Z said:
this is what i don’t get, i have seen rays too ~ as they are described in the egyptian and tibetan books of the dead, hence i don’t see why such things would be so destructive?
you don't understand how treating something incredibly powerful without the relevant respect and careful handling techniques could be destructive? remember, you're talking about people that had seen smiting first-hand, the plagues in egypt and the splitting of the sea, the retribution for their lack of respect in the sin of the golden calf. i think you're being a little obtuse here in not seeing why caution would be advisable.
so my thoughts turn to the idea that the ignorant are being toyed with somewhat, sorry but i believe in honesty. perhaps i have it wrong but the literal interpretations seam to lead to this.
look, it could all be an elaborate joke on G!D's part, of course - and we'd be none the wiser. nor would you. however, you seem in a hurry to rush to sit in judgement on G!D's Conduct and that might be something that you can do with the capricious and selfish graeco-roman, egyptian or near-eastern pantheon, but it is precisely the conspicuous lack of golden showers, adultery, rapine, sea monsters, half-divine children, people being turned into animals and so on that sets G!D apart from mere deities. you seem anxious to drag the Divine down to the level of zeus and his daytime soap-opera antics. in short, yes, you do have it wrong, i'm sorry to be blunt about it but i don't mean to be rude.
he doesn’t have a face, hence one may not look upon it, so we would not die by looking upon it.
not a face per se, but nonetheless a point of interaction, which is how i would define a face, as an "interface". think of it as a "power socket" and you'll understand the symbolic aspects of plugging in the wrong stuff.
spiritual energies to me feel very natural, i just think that some people historically have taken it all out of context by making out that thay burn our skin - so to say. it is in my experience a false representation of what and how spirit is.
but what you are doing is generalising from your own experience. spiritual energies feel equally natural to me, but just because static electricity is harmless it does not follow that i should drop a toaster in the bath. there are many different types of spiritual energy and you are assuming that the stuff you know about is the only type. this is far from being the case.
tis not an infinite face though is it.
the point is that it is something that does not show up using the normal methods of human sense-perception, but its existence can be deduced from other things.
if we cannot see it we cannot die from seeing it!
this is just semantics. effectively, you cannot see something if you cannot see it and live. that is all the Torah is saying. it uses extremely terse and precise language and you have to understand its way of expressing itself.
i don’t get what power-games these men are up to, is it that by giving the almighty more power, then linking themselves to that, they are giving themselves more power in their mind? its all very suspicious and a sad reflection on mans misinterpretation of divinity.
only if you assume this is all an elaborate con-trick by moses and aaron, or whoever. all i can say is that it's easy to cast aspersions from the comfort of your keyboard and make presumptions of guilt, i dare say you'd see it differently if you'd actually been confronted with the situation on the mountain.
your statement about god being like a nuclear furnace does not say why we shouldnt depict him, it just says we literally cannot look upon him. it then become not a moral issue!
there are two things here, one being practical: don't try and look at G!D too closely because you won't survive the experience. surely you can think of people from your own experience that have dived too deep and not come up again. this is one of the reasons that in our tradition, mystics have to be married, otherwise they might not have a reason to come back from the "pardes", the mystical garden. the second consideration is that of short-circuit thinking, the "kissing the postman" argument. the Torah, in typical fashion, is able to pull the two together by saying "don't get too close to the image, because you will end up thinking that because you can have a physically close relationship with the image, you can have the same physical closeness with the Reality - and you'll also end up confusing the two."
as to this point, as a pagan i see no problem with ‘connectives’, the gods do posses divinity just as we and all things do.
this is something we monotheists also believe, that all things possess a measure of the Divine, which we refer to as a "spark".
without intermediaries we have no connection at all! if monotheists disagree then what are their books and prophets all about? its just more contradictions to say they are right and others are wrong.
no, that's exactly the point - we don't WORSHIP the intermediaries, the books and the prophets, for PRECISELY this reason - they are just the CONNECTORS, not the SOURCE! you've just substantiated my argument for me! in fact, this is also maimonides' classic argument against paganism - and in case you think, incidentally, that i am having a go at pagans, i am only having a go at this sort of thinking; i know many extremely spiritually sophisticated pagans that understand this argument completely and are on my side of it. for them, worshipping a polytheistic deity is simply doing maintenance on your cabling so it works properly, they don't lose sight of the Ultimate Infinity of the Divine.
so we just say that creation is thus and it cannot be argued about as it is axiomatic.
not what i'm saying. i'm saying that the actual beginning point of
creatio ex nihilo cannot be argued about as it cannot be examined from outside the system.
surely one has to have a logical basis for such things, we have to ask what was before the creation and is god infinite etc. otherwise i could make anything up e.g. the idea that there is no creation due to infinity is also axiomatic by my reasoning. difference is i can back it up.
what you are failing to understand is that from G!D's perspective, there is *also* no Creation due to Infinity; it is only our perspective that sees it as such. our mystical tradition is set up precisely to examine such questions, but we do not see it as "making things up", rather as a spiritual quest to the heart of the Ultimate Reality - not as a goal but as a journey. it seems to me that you are trying to do precisely what you are accusing monotheists of, playing the "well i can back it up and you can't and i'm cleverer than you" game. i don't see any evidence that you can back any of this stuff up any better than i can - and it seems pretty clear that you are not knowledgeable of how judaism at any rate deals with these questions. in such a situation, surely you should be less aggressive and more circumspect, this isn't about point-scoring.
what has it got to do with eternity infinity or the ultimate nature of reality though?...
mathematics is one of the only tools that can. if you don't understand that, i think you really need to read that book i recommended earlier, the "mystery of the aleph", which deals with the maths of infinity.
the point is that no mathematical shape can define infinity, in fact no definition can properly define infinity
you're evidently not aware that the properties of infinity can in fact be examined mathematically. read the book.
the ultimate and fundamental nature of reality is thence beyond creation!
but that's what WE'RE saying! have you not understood that? we refer to this Ultimate, Fundamental Reality as 'EYN SOF - the Divine Perspective of G!D.
b'shalom
bananabrain
