Dualism (Identity)

by dhw, Monday, March 30, 2015, 12:52 (3287 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

TONY: I can't help but think that sometimes you are deliberately misunderstanding what I have said, not to mention what was written. (Or are you simply playing devil's advocate?) "Visions", what you might consider a waking dreamlike form of communication, was used throughout the bible, and was apparently common enough at one point that the bible writers felt that their absence was worth noting. (1 Samuel 3:1, Psalm 89:19, Numbers 12:6, the entire book of Revelations, and more) Vision, DHW, not illusion, not a lie, not the dead come back to life for tea and a chat. 
The Greek word that Christ used to describe the event was "horama" which literally means:
Cognate: 3705 hórama (a neuter noun derived from 3708 /horá?, "to see, spiritual and mentally") - a vision (spiritual seeing), focusing on the impact it has on the one beholding the vision (spiritual seeing). See 3708 (hora?).-Let me assure you there is nothing deliberate about the misunderstanding, though of course as an agnostic I am playing devil's advocate. Once again, the confusion is caused partly by language and partly by your convoluted theory of spirits, which I discussed in my longer post yesterday. To recap (ignoring your angels and demons): you have said that when people die, their unconscious spirit returns to God, but the information that constitutes their identity (which must include consciousness) is contained in a back-up which will not be activated until the Resurrection. This appears to contradict the experiences of NDE-ers who claim to have met the conscious spirits of dead people in precisely the way you have described - seeing spiritually and mentally. You say this is the work of Satan, deliberately deceiving the patients, because the dead remain dead. I have cited several instances in the Bible in which similar encounters take place, including that between the dead Jesus and his disciples. In the current case, you emphasized that “the vision was so vivid Peter didn't realize it was not real.” I mistakenly (my apologies) took this to mean that what you called the vision was an illusion, just as you claim NDE-ers have been hoodwinked by Satan. That's why I said it seemed pretty pointless. However, it is clear from your post that the communication made in these biblical “visions” is real. Peter, John and James did see Christ talking to Elijah and Moses, but not in the flesh. -Three questions for you, then, from the devil's advocate: 1) Did Christ really talk to the conscious spirits of Moses and Elijah or not? 2) Did the conscious spirit of Christ really chat with his disciples three days after his death or not? 3) To return to our starting point: why do you assume that the same kind of encounter is a Satan-inspired illusion when it occurs in NDEs, even though it has been pointed out to you that the patients often believe themselves to be closer to the God you yourself believe in? (Please don't accuse them all of being pagans!)


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