Christian experiencer testimony

[Hydra009]

I have news for you - the no-slavery stuff is pretty boilerplate.  As for the commandment to not "rob openly", that leaves a little bit of wiggle room, dontcha think?  Do you think?  Because thinking people don't really need lists of rules with everything spelled out and wrapped up in a neat little bow - a life of unthinking servitude to lists - they simply understand the broad idea not to harm people - to value others and others' wellbeing.  (If you can't explain it simply, you don't know it, as the adage goes)  Societies can draw up their own very specific law codes from there because there's a story for every sign and a sign for every story.  Chapter, Section, Subsection.

And if I read you right, you say that they don't follow *most* of the bad stuff.  The obvious inference is that there is some stuff - probably more than you think - that is indeed bad.  If I were to draft a set of laws and 90% of it is fine, but 10% of it is absolutely barbaric, where do you think people's attention would be?  (If I were to build a ship that is 90% sailworthy, could I reassure the sailors that their ship is *mostly* okay?)

[Cassia]

The ancient cultures all had their rules as does a tribe of chimps. Nothing earth shattering about any of them such as The Code of Hammurabi, The Code of Ur-Nammu of Ur, The Code of Lipit-Ishtar of Isin or the Torah. The rules are so provincial and Earth bound.

The Torah is certainly NOT a history. Finally, we have a number of secular scholars researching the historicity of holy books and it is not looking good for Moses, Abraham, apocalyptic floods, unicorns, or the Exodus. The NT is not faring so well either. Just like all the Egyptian, Greek and Roman gods, the Abrahamic gods are mythological. Abiding by their antiquated rules against homosexuality (which occurs in nature) for example is just wrong.

[Mike Cl]

Several rules about how they are to be treated humanely and freed after time though - all things considered for 600 B.C. and older laws, not too bad.

That is probably true.  The Huge problem with that is that the OT is not considered 'old, historical law', but current, up to the minute, law.  And it is to be considered as such and acted upon as such.  Of course, everybody picks and chooses what to ignore and what to follow.

[Cassia]

I have news for you - the no-slavery stuff is pretty boilerplate.  As for the commandment to not "rob openly", that leaves a little bit of wiggle room, dontcha think?  Do you think?  Because thinking people don't really need lists of rules with everything spelled out and wrapped up in a neat little bow - a life of unthinking servitude to lists - they simply understand the broad idea not to harm people - to value others and others' wellbeing.  (If you can't explain it simply, you don't know it, as the adage goes)  Societies can draw up their own very specific law codes from there because there's a story for every sign and a sign for every story.  Chapter, Section, Subsection.

And if I read you right, you say that they don't follow *most* of the bad stuff.  The obvious inference is that there is some stuff - probably more than you think - that is indeed bad.  If I were to draft a set of laws and 90% of it is fine, but 10% of it is absolutely barbaric, where do you think people's attention would be?  (If I were to build a ship that is 90% sailworthy, could I reassure the sailors that their ship is *mostly* okay?)

Speaking of slavery, few people know that Jefferson's first draft of The Declaration trashes King George and the practice of slave trading....of course that section got deleted by the Southern Christians..

He (King George) has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another

[Mister Agenda]

Actually they are evidence just not so much in a "hard science" type of way. It is difficult to get empirical evidence on things involving the consciousness like near death experiences, shared death experiences, astral projection, dreams, etc (at least as far as we know with public science...I suspect there is secret tech to record consciousness remotely). As for AP, I could refer you to the cia research paper on it when they did the Monroe institute hemisync using binaural beats where they AP'd and encountered reptilians or the many people that AP as a hobby and meet up together in the astral realm. Or the work of dr Eben Alexander who was an atheist neurosurgeon that had NDE while his neocortex wasn't working (in coma from meningitis) so he came up with theory of external signal for consciousness.  For shared death experiences where healthy people around the dying person all share the death experience (like an NDE), look up the work of Dr Raymond Moody. With these, you can't just say the experience is product of dying brain because healthy people share the experience.

Evidence leads to a particular conclusion, religious experiences can contradict each other. It seems to be the nature of religious experiences that they compel belief, so I don't blame you for believing...but to me your experience is an anecdote about a brain state you had.

If there's an external signal for consciousness, there doesn't seem to be anything that can block the signal, so there's no possible experiment that could confirm that hypothesis. If people lost consciousness in a Faraday Cage, that would be good evidence for an external signal, but without any supporting evidence (or any evidence this hypothesis is needed to explain), it's just speculation.