The next time someone asks you if we came from God or apes, ask them if ice cream comes from cows or man.
I once went to a service where the preacher talked about truth and the Bible as always being in black or white. He said the Bible describes good as light and evil as darkness. Everything in life is one thing or another, just like where Man came from. Good and evil may be opposites — “night and day” — but I wonder if he ever saw a sunrise or sunset, light from the moon, or shadows at noon. And worst of all, he labeled philosophy and even any theology that he didn’t agree with as from the deceiver because they “confuse us” with understanding things in more tahn black and white.
You see, I learned in pychology that when people start to see things in absolutes (black OR white), they are mentally losing control. Suicidal people think that way. Delusional people think that way. And people who just are afraid to think for themselves, think that way. Political extremists, fascists, and terrorists think that way. Why have we reduced something as sacred as our faith to such ignorance?
Faith needs no reason. So why all the trouble to hijack science and history and put out such deceptively watered down pseudo-philosophical theology throughout today’s churches? Is it just because that’s what people want — easy answers they don’t have to worry about or argue about? Do they desperately need some immutable truth based on a narrow interpetation of a book we elevated to the status of G-d Himself? And if it was such obvious truth, why does the average preacher spend so much time beating it over and over with this reason and that, yet can’t agree with a preacher quoting the same passages two churches down the street?
The adversary is a clever one, not causing one to stumble far away from the Lord, but at the foot of the altar itself, holding us back at the last possible step. The fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil? That’s what seeing thruth as only black and white is all about. The price has been paid for that sin, so why can’t we let go of such childish things, and see each other face to face?
Been there done that.
I’m almost too tired of attempting to educate people these days. Chi / Ki IS empirical, like you said, and is just as “real” as most other things in daily life that do not fit the science textbook explanation of life.
The thing is, if you beleive something (or dis-beleive in it), you will turn heaven and earth upside down to not let go of ignorace.
I could toss that guy around with little physical force, and he will claim I was using some kind of leverage, even though he claims to know physics and should know better. The fact that chi is measurable even with modern equipment as energy fields right down to the meridians would be dismissed as being something else.
But I’ll still toss him around with no effort and he can be as “scientific” as he wants all day long in denial of the reality at hand. And people think religion is irrational …
Because, they art mortal, and to be mortal, is to be flawed.
Heres proof: http://www.martialtalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=32912