Quote:How do you know this? Why don't they just stop the terroists, or are they powerless? Why are they powerless? Free will I suppose!
That's the million-dollar question:
HOW DO YOU KNOW THIS?
How do you know anything?
This is really a deep question for serious meditation,but that has never stopped anyone from trying to answer with words.
We base our knowledge on our senses of the world. We build up a picture and then we build on that. Where language comes from is a mystery, but it is part of our building of the world. So we extrapolate from the pure senses to the abstract by using language. We create a word-built world. So everything we claim we KNOW must fit into that created world.
Every time something new has come down th epike, there has been a struggle as to whether it would be incorporated. Science was reviled because it questioned the assumptions of that great political bosy, the Roman Catholic Church. Now it is the cornerstone. But it is still all invented.
So how does Gordon know what he says? Becuase it is what he experiences.What else can any of us claim?
I don't believe in the existence of Jesus the Christ. I see old mythologies got re-written to create a story. The Isis-Horus-Osiris thing is pretty clearly a template for the Jesus story. I don't experience Christ through personal experience and I don't experience Christ through the lives of most of the folks who run to sit their fannies in a church pew at regular intervals. So I don't really believe in that.
(This was for "Harvey").
Quote:that they didn't know what they were doing.
On what level, Rondele? Yes they knew to get guns and boats so on that level they knew what they were doing. But on the level of understanding that we create this world, as I alluded to above, did they know? Does any of us really know what we are doing?
"Forgive them, for they know not what they do."
I have a problem with the word "forgive" because in my family what it really went was, let it go, turn the other cheek and pretend it didn't happen, so the perpetrator can do it again. The definitions alluded to in ACIM have given me a whole new perspective on this. "Forgive" means letting Spirit somehow undo the mess we made. Wow.
Then there is the issue that the victims are also part of what is created. I'm not ready to advocate for letting the perps go, just advocating to think on what that means.
I truly hope this mom/wife is able to surround herself with PUL and feel peace. I admire her for trying. I hope we can reach a time where maybe someone like Gordon can easily bring her some verifiable info and help confirm for her that her family still continue on. Her case is not the place to go loking for verifiable information but it seems like there are other times we could practice here.
We are like babies just learning to talk. We don't know what all the words mean yet.