Revelation

Now that its the end of the quarter I took a moment to look back at what we went through at the beginning. Lately we have been taking about religion and God and I realized the ending of the quarter can be answer to the beginning (or vice versa). You see, in the beginning we were doubting almost everything. "How do we know the truth" we would ask. We would talk about how we might be a ball of dust or a vibration of a guitar string. How we wished we could just know. Well, maybe the answer to this is God. We want a revelation and it is written in so many spiritual writings that there have been revelations between God and Man. I think the professor mentioned something like this briefly but I did not get it. God is the outside man that sees all and knows what we really are. He is the elephant in Horton Hears a Who. He is the answer to our questions. How could we miss this?

Why?

Why is it that we want to know, so badly, what it is that will happen after we die? Were does the idea of an afterlife come from? Is that as natural as saying that there is a God? Now I believe in heaven, but apart from those things all we really know for sure is that right now is all we have. Why not live the best way possible? Many people can come to different opinions on what is the best way possible. Some may say "learning all you can", "have fun", or "explore the world". I am not going to say that these are wrong, I don't know that? Perhaps to some individuals they are true and maybe to all of us to some extent. What I do want to say is that in the most part when a person truly seems happy and at peace they have come to a conclusion that is found in the scriptures and the mouths of wise men known throughout history. I will say it as I have known it "love your neighbor as yourself". Now I think that in order to get the greatest experience one would have to include the first part which is love the Lord with all your heart, with all your mind, and with all your strength. This may not want to acknowledged by everyone so I guess to be more universal I will stick to the second part of the whole. Treat as others as you would like to be treated. If we all do this I am sure we would all live in a happier and more peaceful state. Sure we can wonder what will happen after we die but I don't think that is as important as to what will happen while we are still alive.

Wanting

This week we spoke about proving to someone that God exists. I think this is something that one person cannot prove to another but each individual has their own encounter and needs to chose whether or not they want to believe. We each believe in what we believe because of experience and perhaps that is the only way that God can be proved, through our own experience of Him. I strongly believe that if someone is looking for Him and wants to believe in Him, He will reveal Himself to them. He wants us to get to know Him and He will not hide.

Now let us say that maybe the longing to believe was there but the proof was not given, God knows what is in the heart and I believe He will be merciful. He is more than we can imagine and understand, He knows this. He is all good and will judge each of us as individuals. All we can do is seek him and spread His word.

How Can We Judge Morality to the Extreme?

Have any of you seen the movie Frailty? This movie tries to show the Old Testament's version of God. This film brings the idea that sometimes we cannot judge what is right from what is wrong because sometimes we are blind to the truth. There are simple things we now are morally incorrect such as stealing a candy from the store because of a dare or something. We now that doing that would be wrong. However, there are some situations that are difficult to claim as being ethical. Situations which we now are right but go against a principle such as not murdering, not stealing, etc.

Who are we to judge anything? Is not God the one we should trust would know whether something is wrong or right? He gave us commandments to follow and if we let Him, He will steer us the right direction. It is He that defines what is good and right. We do not know everything like He does and we have to learn to trust in Him. Frailty does a good job at presenting this idea.

Just One Point of View

I was thinking more about the free will subject after class and I remembered the movie The Minority Report. In this futuristic movie, people are being put in prison before they commit the crime. This is by these the help of three people who get visions of future murders. By the end of the movie all the people are freed because it was found that in reality they cannot know for sure if a person would commit a crime until it was already done.

Now in class it was debated if we still had free will if God knows all. I believe we still do. God may know what we will chose to do and lets us chose it even if he does not agree. He knows what we are going to do before we do it and by letting us do it we have free will. What I mean is that He could very well stop our existence if He knew we would fall but because He loves us and grants us free will He let us be. He let us live to understand His justice. We have to experience life and our choices in order to know ourselves and all those watching us from afar that do not know what God Himself does know.

The fact that we exist to make the choice of doing what is already known to God is the reason we can say we have been given the choice to choose.

What Have We Done?

Common sense is basically what is commonly sensed by people. In other words it is like the majority rules. Its true that most of the time common sense is usually correct and reliable. However there have been moments in history in which common sense has been found mistaken and seems to turn the world upside down. Horrible things have happened to people because they were thought as crazy or that their words were absurd and impossible. How many truths have we lost throughout the ages because of our common sense.

Now I am not saying that relying on our common sense is not reasonable but this is just something to think about. Really. I wonder what have we done in the past. Could we have killed the only person who would have given us the answer to everything or perhaps burned the only proof of our true purpose to our being? Have we had more than one chance to reveal the truth and missed it? Will we have another chance at it?

The more I think of this the more it bothers me. I really want to know. Even if I looked through history books and help find lost scripts the answer would be incomplete. History is so fragile. One day all proof of our history could be turned to ash and all that could be left are our unreliable memories. How can such questions be found? Maybe all this has happened before and we are just victims of this never ending cycle. Who knows? Maybe someone knew, But how can we know that now?

Are We the Problem?

In the novel Sophie's World, a teenage girl finds herself learning about philosophy. One of the examples given to her to help her learn went something like this... a mother and baby are in a kitchen and a third person is either walking on the roof or floating in the air. I'm sorry I do not remember exactly. Anyway, the mother of the baby is terrified at the scene, yet the baby sees nothing unusual and continues giggling as if nothing weird has happened.

To the baby the person floating was just something new and no different than someone walking up to him or her. The mother on the other hand is filled with fear because a person floating is something that to her knowledge cannot happen, something that should not happen. To her it is impossible.

This is something that came into my mind throughout the week during class. We spoke about how a pen will always fall when it is let go in the air. If we were to believe that everything is like a dream, perhaps the pen always falls because that is what makes sense to us. Perhaps deep in our subconscience we believe that the pen will always fall and therefore it does. Maybe we are not open to other possibilities anymore because we have never let ourselves experience them before. What if we can allow that pen to float and then it does because we can believe it actually can.

I know this sounds weird and unreasonable, but just think, what if it were so. After all, we do only use part of our brain and not all of it. What if the part we do not use allows us to discover the unknown or maybe let what we now don't comprehend, happen.

The Senses

Recently we have been talking about what reality really is and how what we see,hear, feel, smell, and taste could be fake. Well I have been wondering about why we have those senses. Why can we do all that stuff? Can we live without all of them?

I took Developmental Psychology during this summer and during the class we discussed about the senses. It was talked about a tank that numbs all the senses of a person. Inside is a kind of fluid that is kept at body temperature so that the sense of feeling is gone. In there the other senses cannot be used either.

My professor said that in just moments a person loses track of time and cannot handle being in that state. As if they are slowly turning toward insanity. They just want to get out.

Does this change anything? To me it seems as if we cannot live without them. Does this make them any less real than out thoughts? Perhaps they are just as real. Or maybe they are not real and are just there like food and water. However, our senses could be even more important than all the other things and with our thoughts probably construct reality.

"They"

I hope you liked the music and the video. However, the main purpose is to listen to the lyrics. What do you all think about them? Who do you think she is singing this song to? Who are "They"? Can you or I be included in that category?

We are so used to things being the way they are that we become numb to the truth behind it. Many of us carry on with our day without asking the question about why things are the way they are. We know that many rules and laws have been made to keep us safe and make things easier, but have all of them? There may be other reasons why "They" let certain things happen and stop others.

We need to think about what we get from it and what "They" do. Is it fair? Is it right? in reality, how much control do "They" have over our lives? How much of our freedom are we giving up?

The thing is that this situation has been occurring throughout history. There have been many who have thought of ways to end this but in the end they all seem to be corrupted sooner or later. Why is that? Is it a part of our nature? Are we naturally greedy? Naturally evil?