To say that one can have a personal relationship with Jesus
is vague because what does this mean? If you have a personal relationship with
someone you typically use one of your sensory apparatuses: your touch, your
ears, your eyes, your nose and most importantly, your tongue. You use these to
learn more about the other person and to “experience” them.
If you are not using one of your senses to interact with
someone surely the experience you are having is inside your brain (perhaps a
hallucination or just a strong, irrational case of wishful thinking).
“Ahh, but your brain is ultimately responsible for any and
all of the senses you experience in the first place; a faulty brain can render
certain fake experiences—that is, generate seemingly real experiences”. The
religious individual might say this in an attempt to denigrate our reliance upon
the human brain as a standard to draw accurate conclusions about reality (this seems nihilistic from my perspective).
The above is most certainly plausible. Perhaps the brain
isn’t a reliable medium to gauge and represent the world around us. However, since science has a comparison of a functional
brain to a faulty brain, we can readily distinguish the difference and thus draw
accurate conclusions about a functional brain and the results that it should
produce (and vice versa). We don’t have to jump into the grand descent towards nihilism and
“What can we know then?”
We know that a functional/healthy brain requires physical
stimuli (physical (i.e. reality-based, drugs are physical too, remember) to respond—if
Jesus is immaterial, how can the brain respond to him? Thus, how can you have a
personal relationship with him?
Sorry to hog your site, Renee, but something weird keeps going on like blogs appearing and disappearing then reappearing again. Guess it must be those damn Illuminati 'Overwatch' ads on your site which may or may not be appearing on my site as they're visible only to viewers. Otherwise, it must be your fairy godmother waving her magic wand or maybe its just Renee having one of her funny turns. Yer, that must be it! Renee, my dear, glad to see you're thinking about Jesus this Xmas. Did you know that your name means 'born again' - so Renee, there's no escape, you're a born again Christian, period! Its just that you've got to please your fan base of pagan male droolers and keep them guessing. Yer, a personal relationship with Jesus? Okay Renee, do you know that millions of female Christians literally imagine they're in bed with Jesus ie. they literally believe they're physically married to Jesus! I mean this is really weird! Okay, Jesus and his father Joe from the planet Hoova (heaven) are physical people like you and me, but Universal Mind or whatever you want to call it eg. Holy Spirit et al, is non-understandable in a physical sense, okay? Renee, God is inside every cell of your body, but if you screw up the link to God and the universe it becomes degraded ie. sin eg. adultery, homosexuality, murder et al. Okay, Renee, that's enough for now. This is your guardian angel in his cave in the Indian wilderness signing off. AGP, 20th Dec 2012.
ReplyDeleteObvious troll is obvious.
DeleteWow sometimes I worry upon my responses to your blogs. Yet when I read some of the other respondents my worry disappears.The division between what is thought and what is real is immaterial. What you perceive to be reality will become it. Be careful with your perceptions!
ReplyDeleteIt's funny that you qualified "physical" to exclude drugs. Have you ever noticed that a lot of proselytizers are former junkys/drug dealers? At least, the ones I've met are. It's like they're substituting a chemical crutch for a spiritual one. My theory is that they dropped acid one time and saw Jesus, and that's how they found religion and have a "personal relationship" with Jesus.
ReplyDeleteVery superficial observation.
DeleteBut accurate.
DeleteI actually disagree that having a personal relationship is essentially a product of the senses. If this were true, then Helen Keller, who lacked sight and hearing, would be less able to have personal relationships with others than would a person with all their senses!
ReplyDeleteWe can in fact imagine a blind and deaf paraplegic who otherwise has a whole mind – can they not have a ‘personal’ relationship with someone else because their senses are denied them? I would think they still could.
Also, if you think about it, your relationship with another person isn’t primarily a physical one to begin with, since who one is physically is always changing. I loved my children as individuals as when they were babies and I love them now as young adults – I didn’t love their baby bodies and their adult bodies separately.
I think we intuit this when we say we have found our ‘soul mates’ – that is we found someone with whom we can have a relationship beyond mere physical interaction, who knows us beyond our physical selves.
And that is exactly the sort of relationship Jesus teaches us to have with God – to love Him with all our mind, soul, heart and strength.
So I don’t think your description of a ‘personal relationship’ is accurate here at all.
We can in fact imagine a blind and deaf paraplegic who otherwise has a whole mind -
Personal relationship with immaterial individuals = multiple personality disorder.
ReplyDeleteRenee, is everything okay? You need to decide which direction you're gonna take in life - oblivion as an atheist or paradise in heaven as a believer. Check out my recent post on Christopher Hitchens at https://cosmicrf.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/christopher-hitchens. By the way, it seems I'm disturbing all your pagan male droolers who would rather this site remain religion-free. Well, stuff it, Mr Pagan Male Drooler, Renee is trying to make her own mind up without all this outside interference. Best of luck, Renee, in your quest. AGP, 18th Jan 2013.
ReplyDeleteI was under the impression that Renee's mind was already made up on the subject. Her videos are evidence of that. There isn't any "outside interference" on my part. Unless, of course, you mean moral encouragement and standing up for truth, then yes, I do "interfere". And I'll keep "interfering". A lot.
DeleteHaving a relationship implies a two way street. You don't have a relationship without another. Jesus showed us that he his alive. The HolySpirit is alive. We can connect with Him. Jesus is perfectly able to make Himself heard and known. I don't have to imagine anything, He is there. Seek and you will find. This isn't an intellectual pursuit. It's supernatural. Believe it or not.
ReplyDeleteThat's quite a claim. Where's your evidence? Because my claim is that not only is Jesus not alive, but that he never existed in the first place. My evidence is that Jesus shares traits with the Egyptian God Horace, the Persian God Mithra, and at least two Greek Gods as well. The Christian plagiarism of pagan beliefs and icons (The Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and the Virgin Mary all come to mind) combined with the scientific discoveries of evolution, The Big Bang, and The Higgs Boson pretty much make Jesus look about as real as magic nose goblins.
DeleteLet's leave Renee to enjoy her relationship with real life, shall we? She certainly doesn't need advice from delusional people with a tenuous grasp on reality.
ReplyDeleteLike who?
DeleteOf course Renee can enjoy whatever she desires.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteRenee, Jesus is just another name for God. I know many Christians will disagree with this, but “Jesus” is a concept of God, like Vishnu would be for Hindus or Allah is for Muslims. So your real question is how could someone have a personal relationship with God. The answer to this is that they have it the same way they have a personal relationship with anyone.
ReplyDeleteTo have a personal relationship with someone, as you say, usually involves sensing them in some way as well as involving conceptual ideas about them based on those senses. However, the relationship is not a personal one if that is all that is involved. To make it personal, you must assume that there is more to them then what you can sense and conceptualize. If you don’t do this, then you turn them into your own concept of them rather than assuming that you are in relation to someone who is always more than your concept of them. To the degree that you don’t do this, your concepts of them are usually more about you then they are about them. You turn them into a means for you rather than an end in themselves and to the degree you this you are no longer in a personal relationship but in a relationship to them as a non-person; you’ve objectified them.
The important point in the above is that you ASSUME that the persons you are in relation to are more than your concepts and experience of them. You have to ASSUME this since to KNOW it would involve your concept of them and we’d be back to a non-person. A personal relationship with God is no different; it is an assumption that the origin of everything is essentially non-conceptual and personal. Nothing need be sensed or experienced to make this assumption and making it is no bigger a leap of faith then assuming the people you are related to are more than you could ever know or define.
For more elaboration on this, , read Martin Buber’s book I And Thou.