God and We Morons

I know an elderly lady, who is part of a very peculiar church. Look, I know that the King James Bible says God’s people are a peculiar people. The Bible even says that his people are morons. That’s the Greek word used when the English Bible says that “God calls the foolish of the world.” And the Greek word which the apostle Peter wrote, and which was rendered as “peculiar” in English, is a word that might be better translated as “purchased” because it has to do with belonging to someone as their possession. 

I won’t argue about whether the people of that church are a purchased people. I’ll just say they are truly a peculiar people.

The elderly lady attends a weekly service in a hotel meeting room with what is a small local segment of an international body, but worldwide they probably have less than 10,000 members. The attendance at the elderly lady’s weekly service varies between 3 and maybe 8 or 9.  Now, this lady can barely walk, but she must attend each week because the other two that regularly attend to make up the rest of the 3 are a gentleman of I would say about 70 and a woman probably in her early sixties. Those two are to be seen in each other’s company in public, but they apparently are not allowed to meet alone in the hotel meeting room without a third person in attendance because to do so would create the “appearance of evil”.  Who knows what they might be doing on the table during the pre-recorded hymn service!  

No, they must have someone else there or they cannot hold the service, and the elderly lady, old enough to be the mother of either of them, goes in case nobody else shows up to be that chaperone. I am not sure how that doesn’t give the appearance of evil also in this world of variable numbers of participants in certain acts, but evidently it doesn’t. Peculiar.

I sometimes give the elderly lady a ride to her church service. That means driving across town to pick her up and then taking her across the street to the hotel. The others in her fellowship are not able to cross the street to do that for some reason.  Peculiar.

One day I went to fetch her and the door to the meeting room was locked. I didn’t realize that at that time they routinely locked the door. Talk about giving the appearance of evil. What might you be doing behind the locked door of a hotel room? I wondered how interested people (hypothetically there might be another peculiar person interested) would gain access.  I asked about it after the door was unlocked and opened. I was told that they were doing that so that nobody would shoot them. Peculiar.

I don’t mind peculiar. I’m pretty weird myself. But what I do mind is that when I talk to these people for more than a few minutes, I gain a sense that they are fearful. Afraid of doing the wrong thing.  Afraid that they may not achieve the eternal life they are seeking. Afraid that their performance won’t cut it.  I don’t detect love, because you cannot give what you don’t have, and fear is what thrives in the absence of love. In fact, the Bible says that “perfect love drives out fear.”  Now, that isn’t peculiar. That is basic psychology.

The love of God is unconditional, and in that unconditional love he promises eternal life to those morons he has called. It doesn’t depend on them. They can’t earn it, nor can anyone thwart him. He describes this in Romans 8, a chapter that begins with no condemnation and ends with no separation, while everything in between is your story if you are among the morons God has called.  

Telepathy

We get the impression that information comes into our heads from outside of our physical senses. We don’t often consider that maybe information flows out of us also, and I don’t mean through speaking, writing, and body language.

Just like there is quantum entanglement of particles that affect each other no matter the distance between them, there appears to be mind entanglement whereby people that are very close to each other emotionally and spiritually can affect each other at great distances without knowingly being in contact. Twins who grow up apart, without knowing each other, marrying at similar times and giving the same names to their kids. Someone suddenly knowing that something is wrong with their close friend.  My father died of heart failure and that morning I had felt “a disturbance in the force”….a shift in perception that made me feel something was wrong and that I should see him. I looked at the clock.  Turns out his time of death was around then.

You think of someone and then the phone rings and they are on the other end.  You want to take the cat to the vet, and that cat that any other day would be freely available has gone into hiding.  A dog sits at the door waiting for Master to arrive, and it is noticed that they went to the door at the time the master had decided to go to the car to come home. Hunters and guides whose lives have been saved because they felt the hair on the back of their head bristle and they looked and saw a large predator staring at them. Or you are in a group and feel the same thing, and you turn and see someone staring at you.

There are schools of fish, flocks of birds and swarms of insects that travel very close to each other in perfect formation, all turning at the same time. Some have tried to explain it in as a function of each member noticing what the one next to it is doing, but the nervous systems which would take in the information, interpret it, react and tell the body what to do simply operate too slowly for that method to be functional.

These examples can all be explained in terms of information telepathically or psychically flowing out of living beings to others. Fascinating. Now we just need to learn how to transmit intention to a particular target.

Three Questions for an Engineer...

Question # 1??:  
How much does a house weigh?

Question # 2??:
How much weight can a rural two-lane bridge hold??? 

and... Question #3??:

WOULD THIS BE COVERED BY
HOME INSURANCE,
CAR INSURANCE,
OR, DOES IT COME UNDER ROADSIDE ASSISTANCE???

Go, Kitty, Kitty...

There’s a book review entitled The Case Against Cats in the current issue of The Atlantic magazine. Cat lovers won’t like it. It discusses the sociopathic nature of cats and mentions the number of species that cats have wiped out, the diseases they carry, and the mega roundup and extermination of cats in New Zealand and Australia. I was uncomfortable reading it because I think cats are cute.

There has long been an argument over whether dogs are smarter than cats. The dog people contend that dogs can learn tricks and that cats cannot. But frankly, I don’t recall anyone ever saying “Oh that Stephen Hawking! What a clever fellow he is….he does exactly whatever you tell him to do.” 

Yes, cats do sleep a lot and Yes they don’t seem to be very empathetic, but they must have provided some benefit because some people surely do like having them around.

And Wisdom is....?

What is wisdom? To me, it’s the ability to be able to project outcomes. It is being able to size up a situation and know what course of action will lead to what results.

Is wisdom a talent?  I sometimes have a hard time distinguishing wisdom from the combination of intelligence and information. I mean that if a person is smart and has information about a situation, doesn’t that make him wise?

There is a problem with this concept though. I have known smart people who were aware but who made stupid mistakes. I have observed that when we are acting through a security, pleasure or power centre of consciousness, we do not tend to act wisely. See https://gordonfeil.blogspot.ca/2016/11/why-dont-we-love.html. It isn’t until we move into a love centre of consciousness that we can stop filtering what we see about our here and now through the desires of security, sensation and power. A smart person may have the experience to know what is the best decision, but if he is off kilter because of an issue of security, pleasure or power, he may find himself confused, or thinking he is not confused but making bad decisions anyway.

A brother of Jesus, named James and known in his society as James the Just, wrote in a book to his Jewish countrymen that if you lack wisdom you can ask God for it and he will give it to you freely provided you believe that he will (James 1:5). So it appears you can be given wisdom even if you aren’t very bright. How is that possible? Maybe wisdom has more to do with being informed than it does with being smart. And we get informed by our own experiences and by learning of the experiences of others. Yet some people have experiences but don’t learn from them. Is that because they aren’t smart? Does wisdom need intelligence after all? Maybe it’s because they are too distracted by their own security, sensation and power addictions to learn from these experiences.

I observe that wisdom is about noticing patterns and tendencies, and being able to recognize in a situation patterns and tendencies with which one is familiar, so that one can extrapolate likely outcomes. I can envision that this can be a gift.  It seems to me that a dull person could be inspired to notice patterns he might not otherwise have noticed. You plus God are a very wise combination methinks.

However wisdom works, it is clear to me that some have it and some don’t.

Does the World Need more of YOU?

I am a Star Trek fan. Not a trekkie, but I enjoy the concept, the characters, and many of the philosophical questions that thread through the plots, especially in the series Star Trek Voyager, which to me is the pinnacle of the franchise.

Those who have watched are familiar with the Transporter. For those 3 people on the planet who don’t know what that is, it is a teleportation device that dissolves you and sends your molecules to a remote location where it reassembles you. Teleportation is a concept that is being researched, and I think it likely that if the world continues even another 100 years without entering a new Dark Age, the technology will be developed to accomplish something similar to Star Trek’s transporter. And this raises a lot of questions for me.

Will the real transporter actually transport your molecules?  Unlikely. It seems much more realistic that what will be sent is information. You will be read and enough information sent to immediately clone or rebuild you on the other end. But what about the spiritual component? Now, for those who think that we are each just connected cells, this is a vain point. But for those of us who believe that there is an energy in us that is not physically produced, this has meaning. Maybe the universe is such that the energy pattern that is your spirit will go to where you are. I don’t know, but it is an intriguing question.

Will the new assembly really be you? Or will it be a new person that just happens to have your memories? Some people seem to think that if it has your memories and exact constitution, it is you because those things are what define you. But suppose there was a way to replicate you without the original You disappearing, would that new creation be you? And, if information is what is being transported, then would there be a need to destroy the original You in the process? Or would the original survive just like the original does in a photocopying process?  If so, then that would create an interesting phenomenon: a new You every time “you” transported. If we have too many people for available resources now (which I do not at all believe), how would that work out?

The new You would be making new memories that would separate them from you and define them as a different person. Or would there be some invisible spiritual connection that would inform you of each other? Maybe you would see, in something like an hallucination, what they were seeing, and vice versa. That would get mighty confusing, and you would likely want to integrate again.

Once the purpose of the teleportation was satisfied, then what would happen to the copy? If you were teleporting to India to attend a cousin’s wedding while the original version of You stayed home, after it was done, would the copy have to report back to the station to be destroyed? That person might flee instead. Will we have a planet full of run-away clones on the lam?

If the pattern of what is you is copied so that the information can be sent to inform a remote assembly of a copy, couldn’t it be kept for emergencies?  When you die, couldn’t that information be used to rebuild you? But would that new build be you?  Or maybe you’ve had a bad time of it the last few weeks, and you want to do a reset back to the last time you transported, so you just have a technician destroy you and rebuild you from the last recording.

There are many issues involved with transporter technology. Maybe it’s so complicated that we’ll stick to transporting rabbits and kitty cats.

Tedium as a Medium for Creativity

A few days ago I was listening to a CBC Ideas program about boredom. It is called The Tedium is the Message and can be found at http://www.cbc.ca/radio/popup/audio/listen.html?autoPlay=true&clipIds=&mediaIds=815275075787&contentarea=radio&subsection1=radio1&subsection2=currentaffairs&subsection3=ideas&contenttype=audio&title=2016/11/22/1.3862159-the-tedium-is-the-message&contentid=1.3862159

The program is a study of boredom, its origins and its results. Apparently, boredom can lead to creativity. Makes sense to me. Boredom appears also to sometimes arise when there are distractions….for example, if you are reading a book when there is a low level sound playing (maybe a television), you may find you can read, but with effort because it is hard to concentrate. In that circumstance you may attribute the reading difficulty to the book being boring. This has been shown experimentally.

I have long viewed boredom as a rejecting type emotion --- an emotion that, when we feel it, says we are not content with our here-and-now….we reject our current experience. I have treated it as something which requires an antidote, and sometimes that has been deliberate diversions….perhaps thinking of something or doing something. I can now see that it isn’t necessarily something to be mitigated.

Another aspect of boredom to which my attention was drawn was that it has apparently not always being recognized in history. It appears to be a relatively modern experience, and one which was known within the wealthy class of ancient Rome. This is evidenced from word studies.