Doctor vs Hagerty´s Fingerprints of God and Philosophers

W cheung amazon I regret buying the book (B B Hagerty´s Fingerprints of God). It starts out pretty promising. The author sets out the plan of visiting people who have "spiritual experiences" (e.g. mystics, near-death experiencers, etc.) and interviewing various scientists. Ostensibly she is being objective, attempting to see whether there is any "evidence" that prayers work, that "near-death experience" proves that we have a soul, etc. It was initially quite harmless, but she keeps screening out data that she does not like. I am a medical specialist and I am also a Christian who also believes in prayers. However, there is just no scientific data to "prove" that prayers work. The author just refuses to give up in spite of being given the results of the experiments on prayers (pg 55-61). There are also obvious factual errors as well. E.g. pain from shingles is NOT due to viral replication (pg 113). This may seem trivial, but this error leads her to suspect some religious/spiritual healing works on a physical level (pg 106-113). Towards the end of the book (from pg 246), it just becomes too painful to read. She brings up "quantum entanglement", "non-local mind", even "dark matter" to explain how prayers and premonition work. This demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of basic knowledge in physics. While it is always good to have an open mind, misuse of science and disregard of disagreeable data are not the way to find out the truth, they just obstruct the path to enlightenment.

*** Just to address the prejudicial, extremist, and unquestioning nature of your comment. Being a professional scientist isn´t always an advantage if you don´t understand your own limitations, especially if you are a "doctrinal" Christian. In terms of "proving" prayer, I believe from the selection I have access to, she cites a number of experiments that do demonstrate some phenomena, in addition to referring to the negative study findings. You don´t seem to understand that Science itself never represents any Absolute Truth, but paradigm models. It is one FORM of Philosophy. Human-related studies are fraught with the issues that were observed since DesCartes was questioned by Pascal and applied Cartesian Rationalism by G Vico. After that terms like anti-positivism met logical positivism, and more. Thomas Kuhn´s paradigms and their shifts honors those efforts in effect. Here, you DENY her citations without qualification, in fact disqualifying your comment as unscholarly and ideological. No doctor is immune to second opinions, and this is not your job here, where your limitations are as human and on display as anyone else. You thus seem to confuse your medical qualifications with your scholarly ability and human identity. Sorry, my friend, my Harvard degree in Bio Anthro, masters in IR-Sustainable Dev in NYC, etc mean I`m another kind of reputable scholar capable and alert to the philosophical and psychological issues, and more. As such, to complete, that Benson et al study, frames its conclusions unwisely and with untenable overstatement as it ignores the longstanding complexity challenge of reducing human psychosocial and cultural context to lab conditions. Besides the studies Hagerty does cite that you ignore, there are medically associated testimonies of prayer-related healing that capture very well those complexities. "Spontaneous remissions" is a term that reflects a medical conceptual barrier to adequate evaluation. Marlene Klepees´ vision-prayer-church/prayer sequence that was sandwiched by and independently experienced of her time at the Mayo Clinic, online, would be a powerful challenge to medical models if they could handle it. Scientists and doctors in Psychosomatic Medicine are taking up their roles at various levels. Bill Owen´s testimony of liver failure and recovery after prayer at an Orlando, FL hospital is told in the It´s a Miracle ep The Healing Ritual online. Among others, there is C Crandall MD´s testimony of resurrecting Jeff Arkin after 40+ min in an ER also online. These "anecdotes" are not invalid. They are PHENOMENA that real science grapples with. DENIAL of possibility isn´t science, it is the misuse of science as ideological Scientism. As for Physics, it seems you can´t seem to disentangle your psychological overidentification of Science as Inviolable, Non-transferable Truth instead of a form of Philosophy that has supplemented Moral Philosophy to create the modern disciplines in the Social Sciences and Humanities, with critical problems in economics and elsewhere. As in Ecological and Social Economics, it is the academic grounding and "soil" of Philosophy that has allowed the limitations of mechanistic Physics to be overcome. Hagerty´s attempts deserve being contextualized more broadly with Physicist-Philosophers like Fritjof Capra´s work and David Bohm´s so that her philosophical efforts can be flexibly and knowledgably be evaluated on their merits. Capra´s work in General Systems Theory and emergence and Bohm´s ideas like the Implicate order are far more intriguing and conducive to adequate appreciation of Hagerty´s efforts. It is your own unacknowledged psychological and mechanistic attitudes that you twist into intolerance and mistaken judgment.

Some Say, "Religion Is Elusive"

R S Ron I think this is inadequate, being parochial because too much influenced by the three Abrahamic theistic "religions" (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) & their notion that religion is about beliefs, doctrines, creeds, commandments, scriptures, rituals & the like. Religion-in-general is elusive & very difficult to define or characterize, as the cultural anthropologists warn us, & to distinguish from magic, superstition, mythology, folklore, etc. Some anthropologists have claimed to find tribes with no religion, but others dispute this, saying it is the result of a too-narrow view of what religion is. 🤔

Religion as a human behavior accounts for various characteristic elements in the conduct of atheists. Mircae Eliade focused on the "Sacred" and "Profane," for example, which are terms especially modern ideological atheists themselves hardly might recognize or apply to themselves, which reveals a few things including the value of the Social Sciences and Humanities. Drawing on my own background based in Bio Anthro, Psych, Int Rel, et al, the career work of a Harvard ed Anthro-ist named Eliot Chapple provides a powerful behavioral-interactional foundation that has simply been widely ignored and unaccounted for because of social theory presumption. An adequate account requires that bridge to the Biology of Symbolic Behavior. In its psychological angle, God is understood relationally with reference to the Universe, so that modern atheists are normally materialists. Process Theology has begun to address some features of Christianity using Whitehead´s points, and George Fox of the Quakers made some interesting developments that appear to be a form of spiritual modernization. Christian monasticism also takes an interesting role. All that is enriched in a framework that includes work on Comparative spiritual practice and systems like Buddhism, Therapeutic Psych, Transpersonal Psych, New Thought Christianity, and the Anthro of Shamanism.

Religion the Social Construct

RagBlast2F You can't refute religion. It's a social construct, and not a proposition. You can however refute claims made by religion. me Good phrase, "social construct." Except that term represents how seligion is a a universal human behavior based on relating to a facet of the Universe, usually through prayer and meditation, at least, among other components. Atheist-type arrangements are usually subcultures of presumed materialists. They would be limited in their use of shamanic Transpersonal psychosomatic rituals, presumably. Modern psychotherapy has consistently generated Transpersonal orientations like post-Reichians like Perrakos´Core Energetics and the post-Rogerian Rosenberg´s NVC. Science for its part has emerged as a form of Christian modern Philosophy conducted at post-Monastic School Universities that led to the modern versions, and so is a Christian subcultural form of Empirical Philosophy and practice. Wherever Religion oversteps its bounds, it can be refuted. The same goes for Science. It is the Christian-derived modern forms of Philosophy that guide the logical reasoning, and its different epistemological forms, to make sense of it all, it should be pointed out.

That "Fictional" Bible and "Evolved" Morality- Not Quite

​ Sce Sci me- gp Actually most Ancient Historians know the Bible is historized Fiction based on Forgery and emulation Mythology! Evolution can explain Morality!! *** @Sce Sci ytube Yeah, you mean all those historian scholars linked to modern University culture that descends from Christian monastic schools, secularized as a conflict-resolution strategy following the Protestant Reformation and anti-authoritarian Christian Enlightment, that operates according to that historic model and the non-Greek historic Christian scientific principles that "God says what is possible, not Aristotle"? BTW, I think you mean to say "Historians of the Ancient World," or more typically, "Biblical Scholars." The problem with "knowledge" is that you have to know that you´re actually doing some form of Philosophy, and engaging in interpretation based on assumptions, and stand in relation to alternative schools of thought and classification systems themselves. Anybody thinking that the Bible is mere "Fiction" and your other assertions is anachronistic and an extremist reductionist who should move to China and work in a village or factory to have a little anthropology and epistemology smack them in their artificially flavored video game and Hollywood faces. A little threat of state-sanctioned organ harvesting should open your Sci-Tech razzle dazzled eyes to a few basic aspects of the strengths of the Judeo-Christian West and its own kinds of limitations. Those "Fictional words" of FD Roosevelt about the importance of religion and his clarity of thought and action led him to exceptional preparedness over the Isolationists´ objections, theist or not, because of FDR´s integrity in relation to a Judeo-Christian Higher Power rather than hypocritical political posturing. FDR is one of many examples, including the end of slavery as a pioneering act of Social Movements ignited by the Quaker- Friends. The Q-F´s have a post-monastic highly spiritual practice of a kind that is being studied even scientifically already. Thus, not only is the Philosophy of Religion one of Religion´s established forms of Philosophy, it is already being supplemented by Science. As for Evolution and Morality, hands up, you´re surrounded. Since you try to claim Evolution as an Absolute and Supreme Truth, we have to ask what Truth is. As a form of modern Philosophy, Evolutionary thought has emerged from the human phenomenon of cultural development and its own psychosocial, sub-evolutionary complexity dynamics that led to modernized, complex Christianity in the first place. Thus, co-existing philosophical Levels of Explanation mean Evolution tries to explain Morality, which is a human religious behavior and area that is being studied, not directed by evolutionary biological philosophers. Morality is its own phenomenon that reductionist extremists confuse in their zeal for evolutionary thought. Sorry. I suggest studying some Anthropology and Sociology to prepare you for the reality checks ahead, including the evolutionary theory of symbolic behavior and shamanism. ***

Sce Sci GrePe-me https://youtu.be/L0-tFahPVIU https://youtu.be/tRrq3s3P3Pw https://youtu.be/pDfYA21lDic https://youtu.be/bQmMFQzrEsc https://youtu.be/-lggQfd-kZQ https://youtu.be/7xVBldyy_Oo https://youtu.be/uLcK3Up8z7c https://youtu.be/-5dyJNMTD6A https://youtu.be/-5dyJNMTD6A What Genesis Got Wrong: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL32CC279BF7082A24 Top Ten (Failed) Proofs for God's Existence: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL24169BF14A977E08 Top 10 (Failed) Proofs the Bible is True: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLw-sbZFAk8EHxfA7oq-N5bD8AXw6FS5qC https://youtu.be/Gpw-TSd36l8 ***

Gr P @Scep Sci Letting links do your talking and thinking? Not good. I looked at BS, ah, Bible Skeptic´s God´s Ex pf 1. First of all, I´m a modernist and empirical theist Christian, and would orient any doctrinal Christian about Christian spiritual and philosophical modernization. As for Bib Ske, I see that it tries to pull the Atheist chameleon maneuver, "Nobody here but us science fans. There is no God." Science (i.e. scientific philosophy) investigates natural phenomenon and doesn´t normally revert to non-mechanistic hypotheses. In certain subdiscipline studies of human behavioral phenomena, that has changed, in brain scans and psychosomatic medical studies, for example. If the doctrinal Christians don´t know they are doing Metaphysical Philosophy and mixing it up with Science, atheist materialists do the reverse. In science, you just say, "We don´t normally work with the God hypothesis. We´re mechanistic in Physics" not, "There is no God." That´s all because Science is actually a form of Philosophy, and if God is the eternal unobservable source of Higg´s fields and particles, he´s got some multidimensional vision, multipolar eyesight equivalent to have spawned spirritual-religious phenomena from Shamanism across the spectrum until the Abrahamic religions and Jesus´ legacy in Western Civilization. That is the interdisciplinary Philosophy of Religion. You can´t escape your psychological and philosophical behavior and the relevance of the question, "What is the meaning of atheists denying the qualitative Christian theistic reference points, balance of components, and visionary experiences that underlie the justifications of the freedom of thought in a unprecedentedly complex Christian and theist-derived and permeated Civilization?

Coronavirus, Psychosomatics, and UU Materialists

Me- This is a good time for some fuller dissemination of Psychosomatic Medicine. Here´s part of a series taken from Barbara Bradley Hagerty´s book, in which she interviews Gail Ironson MD PhD on her findings that belief in and practice around a benevolent God correlates with a 4.5 more vigorous immune response to viral load in HIV. She also interviewed one subject, Sheri Kaplan who id´d as raised Jewish but now unaffiliated and spiritual, has never used medication. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104351710 ***

Car Bal This is on a par of NPR running an interview with a prominent anti-vaxxer about a week and a half ago; wrong at any time, but during this pandemic it's especially harmful. ***

M R Mo @ Clyn Balda Gossipy referring to "anti-vaxxers," whatever their actual position, and your presumptuous, simplistic, and confusedly glib smear talk about NPR as wrong and harmful based on unjustified, and untenable, insinuation is a polarized, and apparently ideological, stereotype that is ad hominem, not substantive nor even conversational. Your superficial talk lacks logical clarity and uses philosophical fallacy to divert from honest talk, argument, and integrity. The issue is the value of a benevolent God in belief and practice and a medical finding about immune system vigor in the case of a viral illness by a medical doctor, her collaborators, and as part of the growing and established professional discipline of Complementary and Integrative, aka Psychosomatic, Medicine (CIM-PS). Not only is there no vaccine yet for COVID-19, none is anticipated until 2021 because it takes research and development time, effort, and expense. Even with vaccines, in general vaccines themselves are not without risk and limitations, which is why smallpox vaccine is no longer a standard. As in antibiotics, combined therapy is the most advantageous strategy in general, so that speaking against Psychosomatic Medicine results that demonstrate anti-viral and immune system vigor is indeed harmful. In fact, you are a repeat offender with your offensive manner and superficial standards, and deserve a warning. ***

JM Tw your post strikes against our 5th source of wisdom, the humanist teachings that advise us to respect the findings of science. But it's not like we've got an orthodoxy or we're going to kick you out over it. ***

Me As mistakes go, your comment reveals a form of ideological bias verging on worse. If such blatantly disrespectful and errant bias is flaunted, you should be grateful you won´t get kicked out. Your reasoning is incorrect, and rather absurdly reflects a view using the sources and principles without understanding their meaning. As in the case of JCH´s citation, "findings of science" is actually misleading, since science makes efforts to understand, and even more precisely, science makes philosophical efforts to understand observable phenomena using empirical methodology. Philosopher of Science Thomas Kuhn is pretty well-known for identifying the philosophical and psychosocial basis of scientific paradigms and their shifts, as in Newtonian mechanics working in relation to Einstein´s relativity and Schrodinger et al´s Quantum mechanics. In this case, G. Ironson and collaborators´ work is the main subject here in which they study psychosomatic phenomena in terms of psychologically-based, Transpersonally-oriented religious variables. Certainly, Pasteur, Einstein, Freud, and Salk are more famous names. Psychosomatics, "mind-body dynamics," is an extension of brain-body processes based, from the biological basis, on homeostasis and pretty famous work on stress. Hans Selye wrote a 1950s book, Stress for Life, about his identifying the three stages of stress: shock, response, and recovery/exhaustion. That´s not so strange sounding knowledge nowadays, but Selye is no household name. Another researcher, G Solomon in the 1960s, observed that highly stressed, severely mentally ill patients had lower immune response to vaccination. He innovated the term "psychoimmunity." In the 1970s, researchers like R Ader and N Cohen, D Felten, H Besedovsky et al made various advances until in 1985, Candace Pert et al at NIH at Georgetown U discovered key neuropeptide receptors in the cell walls of the immune system. Scientists started using the term "Psychoneuroimmunology." However, scientific efforts to understand don´t just happen under the microscope. If stress is the negative side of psychosomatics, the positive side was already observed in the placebo effect by H Beecher MD in his 1955 paper "The Powerful Placebo." OC Simonton MD and his wife associate psychotherapist Stephanie Matthews developed visualization and support group techniques to help cancer patients with their clinic in 1971 and book by 1978. Harvard´s Herb Benson MD then studied Transcendental Meditation practitioners and found that chanting meditation stimulates healthful relaxation, and he called it the opposite of stress in his 1972 book The Relaxation Response. Coming back to this case and Ironson MD´s study, they now use a psychocultural variable, "religious belief and practice," conduct a procedure, and get results. They then interpret those results and draw conclusions. For you to fail to recognize that as science, you are make an egregious mistake. For you to leap to the comment, "we won´t kick you out over it" is hardly the issue. You at least tried to reason, despite your telling mistake because a scientist found benefits in religious attitudes and practice, you were unwilling or unable to recognize it as science. ***

J M Tw We don't have to think alike to love alike ***

Mark R M J M Twe If people misunderstand basic things and make disrespectful, gossipy, and even accusatory comments based on those misunderstandings, and others associate attempting to reinforce some or all of key aspects of that misunderstanding, the love is in the appropriate combination of attention to non- or anti-intellectual and obnoxiously presumptuous conduct and mistaken notions. That love, moreover, cannot merely be assumed, but in its relative clarity and exercise, it very much reveals that UUism´s full spectrum of Principles and Sources are sophisticated and not separable from the educational University culture that Christians developed in much ignored and actually fairly obscured historical and varying principled basis of modernization. It is similar to UUism´s own origins, except that the University and its standard in society-at-large demands some exercise of scholarship. Bureaucratic tolerance without demanding intellectual rigor and avoiding anti- and non-intellectual and obnoxiously presumptuous gossipy bias and intolerance is certainly the bottom of the barrel of love. Love benefits vigorously from quality and modeling, and while Freud, Jung, Adler began a key field that contributes richly to understanding that four-letter word, its origins and levels of continuity in the Judeo-Christian tradition are ignored at a great loss. It´s not just the fundamentalist Christians who have been overwhelmingly manipulated and misled, but those who become anti-intellectual and obnoxiously presumptuous in superficial and gossipy bias twisted to the extreme even of misguided accusation, and their unreflective supporters who unquestioningly perpetuate such distortions. ***

Jn M Twt Thanks, Jn & Clyn. Obviously, opinions vary a lot, so let's humbly respect science.

*** M R M Jn M Twt Genuine humility requires integrity, and respecting science requires nothing less, and any opinion worth its salt needs its own empirical and philosophical exercise to differentiate it from Jay Leno´s erstwhile Quiz Fails. Thinking that science requires anti-theist prejudice and that that is not unscientific, or even that successful demonstrations of theistic health benefits threatens the relevance of mechanistic science, is simply unfounded and a blurring of key distinctions. Besides N Krause of U MI´s statement at Harvard about 3,000 studies finding positive benefits of religion on health, Duke U´s H Koenig MD has reviewed massive amounts of literature and concluded, "A large volume of research shows that people who are more R/S (religious/spiritual) have better mental health and adapt more quickly to health problems compared to those who are less R/S." It comes down to respecting the truth, and yourself. UUism hardly suffers in that case, and in fact its full scope of Principles and Sources gets the vindication that has been denied it. As for gratitude, thankfully UU theists clearly have an opportunity to make clear that Uuism is not the American Humanist Association. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3671693/

The "Dark Ages" and Human Kindness

​ Aloys Fl @G P-me well, let’s not forget Christianity brought us the Dark Ages, and if it wasn’t for Muslims preserving pagan knowledge we probably still wouldn’t know what zero is. And I’m not saying that she is a relative. I’m saying that we inherit most of our impulses to be kind from prehistoric social situations. That’s my whole point. Do you think Buddhists aren’t nice to old ladies? :) Or consider the Confucian reverence for elders. The old lady on the bus is a stupid example. Proves the reverse.

@Aloys Fl youtube Your reference to the Dark Ages is untenable, since it is based on anachronistic, preconceived, and normally prejudicial assumptions. It was more like A Great System Reboot building the foundations of a non-Roman Christian society . The Muslims played their part, having used Christians to translate the classics in the first place, and having delivered up at Toledo because the Christians stopped their military conquests and Reconqista´d Spain because of Muslim collapse, along with their being devastated by the Mongols due to the centralized state of Muslim political power and disconnect of the religion from scholarship. Yes, Christian-derived Scientific Philosophy allows us to illuminate the nature of our impulses since Judeo-Christianity, now globalized, gave us sufficient theistic orientation to validate those "kind impulses." Those "kind impulses" were a wee bit smothered in ancient Greece, e.g. by Alexander the Great´s mom when she goaded dad and hubby King Philip´s ex-homosex lover to assassinate him, and on into Rome when Caesar was kindly assassinated by a band of Senators, Emperor Commodus later kindly renamed Rome after himself, slayed the physically disabled, and after numerous kind plots to assassinate him was kindly assassinated by conspirators kindly inciting his mistress and training partner who kindly strangled him in his bath. Emperor Decius kindly had Christians executed, and so with all that "kindness" also in Asia, it´s good to value Buddhism, yoga, Taoism, Confucianism, and so on. However, Buddhists weren´t nice to old ladies on buses before University-based Karl Benz or without facing Japanese Imperial militarism defeated by FDR´s US. And then there was the Buddhist need to flee Tibet from China. Don´t confuse commonalities with very distinct psychosocial, cultural, and religious systems and which one underlies globalization and the UN with its Human Rights. Commonalities reflect psychosocial biological potential, and important points of intersection. Those Eastern practices are desperately needed in unsustainable, widely hypocritical Christianity to intensify and spread the neglected spiritual integrity teachings of the founder, the Supershamanic Savior, Jesus in globalized Western Culture that "kindly" used secularism to hide any cultural reference to him as the right wing has hijacked his image by manipulating antiquated doctrines. US profiteering Corporate executives kindly refuse to go sustainably, or promote living wages, economic democracy, and human rights, but that would mean respecting Jesus´ "cruel" teachings for a loving God to "love thy neighbor as thyself" instead of funding the kind-to-fetuses and executives Religious Right. I´m an interfaith Christian, see, like the ex-communicated Matthew Fox and Alan Watts, based on Unitarian Universalism. Again, by not acknowledging your own context accurately, you are failing to recognize the human need for standards, and that the UN Universal Dec of Human Rights doesn´t come from Buddhist or Confucian leadership. FD and Eleanor Roosevelt weren´t like Alan Watts or George Harrison, but they were modernizing. *** Aloys Fleischmann 55 minutes ago Green Peacemst It’s kind of hard to keep up with what you’re saying, but my point is that Christianity had a nasty habit of burning any book that wasn’t explicitly Christian and suppressing any science that conflicted with scripture. And, as I’m sure you’re aware, the “Judeo” part of Judeo-Christian is a relatively recent addition to North American cultural chauvinism. Until about 70 years ago the idea that Jews had anything to do with Christian thought was repulsive to the masses—they much preferred to be seen as the inheritors of Greek philosophy. The Judeo part started getting added in the 30s as a reaction to fascism, then as a means of unifying the non-Islamic Abrahamic religions against communism and... Islam. Green P ​@Aloys Fl Kindness needs definition and standards to avoid the trends to unkindness. Jesus´ life, mission, and message for God´s love have set an unprecedented ball rolling that has at least resulted, through hacking, slashing, excess, dissidence, and discernment, in University-based society, the UN, and globalization. Meanwhile, Communism was largely a distraction, while Islam is also in the corporate imperialist US, except for valiant Israel, with Marx´s insights all contaminated. Denmark, Germany, and Social Europe have illuminated social business models and social market democracy, although a bit artificially and needily divorced from spiritual philosophy. Historically, sure, burning books and executing heretics, and persecuting the Jews has taken place in institutionalization, but that´s the unkindness that has been afflicting humans. That´s the unkindness that undid the ancient Greeks, the pagan imperial Romans even into their Imperial Roman Christianity. Christian sociopolitical unkindness, however, has had a "kindness monkey" on its back, the Christian monastic system that descended from St. Anthony of the Desert and has another branch in E Orthodoxy. Sure, Jesus for God´s love didn´t claim to automatically abolish human inclinations to unkindness, just like he didn´t invent kindness. People have had to choose, learn, and clearly err. Jesus´ life, mission, and message are a Big Bullseye message from God, a Neon Sign On The Long and Winding Road With God´s Certification, that underlies the complexity of the rise of Christian society in the West. The History of Christianity and Science is not reducible to Galileo, and emerges before Aquinas, and steers clear onto other bumpy roads, but less so, after Luther and Henry VIII. Scholar Huston Smith´s work is helpful, as is Stan Jaki´s. As for the " Judeo-" thing, I´ve been reading some K Armstrong, but also noted a Rabbi linked to the Unitarians after 1850 at some point. It all follows Jefferson´s landmark Freedom of Religion (not just "denominations"). Well, is Judaism without its prejudices? Jesus went beyond previous Jewish teachings, and Peter and Paul made the explicit move to the Gentiles. It´s monastic-derived Universities that fueled the (Judeo-) Christian-based Enlightenment, that fueled Jefferson, that fueled the Jewish Haskalah with Moses Mendelssohn and crossover breakthrough scholar-innovators Marx(?), Durkheim, Freud, Einstein as Herzl and Jewish nationalism emerged. *** ​ @Aloys Fleischmann Kindness needs definition and standards to avoid the trends to unkindness. Jesus´ life, mission, and message have set an unprecedented ball rolling that resulted in University-based society, the UN, and globalization. Meanwhile, Communism was largely a distraction, while Islam is also in the corporate imperialist US, except for valiant Israel, with Marx´s insights all contaminated. Denmark, Germany, and Social Europe have illuminated social business models and social market democracy, although a bit artificially and needily divorced from spiritual philosophy. Historically, sure, burning books and executing heretics, and persecuting the Jews has taken place in institutionalization, but that´s the unkindness that has been afflicting humans. That´s the unkindness that undid the ancient Greeks, the pagan imperial Romans even into their Imperial Roman Christianity. Christian sociopolitical unkindness, however, has had a "kindness monkey" on its back, the Christian monastic system that descended from St. Anthony of the Desert and has another branch in E Orthodoxy. Sure, Jesus for God´s love didn´t claim to automatically abolish human inclinations to unkindness, just like he didn´t invent kindness. People have had to choose, learn, and clearly err. Jesus´ life, mission, and message are a message from God that underlies the complexity of the rise of Christian society in the West. The History of Christianity and Science is not reducible to Galileo, and emerges before Aquinas, and steers clear onto other bumpy roads, but less so, after Luther and Henry VIII. Scholar Huston Smith´s work is helpful, as is Stan Jaki´s. As for the " Judeo-" thing, I´ve been reading some K Armstrong, but also noted a Rabbi linked to the Unitarians after 1850 at some point. It all follows Jefferson´s landmark Freedom of Religion (not just "denominations"). Well, is Judaism without its prejudices? Jesus went beyond previous Jewish teachings, and Peter and Paul made the explicit move to the Gentiles. It´s monastic-derived Universities that fueled the (Judeo-) Christian-based Enlightenment, that fueled Jefferson, that fueled the Jewish Haskalah with Moses Mendelssohn and crossover breakthrough scholar-innovators Marx(?), Durkheim, Freud, Einstein as Herzl and Jewish nationalism emerged. Ah, Spinoza, too! Yeah, Greekness is what Christopher Hitchens (of Jewish descent) goes for. And it is an impressive tradition. But it was the (Judeo-) Christian scholars at Christian Universities who started taking the Greek work et al and submitting it to Judeo-Christian thinking with Creator omnipotence in academic community Getting clear about the OT can been transformed, but secularism, Science, and right wing distortion of Jesus and Christianity requires high integrity action and scholarship. Jefferson, FD and Eleanor Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, and Barack Obama, and the UN UDHR are all good reference markers, as are Noam Chomsky and Michael Lerner. *** Aloys Fl Green P-me thanks for your thoughts. You are obviously well-read. Allow me to part with a simple observation: the problem with Christianity is that it confuses correlation with cause, and, a linked difficulty, admits to only one cause. *** ​ @Aloys Fl A pleasure trading thoughts with. A passionate guy like you deserves attention. Just remember, if you´re going to try to claim an asserted cause is merely correlation, you´ve got to demonstrate competent, necessary, and sufficient evaluation and substantiation in an attempt to justify it. Otherwise any claim you make is not well made Christianity also doesn´t underlie University-based education for nothing. It is the most complex Historical Sociological and interdisciplinary phenomenon ever, and unless you get all the issues straight, as likely as not, you´re mixing things up. If you were alleging that a simplistic Fundamentalist Christian were neglecting to refer to eclectic processes, I might agree with you on the "one cause" as problem. However, I think you´re actually failing to identify the factor that makes the correlation between Jesus´ commandments and UN Human Rights coherent and not say, Greek, biological, Chinese, Shamanistic, or Jewish in a non-Christian sense.

God and Jesus, Did God "Come Down"?

N H @ Av Prog Chr God has not come down from heaven. OUT FATHER WHO ART IN HEAVEN.. The anointed man, Jesus of Nazareth, the Son, proved a worthy vessel for God, as His Spirit, to indwell from the Jordan and do His works through him. Compare Mt 12.28 with Lk 11.20 you will see that the SPIRIT of God is as the FINGER OF GOD. Acts 5 1-5 also confirms this. It´s a good point you make in quoting Jesus´ Lord´s Prayer that makes explicit God as parent, and implies Jesus as "Son," and that endows all followers in the same sense, albeit derivative of Jesus´ pioneering, comprehensive, and contextualized life, mission, and message as the initiator and demonstrator of a new level of sacred conduct in relation to God through Jesus. Followers as "Children of God" preserves that distinction of descent. Since "Christians" can assume hypocritical and treacherous, apostatic appearances misusing Jesus´ name, Jesus only initiated a potential, he potentiated salvation, it might be said. High integrity monks and other spiritual activists thus are a revelatory phenomena in the Historical Sociology of Christ´s legacy. Your phraseology after that, however, already seems to blur the distinction you are trying to make. When you say, "a worthy vessel for God, as His Spirit," I might suggest the component of relationship by illuminating "as His Spirit" as follows, "a worthy vessel for God, (expressing God´s nature and Spirit by his (Jesus´) intimate choice in having prepared and delivered himself in all necessary and sufficient ways)."