Split Thread Scorpion's Spiritualism

[JayUtah]

I think we have to read between the lines and work out what is true for ourselves.

So you do believe yourself to be better or worse than other people at reading between the lines?

 

[JayUtah]

I do not know enough about angels to say...

Then since your knowledge is deficient and your critics have raised what you seem to think are valid objections, simply admit you're wrong. Digging in and "deciding" that you still must somehow be right is comically egotistical.

 

[JayUtah]

I had a revelationary dream last night which put me back on track. See my thread 'dream interpretation' in the members forum.

You say that in your dream you fought the forces of darkness and eventually prevailed. You say that this has "put you back on track," and you've said that on the basis of that newfound direction you've "decided" that the logical problems and inconsistencies you've been confronted with here in this thread are simply resolved -- no further comment.

Are atheists the "forces of darkness" in your dream?

 

[Scorpion]

So you do believe yourself to be better or worse than other people at reading between the lines?

I can't speak for other people, but I feel I have worked my passage quite well.

 

[JayUtah]

I can't speak for other people, but I feel I have worked my passage quite well.

How do you know that?

 

[Scorpion]

You say that in your dream you fought the forces of darkness and eventually prevailed. You say that this has "put you back on track," and you've said that on the basis of that newfound direction you've "decided" that the logical problems and inconsistencies you've been confronted with here in this thread are simply resolved -- no further comment.

Are atheists the "forces of darkness" in your dream?

I suppose my subconscious mind might be interpreting criticism of my beliefs in that way. But I do not think there is anything wrong with being an atheist, apart from I believe atheists are mistaken in their overview of things.

 

[JayUtah]

I suppose my subconscious mind might be interpreting criticism of my beliefs in that way.

But it's your conscious mind that interpreted the dream and, on that basis, declared victory in this thread. Does your conscious mind equate atheists to the "forces of darkness" in your dream?

But I do not think there is anything wrong with being an atheist, apart from I believe atheists are mistaken in their overview of things.

A belief strong enough to motivate you to come to where atheists live and declare over and over the superiority of your way of thinking. "Oh, look at me! I trumped all those philosophers with coffeehouse mumbo jumbo!" And you tell us you go all over the internet to other places and tell people how they're wrong.

Today's offering is very short on addressing your critics' legitimate objections to your hot mess of a theology, and very long on your fantasy wish fulfillment. Convince me your entire performance in this thread is not just ego reinforcement.

 

[Gamolon]

I have decided it is not contradictory that God and the angels can see the future and that we still have free will. God and the angels know what is going to happen when we act according to our limitations, but they do not intervene to save us from our mistakes.

That is NOT how you've explained it Scorpion.

You said Angels of Karma can see the future. That they determine which incarnation is best for us. That they KNOW some incarnations will make other incarnations suffer.

Example.

You move onto the spirit world. At some point, an Angel of Karma looks at an incarnation and knows that it is best for your spiritual progression. The Angel of Karma KNOWS that the incarnation will cause other incarnations to suffer. You have no choice in the matter to cause or not to cause suffering unto others based on what the Angel of Karma chose for you.

That is not free will.

True it is known to the angels of karma that unevolved souls will cause suffering, and thereby reap future bad karma.

 

[The Greater Fool]

I have decided it is not contradictory that God and the angels can see the future and that we still have free will. God and the angels know what is going to happen when we act according to our limitations, but they do not intervene to save us from our mistakes. They simply guide the process of our karma to give us the motivations and opportunities to change our ways.

If the angels and god know the future only based on human limitations, how is it they predicted lottery ball numbers? No human limitations involved, purely a random event.

 

[Gamolon]

They simply guide the process of our karma to give us the motivations and opportunities to change our ways.

How can certain souls "change their ways" when the Angels of Karma and God have foreseen the suffering those certain souls/incarnations will cause others? This same suffering that is needed by both the soul/incarnation causing the suffering and the soul/incarnation receiving experiencing suffering.

 

[Thor 2]

I do not know enough about angels to say if they are perfect, but I think not.
The angels are a separate species who never incarnate, and therefore they are not tried and tested like us. I have read somewhere the angels sometimes envy us our struggles. Because they never had a choice but to serve gods will.
There may be some truth in the story of the fallen angel, but Silver Birch says there is no supreme devil. The angels know there is no other way than to serve the will of God because to them his presence is obvious. We are not talking about an old man with a beard here. The God I believe in is a formless ocean of consciousness. But unlike us the angels can see his light and power. So there is not much point in rebelling.

Such a curious mixture of knowing stuff with certainty and not knowing other things. Like others here I am intrigued by your certain knowledge about some details. If these angels are not perfect how can you be sure their guidance is without flaw?

Angels that envy us struggling in our quest for perfection as we suffer from one incarnation to another? You don't think it rather unfair of your formless ocean of consciousness God, to make these other beings, who have no hope of achieving what we, the beings they are helping, achieve? If I were such an angel I would be pissed.

 

[abaddon]

Such a curious mixture of knowing stuff with certainty and not knowing other things. Like others here I am intrigued by your certain knowledge about some details. If these angels are not perfect how can you be sure their guidance is without flaw?

Angels that envy us struggling in our quest for perfection as we suffer from one incarnation to another? You don't think it rather unfair of your formless ocean of consciousness God, to make these other beings, who have no hope of achieving what we, the beings they are helping, achieve? If I were such an angel I would be pissed.

Weeellllll, Scorpion's scenario can be made to work. I should know. I rationalised it as a kid. Granted I subsequently tossed it as nonsense. Nevertheless, it is possible to construct a workable scenario out of it. The simple fact is that Scorpion is not good at it. I was.

I could, from memory, reconstruct a pretty bullet-proof version of Scorpion's position, and at the time, genuinely found convincing.

To do so requires that one accept a HUGE bunch of assumptions and follow that with a bucket of necessary consequences of those very assumptions.

A necessary consequence, for example, is that for logical consistency, one must assume that all suffering for anyone is a necessary consequence of karma and is not to be interfered with. And that is what stopped me in my tracks. While logically consistent, such a view leads inevitably to regarding ones fellows as mere victims of karma and as such, they should be abandoned to their fate because they need it.

Such is the inevitable horrible consequence of that kind of thinking.

Now, this was back when I was a mere callow youth. Thankfully, I grew up and fully realised the utter moral abdication for what it was.

Now, Scorpion reminds me of the naive teenage me of 35 years ago. I was sure, at the time, that I had it all down pat. Turns out I was flat out wrong.

Scorpion is AFAIK older than me and is stuck back in some mad version of teen me.

 

[Myriad]

Weeellllll, Scorpion's scenario can be made to work. I should know. I rationalised it as a kid. Granted I subsequently tossed it as nonsense. Nevertheless, it is possible to construct a workable scenario out of it. The simple fact is that Scorpion is not good at it. I was.

I could, from memory, reconstruct a pretty bullet-proof version of Scorpion's position, and at the time, genuinely found convincing.

To do so requires that one accept a HUGE bunch of assumptions and follow that with a bucket of necessary consequences of those very assumptions.

A necessary consequence, for example, is that for logical consistency, one must assume that all suffering for anyone is a necessary consequence of karma and is not to be interfered with. And that is what stopped me in my tracks. While logically consistent, such a view leads inevitably to regarding ones fellows as mere victims of karma and as such, they should be abandoned to their fate because they need it.

Such is the inevitable horrible consequence of that kind of thinking.

Now, this was back when I was a mere callow youth. Thankfully, I grew up and fully realised the utter moral abdication for what it was.

Now, Scorpion reminds me of the naive teenage me of 35 years ago. I was sure, at the time, that I had it all down pat. Turns out I was flat out wrong.

Scorpion is AFAIK older than me and is stuck back in some mad version of teen me.

Modern occultists who write about karma and reincarnation have come up with some pretty refined narratives too. Their usual answer to the moral issue is that because you don't know anyone's karma including your own, you don't know whose karma it is to suffer, so karma isn't a valid reason not to help others. If you help someone, it was their karma to be helped by you, and your actions benefit your own karma also. On the flip side, if you mistreat someone, your karma suffers from that, even if the person you mistreat turns out to have been Hitler in a previous life and so it was their karma to suffer from being mistreated. You don't get karmic brownie points for doing karma's dirty work. (There seems to be no shortage of volunteers to do it for free.)

For me the problem with the whole narrative is that the described cosmic pedagogy makes no sense for the described purpose. Learning from experience is all well and good, but any such purpose is defeated by erasing memories over and over. It's also crippled by the focus on negative lessons (don't do the things that caused you misery and death in previous lifetimes!) with no positive instructional input. Millions and millions of people dying miserably from infection for century after century is just a stupidly cruel and inefficient way to teach people to wash their hands before tending wounds.

I don't suffer from a gambling addiction, so I know what that's like only from stories told by others (most of them cautionary about the unwisdom of indulging in gambling to excess). I'm sure that doesn't give me the depth of understanding of the misery (or the attraction) of compulsive gambling that would come from actually experiencing it. If the gist of the reincarnation narrative is true, then either my current ability to avoid excessive gambling comes from having had a miserable experience with gambling in a previous life (likely, the way it's usually told, coming to a bad end from it), or I haven't really faced that lesson yet at all and so must reincarnate until I get a chance to tick it off the grand karmic bucket list in some future life. In theory, if it's the former, that experience is now represented by something in my innermost character that brings me a step closer to spiritual perfection. (But we can't tell this; maybe it's just not in the lesson plan for me to be significantly tempted to gamble during this lifetime.) That kind of "advancement" is the only kind of learning that counts. All the time you spend lifetime after lifetime learning over and over again to poop, speak, read, prove geometry theorems, and recite all the dialog of Monty Python and the Holy Grail from memory is wasted.

There's a scene in a classic Looney Tunes cartoon ("Lumber Jerks") that shows an entire tree trunk log fed into a giant pencil sharpener that shaves it down to a single toothpick for a box of toothpicks being manufactured. That's what the reincarnation-as-education narrative reminds me of.

 

[JayUtah]

If you help someone, it was their karma...On the flip side, if you mistreat someone...
You don't get karmic brownie points for doing karma's dirty work.

Scorpion seems genuinely chagrined that he can't solve the Predestination Paradox and the Problem of Evil -- issues that have vexed theologists and philosophers for centuries. What's amusing is how he pretends to have solved them by virtue of having a self-aggrandizing dream. But then he won't share the answer with us. He's just declared that they are no longer a problem for his religion.

There's a scene in a classic Looney Tunes cartoon ("Lumber Jerks") that shows an entire tree trunk log fed into a giant pencil sharpener that shaves it down to a single toothpick for a box of toothpicks being manufactured. That's what the reincarnation-as-education narrative reminds me of.

Thank you for this. I now have an excellent visual to fall back on.

In fairness, we say that the rise of high order organisms on Earth by means of evolution has taken billions of years. We ask people to be okay with that, and to accept that this is such a colossal time scale that we really can attribute to evolution all the twists and turns that gave us modern humans. Specifically we ask people to regard the many species that went by the wayside: such an awful waste of life.

So why can't we accept the long, drawn-out process of reincarnation and karma? Because we acknowledge that evolution isn't designed. It doesn't operate according to any overarching principle or toward some ultimate goal. It's a system governed entirely by here-and-now, short-term survivability. It's allowed to be chaotic, and we respect that H. sapiens can be called an accident. This whole process of reincarnation and learning and progression is supposed to have been built by smart gods with an end in mind.

Theists have an answer for that too. If God's plan doesn't make sense to you, that just proves how much smarter God is than you.

 

[abaddon]

Scorpion seems genuinely chagrined that he can't solve the Predestination Paradox and the Problem of Evil -- issues that have vexed theologists and philosophers for centuries. What's amusing is how he pretends to have solved them by virtue of having a self-aggrandizing dream. But then he won't share the answer with us. He's just declared that they are no longer a problem for his religion.

That is always the problem. We are seeing Scorpion doing this all the time. Whenever inconvenient facts intrude, invent some new baloney.

Thank you for this. I now have an excellent visual to fall back on.

Sadly, I can recall it from childhood. Have some fun nostalgia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ7Hs9cuQfw

<snip for brevity>

Can't argue with any of that, but I am guessing that Scorpions will. Why? Because Scorpion appears to believe his experience is unique. Given the volume of confounding evidence, a fringe reset is almost inevitable. Predictable even.

 

[Nay_Sayer]

I can't speak for other people, but I feel I have worked my passage quite well.

That sort of thing is best left to professional proctologists.

 

[Myriad]

Sadly, I can recall it from childhood. Have some fun nostalgia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ7Hs9cuQfw

Ah, Crazytown! And Harveytoons, not Loony Tunes. That's the one I remembered from my childhood too! But when I went searching yesterday I found "Lumber Jerks" instead, which (in the midst of a plot involving talking gophers trying to recover their tree back that's been cut down and sent to a furniture factory) has a different and shorter scene of the same idea with the giant pencil sharpener. Warner just reincarnated the joke a year later. I figured I must have misremembered the details of the scene and forgotten the gophers.

That one's at 4:19 here:

 

[JayUtah]

That is always the problem. We are seeing Scorpion doing this all the time. Whenever inconvenient facts intrude, invent some new baloney.

Which is meant to supersede the previous baloney, not to refine it or qualify it. No, we're not just going to pretend he didn't say something earlier that flatly contradicts the explanation du jour. If someone has to go through 51 cards asking, "Is this your card?" without success, we have no obligation to regard him as a skilled magician. Scorpion doesn't seem to think we can see that this is what he's doing.

Because Scorpion appears to believe his experience is unique.

At least a special qualification, if not unique. He seems to be saying he has greater insight and understanding that others, or some such equivalent quality. But the only reason his critics prevail here is that he's just not very good at debate, and that this is not a big deal. I interpret this as ego reinforcement. He's groping for an ancillary excuse for his failure that doesn't mean he has to admit he doesn't have a coherent, informed argument.

 

[Thor 2]

Weeellllll, Scorpion's scenario can be made to work. I should know. I rationalised it as a kid. Granted I subsequently tossed it as nonsense. Nevertheless, it is possible to construct a workable scenario out of it. The simple fact is that Scorpion is not good at it. I was.

I could, from memory, reconstruct a pretty bullet-proof version of Scorpion's position, and at the time, genuinely found convincing.

To do so requires that one accept a HUGE bunch of assumptions and follow that with a bucket of necessary consequences of those very assumptions.

A necessary consequence, for example, is that for logical consistency, one must assume that all suffering for anyone is a necessary consequence of karma and is not to be interfered with. And that is what stopped me in my tracks. While logically consistent, such a view leads inevitably to regarding ones fellows as mere victims of karma and as such, they should be abandoned to their fate because they need it.

Such is the inevitable horrible consequence of that kind of thinking.

Now, this was back when I was a mere callow youth. Thankfully, I grew up and fully realised the utter moral abdication for what it was.

Now, Scorpion reminds me of the naive teenage me of 35 years ago. I was sure, at the time, that I had it all down pat. Turns out I was flat out wrong.

Scorpion is AFAIK older than me and is stuck back in some mad version of teen me.

Can be embarrassing to look back on ones own self deception in the past. In my callow youth days a couple of years after discarding Christianity, I met a couple of guys who were taken by the works of Lobsang Rampa and persuaded me to read "The Third Eye" and some other books of his.

There I was, attempting to see auras and trying hard to leave my body in my astral form. The phase didn't last long ... hallelujah.

 

[Steve]

Can be embarrassing to look back on ones own self deception in the past. In my callow youth days a couple of years after discarding Christianity, I met a couple of guys who were taken by the works of Lobsang Rampa and persuaded me to read "The Third Eye" and some other books of his.

There I was, attempting to see auras and trying hard to leave my body in my astral form. The phase didn't last long ... hallelujah.

Sounds very familiar . Late 60's, when I was around 15 or 16, same thing.