difference is that this God did not create the universe (an absurd answer which demands infinitely more explanation than it provides), this God is created BY THE UNIVERSE!

The explanation you provide only pushes the "absurdity" back one step; you're still left with the same problem as you say I have. Yet, it is not a problem to believe in something eternal. To believe something came from nothing wouldbe the absurdity. Do you believe the Universe is eternal?

We are all "God" experiencing itself subjectively as it evolves teleologically towards perfection. If Consciousness is eternal then this is the only outcome that makes any sense. God being perfect and beyond all time experiences everything it is conceivably possible for a perfect being to experience within an instant of non-time. With all of eternity stretched it before it does the only sensible thing it could do, it commits suicide and returns the universe to a state of pure potential, ready to undergo the experience of evolving from the most basic "mathematical" principles to fully actualised and all powerful consciousness (i.e. back at God again). A fundamental part of this entire process is the journey from elemental and animalistic unconsciousness to fully self aware enlightened consciousness, the highest truth then is to discover that you yourself are God (at least in-potentia), not some mysterious external power.

If God is perfect, which He is, then He isn't limited. His joy never ends; it is the limitation of the human intellect that prevents you from understanding an infinite being, so you have devised a scenario based on those limitations where you impose a limitation on Gods experience so that He is forced to "commit suicide" in order to have new and enjoyable experiences. An infinite being experiences infinite joy. A perfect being will always be perfect. God doesn't evolve; a perfect being has no need to evolve or ever become "basic". He is eternally perfect, and we are not.

1 John 1:5 This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.

The other is your conviction that the Gospel is absolutely true and that you appear to see everything related to it and the greater human spiritual quest via this filter. I'm not going to trade scripture with you on matters of pedantry it'll take all day and get neither of us anywhere. Instead I shall focus on one key argument that undermines the entire house of cards. If the God of Abraham and the old testament is one in the same as the God of which Jesus preaches (/is in corporeal form) and further more that the Old testament is in some way a true account of his/its actions......Then the God of Abraham and Jesus is demonstrably A. not perfect and B. malevolent/incompetent.

Yes, the God Abraham is the God Jesus is referring to. The error is that you think you understand God better than Jesus did. Jesus is the perfect representation of God; His exact image. If you've seen Jesus you have seen the Father. They are one and the same in terms of their character and every other attribute. You don't see that because you don't understand the scriptures. Jesus did, which is why He said things like this:

John 17:23 I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.

The atheist version of studying the bible is to look for something that seems to contradict the claims of Christians so that they can throw it in the garbage and be done with it. You would see the same God that Jesus represents in the Old Testament if you understood the history that it presents.

Go ask the Benjamites or the Canaanites how they feel about this "God". Or how about the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah? The firstborn of Egypt? etc. etc.

Go ask the criminals on death row how they feel about the judge and prosecutor who sent them there. Does that mean they don't deserve to be there?

Yaweh demands Abraham sacrifice his own son, truly the act of a benevolent creature no? And while were on the subject what kind of "God" demands a blood sacrifice for anything? Even if it was a legitimate test of Abrahams faith (a highly dubious notion unto itself) what about the poor goat sacrificed in his sons stead?
This leads into the key difference between the Gnostic God/The Buddha/Dau/Chi etc. (Esoteric) and the Abrahamic God (Exoteric).....

God didn't ask Abraham to do anything that He wasn't willing to do Himself, but unlike Abraham God did sacrifice His son. This is what I mean when I say that you you're not understanding what you're reading. The sacrifice of Issac is a picture of Jesus Christ. You don't see these things because you don't know what to look for.

One merely offers the wisdom to transcend the suffering inherent in mortal life and make ones way back to union with that which we were all along. It is not invested in the material world, it is merely a higher expression of consciousness no longer bound by emergent natural laws. It never judges, it never condemns or punishes and it helps only those who are ready to help themselves.

The other demands blood sacrifices, incites genocides, sets strict rules and threatens you with damnation if you don't obey, demands worship (WORSHIP! WTF!!!!), inspires/authors deeply contradictory and difficult to understand written works (it expects you to accept on faith alone), claims to be a perfect creator of a universe into which suffering and imperfection are inherent (perfect beings do not create imperfect things) etc. etc.

Here is the difference..the God you describe wants to "help" you out of a situation that it created because of its own limitations and need for self-gratification. It is not only responsible for evil, but it does nothing about it. The God you describe is limited, selfish and immoral.

The way you describe my God is a strawman argument in itself. It is not an accurate representation of the biblical account. The God of the Universe created a perfect Universe and endowed His creatures with free will. The creatures He created freely chose to do evil and this is what brought sin and death into the world. This is the reason for the imperfection, and God, at great personal cost to Himself, restored and reconciled His creation through Jesus Christ.

You won't be able to understand the bible without Gods help:

1 Corinthians 2:14 But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.

That's why I suggested you read the gospel of John, if you really do want to understand God accurately, and pray for assistance.

I don't side with Lucifer (I think she has the opposite problem to Jehova i.e. enlightenment at all costs as quickly as possible and damm the journey to get there), but I do recognise her as the fundamentally opposing force to Jehovah/Allah out of which a higher synthesis emerges (Abraxas the Gnostic God of light, or whatever you want to call it). Jehovah represents supreme attachment to the material world (R>0),

It's a false dichotomy. What you're describing when you refer to God is the gnostic demiurge, which bears no resemblence to the God of the bible. There are no opposing forces to be spoken of because there is no actual duality. God is only light and the only thing He is attached to is His children, because He freely loves them. He is the only power in the Universe. Satan has a paper kingdom; it is just shadows on the wall. In any case, you can't escape the corruption caused by your sin nature. If you shatter a mirror, no matter how well you glue it back together it will never reflect purely again. It doesn't need to be repaired, it needs to be replaced. This is why Jesus said you need to be born again:

John 3:3 Jesus answered him, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God."

When you receive Jesus as Lord and Savior, He will send the Holy Spirit to live inside of you and make you a new person. You are spiritually dead in sins and transgressions, but the Holy Spirit will regenerate your spirit and cleanse you from all of your sin.

while Lucifer supreme attachment to the spiritual/mental (R=0). A wise man see's the two as a personification of the two highest drives in the human psyche and thus concepts to be transcended/mastered.

Satan desired one thing, which was to be God. He became prideful because of his great beauty and intellect and based on his ignorance of Gods true nature, he tried to form a rebellion against God to replace Him and was kicked out of Heaven. This is essentially the process you are describing for those who believe they are God. All Satan is trying to do is duplicate his errors in you and as many other people as he can so that he can destroy them before his time comes. He can't strike back at God directly so he goes after his creatures. Satan is an imitator; he is a potter just as God is a potter. He is doing everything possible to shape and mold you into his image and character, and he has entire universes of deception waiting for you, filled with as much "secret knowledge and wisdom" as you desire. He has a door for every kind of person, every kind of philosophy; his is the broad road that leads to destruction. Jesus said enter through the narrow gate:

Mat 7:13 "Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many.

Mat 7:14 For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.

Either way I regard worshipping the God of Abraham as the "one true God" to be a supreme mistake, if Jesus professes to preach that same God's gospel then following him would be a supreme mistake also. I show no fealty to torture Gods, I have more self respect than that.

You surely prefer the idol you have created in your own mind, because that is the god who allows you to do whatever you want. That's all this is really about. Do you know what Jesus said the reason is that men won't come to God?:

John 3:19-21

19 And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.

20 For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed.

21 But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God.”

You don't get to decide who God is, and just because you don't think you should be accountable for what you've done in this life doesn't mean you won't be.

For the record. I love you as much as any other creature in this cosmos but I don't pray to anything for your soul to be saved. Truly it was never in jeopardy in the first place! That part of you which lies beyond the limits of mortality will find its way back to the highest state eventually no matter what, even if it takes eons. In the mean time however I'm happy to waste a small portion of said eons arguing (I suspect futilely) with you on the internet.

God loves you and I love you, and that's why I am telling you all of this. The highest state is the lowest state:

Mat 23:11 The greatest among you shall be your servant.

Mat 23:12 Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

(I'll get back to you on some of your other more specific points at a later point, I don't have the time or inclination to dig out the texts to make those counter arguments right now.)

Take your time. God bless.

I suspect you've heard it all over the place in various different forms . Crowley merely translated and expounded upon it, the fundamentals of the mantra itself have done the rounds in the Occult and Esoteric circles for millenia. ("nothing is true..." goes back 1000's of years also).

I understand now why you garner such hostility from other Sifters . Still at least your trying to engage me intellectually, in that respect at least you may consider yourself light years ahead of most of your brethren.

There appear to be two fundamental points of disagreement/misunderstanding here.

First if your reliance on Aristotelian Logic to attack my Dialectic argument. When I said you were using the language with which I described to counter instead of addressing the underlying concept it was to this I was alluding (not clearly enough it seems).
Philosophers (good ones anyway) have largely up on traditional Aristotelian logic as a means to extrapolate objective truth because it functions only upon linguistic syntax. The very fact that such a fundamental assertion as "nothing is true" is mutually contradictory as a prime example of this. The language we use to describe and frame the problem simultaneously limits our ability to comprehend it. As I suspect you well know deeper conceptual matters are often too deep to be fully expressed by mere syntax based language.
Instead we apply Hegel's Dialectic:

Thesis- all statements are false

Antithesis- therefore the above statement must be false and some statements must be true

Synthesis- statements can be both true and false simultaneously!!!!!!!!!!!!

"Nothing is true" is mere expression. It is a poetic sounding mantra which contains therein a deeper wisdom about the foundations of all human knowledge. You are not specially equipped to break the problem of "under-determination" as outlined by Philosophers like David Hume. God himself could appear to you and say/do anything he liked, it would not change the fundamental limits of the human condition.

How could you possibly know for certain that it was not Satan out to trick you? Satan is a deeply powerful being after all, powerful enough to fabricate a profound spiritual experience don't you think? How could you ever prove that the God you worship is not the greatest impostor in the cosmos beyond all doubt? I ask this because the God you worship DEMANDS that you do in fact worship him (and only him) on threat of divine punishment. No true God would ever require worship, let alone demand it! What kind of sick egotist are we dealing with? (the changes in the system related to that whole Jesus thing don;t make a difference here. Either This "God" started perfect or it is not what it claims to be! Past crimes count no matter what token amends were made later on)


Your not the only one to have experienced encounters with things you might call "Gods" or "Angels/Daemons". But the God I found lies entirely within and demands/threatens ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, and sets ABSOLUTELY NO CONDITIONS. It knows that all Monads (souls) will inevitably make their way back to it, and that it has the patience of eternity with which to wait.
The fundamental difference is that this God did not create the universe (an absurd answer which demands infinitely more explanation than it provides), this God is created BY THE UNIVERSE!
We are all "God" experiencing itself subjectively as it evolves teleologically towards perfection. If Consciousness is eternal then this is the only outcome that makes any sense. God being perfect and beyond all time experiences everything it is conceivably possible for a perfect being to experience within an instant of non-time. With all of eternity stretched it before it does the only sensible thing it could do, it commits suicide and returns the universe to a state of pure potential, ready to undergo the experience of evolving from the most basic "mathematical" principles to fully actualised and all powerful consciousness (i.e. back at God again). A fundamental part of this entire process is the journey from elemental and animalistic unconsciousness to fully self aware enlightened consciousness, the highest truth then is to discover that you yourself are God (at least in-potentia), not some mysterious external power.

R>=0 (R= distance between two points)



The other is your conviction that the Gospel is absolutely true and that you appear to see everything related to it and the greater human spiritual quest via this filter. I'm not going to trade scripture with you on matters of pedantry it'll take all day and get neither of us anywhere. Instead I shall focus on one key argument that undermines the entire house of cards. If the God of Abraham and the old testament is one in the same as the God of which Jesus preaches (/is in corporeal form) and further more that the Old testament is in some way a true account of his/its actions......Then the God of Abraham and Jesus is demonstrably A. not perfect and B. malevolent/incompetent.

Go ask the Benjamites or the Canaanites how they feel about this "God". Or how about the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah? The firstborn of Egypt? etc. etc.

Yaweh demands Abraham sacrifice his own son, truly the act of a benevolent creature no? And while were on the subject what kind of "God" demands a blood sacrifice for anything? Even if it was a legitimate test of Abrahams faith (a highly dubious notion unto itself) what about the poor goat sacrificed in his sons stead?
This leads into the key difference between the Gnostic God/The Buddha/Dau/Chi etc. (Esoteric) and the Abrahamic God (Exoteric).....

One merely offers the wisdom to transcend the suffering inherent in mortal life and make ones way back to union with that which we were all along. It is not invested in the material world, it is merely a higher expression of consciousness no longer bound by emergent natural laws. It never judges, it never condemns or punishes and it helps only those who are ready to help themselves.

The other demands blood sacrifices, incites genocides, sets strict rules and threatens you with damnation if you don't obey, demands worship (WORSHIP! WTF!!!!), inspires/authors deeply contradictory and difficult to understand written works (it expects you to accept on faith alone), claims to be a perfect creator of a universe into which suffering and imperfection are inherent (perfect beings do not create imperfect things) etc. etc.

I don't side with Lucifer (I think she has the opposite problem to Jehova i.e. enlightenment at all costs as quickly as possible and damm the journey to get there), but I do recognise her as the fundamentally opposing force to Jehovah/Allah out of which a higher synthesis emerges (Abraxas the Gnostic God of light, or whatever you want to call it). Jehovah represents supreme attachment to the material world (R>0), while Lucifer supreme attachment to the spiritual/mental (R=0). A wise man see's the two as a personification of the two highest drives in the human psyche and thus concepts to be transcended/mastered.
Or if you want to put your scientific head on for a moment they represent the Left and Right hand brain (all truths are relative, one can approach this from a purely psychological/neuroscience position and argue the same case just with less colourful imagery ).

Either way I regard worshipping the God of Abraham as the "one true God" to be a supreme mistake, if Jesus professes to preach that same God's gospel then following him would be a supreme mistake also. I show no fealty to torture Gods, I have more self respect than that.


For the record. I love you as much as any other creature in this cosmos but I don't pray to anything for your soul to be saved. Truly it was never in jeopardy in the first place! That part of you which lies beyond the limits of mortality will find its way back to the highest state eventually no matter what, even if it takes eons. In the mean time however I'm happy to waste a small portion of said eons arguing (I suspect futilely) with you on the internet.

(I'll get back to you on some of your other more specific points at a later point, I don't have the time or inclination to dig out the texts to make those counter arguments right now.)

If you had been reading more closely, you might have noticed that I never said the OT was irrelevant; I said that the moral and ceremonial laws given to Israel were done away with. It is still the word of God and much of it concerns prophecy which confirms Jesus as the Messiah and prophecy about the last days.

What you consider to be progress is to discard Gods laws and believe that you can enlighten yourself up to His level. This is exactly what caused humanity to fall in the first place; it's the same lie that human beings have been chasing since the beginning of time. What spiritual progressives/relativists cannot understand is that you can't build a ladder up to Heaven. You can't get anywhere near a holy God on your own. That holy God, in the person of Jesus Christ, had to bring a ladder down to Earth for us. And to get on that ladder you have to pay a very heavy price; you have to die. When you get on that ladder you don't get to do whatever you want anymore. You have to be holy as He is holy, and that's exactly what all of these seekers of the esoteric and "secret knowledge" don't want to do. That's all this relativity amounts to; justifying rebellion against God so you can do whatever you want. Or as aleister crowley summed it up "do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law". That is from Satans lips to your ears.

Do some homework ;-).

Your religion (Christianity) is a bastardization of "Messianic Judaism" (the crazy old testament stuff) and Mithraism (a "Gnostic" religion which was highly (& most) prevalent among the roman legions around the time of the reformation).

Virtually everything positive you allude to in the Christian teachings originally come from Hermeticism and other such ancient "Gnostic" traditions.

Jesus (that is to say "Yeshua ben Yosef") as portrayed as a mortal man is a fabrication at best (and outright fraud at worst).

The "Christ" however has been around for a loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooongass time before the name "Jesus" ever hit the scene . This stuff goes back to the Greeks, Egyptians, Babylonians, Cannanites etc.

And that not even mentioning The Buddha, Zoroaster, Lao Tzu etc. etc. all of whom predate your Jesus by quite some centuries and preach many of the same fundamentals.

Ditch the Dogma and try out the approach of some other religions, you'll quickly find that underneath all the silly myths there's certain things they all have in common (to a greater and lesser extent). You'll also I hope quickly start to realise that the three major "Exoteric religions" (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) are by this stage corrupted to the point of being barely serviceable and a mere shadow of their "Esoteric" counterparts.

Then again you could always just pull the faith card on me

Love is the law...

no, it's the opposite of instagram. it's using very old, esoteric, and volatile materials and experimenting to discover results. instagram deals with known methods and known and [only] repeatable results that imitate cheap film cameras from the 60s and 70s. this is an expensive camera, probably hard to find and expensive film, which may or may not work, giving completely unknown results. saying this is just like instagram is like saying that a PT cruiser is just like chrysler airflow or that a van gogh poster is just like the original painting: you're confusing the cheap imitation for the original. it's exactly like confusing a low res, digital instagram shot with an extremely high res, large format, film photo done with 100 year old camera.

saying this is "making a picture look bad misses the point entire" in fact, misses the point entirely. it misses the point of art, it misses the point of experimentation, and it's an extremely narrow and purely utilitarian understanding of a rarely utilitarian process.

also, maybe you should check out the whole story before dismissing this as being part of a cheap "fad".

http://www.expired-instants.com/stories/1978-10-polacolor2-808.html

For the rest of you, here's some quotes from shinyblurry from another thread, just so you know where he's coming from.

----------------------------------

shinyblurry says...

Since you asked, I'll tell you why I believe in God. Up until 8 years ago I was agnostic. I was raised agnostic, without any religion. We celebrated Christmas and Easter, but that was about it. I wasn't raised to like or dislike religion, I was simply left free to decide what I believed.

At the time I became a theist, I didn't believe in a spiritual reality, or any God I had ever heard of, because like most of the people here I saw no evidence for it at all. I actually used to go into christian chat rooms and debate christians on what I saw to be inconsistances in the bible. A lot of what people have said in this thread are thoughts that I once had and arguments I used to use myself.

Then one day it all changed. I guess you could say my third eye was opened. I had something akin to a kundalini awakening, spontaneously out of nowhere. When it was over, I could suddenly perceive the spiritual reality. I didn't quite know what I was looking at, at the time..didn't truly understand what had happened to me (though through intuition i understood the great potential of it). It was only after researching it online and finding out about the chakras did I start to understand.

It's an amazing, truly truly amazing thing to find out everything you know is wrong. It is really utterly mind blowing. This however, was the conclusion I was forced to immediately reach however, because the evidence for it was right in front of my face. Everything that I had known up until the point I could perceive the spiritual was missing so many essential elements that I may as well have been just born.

I started to receive signs..little miracles, I would call them..like stepping in front of a vast panarama of nature and suddenly seeing it at an angle impossible to human sight, where everything is in focus at the same time, that produced such startling beauty it filled me to overflowing with estatic joy. I started to perceive there was a higher beauty, a higher love that had always been there but I had somehow missed it. I started to get the point, that there was something more. That there was a God.

When I conceded it was possible, to myself, it was then that I started to hear from Him directly. He let me know a couple of things, and proved to me that I wasn't just imagining Him. He showed me that He had been there my entire life, teaching me and guiding me as a child on, only I had been totally unaware of it. He showed me how we "shared space", and that not only could He read my mind, but in some essential way that He was what my mind is. That He is mind itself. He showed me how my thought process was more of a cooperative than a solitary thing.

Now before you say I just jumped at all of this because everyone wants to imagine a loving God, etc etc..untrue in my case. When I first found out He was definitely real, i was scared shitless. Up until that point, my thoughts about God were all negative. I figured if He did exist He probably hated me. You see, that is what I had gleaned growing up in a Christian society without actually knowing anything about it.

At this point I became a theist. I thought of God as a He because He seemed masculine rather than feminine, and also I thought of Him as the Creator. I didn't know anything about the bible, or the Holy Trinity, or what a messiah was, or any of that. I thought the God I knew must not be generally known because I had never seen anything out there that pointed to a loving God.

For the next 6 yeears I was on a spiritual journey. I studied all the various belief systems, spiritual or otherwise, all the religious history..east and west, north and south. I studied philosophy and esoteric wisdom, gurus and prophets. The one I really hadn't studied though, was Christianity. The reason being I didn't believe Jesus actually ever existed so I dismissed it out of hand.

Before I knew anything about Christianity, God taught me three important things about who He is. One, He taught me His nature is triune, that God is three. I didn't understand what that meant precisely, I just knew that was His nature. He also taught me that there was a Messiah. He taught me that there was someone whose job it was to save the world. The third thing and most important thing He taught me was about His love. That He loved everyone, and that He secretly took care of them whether they believed in Him or not. He showed me His perfect heart.

What led me to the bible was this: I asked Him who the Messiah was and He told me to look in a mirror. At the time I had been away from civilization for a few months and my beard had grown out for the first time in my life. I hadn't seen a mirror since I was clean shaven. I sought one out and when I saw my reflection I couldn't believe my eyes. I looked *exactly* like Jesus Christ. I mean to a T.

It was then I was forced to accept the possibility that Jesus was real. To be honest, I really didn't want to. I felt like I had a really special relationship with the Father and that Jesus could only get in the way of that. I didn't even feel like I could pay Him any real respect, because I knew the Father was greater than He was. But, I couldn't ignore what He was showing me, so I started to read the bible. To my surprise, I found out it was about the God I already knew.

Everything I read in the bible matched what I already knew about God . The Holy Trinity matched His triune nature. That there was a Messiah and Jesus was it. And most of all His love, His great and majestic love, for all people, was perfectly laid out in ways I had never before comprehended. The bible was the only information on Earth that accurately described what I already knew about God. That is how I knew it was true from the outset.

So that's when I became a Christian. I couldn't ignore the evidence. My journey to Christianity was based on rationality and logic, believe it or not, albiet with miracles and spirituality mixed in. Even the miracles themselves were logical, as God showed me how He worked from a meta-perspective, and that time and space didn't restrict Him at all. So there you have it..an interesting testimony to be sure.

I am unusual in that I didn't come to God on my own. God chose me, I didn't choose Him. I might never have come to God if He hadn't. I found out later that this means I was elected..in that, before God made the world He had already planned to create me to do His will. After He woke me up it never really took much faith to believe in God because He demonstrated to me His amazing power and ASTONISHING intellect in ways that were impossible to refute. Whatever brick wall I would put up, He would smash it down into oblivion. He favored me because I stayed hungry. I knew the truth was knowable, and I gunned for it 200 percent. I would have died for it.

So I empathize with the people here. Some of you might actually be elected too, it just is not your time to know. Some are probably angry/scared/rebelliious, while still others are intellectually incurious and swayed by hyperbole. I'm pretty sure not many people here have actually read the bible. I hadn't either..I was simply arrogant at the time.

So what I would say to people here is..there is far more going on than seems apparent..if you don't believe at least that there is a spiritual reality, you're practically rubbing two sticks together. God definitely exists and will prove it to you if you humble yourself, come to Him in sincerity, with your total heart and pray. Admit you're a sinner, and ask Him to be your Lord and Savior. Anyone can know God is real. I wish I had read it earlier..would have saved me a hardship. Save yourself the trouble and find out the truth for yourself, that God is real He loves you. God bless..

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Ctrl+L is not esoteric and plenty of people use keyboard shortcuts. I don't care whether it's part of a Windows library or not but if it's widely used across existing Windows installations you'd expect to be able to use them again in the new version of Windows. But if the new interface is going to disconnect from the desktop experience I just don't understand why it has to be linked at all to the desktop. Schizophrenic indeed. The user-interface needs to be consistent and harmonious. Hasn't everyone got that memo by now?

What they're showing with the search failures is that demonstrates a lack of focus on making the desktop interface as polished and user-friendly as possible. If nothing else it appears rushed and sloppy.

I want the system to be gleaming right out of the box - I don't want to have to note all the little exceptions and workarounds . Clearly in some aspects they've put in some work with multi-monitor support and Explorer but in other areas it looks incomplete.

>> ^spoco2:

Yeah, I'm not sold on the whole interface at all. BUT these guys are also missing things which I got pretty much straight away.
The typing to search for things, and not finding 'device manager' et al... if they just looked then below the search box it shows that it's matched items within Apps/Settings/Files So the default is to show just the apps that match, but if he clicked on 'Settings' then it would have shown him what he was looking for without having to actually go to control panel first. And my guess is there's an option for the search results to list all three of those things. DO THEY NOT LOOK AT THE SCREEN... Arg... now they're doing it for printers. The screen says 'NO APPS MATCH YOUR SEARCH', and then it has 17 matches in settings, and some matches in files.

Then they start bitching about Control L, which isn't a windows thing at all
The tabs thing is definitely something to bitch about, as it makes zero logical sense to have everything hidden off screen and not be able to access things without right clicking.

Yes, it looks like Microsoft have not considered non touch interfaces enough, which is a huge oversight. And it really seems they've taken something that was working really well, Windows 7, and stuffed touch stuff over the top and then said it was all done without looking at whether it was a cohesive whole.

So I don't like the look of windows 8 for non touch devices, but these guys jump to conclusions, don't read the interface properly and assume that everyone is a power user who uses the esoteric key combos they use (even when they're specific to particular apps).

Yeah, I'm not sold on the whole interface at all. BUT these guys are also missing things which I got pretty much straight away.

* The typing to search for things, and not finding 'device manager' et al... if they just looked then below the search box it shows that it's matched items within Apps/Settings/Files So the default is to show just the apps that match, but if he clicked on 'Settings' then it would have shown him what he was looking for without having to actually go to control panel first. And my guess is there's an option for the search results to list all three of those things. DO THEY NOT LOOK AT THE SCREEN... Arg... now they're doing it for printers. The screen says 'NO APPS MATCH YOUR SEARCH', and then it has 17 matches in settings, and some matches in files.


* Then they start bitching about Control L, which isn't a windows thing at all

* The tabs thing is definitely something to bitch about, as it makes zero logical sense to have everything hidden off screen and not be able to access things without right clicking.


Yes, it looks like Microsoft have not considered non touch interfaces enough, which is a huge oversight. And it really seems they've taken something that was working really well, Windows 7, and stuffed touch stuff over the top and then said it was all done without looking at whether it was a cohesive whole.


So I don't like the look of windows 8 for non touch devices, but these guys jump to conclusions, don't read the interface properly and assume that everyone is a power user who uses the esoteric key combos they use (even when they're specific to particular apps).

>> ^seltar:

Wikipedia - The harmonica, also called harp....
>> ^Chaucer:
Those are called harmonica's. A Harp is a stringed instrument that is quite large.



Someones trying to be esoteric and exclusionist.

>> ^spoco2:

Oh bullshit, no-one reacts like that the first time they taste beer.
Everyone I know went 'ARGH, that tastes fucking horrible'
It's only once they've 'developed' a taste for it that they enjoy it.
Or, you're like me and you never, ever develop one.
Spirits and wine for me please.
Nicely done vid though


While common the "ARGH, that tastes fucking horrible" is not a universal first impression. I've loved the stuff from the first try. And one common theme I see is that people who are heavily into more esoteric beers (guilty as charged) either seemed to like beer from the start or developed the taste very quickly.

But yeah, it doesn't come naturally for most people.

Even though I was sceptical, I wouldn't accuse others of gullibility for believing this, given that it's not an unreasonable leap to go from this video to the current one.

I think most people who have a reasonable scientific background have a good feeling for what is potentially possible (this video for instance) and what is extremely unlikely (ultraluminal particles).

>> ^longde:

@gwiz665
Witness the intersection of science and religion. Ordain something in the raiment of science and people will believe. More so, if the field is as esoteric as quantum physics.

I'd say that spoco2 applied some fine skepticism to the whole thing. Extraordinary claims, such as this one, requires extraordinary evidence. If a youtube video is the only evidence, then it's not a very persuasive case.

Technobabble has been around since soothsayers and before, right now it's just all quantum because it's super mysterious to average folks.
>> ^longde:

@gwiz665
Witness the intersection of science and religion. Ordain something in the raiment of science and people will believe. More so, if the field is as esoteric as quantum physics.

@gwiz665

Witness the intersection of science and religion. Ordain something in the raiment of science and people will believe. More so, if the field is as esoteric as quantum physics.