Why is the Holy Spirit sometimes called the Holy Ghost?

Nowadays, the word ghost typically refers to ‘An apparition of a dead person which is believed to appear or become manifest to the living, typically as a nebulous image’.1 However, this hasn’t always been the case.

A long time ago, the words spirit and ghost meant the same thing. The main difference between them was the language they had originally come from: spirit came from Latin and ghost from Germanic, via Old EnglishGhost meant ‘spirit, soul’ and spirit meant ‘breath, spirit [unsurprisingly!]’.2

The words Spirit and Ghost are used interchangeably in the Authorized Version [of the Bible]. Spirit (Latin spiritus from spiro to breath…) simply signifies breath or air in motion. Ghost appears in Saxon as gast, in German as geist, in Danish as geest, in Irish as gasda, and seems to be derived radically from some word signifying to move or rush; Irish, gaisim to flow; English, gush, gust… So that the Hebrew [word translated as spirit] (spirit or breath or wind), the Greek [word translated as spirit] … , the Latin spiritus, and the old English ghost, all suggest the breathing or moving of air, and are all nearly equivalent.3

It was only later that ghost got the meaning of an ‘apparition of a dead person’.4 Because this is now the most typical meaning of the wordghost, modern translations of the Bible use the word spirit consistently.5

Further reading


Notes

1. Meaning 1. in ‘ghost‘ on Oxford Dictionaries

2. See “Origin” section of the entries ‘ghost‘ and ‘spirit‘ on Oxford Dictionaries

3. E. H. Bickersteth, The Spirit of Life (London: Religious Tract Society, 1869), p. 37 footnote

4. See under ‘ghost’ in The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories (Springfield: Merriam-Webster, 1991), p. 196-197

5. ibid. Cf., e.g., Mat. 1:18,20 and 3:11  in the KJV with the same verse in CEB, CEV, ESV, GNT, HCSB, LEB, NASB, NCV, NEB, NET, NIV, NLT, NRSV, REB, RSV, etc.

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Mortal Soul and Mortal Psyche #5 Mortality of man and mortality of the spirit

Mortality of man and mortality of the spirit

Though we are mortal, we have a choice of spiritual birth and spiritual life, providing us with the possibility to face a better life which shall not have an end (immortality). When the New Testament speaks about a new birth and a new life it does not speak about some reincarnation, but about our transformation of our psyche, our spirit which gets a total new attitude and lets us live in a different way than before.

We have to get away from our old attitudes; we have to cut down our old trunk or put our old ‘me’ to death, giving the new ‘me’ the opportunity to spring up from fertile ground. By coming to the true faith we shall blossom again, and our renewed psyche or spirit shall be like the branches of a tree and shall not fail. The power of a plant to spring forth lies within itself (Genesis 3:22), but man needs “outside help.” A man that has died is utterly gone, and when a mortal has fallen, he is no more, but when we are alive we have a choice to bring forth good branches or wild branches bringing forth no fruit. Though those who fear God may have to work hard and have to endure difficulties like others in the world, they may count on the Most High, when they produce fruits worthy of repentance.

Frans Floris - The Sacrifice of Jesus Christ, ...

Frans Floris – The Sacrifice of Jesus Christ, Son of God, Gathering and Protecting Mankind – WGA7949 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The New Testament speaks about new life, which is the life of the Christian attitude to the Old Law and to the world which does not fear God. For those who accept Jesus, the Old Law is no longer the first ruling principle in their life. It is not that they really died, but they put away their old life figuratively. We, when we changed our position in life, and choose to follow Jesus try to obtain union with him. It is also not us who directly will be raised from the dead. The significance of being “raised from the dead” lies in the fact that it was Christ’s death that made the fatal blow to the power of the “old man” – the seed of the serpent, or lust. It is only through the power of Christ’s resurrection that the efficacy of his victory can pass to us by our identification with his death in baptism, for we must be raised to “a new life”. But that new life in Christ can only bear fruit of Christ because he has been raised from the dead.

First there is the spiritual or figuratively coming to a new life in this world system and only later there will be for each one in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then only those who belong to Christ at His coming. Not earlier. Only at the return of Christ they will be taken out of the dead to be judged by Christ Jesus. Only at the end times the world will see the dead coming back to life or to see the psyches called to come in front of the judgement seat of Jesus.

The followers of Christ, who know they are formed of dust and have to return to dust, shall find themselves liberated from death by Jesus, the unique Son of God, the ‘only begotten.’ By the right free choices they made they shall be allowed to look at that eternal life, having age-abiding life, not to be lost or to be wasted to undergo a second death and to perish forever.

 

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Preceding

Mortal Soul and Mortal Psyche #4 Psyche, According to the Holy Scriptures

Continued with: Mortal Soul and Mortal Psyche #6 Summary

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3 Reasons the Resurrection Matters

The resurrection of Jesus (alongside his crucifixion) is by the majority of Christians the central historical event in the Christian faith. You could say that

Without the resurrection there would be no Christianity.

The Jewish fighter against the first followers of Christ, after some time changed  his mind and wrote to the Corinthian community:

“If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14).

The Resurrection of Christ (Kinnaird Resurrection)

The Resurrection of Christ (Kinnaird Resurrection) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Lots of people came to the faith because of the tremendous stories they heard and because they came to believe that resurrection of Christ Jesus was not a joke or a fairy tale. Many do not stand still what importance such an act of coming of the dead, by a man really means. Those trinitarian (believing in a three godhead) Christians who take Jesus to be God nullify his death, because the God of gods can not die, and make a farce of this man, who only wanted to follow the will of his Father and not of himself.

“41 And he was parted from them about a stone’s cast; and he kneeled down and prayed, 42 saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” (Luke 22:41-42 ASV)

We should understand that Jesus did not pray to himself, but to a much Higher Being, to Whom he would go later.

“28 and I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand. 29 My Father, who hath given [them] unto me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch [them] out of the Father’s hand.” (John 10:28-29 ASV)

“Ye heard how I said to you, I go away, and I come unto you. If ye loved me, ye would have rejoiced, because I go unto the Father: for the Father is greater than I.” (John 14:28 ASV)

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater [works] than these shall he do; because I go unto the Father.” (John 14:12 ASV)

“Now I know that Jehovah is greater than all gods; yea, in the thing wherein they dealt proudly against them.” (Exodus 18:11 ASV)

Several Christians say they  believe in the resurrection and are convinced that after dying a violent death on a Roman cross on a Friday afternoon in 30 A.D., Jesus of Nazareth came back to life and emerged from the tomb on Sunday morning. Those days are not correct, but are not the subject of what we want to bring forward today.

Jesus, as a devote Jew celebrated the Passover or the liberation of God’s People. On the 14th of Nisan, the first month of the Judaic year, he with his closest friends installed a New Covenant, between his Father and those who wanted to come close to God . The Jews had got their opportunity to be the most praised people of God, but now others could also come into the House of God, thanks to what Jesus accomplished.

He was a man of flesh and blood who could be tempted. His heavenly Father is a Spirit and has no flesh, blood or bones. God also can not be tempted and can not sin. Jesus himself never had claimed to be God and always had spoken with respect of his Father in heaven, without Him he could do nothing. Him always referring to his Father made the Pharisees willing to get rid of him.

“17  But Jesus answered them, My Father worketh even until now, and I work. 18 For this cause therefore the Jews sought the more to kill him, because he not only brake the sabbath, but also called God his own Father, making himself equal with God. 19 Jesus therefore answered and said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father doing: for what things soever he doeth, these the Son also doeth in like manner.” (John 5:17-19 ASV)

“21 Jesus saith unto her, Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father. 22 Ye worship that which ye know not: we worship that which we know; for salvation is from the Jews. 23 But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth: for such doth the Father seek to be his worshippers. 24 God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” (John 4:21-24 ASV)

That he was not a spirit he would proof to his disciples after he was taken our of the dead, after having resided for three days in hell. (In case many Christians could count well, they would not take Good Friday as a day Jesus died and Sunday being the day he stood up from the dead, because than he would not have been three days death.)

Lamentation at the Tomb, 15th century.

Lamentation at the Tomb, 15th century. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We may already be happy those Christians say Jesus was put unto death, put in a grave (sheol = the hell) and was resurrected. They should come to see it was not Jesus who came from himself out of the grave, but that it was his Father Whom took him from the dead. This is important, because when Jesus is a man of flesh and blood, who can get up from being death, this makes it also possible for us. In case Jesus is God that does not proof anything for a humble human being, who can sin and probably did more than one sin in his or her life. When we know how severely God punished the first human beings and did not make an end straight ahead to this distorted situation and broken relation, we should wonder what the use would be in case God Himself would come to earth to play a man and to do as if He could be tempted and as if He could die. You might wonder why such a charade would have any use and why God than waited such a long time to come to this earth to play the role of Messiah.

From historical writing we got to know what happened in the past with the people who claim to be God His People. We also got to know about the Nazarene Jew Jeshua who did many miracles and who claimed to be the son of God, but never said he himself was God.

His resurrection is not easy to believe. But if it is true, it is the most pivotal event in human history. Much has been written in defense of Jesus’ resurrection, according to Brian G. Hedges, Lead Pastor for Fulkerson Park Baptist Church and the author of Christ Formed in You: The Power of the Gospel for Personal Change, Licensed to Kill: A Field Manual for Mortifying Sin, and Active Spirituality: Grace and Effort in the Christian Life, the most thorough and convincing book being N. T. Wright’s massive 800-page volume, The Resurrection of the Son of God. (Christian Origins and the Question of God, Volume 3) (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2003)

What is unquestionable is that the first generation of Jesus’ followers did believe he had risen, and were convinced that everything had changed as a result.

Consider just three of the ways the New Testament highlights the significance of the resurrection.

1. Jesus’ resurrection means that his sacrificial death on the cross was sufficient, and therefore our sins can be forgiven.

Paul emphasizes this in 1 Corinthians 15, reminding us that

“Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures” (vv. 3-4).

Then, in verse 17, he argues that

“if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.”

In other words, Paul saw a direct connection between the resurrection of Jesus and the sufficiency of his death to atone for our sins. When Jesus rose again on the third day, it was the public announcement that God was fully satisfied with the sacrificial death of his son Jeshua.  In his resurrection, Jesus was vindicated (1 Timothy 3:16).  But in his vindication, we are vindicated too. That’s why Paul says in Romans 4 that Jesus

“was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (Romans 4:25).

2. Jesus’ resurrection means that death is defeated once and for all.

As Peter proclaimed on the Day of Pentecost,

“God raised [Jesus] from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him” (Acts 2:24).

The distinctive English image, with Christ ste...

The distinctive English image, with Christ stepping on a soldier, in a 14th century Nottingham alabaster relief (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We are told that ‘Death‘ lost its grip on Jesus! Death could never have had a grip on God. But every man, though being created in the image of God, would, because of the sin of the first man, be in submission to death.

When Jesus was a man of flesh and blood and not a spirit, like his Father, this all makes sense. By the Father taking His son out of death and even by taking him to sit on his right site, to become a mediator between God and man, we have the assurance Jesus can mean something to us. He is not only our solicitor or privileged intercessor by the Most High, he is also an example to what can happen also to us.

The resurrection means that Jesus not only defeated death for himself, but that he defeated it for us. He died and rose as a new representative for humanity, as the Second Adam.

“But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead,”

writes Paul,

“the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:20-22).

It is in that way that Jesus his disciple John looks at the genesis of the New World of Christ, where Jesus is that begin for all of us, the alpha, but also the end, the omega.

After the default Adam, we have a remake Adam to which we can refer; In him we find a new harddisk to start anew, fresh under his guidance, with his software.

His resurrection guarantees ours.

Perhaps no one has said this more eloquently than C. S. Lewis. In his 1947 book Miracles, Lewis wrote:

“The New Testament writers speak as if Christ’s achievement in rising from the dead was the first event of its kind in the whole history of the universe. He is the ‘first fruits,’ the ‘pioneer of life.’ He has forced open a door that has been locked since the death of the first man. He has met, fought, and beaten the King of Death. Everything is different because He has done so. This is the beginning of the New Creation: a new chapter in cosmic history has been opened.”

The empty tomb assures us that sickness and suffering, death and disease will not have the final word.

This should be both personal and powerfully hope giving to all of us.

3. Jesus’ resurrection means that the material world matters.

Lest there be any misunderstanding, when the apostles said that Jesus rose again, they meant that his physical body came back to life. The risen Jesus wasn’t a phantom or ghost, but a breakfast-eating, flesh-and-bone, human being (see Luke 24:36-43 and John 21:10-14).

As the Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist John Updike once said,

Make no mistake: if He rose at all

it was as His body;

if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules

reknit, the amino acids rekindle,

the Church will fall.

When Jesus’ came out of the tomb in a physical body, it was God’s definitive stamp of approval on the creation project with all of its materiality. The resurrection shows us that matter matters. And this is why the early Christians looked to the future with confidence that the created order itself would be redeemed (see Romans 8:18-25).

Though we wait for the full consummation of new creation, the Scriptures also teach that the power that raised Jesus from the dead is already working within us (Ephesians 1:19-20). The resurrection, you see, not only assures of God’s forgiveness and comforts us in suffering as we anticipate the final reversal of death, disease, and decay; it also motivates and empowers us to push back the tide of suffering and evil in the present world, through word and deed, in mercy and in justice, all in Jesus’ name.

(Having taken in mind words from Brian G. Hedges,Lead Pastor for Fulkerson Park Baptist Church and the author of Christ Formed in You: The Power of the Gospel for Personal Change, Licensed to Kill: A Field Manual for Mortifying Sin, and Active Spirituality: Grace and Effort in the Christian Life. Brian and his wife Holly have four children and live in South Bend, Indiana. Brian also blogs at www.brianghedges.comand you can follow him on Twitter @brianghedges.)

End Notes


N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, Volume 3) (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2003).

The Greek word for “justification” (dikaiosin) in Romans 4:25  is closely related to the word “vindicated” (edikaiothe) in 1 Timothy 3:16.

C. S. Lewis, Miracles (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1947) 236–237.

John Updike, “Seven Stanzas of Easter,” in Telephone Poles and Other Poems (Random House, 2013).

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Preceding articles:

Entrance of a king to question our position #1 Coming in the Name of the Lord

Entrance of a king to question our position #2 Who do we want to see and to be

Seeing or not seeing and willingness to find God

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Additional reading:

  1. The meek one riding on an ass
  2. The son of David and the first day of the feast of unleavened bread
  3. About a man who changed history of humankind
  4. Lord or Yahuwah, Yeshua or Yahushua
  5. Who was Jesus?
  6. On the Nature of Christ
  7. Jesus begotten Son of God #18 Believing in inhuman or human person
  8. Jesus is the Son of God but Not God the Son
  9. Yeshua a man with a special personality
  10. A man with an outstanding personality
  11. An unblemished and spotless lamb foreknown
  12. No Other Name (But Jesus)
  13. Servant of his Father
  14. Servant for the truth of God
  15. Slave for people and God
  16. Jesus spitting image of his father
  17. Reasons that Jesus was not God
  18. Jesus and his God
  19. The high calling of God in Christ Jesus
  20. Jesus Messiah
  21. Christ begotten through the power of the Holy Spirit
  22. How is it that Christ pleased God so perfectly?
  23. For the Will of Him who is greater than Jesus
  24. Wishing to do the will of God
  25. Imprisonment and execution of Jesus Christ
  26. A Messiah to die
  27. Jesus memorial
  28. No person has greater love than this one who surrendered his soul in behalf of his friends
  29. The redemption of man by Christ Jesus
  30. The day Jesus died
  31. An unblemished and spotless lamb foreknown
  32. The Song of The Lamb #5 Revelation 5
  33. Why do we need a ransom?
  34. Ransom for all
  35. A new exodus and offering of a Lamb
  36. 14 Nisan a day to remember #1 Inception
  37. 14 Nisan a day to remember #2 Time of Jesus
  38. 14 Nisan a day to remember #3 Before the Passover-feast
  39. 14 Nisan a day to remember #4 A Lamb slain
  40. 14 Nisan a day to remember #5 The Day to celebrate
  41. 14-15 Nisan and Easter
  42. Around the feast of Unleavened Bread
  43. A Holy week in remembrance of the Blood of life
  44. High Holidays not only for Israel
  45. Festival of Freedom and persecutions
  46. Death of Christ on the day of preparation
  47. Why did Jesus have to die on the cross?
  48. Swedish theologian finds historical proof Jesus did not die on a cross
  49. Impaled until death overtook him
  50. Jesus three days in hell
  51. Christ has indeed been raised from the dead
  52. Through Christ’s death you can be adopted as a child of God
  53. Jesus is risen
  54. In the death of Christ, the son of God, is glorification
  55. Jesus begotten Son of God #11 Existence and Genesis Raising up
  56. Seeing Jesus
  57. Faith a commitment to the promises of Christ and to to the demands of Christ
  58. Jesus begotten Son of God #6 Anointed Son of God, Adam and Abraham
  59. Jesus begotten Son of God #19 Compromising fact
  60. One Mediator between God and man
  61. Ember and light the ransomed of Jehovah
  62. A fact of History or just a fancy Story
  63. The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ
  64. Only one God
  65. God of gods
  66. God is One
  67. The Trinity – true or false?
  68. The Trinity – the Truth
  69. True Hope
  70. Epitome of the one faith
  71. Restoration Scriptures True Name Edition Matthew Chapter 27
  72. Hebraic Roots Bible Matthew Chapter 28
  73. Hebraic Roots Bible Book of The Acts of the Apostles Chapter 2

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Related articles:

  1. Pre-Good Friday Rememberances
  2. The Festival Sabbaths and Preparation day
  3. Preparation day of Passover
  4. Weekly Torah Portion: Pesach (Passover) Week 1
  5. Passover, A seven-day festival
  6. The Passover Lamb
  7. Our Passover Lamb
  8. The Lamb of God
  9. He Says Concerning Himself “I am the Son of Elohim”
  10. Preparations for the Passover Meal – Luke 22: 7-13
  11. Passover and the Feast of First Fruits
  12. Passover Confusion?
  13. Jesus Christ, Our Passover
  14. Happy Passover!
  15. Passover and Good Friday are just hours away! – A Message from Bibles for Israel
  16. The Week With Two Sabbaths
  17. The Crucifixion Week
  18. Faith Without Obidience
  19. Easter Reflections: Betrayal, Trials, Denial, and Remorse
  20. Dave Hunt : Scripture reveals the answer Of .Crucifixion Week
  21. Tree of Jesus Life, the Suffering Christ, Passion Week
  22. Gospel according to Saint John – Chapter 19
  23. 10 proofs passover is a memorial
  24. Proof Jesus Died Just Before the Passover Feast in 33 AD
  25. The Day of Crucifixion and time of resurrection
  26. Easter
  27. The Empty Tomb
  28. The Passover Lamb has Gone Missing
  29. He is not here, He is risen, just as He said
  30. Happy Easter, He Is Risen!
  31. He Is Risen! – Matthew 28: 1-20
  32. He’s Risen! (Easter Sunday Reflections)
  33. Resurrection Sunday
  34. Easter scripture for today
  35. He Is Alive..
  36. Walk with Jesus: Matthew 27 He who overcame
  37. The Evolution of the Resurrection
  38. Oh Foolish People
  39. How long was Jesus in the grave?
  40. Solving the Three Day Three Night Mystery
  41. Yet Another Three Day Three Night Question
  42. Three Days Three Nights Follow Up

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  • Can you question the Resurrection and still be a Christian? (religionnews.com)
    Did Jesus literally rise from the dead in a bodily resurrection, as many traditionalist and conservative Christians believe? Or was his rising a symbolic one, a restoration of his spirit of love and compassion to the world, as members of some more liberal brands of Christianity hold?As Easter approaches, many Christians struggle with how to understand the Resurrection. How literally must one take the Gospel story of Jesus’ triumph to be called a Christian? Can one understand the Resurrection as a metaphor — perhaps not even believe it happened at all — and still claim to be a follower of Christ?
  • Resurrection – for ME? (aworldontheedge.com)
    Resurrection is defined in the dictionary as the act of causing something that had ended or been forgotten or lost to exist again, to be used again, etc.We come into this world innocent, and nothing can change that we’re made in the image and likeness of God. Part of each one of us is spiritual, like it or not. And it is that spirituality that draws us to God.
  • The Resurrection is Believable (burrissblog.wordpress.com)
    Opponents of Christianity and skeptical minds have always questioned the resurrection, just as they question many other teachings of Christianity. Such skeptics are more common in contemporary America, but they have always been around. What is surprising is that more and more Christians are stating their skepticism about the resurrection.
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    1. Something dramatic happened that changed the disciples from a hiding, defeated group to a group willing to die for their faith in Jesus. They were devastated when Jesus was killed. Did they just decide to reinterpret His death or did they see Him alive again?2. If Jesus’ dead body was in a tomb near Jerusalem, why didn’t His opponents simply bring out the dead body when His disciples started preaching that He was alive?
  • The Significance of the Resurrection (spyghana.com)
    The embalmed remains of Lenin lie in a crystal casket in a tomb in Red Square in Moscow. On the casket it says: “He was the greatest leader of all peoples, of all countries, of all times. He was the [savior] of the world!”All is in the past tense for Lenin. How forward-looking, by contrast, are the triumphant words of Christ: “I am He that [lives] . . . I am alive forevermore.”
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    What judge would listen to you in a court of law, if you said that while you were asleep your neighbor came into your house and stole your TV set? Who knows what goes on when he/she is asleep? A testimony like this would be ridiculed in a court of law. Besides, the guards would have lost their heads if they told the Roman governor, Pilate that they were asleep at their post and the disciples came and stole the body. Furthermore, we are faced with a psychological and ethical impossibility. Stealing the body of Jesus was something totally foreign to the disciples and all that we know of them. It would mean that they were perpetrators of a deliberate lie, which was responsible for the deception and the ultimate death of thousands of people.Each of the disciples faced the test of possible torture and martyrdom for his statements and beliefs. People will die for what they believe to be true, though it may actually be false. They do not, however, die for what they know is a lie. If anything is clear from the Gospels and the Book of Acts, it is that the apostles were sincere. They may have been deceived, if you like, but they were not deceivers. Hypocrites and martyrs are not made of the same stuff.
  • The Resurrection Of Jesus Christ Is The Greatest Single Event In Human History (fggam.org)
    Do you realize that Jesus never corrected, withdrew, or amended any statement He ever made? I wish I could say that! Jesus Christ never apologized for anything He ever did or said. Jesus Christ never sought advice from anyone, never had to ask for forgiveness. Jesus Christ doesn’t have any strong points. For Him to have strong points, He would have to have weak points.
  • Three Implications of the Empty Tomb (mainthings.wordpress.com)
    Paul says, if the King is risen and if the King is enthroned than nothing done for Him is meaningless. It is His triumph and not our fruitfulness that determines these realities.
  • Because of Easter, We Are Overcomers (chronicillnesspaindevotionals.wordpress.com)
    As I think about the power that God exerted to raise Christ from the dead, my human mind can’t fully comprehend what that entailed. But I do know that no other power is so great, and as a Christian, that power now lives in me.
  • The Resurrection of Jesus is not optional (gracedigest.com)
    Notice that there are three key parts to the gospel Paul preached. 1. Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures. 2. He was buried. 3. He as was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures. This is important! If you take away the resurrection component you have nothing! Try sitting on a stool with two legs! Just so, a gospel without the resurrection of Jesus is no gospel (good news) at all! Paul went to great lengths to assure his readers that indeed Christ did rise from death.
  • Is Jesus’ Resurrection the Best Explanation of the Evidence? (jkw00d.wordpress.com)
    1. Historical claims are strong when supported by multiple, independent sources.
    2. Historical claims which are also attested to by enemies are more likely to be authentic since enemies are unsympathetic, and often hostile, witnesses.
    3. Historical claims which include embarrassing admissions reflect honest reporting rather than creative storytelling.
    4. Historical claims are strong when supported by eyewitness testimony.
    5. Historical claims which are supported by early testimony are more reliable and less likely to be the result of legendary development.+
      Some skeptics argue that Jesus may have been crucified but He did not actually die. Instead, He lost consciousness (swooned) and merely appeared to be dead only to later be revived in the cool, damp tomb in which He was laid. After reviving He made His way out of the tomb and presented Himself to His disciples as the “resurrected” Messiah. Thus the Christian religion begins.
  • The Doctrine Without Which Holy Week Is Not Good News (derekzrishmawy.com)
    Unless I am united to Christ, all of his obedience to the covenant, or righteousness, is not mine–I am left to stand on my own false works before the judge of all the earth. Unless I am united with Christ, then his sin-bearing death is not mine, and I am left to give an account for all my wicked sins. Unless I am united with Christ, I am not part of the crop of which Christ is the first-fruits, and I can only reap the death that  sin leads to and have no life through the Spirit.

Philosophy hand in hand with spirituality

Experiences and Interest in philosophy and spirituality

I think it is wrong to think philosophy can not go together with spirituality. I also think it is wrong to assume that when a person is interested in philosophy, he would not be interested in the spiritual or the religious.

Expérience

Expérience (Photo credit: Saturne)

The world itself presents itself in a succession of pure experiences which we should see. We can either ignore what is going on in the world or look at it question the what and why’s and how’s. Often the human beings can not qualify these experiences in a way by which all would agree with.

Should we not recognise that those things which come along our way are always felt and undergone by our own self, which was constructed by previous experiences and learnings. In a way this may give us always the way of the subjective choice and subjective sense or experience. Each is simply a pure impression that is made upon us at some point in our life, where we do have a certain education or development which shall obey the laws of our state at the moment.

Experiences and Impressions

Reality appears to us first as an unqualified multitude of original impressions that cannot be compared or ordered in anyway without our previous learnings. Is our experience not mere juxtaposition in space and succession in time; an aggregate of utterly disconnected particulars?
Living in this world we can not do without seeing what is happening around us. We can not merely observe the things, and not bring them into thought-relationships.

The things which happen in our lives shall give us our experiences. Those experiences will create senses and shall be our best teacher, experience being the mother of wisdom. To take on any qualities or relationships whatsoever thought or reason must act upon them. It is the process of thought that attributes qualities to pure experiences and relates some experiences to others to build an understanding of the world.

Conscious or unconscious direction with second nature

Our way of thinking or the process of thought should proceed through certain ways be it our conscious or unconscious direction. Our brain should go on working, considering what happened and analysing everything. Probably it shall order everything, classify it. This using some organic laws of interconnection. These laws are part of the world of thought itself and not completely within our control. Pure experience presents itself in a spontaneously emerging stream and thoughts grow out of that experience making it distinguishable to us and situating it in relationship to the rest of experience.

Some do consider the process of thinking not a human activity. We may say that thoughts emerge out of pure earlier experiences and are dependent on our upbringing or rearing and the language we learned, both becoming a second nature.

Out of body experience

Out of body experience (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Our religious thinking and being should also become such a second nature. From the Bible we can learn that the ‘soul‘ is not an external element in our being. Many Christians and Muslims imagine there are a good and a bad angel sitting on our shoulders and talking to a soul which can go out of our body when we die. For them this human soul is to be a phantom-like inner being that contains our conscience and moral fibre. It is the element which can let us do good or let us do bad, under influence of other spirits called either angels, for the good ones, and devils, like Satan and Lucifer, for the bad ones.

Breath given by Creator

Those people forget that it was God Who blew his breath in the nostrils of the first man and woman, to bring them to life. The Pneuma or spirit in those first human beings was not something separate from them. It was their breathing, their being itself.

The soul is not a specific element as such but the transcription of the inner being and the thinking which happens by ‘electronic actions’ in our brain and by breathing. Without breathing we shall not be able to give oxygen to our brains by which they will not be able to work, and with a non-working brain we are as good as dead.

You could say that the soul is our “background of our being”. This ‘being’ has to be fed to stay alive. And because it is not a material element it has to find its food in the immaterial. therefore we as human beings should also give food to the immaterial elements of our being, our “body and soul”.

God gave breath to all creation, but the difference between man and the other living organisms is that god has given more power to man. He has received the power to think, to make choices, to make decisions, to give names and to handle like he wishes to do. But all his actions will create experiences, be it nice or bad ones. He shall have the choice to learn from them or to continue his life without learning more from those things that overcame him.

Material and immaterial being and understanding

Like the soul in an immaterial thing, our thinking its coming to understand something is an abstract element. Understanding is “an abstraction which the human mind forms by reflecting on its own thoughts and forms of thinking.” This knowing is a natural product of the process of mind and it is bound up in, and limited by, language. {Coleridge}

Coleridge asserted that it is a process that requires no “self” to enact. It is a natural process of the lawful interaction of mental elements, a simple unfolding of the characteristics of the mind in nature. But I do think we do have a responsibility and we do have the choice and power to have the self to come to understanding.

I believe when we do open our mind to different thoughts we can enable ourselves to learn more. I also believe this is one of the tasks God has given His creation in the Garden of Eden. We can only give the plants and animals name and classify them in groups when we do have the knowledge and skill to do so. This would not require that we all have the same certificate of proficiency or that we may excuse ourselves when it is not in our domain.

Given brains and reason

An illustration of the Cartesian theater, wher...

An illustration of the Cartesian theater, where a homonculus sits in a person’s head seeing and hearing everything that he experiences. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Because God has given us brains to use, we should use them. So we should think about matters and question things. This questioning things may fall under philosophy. Today many may say “Reason is a direct product of the reasoning faculty.”, but that is not taking the Creator in mind. He had a reason to place human beings on this earth having a brain to reason. Reason is a direct product of the power of creation, Who Himself is Spirit. God is not a man of flesh and blood, but a Spirit without a beginning and without an end. His breath gave us spirit, making us capable to reason, to become reasonable figures in that Created World.

It is not an “accident” that reason comes to us. Reason is breathed into us by the Creator. Though many may think it is just something what happens accidentally, it is something which is in-breath in our human constitution. It may appear spontaneously without warning or precursor, but it is grounded or part of a growing seed, which can only come into existence when the person is willing to use his brain. It is from all the previous experiences, the teachings a person got, that he or she shall be able to think. Though this would not be possible without the Power of the Most High, the Spirit God. Without Him we are nothing. It is the Holy Spirit Who can give us ‘spirit’ to think about matters and to come to reason. God has implanted ethic thoughts in us. He has created us all in His image, so we all do have certain elements of the Supreme High Being. We do not all have the same elements, but somehow we all received enough elements to become full human being who can think properly and who should be able to find God. The Reason as such becomes Spontaneous Knowing. We all have received the power to get to Knowing. Some may think it is not an understanding that is constructed through any thought process, but they should remember the Creator who build in His creations the possibility to think and to come to conclusions. In our inner being we do have the key to come to understanding. It is the direct and self-authenticating recognition of truth.

Different ways to go giving different opinions

From the beginning of the world mankind questioned the Spirit God and for that reason Jehovah God gave man the possibility to work it out himself. Woman would bear children in pain and would find they all could be different, going their own way or helping each other. All had to make their own decisions and could think their own way. God allowed it to be so.

Because we all went different ways on the paths which lay in front of man, different opinions came into the world, and people could choose between many theses or postulates.

The direct knowing of truth is build in by the Creator and could happen spontaneously and also compulsively. The reasoning faculty is ‘knowing’ itself. It is not a process that leads to knowing. This implies that there is some part of us that simply knows the truth and cannot help but know it. But we are stubborn beings, though we do not want to admit it. We have direct sense impressions – smells, tastes, sensations, sounds and sights – which simply appear in awareness. We don’t call them into being and we cannot alter or avoid the way they present themselves. Ideas and intuitions also – upon their initial appearance – share the same unalterable immediacy of presence.

With this awareness of things, matters and background knowledge, we can hear others and see what others do or create. Seeing what happens in the world we can not ignore the inner language of thought. We can only deny our interpretation of experience, not the fact of having it.

Trying to perceive more knowledge

So we may experience a lot of things in our life, encounter lots of publications and thoughts. By tackling our taste to get more knowledge,we are not going against God His wishes. The opposite I would say. We should learn and we should try to get more knowledge.

With philosophy we may come into the domain of the seekers who search to get more wisdom, knowledge and understanding about reality. Did or do not many philosophers try to get to answers about life and about why and how things are? They do like to offer an explanation of the way things are where spirituality is a description of a position that we as a human being should take in relationship to the way things are.

Trying to become one with self and environment

Experience

Experience (Photo credit: Kaptain Kobold)

In the action of Spirituality a person tries to become One. Bring mind, soul, thinking in unison with his being, material body. By the spiritual action we do want to go to the source from which everything else originates, whilst by the philosophy we want to come to an understanding why and how human being went away from its source and how it can come back to this source again.

While Philosophy is generally in the mental state of consciousness, the mind taking efforts to know, the spiritual would love to come to that Source of knowledge, believing that there exist something more than the material being its consciousness that exist above the mental ranges.

Trying to transcend domain of rationale and intellect

Moral philosophy

Both the philosopher and the spiritualist may be willing to come to knowledge which transcends domain of rationale and intellect. The philosopher not so much concerned by the own individu or individual, person, character, his identity, but preferring to give objective pictures of reality without telling us explicitly (although often they do implicitly) how we should be in relationship to that picture. Even in moral philosophy generally what we get is an explanation of why certain things are right and others wrong. What we don’t get is someone telling us that we should do the right thing. What we do with morality is left in our own hands.

Spirituality resides in higher regions and has much more to do with the own subjective personality. From the subjective point of view the spiritualist tries to go deeper into himself, looking for the realm of truth there and not as such by others. He knows that the soul is in each of us and is inseparable joined together with flesh and blood. In that casing of human flesh there is our way of breathing and thinking, spirit and moral judgment.

Trying to Relate things

We may be interested to see how we can relate to things, and therefore we can look what philosophers do have to say about that. Spirituality wants to go a step further than just knowing how things are related with each other. It tells us how we should be in relationship to the way things are. It can show us how we should react and by knowing what actions we do have to take we also shall be able to choose if we are willing to use such a knowledge to take on an attitude and to build up a religious field. Spiritualities always include philosophical explanations of the world, but those philosophical aspects are the backdrop for the main event which is direct instruction about how to live.

Door to transcendence

Understanding, intellect and the mind is one door to transcendence. From philosophers we can learn a lot, and we should take the opportunity to learn from their writings. But they will never be able to give the full answer. They mostly do not look for The Divine Source. In our normal consciousness people are so caught up with their emotions, sensations and thoughts and their own mind, they get full of themselves in the emptiness of the world. They become so active that there is no room for the Divine. There the spiritual person wants to go against. He wants to have his wondering not taking him to put Him in the chains of life.

No reason to be afraid of philosophy

To see clear
Man thinking on a train journey.

Man thinking on a train journey. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Christians should not be afraid that the philosophy would carry people away from the Divine. When this would happen it is because the person is not prepared to sincerely look for the Divine. Often the person going away from religion is because he does not see clear the difference between philosophy, religion, religiousness and spirituality.

The philosopher may have the love and intellectual search for wisdom. The spiritual minded person knows or believes there is something extra in our life than just the knowledge of the material world. The spiritual person does want to find knowledge to come to wisdom, but understands that wisdom is more that putting all facts together. To come to spirituality there must be more than the willingness to come to understand the own being. Besides the willingness to come to get to know the inner-self there is the love and opening of their hearts for the wisdom and the willingness to have it taking part in the relationship with others.

Sister and brother

We should understand that the religious person may like to look into philosophy and at the same time may look into spirituality. The two approaches can marvelously be like sister (heart) and brother (brain) in the process of coming to the point of Being part of the One on one side and then Becoming part of the big thing on the other side – in being active in life.

Relationship of unity and Oneness

So, I would say, do not mind letting philosophy going hand in hand with spirituality and making a person to become religious in the good sense of the word, finding and loving the Only One Who is One and wants us to be one and worshiping the Right One in a relationship of unity and Oneness.

The only thing a Christian should be careful for is that he does not get carried away with human thinking, but keeps himself concentrated on the sacral and spiritual matters, looking for the Most Important Being making our self being possible to be a being, the Only One God, the Adonai Elohim Hashem Jehovah.

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Preceding articles:

Looking for True Spirituality 1 Intro

Looking for True Spirituality 2 Not restricted to an elite

Looking for True Spirituality 3 Mind of Christ

Looking for True Spirituality 4 Getting to Know the Mind of Christ

Looking for True Spirituality 5 Fruitage of the Spirit

Looking for True Spirituality 6 Spirituality and Prayer

Looking for True Spirituality 7 Preaching of the Good News

Looking for True Spirituality 8 Measuring Up

Fruits of the spirit will prevent you from being either inactive or unfruitful

How long to wait before bringing religiousness and spirituality in practice

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Additional reading:

  1. A concrete picture of what is to come in the future
  2. Migrants to the West #7 Religions
  3. Self-development, self-control, meditation, beliefs and spirituality
  4. Women, conservative evangelicals and their counter-offensive
  5. Lying in the senses in matters of love
  6. Our relationship with God, Jesus and each other
  7. Separation from God in death, the antithesis of life
  8. Fragments from the Book of Job #7 Epilogue
  9. Exceeding Great and Precious Promise
  10. Wondering
  11. Believing to understand
  12. Light within
  13. Let tomorrow be sufficient
  14. Clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience
  15. Don’t let anyone move you off the foundation of your faith
  16. Know Who goes with us and don’t try to control life
  17. Know by trying
  18. Knowing where to go to
  19. Think hard before you act today
  20. Disappointed expectations
  21. I Only hope we find GOD again before it is too late !
  22. Put on the whole armor of God
  23. Weapons of our warfare
  24. A call easy to understand
  25. Getting of at the fence
  26. Hope as long as you live
  27. A goal is a dream with a plan
  28. Lying in the senses in matters of love
  29. Be humble like Christ
  30. The way God sees us
  31. Two forms of Freedom
  32. Altar everything in life
  33. Duty of encouragement
  34. Establish Priorities
  35. Luck
  36. Joy: Foundation for a Positive Life
  37. Nothing noble in the flesh left to itself
  38. Determined To Stick With Truth.
  39. Created to live in relation with God
  40. God’s promises
  41. Sow and harvests in the garden of your heart
  42. A love not exempting us from trials
  43. Call unto God so that He can answer you
  44. Life in gratitude opens glory of God
  45. Do not be so busy adding up your troubles
  46. Preexistence in the Divine purpose and Trinity
  47. Immortality, eternality – onsterfelijkheid, eeuwigheid
  48. Dying or not
  49. What happens when we die?
  50. Dead and after
  51. Sheol or the grave
  52. Satan the evil within
  53. Soul
  54. Destination of righteous
  55. Destination of the earth
  56. God’s design in the creation of the world
  57. God His reward
  58. Is there an Immortal soul
  59. The Soul not a ghost
  60. The Soul confronted with Death
  61. The soul has no rainbow if the eyes have no tears
  62. Trust God to shelter, safety and security
  63. God wants to be gracious to you
  64. Invitation to all who believe

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Blackness, nothingness, something, void

Void and darkness

Darkness. Nothingness.

Void, so there was and there is ….. complexity. Empty spaces make up void, but than there is something to make the spaces in between. Then there is density, length, with, depth, hight … space. When there are periodic fluctuations in the density of the visible baryonic matter of the universe, this means there is a stand still, a movement, but caused by what? If caused by acoustic waves then there would be sound and movement in space. If it would come to an explosion, call it Big Bang, than still it had to exist in the early universe.

Cosmology

First baryon octet

First baryon octet (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) may provide a “standard ruler” for length scale in cosmology. does it help us to understand more about the nature of dark energy (which causes the apparent slight acceleration of the expansion of the universe) by constraining cosmological parameters? When there was a hot, dense plasma of electrons and baryons (protons and neutrons) then those also had to come into being.when there would have come overdensity gravitationally attracting matter towards it, the heat of photon-matter interactions creating a large amount of outward pressure, then there should have been something like emptiness and matter, something to cause limitness or presser on something else.. Then counteracting forces of gravity and pressure could create oscillations, analogous to sound waves created in air by pressure differences.

Collapses of masses, Big Bang and billion of years

Voids are believed to have been formed by baryon acoustic oscillations in the Big Bang—collapses of mass followed by implosions of the compressed baryonic matter. Starting from initially small anisotropies due to quantum fluctuations in the early Universe, the anisotropies grew larger in scale over time. Regions of higher density collapsed more rapidly under gravity, eventually resulting in the large-scale, foam-like structure or “cosmic web” of voids and galaxy filaments seen today.

When, according to scientists, approximately 13.798 ± 0.037 billion years ago the Universe was in an extremely hot and dense state and began expanding rapidly to cool down sufficiently to allow energy to be converted into various subatomic particles, including protons, neutrons, and electrons, there should have been all these elements. Subatomic particles, present in the nucleus of each atom having a mutual electromagnetic repulsion stronger than the attraction of the nuclear force, should still then have something to bring in force.

Books of man against books of Supreme Being

The Big Book made up of 66 books, brought together by men, beings of flesh and blood, got ideas in it which came from somewhere and bothered their brains. It let them think and handle, wondering about their being or not being, life and death. Being nothing, would it be being part of that void?

So that “Void” was considered part of the beginning.

“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness [was] upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” (Genesis 1:2 AV)

Spirit, Space and Earth

Mass map of Abell 1689.

Mass map of Abell 1689. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Space and Earth being without form, part of the so called nothingness, which was something not seen, because darkness did not reveal it,  bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness. God’s Spirit brooded like a bird above the watery abyss, so there was water to hover over.

“And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” (Genesis 1:3 AV)

Then there was a God, a Being, a Spirit, not man not woman, not flesh, not blood. darkness was elevated so there was light.

Fluids and Being

When there was water, there was space or volume, the volume of void-space (such as fluids). Having darkness and light makes radiation and reflection. To have reflection there has to be material and volume of solids. Volume change tendency control. If void ratio is high (loose soils) voids in a soil skeleton tend to minimize under loading – adjacent particles contract. The opposite situation, i.e. when void ratio is relatively small (dense soils), indicates that the volume of the soil is vulnerable to increase under loading – particles dilate.

The Void also can denote excretion, the process by which waste products of metabolism and other non-useful materials are eliminated from an organism. In vertebrates this is primarily carried out by the lungs, kidneys and skin. The void as such could be the part of the being, the breathing or passage of air, the composure of the things, be it man or animal or plant.

Dependant Independence

Elementary particles need not be statistically independent and everything could move around without the other but would interfere with the other. Einstein observed that the exchange of radiation between bodies should involve an exchange of mass; light quanta have mass exactly as do ordinary molecules. In his derivation of this result, Einstein speaks about a “light complex,” an entirely classical concept, rather than about a light quantum. When, after Bose’s work, he did attribute corpuscular properties to light quanta, he distinguished clearly between photons (a word he did not use), zero rest mass bosons (another word introduced later) whose number need not be conserved; and massive bosons, whose number must be conserved. His prediction of a condensed state for massive bosons (see Einstein, 1925), now called a Bose-Einstein condensate, offered the first theoretical explanation of a transition between two phases of a system. The prediction was spectacularly confirmed some seventy years later, winning its discoverers the 2001 Nobel prize in physics.

A light ray divides itself, but a light quantum cannot divide without a change of frequency” (Einstein to H. A. Lorentz, 23 May 1909, Collected Papers, vol. 5, p. 193).

Originator of Big Bang

The Big Bang era of the universe, presented as...

The Big Bang era ofthe universe, presented as a manifold in two dimensions (1-space and

time); the shape is right (approximately), but it’s not to scale. (Photo

credit: Wikipedia)

For those saying because there was a Big Bang, so there could not be a Creator is like having the empty peace of paper, getting sings or drawings on its own, without someone using a pen, his hand or his brains to bring something on the paper.

The Big Bang does not contradict anything which is written in the Book of Books, the Bible or Holy Scriptures, which is inspired and infallible the Word of that Maker, the Being behind it all.

The void got formed.

Philosophers

A pagan Greek philosopher, Proclus, called the Successor, had written a massive polemical commentary explicitly criticizing the Biblical description of the universe and its origin, on the grounds that it was scientifically unsupportable. Philoponus, also known as John the Grammarian or John of Alexandria, was a Christian and Aristotelian commentator and the author of a considerable number of philosophical treatises and theological works, destroyed Proclus’ arguments in his reply, demonstrating the many flaws in Proclus’ work. {Wilderberg, ‘John Philoponus’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.}
He also wrote numerous commentaries on Aristotle’s works which identified their errors, using the Biblical cosmology as his tool. {John McKenna, article ‘John Philoponus, Sixth Century Alexandrian Grammarian, Christian Theologian and Scientific Philosopher’, Quodlibet Journal, Volume 5, Number 1, January, 2003.}

Cosmology, Philosophy and Science

This breakthrough was instrumental in the formation of Western science as we know it. Philoponus’ work was used by later scientific investigators such as such as Bonaventure, Gersonides, Buridan, Oresme, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton, all of whom made significant scientific progress as a result.

Philoponus had defended the Christian cosmology, deriving powerful arguments from observations of the universe that it must have had a beginning, and that it was finite in duration. He single-handedly debunked the greatest pagan philosopher and cosmologist in recorded history (Aristotle), as well as burying Proclus’ criticism of the Christian cosmology.

Around 550 Philoponus wrote a theological work On the Creation of the World as a commentary on the Bible’s story of creation using the insights of Greek philosophers and Basil the Great. In this work he transfers his theory of impetus to the motion of the planets, whereas Aristotle had proposed different explanations for the motion of heavenly bodies and for earthly projectiles. Thus Philoponus’ theological work is recognized in the history of science as the first attempt at a unified theory of dynamics. Another of his major theological concerns was to argue that all material objects were brought into being by God (Arbiter, 52A-B).

Later Jewish and Christian cosmologists throughout the medieval era made similar arguments, based on the same observations. Christian scientists from Francis Bacon to Isaac Newton all understood this, for centuries.

To be or not to be true

Incredibly, some of the greatest 20th century scientists such as the son of a Somerset Quaker, Arthur Henry Eddington and Einstein claimed it could not be true (apparently Einstein later said it was possibly the greatest error in his career). Eddington even admitted he didn’t want it to be true, for philosophical reasons. [9] It was only recently that scientific evidence for the ‘Big Bang’ proved that the universe did indeed have a beginning and would have an end, contrary to what many scientists had believed.

The Bible did not want to give an exact picture of who everything came into being but does contain information which has historically been of considerable scientific value.

Biblical concept of the universe

WMAP image of the (extremely tiny) anisotropie...

WMAP image of the (extremely tiny) anisotropies in the cosmic background radiation (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Unlike every other Ancient Near East cosmology, the Bible describes the universe in naturalistic terms. The sun, moon, and stars are inanimate objects rather than gods, the universe was not created from the recycled body parts of divine beings, and the universe operates according to fixed laws. Early Jewish and Christian commentators understood that nature is regular and orderly, since everything in nature takes place according to fixed laws which God has instituted, which never change.

Sirach chapter 16, verses 26-28, 180-175 BCE.

‘When the Lord created his works from the beginning, and, in making them determined their boundaries, he arranged his works in an eternal order, and their dominion for all generations. They neither hunger not grow weary, and they do not abandon their tasks. They do not crowd one another, and they never disobey his word.’

Basil of Caesarea, ‘Hexamaron’, chapter 5, sections 10, 370 CE.

‘It is this command which, still at this day, is imposed on the earth and, in the course of each year, displays all the strength of its power to produce herbs, seeds, and trees. Like tops, which after the first impulse continue their evolutions, turning upon themselves, when once fixed in their center; thus nature, receiving the impulse of this first command, follows without interruption the course of ages until the consummation of all things.’

This concept of the universe, which we take for granted, was revolutionary in the Ancient Near East and was not even approached by the Greeks until around the 4th century BCE. In fact the inadequacy of Greek science led to a complete dead end.

Concept of Origin and Originator

John McKenna, article ‘John Philoponus, Sixth Century Alexandrian Grammarian, Christian Theologian and Scientific Philosopher’, Quodlibet Journal, Volume 5, Number 1, January 2003.

‘The Greek concept of God caused a deep confusion between cosmology and theology and was a dead-end to science, as we know it in our time.’

Unable to free itself completely from mythology, Greek science finally stagnated and failed to advance any further.

Wilderberg, ‘John Philoponus’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

‘Reading Philoponus as well as the writings of his great adversary Simplicius, one gets the sense that in the 6th century CE, traditional pagan Greek learning had become desperately insular.’

Inheritance

Western science was not revived until the 6th century CE Christian philosopher John Philoponus challenged the pagan cosmology inherited from the Greeks.

Dan Graves, ‘Aristotle’s Earliest Creationist Critic’, 1998.

‘A widespread religion of Philoponus’s time was pantheism, a belief system that sees God as equivalent to nature. In his rejection of this, Philoponus argued that the Creator transcends nature rather than being within it. Having been created, nature exists without constant intervention by God. This radical conception shocked the pagans who believed the gods were imbedded within the material universe.’

Religious experience versus scientific experience

Eddington argued from a novel interpretation of positivism that religious experience and scientific experience were equally valid parts of human life, but that neither could prove any particular sectarian dogma. This ecumenical, reassuring position was quite popular in the interwar period with the last surge of liberal theology, but became less relevant with the death of that movement around World War II.

Einstein loved to discuss scientific problems with friends, but he was, fundamentally a “horse for single harness.” His belief in strict causality was closely related to his profound belief in the harmony of nature, which did not have to exclude a Supernatural Hand behind it all.

Most of the people do want to look at the universe rationally, in mathematical terms, and by doing so they often become blind for the mystical elemenents we as human beings can not understand. It is not because we can not cope with the matter that we do have to cease to evoke a deep — one might say, religious — feeling of admiration in the Power behind all science.

“The most incomprehensible thing about the world,” Einstein once wrote, “is that it is comprehensible.”

Free inventive capacity of human mind

To discover the basic laws and concepts of nature we can either try to find knowledge by scientist, whose findings after some years may become outdated and not so right as people thought after, first arguing a lot.

Einstein argued that while we learn certain features of the world from experience, the free inventive capacity of the human mind is required to formulate physical theories. There is no logical link between the world of experience and the world of theory. Once a theory has been formulated, however, it must be “simple” (or, perhaps, “esthetically pleasing”) and agree with experiment. One such esthetically pleasing and fully confirmed theory is the special theory of relativity. There was the Galilean invariance or Galilean relativity that states that the laws of motion are the same in all inertial frames. Galileo Galilei first described this principle in 1632 in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems using the example of a ship travelling at constant velocity, without rocking, on a smooth sea; any observer doing experiments below the deck would not be able to tell whether the ship was moving or stationary. The fact that the Earth orbits around the sun at approximately 30 km/s offers a somewhat more dramatic example, though it is technically not an inertial reference frame.

We might also adhere that there exists an absolute space, in which Newton’s laws are true, an inertial frame as a reference frame in relative uniform motion to absolute space where all inertial frames share a universal time. {Newtonian relativity}

If it be a relativity generalising special relativity and Newton’s law of universal gravitation, providing a unified description of gravity as a geometric property of space and time, or spacetime we in a moment of time can appear or dispensary, be or not be.  In the curvature of space-time we shall not be able to avoid the energy and momentum of whatever matter and radiation are present.

Subtle but not malicious

When Einstein was informed of D.C. Miller’s experiments, which seemed to contradict the special theory by demanding the reinstatement of the ether, he expressed his belief in the spuriousness of Miller’s results—and therefore in the harmoniousness of nature—with another of his famous aphorisms, “God is subtle, but he is not malicious.”

This frequent use of God’s name in Einstein’s speeches and writings provides us with a feeling for his religious convictions. He once stated explicitly,

“I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the harmony of all being, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of men.”

It is not difficult to see that this credo is consistent with his statement that the

“less knowledge a scholar possesses, the farther he feels from God. But the greater his knowledge, the nearer is his approach to God.”

This should let us made to think about our position to the Divine Creator who provide human beings with brains so that they can think and have wisdom. Since Einstein’s God manifested Himself in the harmony of the universe, there could be no conflict between religion and science for Einstein. As Christians we should believe the Word of God and notice that many things written in it were first taught otherwise by man. Lots of people twisted words and told people they were in the Scriptures, but that ordinary people could not understand them. Many points of believe were created, people had to accept them, or they would be tortured and even be killed for other beliefs. The major points in this are that the world would be there in one go like we see it today, that the earth would be a flat surface, that God would be three in one (the Holy Trinity), that Jesus was God and that Jesus existed already at the time of the creation.

Looking into matters, taking time to study and for investigation

We should look into all matters, investigate them and make the right choices. The Creator provided the universe, placed human beings, plants and animals in it and gave guidance in His Word, to help them find their way. each of us has to use their brains to search, look for and to experiment. Each of us has also either to hear to the world or to see the Magnificent Hand of God and the Beautiful Works of God, which work faith.

Illustration of the expansion of the Universe ...

Illustration of the expansion of the Universe after the Big bang. In Bulgarian. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Einstein’s theory implies the existence of black holes — regions of space in which space and time are distorted in such a way that nothing, not even light, can escape — as an end-state for massive stars. There is ample evidence that the intense radiation emitted by certain kinds of astronomical objects is due to black holes; for example, microquasars and active galactic nuclei result from the presence of stellar black holes and black holes of a much more massive type, respectively. In time people will find out more about it. Many previous scientific findings may be considered mistaken. those faulty teachings where once taken as the truth and preferred above the Truth of God. We should know better and look for truth in the Bible, the Word of God. Studying that word we should come to conclusions and take the right choices doing the job god wants us to do.

No void anymore

We can have no void, having no members or examples. Today the void is gone. We live in the world not inhabited any more and is not deserted. Being part of those living elements of the universe, we can breath and move and fulfil duties.

When Einstein lay dying he could truly utter, as he did,

“Here on earth I have done my job.”

Shall we be able to say at the end of our life the same thing?

It would be difficult to find a more suitable epitaph than the words Einstein himself used in characterizing his life:

“God is inexorable in the way He has allotted His gifts. He gave me the stubbornness of a mule and nothing else; really, He also gave me a keen scent.”

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Additional notes:

  1. Proclus Lycaeus was a Greek Neoplatonist philosopher, one of the last major Classical philosophers who set forth one of the most elaborate and fully developed systems of Neoplatonism. He stands near the end of the classical development of philosophy, and was very influential on Western medieval philosophy (Greek and Latin) as well as Islamic thought.
  2. The biblical findings and theological ideas of John the Grammarian or John of Alexandria broke from the Aristotelian-Neoplatonic tradition, questioning methodology and eventually leading to empiricism in the natural sciences. His doctrine on Christ’s duality, according to which in Christ remain two united substances, united but divided, is analogous to the union of the soul and body in human beings and coincides with the miaphysite school of thought.
    He was posthumously condemned as a heretic by the Orthodox Church in 680-81 because of what was perceived of as a tritheistic interpretation of the Trinity.
  3. Arthur Henry Eddington was the first interpreter of Einstein’s relativity theory in English, and made his own contributions to its development; and he formulated relationships between all the principal constants of nature, attempting a vast synthesis in his provocative but uncompleted Fundamental Theory.

Please do find:

  1. The professor, God, Faith and the student
  2. The Origin of Life on Earth: Creation or Evolution?
  3. God of gods
  4. The Divine name of the Creator
  5. Two states of existence before God
  6. A viewpoint on creation
  7. The World framed by the Word of God
  8. Creator and Blogger God 1 Emptiness and mouvement
  9. Creator and Blogger God 3 Lesson and solution
  10. Trusting, Faith, calling and Ascribing to Jehovah #3 Voice of God #1 Creator and His Prophets
  11. Cosmos creator and human destiny
  12. Creation of the earth out of something
  13. Creation gift of God
  14. Creation and the Bible
  15. God, Creation and the Bible Hope
  16. A viewpoint on creation
  17. Man made life
  18. The manager and Word of God
  19. Newton did not believe in a Trinity
  20. Trinity: A False Doctrine of a False Church
  21. God works faith
  22. Without God no purpose, no goal, no hope
  23. Finish each day and be done with it

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  • Could ‘Higgsogenesis’ explain dark matter? (phys.org)
    The recently discovered Higgs boson is best known for its important role in explaining particle mass. But now some physicists are wondering if the Higgs could have played an equally significant role in generating dark matter and baryonic matter in the early Universe, as well as causing the hypothetical dark matter asymmetry and the observed baryon asymmetry between matter and antimatter particles.
  • Nothingness (coggj22.wordpress.com)
    When you ask people about how life started, or even how the entire universe came into fruition, their answer would basically boil down into two categories – an answer which is derived from scientific explanations and another which involves an application of faith, a response born of their religion. In the scientific field, we see theories which seek to explain the origin of the universe such as the big bang theory, as well as ideas which aim to resolve the issue of how humans were formed such as Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species.
  • Why Does The World Exist? (rationaloptimist.wordpress.com)
    In writing previously about Lawrence Krauss’s book, A Universe From Nothing: Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing? I called this the greatest question. Comes now Jim Holt’s book, Why Does the World Exist? Whereas Krauss’s was basically a physics book, Holt’s is mainly philosophical. At the heart of the problem is what nothingness means (as the alternative to the Universe we’ve got, full of stuff). Holt spends much time on this, discussing the plausibility of nothingness via a process of subtraction from our cosmos of somethingness. Meantime Krauss described nothingness in such a way that applying physics to it could get you a Big Bang; he talks a lot about field theory and suchlike. imagesBut the trouble is that religious apologists can always say their nothingness (not even fields) is deeper than yours and requires a god to get something going.
  • Creation Myth Flash Fiction (thewriterandpoet.wordpress.com)
    According to the Standard Model of particle physics, the universe should be empty. Matter and antimatter, which are identical except for their opposite electric charges, seem to be produced in equal parts during particle interactions and decays. However, matter and antimatter instantly annihilate each other upon contact, and so equal amounts of each would have meant a wholesale annihilation of both shortly after the Big Bang. The existence of galaxies, planets and people illustrates that somehow, a small surplus of matter survived this canceling process. If that hadn’t happened, “the universe would be void,” Schönert said. “It would be very, very boring for us, who would not exist.”
  • Accommodation of the Void (themanaoblog.wordpress.com)
    Even thinking about it in terms that can be thought as even being semi-friendly makes a lot of our brains itch. We loathe a void. A void means that we are empty of something and that the void demands to be filled. What we are not realizing is that there is a reason for the void and once it is that we understand the reason, there will be no more void. Too many of us are not accepting this. Too many people believe that a void is a bad thing when in reality it is only a neutral thing and doesn’t carry any negative energy until we choose to believe that it is something other than what it truly is, which is merely and only a void.Nothing in existence did not first come from a void. A void is really only an empty space that is waiting for the right and matching energy to come through to it and fill it. The reason that there is a void created is because that which was there to begin with no longer fits and neither does the energy that used to be there.
  • Stephen Hawking’s Big Ideas Made Simple (ritholtz.com)
    No time to read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time? In just two and a half minutes, Alok Jha explains why black holes are doomed to shrink into nothingness then explode with the energy of a million nuclear bombs, and rewinds to the big bang and the origin of the universe?
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    Nice story, but many astrophysicists do not accept this theory of universal birth.
  • [CEA] Constraints on Large-Scale Dark Acoustic Oscillations from Cosmology (arxiver.wordpress.com)
    If all or a fraction of the dark matter (DM) were coupled to a bath of dark radiation (DR) in the early Universe we expect the combined DM-DR system to give rise to acoustic oscillations of the dark matter until it decouples from the DR. Much like the standard baryon acoustic oscillations, these dark acoustic oscillations (DAO) imprint a characteristic scale, the sound horizon of dark matter, on the matter power spectrum.
  • Higgs boson may have played a role in dark matter creation (vr-zone.com)
    The most famous subatomic particle in recent years is no doubt the Higgs boson, which is responsible for defining the mass of particles. Now scientists believe it may also have an important role in the creation of dark and baryonic matter in the early universe. It may also have something to do with the asymmetry between antimatter and matter particles.The concept of asymmetry involves the idea that while the big bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and anti-matter, it didn’t. If matter and anti-matter had been created in equal amounts, they should then have eliminated each other, leaving… nothing. Of course, that’s not what happened; there was a slight excess of matter, meaning some was left over after all the anti-matter had been eliminated. That matter is what makes up our universe.
  • The impact of baryonic processes on the two-point correlation functions of galaxies, subhaloes and matter [CEA] (arxiver.wordpress.com)
    The observed clustering of galaxies and the cross-correlation of galaxies and mass (a measure of galaxy-galaxy lensing) provide important constraints on both cosmology and models of galaxy formation. Even though the dissipation, and more importantly the feedback processes associated with galaxy formation are thought to affect the distribution of matter, essentially all models used to predict clustering data are based on dark matter only simulations.
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    We conclude that predictions for galaxy-galaxy and galaxy-mass clustering from models based on dark matter only simulations will have errors greater than 10% on sub-Mpc scales, unless the simulation results are modified to correctly account for the effects of baryons on the distributions of mass and satellites.
  • Using the topology of large-scale structure in the WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey as a cosmological standard ruler [CEA] (arxiver.wordpress.com)
    The Minkowski functionals are a set of statistics which completely describe the topological nature of each isodensity surface within the field, as a function of the density value.