Not necessarily.
For instance, the ridiculous amounts of wealth I am demanding of god would be not for me. There’s no way I could use that type of wealth with as tight as I am with money. It would give me freedom to do what I wanted and not care about the consequences.
I would set up permanent free housing (non governmental funded) around the USA, complete with all the amenities of a typical home (keep in mind this would be *pretty* basic) potentially even giving them the freedom to figure out how to get off the street. If they wanted training in whatever field they wanted, it would be provided, along with job placement services. If all they wanted was a roof over their head so they could fend for themselves, that could be worked out. If they wanted to do drugs, they would figure that out on their own. So… my getting that type of wealth would be essentially the type of freedom not just for me… but for an entire country. No one would ever need pay anything back as there would be trade for workers to build everything to keep the system rolling. And yes the money I had would double again from the constant feedback from itself.
And ladies and gentlemen, that’s what I call infinite freedom!
@Jear77
Well I’ve heard of worse schemes for trying to Virtue-signal unto the Divine. But I’ve also heard of far better schemes that don’t try to gloss away the reality that the wealth is primarily for you; and the proposed Good Deeds are a bargaining ploy to prove worthiness for such a boon.
If you are still in the religious mindset of thinking you can either bargain or extort for what it is you crave from “The Parent”, consider what I tried.
When it became clear that my natural artistic and explorational skill sets were not going to make me rich, I tried bargaining with God to win the lottery. I took it a step further than you and even set up spreadsheets of how much I would give, and to what causes; setting up hypothetical investments and annuities to make it sustainable.
I was hitting off the parable of the talents from the New Testament. Those who show they can wisely administer a little are given more.
And when that didn’t work I took it a step further; and actually started giving away a similar percentage of my “little”, as I proposed I would with “a lot”.
So figure out what percentage of your hypothetical abundance you would give away with no hope of return (ie, not just to friends and family who would then be indentured to you)
And start doing it! I did it with a take-home income of less than $20,000 a year.
@griz in all honesty no one would be indebted to me (except my “friend” who owes me, but the reasoning is he needs to learn the value of money, nothing less, nothing more). Why? Because I owe them!
@Jear77
You’ve actually hit upon why an exercise in virtue-signaling would not work with friends and family. You would give because you “owe them”; so how could you not expect the same of them if you fell on hard times?
Plus there is the presumption that giving from a position of ludicrous wealth would not just be a one-time occurrence. ( the good feelings and adulation would become addictive)
And if you set aside a percentage of your meager paycheck right now to regularly give to them, you would just enable dependency in them.
The idea is to help: not control. And not to be indentured.
Correct?
For this exercise to work the money that you set aside for charity must be given to strangers with no expectation of it ever coming back.
And while God has no use for such virtue-signaling exercises, what it can do in you is help realign your perspectives when it comes to money: changing it from a lord and savior back into a simple tool.
Plus I found even more benefits from it. Asked me what they were!
@griz it’s not like that. With that type of wealth i could make the bible eat its words “the poor you will always have with you.” With there being no more homeless, i’d be like “really?”
@griz or maybe a good percentage of the homeless would be dead w/i a year. I’m not being cruel saying this, but the majority would likely OD within the 1st month, because they couldn’t afford their habits daily before.
@Jear77
I can run a bit on this new tangent you offer. My only caution would be for you not to forget or gloss away the reality of these insights into your personal process that you perhaps inadvertently offered: because accepting and reconciling them will help you better deal with the incongruencies between “self” and “organism”. (Ego and Id circa Freud).
But that aside, certain human conditions / realities tend to spontaneously recreate themselves even after they are resolved.
Homelessness is one of them. So are poverty addiction depression and inequality.
It is not cruel to observe that people inadvertently slide into these conditions (by not recognizing and / or nurturing unhealthy/incongruous processes and thoughts); and also actively run towards these conditions ( consciously/ subconsciously wanting to punish themselves/others).
This is not overlooking that extraneous circumstances can trigger these states. But a self-actualized/congruous person will tend not to stay there for long.
So generally speaking the Bible is right, in that these things will always be with us.
Even after money might reshuffle things; or a catastrophic disaster resets us all to the same starting conditions.
It is a “cruel reality”.
But one that we have an awful lot of power to make better.
@griz if it were able to be done, it’d simply be one in a long line of places where the bible doesn’t meet reality. And at day’s end if the path were all inclusive, I’d be interested in pursuit. But it’s so limited, so single-minded, so narrow, so wrong as compared to my own experience, as compared to the experience of 99.9% of existence, it’s a waste of time looking into it, and if i’m wrong, i know i walked into it eyes wide open.
@Jear77
Let’s remember that we all very freely phenomenologically “morph” that thing that we call “reality” . . . especially when we are nursing/nurturing/supporting unreconciled incongruities within us.
I’ve shared before that the very nature of “spiritual writings”, is that one tends to find what they go looking for. Even if that means “altering” context, words, processes, thoughts, actual manifest reality etc. The more incongruities within us, the more prone we are to doing this . . . and the less likely we are to be able to see ourselves doing it.
But spiritual writings tend to excel . . . at helping us spot and deal with incongruities! If our energy is not being put into nurturing/protecting them, it naturally flows into reconciling them. But confronting our “vulnerable spots” is exceedingly uncomfortable — a real “journey to the dark underworld” of our own soul. That is why people tend to rail so much at things that tell us we have to go to such dark places to find things like enlightenment, reconciliation, forgiveness, healing, self-actualization.
This ties into the analogy of the building block essential for the structure to stand . . . that becomes a stumbling block and point of offense to many.
Because personal incongruities . . . can never stand as a stable structure. They are self-defeating by design.
@griz it’s ironic that you worry about personal incongruities yet gloss over the bible’s! Me, on the other hand, i accept my own incongruities, yet can’t stand the bible’s.
@griz y’see my degree is in professional and technical communication. The core point of any communication is this: say exactly what is meant, and mean exactly what is said in as plain mater as possible. Any exception, exclusion, or interpretation based around time, technonlgy, culture, or understanding makes rhe entire message null and void.
@griz the different stories also seem to belong to multiple people, or perhaps one person with what would be called “disassociated identity disorder” a.k.a. multiple personalities , though historically it’s more apt to be the former, as there were *dozens* of people making the claim of Christ with different ideals. Those stories got confused and compiled into what we have today.
@Jear77
How many different people authored the books of the Bible?
The wisdom is in the common thread; and the grace is in not overriding individual personalities to deliver it.
It is true there were many gospels of Christ written. And we have the four absolute best representations of the common thread bound up together for our convenience!
And with enough personality difference between the authors to show they are not blatant plagiarizations.
@griz the problem is this: historical events get muddied within days even in a day and age of cameras recording everything, the truth of the matter stretched like taffy. This type of a thing would be amplified in a day where there were no reporters, no cameras, no one who deliberately traveled around recording a person’s deeds. By all accounts these things were recorded YEARS after christ’s death. And if there were a few others who did similar things, had similar messages, what’s to say these events weren’t confused, combined in some way? NOTHING! Which means the accounts in the bible are no more accurate than what you would find in the “national enquirer,” and hence, untrustworthy
@Jear77
Archaeological and anthropological Studies have shown that certain oral traditions can be passed down accurately for up to 25,000 years.
Especially “sacred” ones that might irk a Deity if altered!
Let’s remember that our current way of recording and thinking about things is really only a few hundred years old. Previous to this people recorded and reacted to things in very different ways. There was considerable negative motivation to try and raise oneself on high above God.
We need to guard against misuse of the corrective lens of “Me . . . now”.
But if all we are looking for is easy dismissals of things we would rather not contemplate . . .
@griz this may be true… but these were people who did this for their entire lives, i.e. it was their job (life’s mission) to hold these stories! The people who were around jesus in biblical times were not such people.
@Jear77
Even an exceedingly wise Sage with no claim of Deity, will produce apprentices motivated to preserve the exact wisdom they found so valuable. Luke and John both reporting clear instances of Jesus proclaiming his Deity. Matthew strongly infers it. So does Mark but he was young intended to be wowed by the miracles. Both Peter and Paul internalized and fully conceptualize this in their writings.
I think you are driven to conveniently underestimate them.
@griz forget not the peoples of whom you speak who had such impressive and accurate memories had no written language. Jews had the ability to write, and thus the spoken word would be way less important
@griz memory of that type takes a lifetime of training, an opportunity that would only exist in an illiterate, clan based society. They wouldn’t have possessed, would never have developed the skills because they were able to record things through writing.
@Jear77
Don’t discount that others may have a better memory for things people said than you.
I remember most of the things we’ve talked about before.
And I’ve noticed that you seem not to.
And don’t forget there’s an aspect of Christ Paradigm that you seem to either have had no experience or teaching with, or have chosen to ignore. John 14:26.
Either your training or your motivation to explore this aspect of Christ’s teachings has proven lacking for as long as I’ve known you. I specifically asked you about it on numerous occasions and you’ve just changed the topic.
It’s not surprising that you would not know that which you have chosen never to know.
@griz you don’t see examples of christ quizzing his followers, making them do rote repetition, memory space excercizes, nothing that would even remotely indicate that they were taught how to do such things. And by that lack, i must reject it.
@Jear77
I understand that you want to reject it: so desperately that such a strawman would result.
To reject the possibility of their having been any learning just because it did not resemble modern learning institutions . . . doesn’t stand even in a mild breeze.
Remember that the purpose of these conversations is not “reacting” but learning.
(The kind that happens without quizzes, rote memorization, and pondering if you have sufficient storage capacity! )
@griz it’s inappropriate to think that these people could do this without proper training, especially in light of experiments that show how easily memory can be altered – as simple as asking a leading question. As there is zero textual proof showing safeguards of any kind, or any training whatsoever to keep these stories alive, I’m rejecting it
@Jear77
By that logic it would be inappropriate to hold that human beings had learned or remembered anything save in the last few hundred years!
That would seem the antithesis of logic; with shades of foolish arrogance thrown in.
I’m still looking into the archaeological and anthropological studies my Prof suggested show clear evidence that certain kinds of oral tradition can survive reliably for up to 20,000 years.
I’ll probably have time to do it this weekend in Colorado.
If I find those studies and they follow proper scientific process can we retire this point?
I have so much to say on this topic, but I am afraid to. Literally. The cost of freedom is to fear losing it. How ironic?!
Everything we say on the Internet is public domain. Who is to say that when you have a P.O.V., that those with an opposing view can selectively use your own words against you like a fully clipped assault rifle?
Freedom in our world is only available in isolation from the moronic and this planet has way too many morons, of which, I can suggest that I might be one of them.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.
The treasure that makes you fearful is really just a curse. True freedom is a treasure. The cost of it is to administer it wisely and not just hide it away.
Those who covet and resent that freedom will try to snipe at you, with any and all ammunition they can get their hands on. But truth cannot hurt truth in the long run. So speak the truth bravely. If someone tries to remove the context, return the context. If they mouth lies, speak truth. And they will become like a lobster chasing their own tail!
Here is a classic example.
Sure, it’s easier to just not bother. But then the treasure is either lost, or becomes an unbearable curse.
34 responses to “Freedom that is interpreted as just “personal license”, tends to actively destroy freedom for everyone.”
Not necessarily.
For instance, the ridiculous amounts of wealth I am demanding of god would be not for me. There’s no way I could use that type of wealth with as tight as I am with money. It would give me freedom to do what I wanted and not care about the consequences.
I would set up permanent free housing (non governmental funded) around the USA, complete with all the amenities of a typical home (keep in mind this would be *pretty* basic) potentially even giving them the freedom to figure out how to get off the street. If they wanted training in whatever field they wanted, it would be provided, along with job placement services. If all they wanted was a roof over their head so they could fend for themselves, that could be worked out. If they wanted to do drugs, they would figure that out on their own. So… my getting that type of wealth would be essentially the type of freedom not just for me… but for an entire country. No one would ever need pay anything back as there would be trade for workers to build everything to keep the system rolling. And yes the money I had would double again from the constant feedback from itself.
And ladies and gentlemen, that’s what I call infinite freedom!
@Jear77
Well I’ve heard of worse schemes for trying to Virtue-signal unto the Divine. But I’ve also heard of far better schemes that don’t try to gloss away the reality that the wealth is primarily for you; and the proposed Good Deeds are a bargaining ploy to prove worthiness for such a boon.
If you are still in the religious mindset of thinking you can either bargain or extort for what it is you crave from “The Parent”, consider what I tried.
When it became clear that my natural artistic and explorational skill sets were not going to make me rich, I tried bargaining with God to win the lottery. I took it a step further than you and even set up spreadsheets of how much I would give, and to what causes; setting up hypothetical investments and annuities to make it sustainable.
I was hitting off the parable of the talents from the New Testament. Those who show they can wisely administer a little are given more.
And when that didn’t work I took it a step further; and actually started giving away a similar percentage of my “little”, as I proposed I would with “a lot”.
So figure out what percentage of your hypothetical abundance you would give away with no hope of return (ie, not just to friends and family who would then be indentured to you)
And start doing it! I did it with a take-home income of less than $20,000 a year.
And you’ll never guess what happened!
@griz in all honesty no one would be indebted to me (except my “friend” who owes me, but the reasoning is he needs to learn the value of money, nothing less, nothing more). Why? Because I owe them!
@Jear77
You’ve actually hit upon why an exercise in virtue-signaling would not work with friends and family. You would give because you “owe them”; so how could you not expect the same of them if you fell on hard times?
Plus there is the presumption that giving from a position of ludicrous wealth would not just be a one-time occurrence. ( the good feelings and adulation would become addictive)
And if you set aside a percentage of your meager paycheck right now to regularly give to them, you would just enable dependency in them.
The idea is to help: not control. And not to be indentured.
Correct?
For this exercise to work the money that you set aside for charity must be given to strangers with no expectation of it ever coming back.
And while God has no use for such virtue-signaling exercises, what it can do in you is help realign your perspectives when it comes to money: changing it from a lord and savior back into a simple tool.
Plus I found even more benefits from it. Asked me what they were!
@griz it’s not like that. With that type of wealth i could make the bible eat its words “the poor you will always have with you.” With there being no more homeless, i’d be like “really?”
@Jear77
So your Prime goal is to make the Bible eat its words” on this one count?
Perhaps on several counts?
Are they just abstractions? (Ie, God is cruel or God is unfair). Or are there specific subjective reasons why you personally want them to be false?
@griz or maybe a good percentage of the homeless would be dead w/i a year. I’m not being cruel saying this, but the majority would likely OD within the 1st month, because they couldn’t afford their habits daily before.
@Jear77
I can run a bit on this new tangent you offer. My only caution would be for you not to forget or gloss away the reality of these insights into your personal process that you perhaps inadvertently offered: because accepting and reconciling them will help you better deal with the incongruencies between “self” and “organism”. (Ego and Id circa Freud).
But that aside, certain human conditions / realities tend to spontaneously recreate themselves even after they are resolved.
Homelessness is one of them. So are poverty addiction depression and inequality.
It is not cruel to observe that people inadvertently slide into these conditions (by not recognizing and / or nurturing unhealthy/incongruous processes and thoughts); and also actively run towards these conditions ( consciously/ subconsciously wanting to punish themselves/others).
This is not overlooking that extraneous circumstances can trigger these states. But a self-actualized/congruous person will tend not to stay there for long.
So generally speaking the Bible is right, in that these things will always be with us.
Even after money might reshuffle things; or a catastrophic disaster resets us all to the same starting conditions.
It is a “cruel reality”.
But one that we have an awful lot of power to make better.
@griz if it were able to be done, it’d simply be one in a long line of places where the bible doesn’t meet reality. And at day’s end if the path were all inclusive, I’d be interested in pursuit. But it’s so limited, so single-minded, so narrow, so wrong as compared to my own experience, as compared to the experience of 99.9% of existence, it’s a waste of time looking into it, and if i’m wrong, i know i walked into it eyes wide open.
@Jear77
Let’s remember that we all very freely phenomenologically “morph” that thing that we call “reality” . . . especially when we are nursing/nurturing/supporting unreconciled incongruities within us.
I’ve shared before that the very nature of “spiritual writings”, is that one tends to find what they go looking for. Even if that means “altering” context, words, processes, thoughts, actual manifest reality etc. The more incongruities within us, the more prone we are to doing this . . . and the less likely we are to be able to see ourselves doing it.
But spiritual writings tend to excel . . . at helping us spot and deal with incongruities! If our energy is not being put into nurturing/protecting them, it naturally flows into reconciling them. But confronting our “vulnerable spots” is exceedingly uncomfortable — a real “journey to the dark underworld” of our own soul. That is why people tend to rail so much at things that tell us we have to go to such dark places to find things like enlightenment, reconciliation, forgiveness, healing, self-actualization.
This ties into the analogy of the building block essential for the structure to stand . . . that becomes a stumbling block and point of offense to many.
Because personal incongruities . . . can never stand as a stable structure. They are self-defeating by design.
@griz it’s ironic that you worry about personal incongruities yet gloss over the bible’s! Me, on the other hand, i accept my own incongruities, yet can’t stand the bible’s.
@Jear77
Of the two, one is a living breathing being.
The other is a collection of words on paper.
Where does my concern lie?
Where does yours?
@griz people are alive. Basing one’s life off of a book of inconsistency, trying to cover up, ignore incongruities/ inconsistency makes one dead.
@Jear77
So let’s return to the possibility that most of your perceptions of “God” could have come from a book-worshiping cult.
@griz y’see my degree is in professional and technical communication. The core point of any communication is this: say exactly what is meant, and mean exactly what is said in as plain mater as possible. Any exception, exclusion, or interpretation based around time, technonlgy, culture, or understanding makes rhe entire message null and void.
@Jear77
Are you back to trying to encapsulate the Infinite into the finite again?
@griz the infinite needs to clothe itself in the terms of communication I set forth… otherwise, instead of communication, you end up with gibberish.
@Jear77
The teachings of Christ are quite clear provided one doesn’t try to pre- conceptualize or decontextualized them to fit an existing agenda.
It sounds more and more like this is what the religion you were in, did.
@griz the different stories also seem to belong to multiple people, or perhaps one person with what would be called “disassociated identity disorder” a.k.a. multiple personalities , though historically it’s more apt to be the former, as there were *dozens* of people making the claim of Christ with different ideals. Those stories got confused and compiled into what we have today.
@Jear77
How many different people authored the books of the Bible?
The wisdom is in the common thread; and the grace is in not overriding individual personalities to deliver it.
It is true there were many gospels of Christ written. And we have the four absolute best representations of the common thread bound up together for our convenience!
And with enough personality difference between the authors to show they are not blatant plagiarizations.
@griz the problem is this: historical events get muddied within days even in a day and age of cameras recording everything, the truth of the matter stretched like taffy. This type of a thing would be amplified in a day where there were no reporters, no cameras, no one who deliberately traveled around recording a person’s deeds. By all accounts these things were recorded YEARS after christ’s death. And if there were a few others who did similar things, had similar messages, what’s to say these events weren’t confused, combined in some way? NOTHING! Which means the accounts in the bible are no more accurate than what you would find in the “national enquirer,” and hence, untrustworthy
@Jear77
Archaeological and anthropological Studies have shown that certain oral traditions can be passed down accurately for up to 25,000 years.
Especially “sacred” ones that might irk a Deity if altered!
Let’s remember that our current way of recording and thinking about things is really only a few hundred years old. Previous to this people recorded and reacted to things in very different ways. There was considerable negative motivation to try and raise oneself on high above God.
We need to guard against misuse of the corrective lens of “Me . . . now”.
But if all we are looking for is easy dismissals of things we would rather not contemplate . . .
@griz this may be true… but these were people who did this for their entire lives, i.e. it was their job (life’s mission) to hold these stories! The people who were around jesus in biblical times were not such people.
@Jear77
Even an exceedingly wise Sage with no claim of Deity, will produce apprentices motivated to preserve the exact wisdom they found so valuable. Luke and John both reporting clear instances of Jesus proclaiming his Deity. Matthew strongly infers it. So does Mark but he was young intended to be wowed by the miracles. Both Peter and Paul internalized and fully conceptualize this in their writings.
I think you are driven to conveniently underestimate them.
@griz forget not the peoples of whom you speak who had such impressive and accurate memories had no written language. Jews had the ability to write, and thus the spoken word would be way less important
@Jear77
Huh?
@griz memory of that type takes a lifetime of training, an opportunity that would only exist in an illiterate, clan based society. They wouldn’t have possessed, would never have developed the skills because they were able to record things through writing.
@Jear77
Don’t discount that others may have a better memory for things people said than you.
I remember most of the things we’ve talked about before.
And I’ve noticed that you seem not to.
And don’t forget there’s an aspect of Christ Paradigm that you seem to either have had no experience or teaching with, or have chosen to ignore. John 14:26.
Either your training or your motivation to explore this aspect of Christ’s teachings has proven lacking for as long as I’ve known you. I specifically asked you about it on numerous occasions and you’ve just changed the topic.
It’s not surprising that you would not know that which you have chosen never to know.
@griz you don’t see examples of christ quizzing his followers, making them do rote repetition, memory space excercizes, nothing that would even remotely indicate that they were taught how to do such things. And by that lack, i must reject it.
@Jear77
I understand that you want to reject it: so desperately that such a strawman would result.
To reject the possibility of their having been any learning just because it did not resemble modern learning institutions . . . doesn’t stand even in a mild breeze.
Remember that the purpose of these conversations is not “reacting” but learning.
)
(The kind that happens without quizzes, rote memorization, and pondering if you have sufficient storage capacity!
@griz it’s inappropriate to think that these people could do this without proper training, especially in light of experiments that show how easily memory can be altered – as simple as asking a leading question. As there is zero textual proof showing safeguards of any kind, or any training whatsoever to keep these stories alive, I’m rejecting it
@Jear77
By that logic it would be inappropriate to hold that human beings had learned or remembered anything save in the last few hundred years!
That would seem the antithesis of logic; with shades of foolish arrogance thrown in.
I’m still looking into the archaeological and anthropological studies my Prof suggested show clear evidence that certain kinds of oral tradition can survive reliably for up to 20,000 years.
I’ll probably have time to do it this weekend in Colorado.
If I find those studies and they follow proper scientific process can we retire this point?
I have so much to say on this topic, but I am afraid to. Literally. The cost of freedom is to fear losing it. How ironic?!
Everything we say on the Internet is public domain. Who is to say that when you have a P.O.V., that those with an opposing view can selectively use your own words against you like a fully clipped assault rifle?
Freedom in our world is only available in isolation from the moronic and this planet has way too many morons, of which, I can suggest that I might be one of them.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.
@spitfire3dc
Hmm. A lot to unpack there.
The treasure that makes you fearful is really just a curse. True freedom is a treasure. The cost of it is to administer it wisely and not just hide it away.
Those who covet and resent that freedom will try to snipe at you, with any and all ammunition they can get their hands on. But truth cannot hurt truth in the long run. So speak the truth bravely. If someone tries to remove the context, return the context. If they mouth lies, speak truth. And they will become like a lobster chasing their own tail!
Here is a classic example.
Sure, it’s easier to just not bother. But then the treasure is either lost, or becomes an unbearable curse.