#rather than focusing on creating something with the message of hope. unity. humanity. faith. love. kindness. perseverence. strength. family

[selcouthself]

so anyways... maybe don't remake something that is & has been beloved by the masses for generations....

[dfroza]

it’s a significant thing to take notice of our thoughts

meaning, to guard the area of our thought-lives from being taken hostage by fear or depression. because, yes, the world is quite an imperfect place but there is always hope. and hope is not yet seen on the outside, but within it can be. and we do have the capacity to believe in good despite the evils of this world. our minds are created with a moral sense of right and wrong behavior, a God-instilled conscience. but people are prone to making mistakes, thus the need for grace in the first place. but it helps to begin by thinking clearly, especially about the acceptance of Love that is received as a child.

A string of thoughts shared by John Parsons that reflects upon the nature of this including the Hebraic connections from History in revealing the nature of God to people and how words are used to convey truth about our human condition but also the need of seeing things through the eyes of rebirth of which contain promises of beautiful things to come...

included in the following posts, the coming holiday of Shavout (Pentecost) that begins at sundown on Saturday, may 19 this year on which is celebrated by the Jews the giving of the Torah through Moses in ancient History, also mirrored in the New Covenant (here & now) by the giving of the Spirit who resides within the inner room of the heart to illuminate grace and eternal Light.

(finding “Home” in the Temple of the heart of which mirrors Heaven and its peace)

John’s posts:

It’s important to realize that no one "invented" the rules of logic (such as the law of identity, the law of contradiction, valid rules of inference, etc.); no, these are self-evident and presupposed in all forms of intelligible thinking about anything at all. In other words, God created the mind so that true thinking is possible. If you are reading these words, you are presently using logic. You are identifying and combining letters, interpreting their meaning, making connections and comparisons, and therefore making inferences. There is no way to argue that logic is “artificial” or culturally relative. No one can consistently use logic to argue against its universal validity. The revelation (not the invention) of logical first principles is part of God's “signature,” if you will, of how the mind is wired to correspond to reality. Reason discovers order in the universe but does not create it ex nihilo. If you deny this, you have opted out of the realm of thought altogether and entered the realm of the absurd. [Hebrew for Christians]

Likewise we have intuitive awareness regarding the existence of moral truth (i.e., the standard of justice and moral law), aesthetic truth (i.e., ideals of beauty, goodness, worth, and love), metaphysical truth (i.e., cause and effect relationships), and so on. Even scientific truth is based on principles that transcend the discipline of science itself (for example, the assumption that knowledge is “good” and should be obtained is not an empirical statement). The human mind naturally uses these sorts of categories in its thinking all the time, but each of these are ultimately derived from the rational mind of God Himself.

It is important to understand that the Torah is received in words, which require a sequence of time and logic to form intelligible connections and unity of understanding. Faith comes by hearing the message of God (Rom. 10:17), not by seeing miraculous signs or by experiencing the “numinous.” As Moses later said of the Sinai revelation, “You saw no matter of form” (Deut. 4:15) indicating priority of the inner witness of truth over outer appearance. Even the visions of the prophets held no authority until God revealed the meaning. [Hebrew for Christians]

On the evening of Shavuot it is customary to stay up all night reciting various selections from Torah until sunrise. This custom is called tikkun leil shavu’ot: תִּקּוּן לֵיל שָׁבוּעוֹת, the "rectification for Shavuot night," and the vigil was instituted by the sages as a “remedy” for Israel’s failure to be awake on the morning of the revelation. Philosophically, the theme of “wakefulness” is central to revelation, for without it we lose our consciousness as God’s people. We must understand our history to order our lives according to the truth. The God of our Salvation, the Redeemer of our people, the LORD YHVH, must be distinguished from the gods of the nations; the covenant we have with God must retain its sanctity; there is a real testimony and direction to our lives. Salvation does not mean being “absorbed” into some sort of nirvana or unconsciousness, but instead focuses on concreteness, historical events, our heritage, our future, and the story of our lives… [Hebrew for Christians]

Shavuot is about mattan Torah, the “giving of the Torah,” and therefore reminds us of our duty to “stay awake” to receive its message. Torah, as of course you know, does not mean “law” but rather “direction” or “teaching,” and studying Torah therefore involves personal response, commitment, and intense focus. It is not “book learning” more than it is a type of “holy listening,” heeding the story of our redemption and discovering its application and goal for our lives. Hearing the “Song” of God’s Truth, is more important than the intellectual “seeing” of classical Greek tradition. Hearing is connected with time and not to timeless forms or Ideas of reality; it is dynamic and “intrudes” upon the moment to be witnessed. That is part of the reason the Sinai revelation was attended with shofar blasts and thunder: to awaken the heart to arise and the mind to hear... Torah study, then, implies a complex dialog or discourse ranging over the centuries, stretching back to the time of Moses (and through him, to Adam), through the establishment of the network of judges (Exod. 18:13-26), through the words of the prophets of Israel, all leading to the life of Yeshua the Messiah and the message he gave to his disciples... Our faith, then, is rooted and bound up with history, with the fathers and mothers who went before us, with the lives of scribes, the sages, the prophets, the apostles, inclusing the ongoing dialog of the people of God over the millennia. [Hebrew for Christians]

“Let them make me a mikdash (“holy place,” “sanctuary”), that I may dwell in their midst” (Exod. 25:8). Though this verse refers to the physical mishkan (i.e., “Tabernacle”), it more deeply refers to the duty of the heart to sanctify the Name of God and bring a sense of holiness to the inner life. This requires that we focus the mind and heart to honor the sacredness of life, taking “every thought captive” to the truth of God in Messiah (2 Cor. 10:5). Since our minds and hearts are gateways to spiritual revelation, we must be careful to not to abuse ourselves by indulging in sloppy thinking or unrestrained affections. God holds us responsible for what we think and believe (Acts 17:30-31), and that means we have a duty to honor moral reality and truth. There is an “ethic of belief,” or a moral imperative to ascertain the truth and reject error in the realm of the spiritual. Since God holds us responsible to repent and believe the truth of salvation, He must have made it possible for us to do so (“ought” implies “can”). And indeed, God has created us in His image and likeness so that we are able to discern spiritual truth. He created us with a logical sense (rationality) as well as a moral sense (conscience) so that we can apprehend order and find meaning and beauty in the universe He created. All our knowledge presupposes this. Whenever we experience anything through our senses, for example, we use logic to categorize and generalize from the particular to the general, and whenever we make deductions in our thinking (comparing, making inferences, and so on), we likewise rely on logic. We have an innate intellectual and moral “compass” that points us to God. [Hebrew for Christians]

5.15.18 • Facebook

The truth about God is always available to human beings, if they are willing to look for it. The Divine Light that was created before the sun and the stars represents God’s immanent presence that “lights up” all of creation - including our minds (Gen. 1:3). As Paul stated, “the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen so that people are without excuse” (Rom. 1:19-20). The heavens are constantly attesting to the reality of God’s handiwork (Psalm 19:1). All of creation “shouts out” that there is a God. Since an infinite series of causes is impossible, the Cosmological argument for the existence of a First Cause is intuitively known to be warranted... [Hebrew for Christians]

The witness of God’s truth is foundational to all of our thinking as well. If you regress far enough in a chain of reasoning, you will always encounter first principles, intuitions, axioms, and "apprehensions" of the laws of thought. This is how language works, or rather, how our mind necessarily discovers truth about reality. For example, the law of contradiction (or identity) is not discovered in experience, but is brought to experience by the operation of the mind. All reasoning is ultimately grounded on foundational first principles that are regarded as self-evident and that are known through the light of the mind itself. Even the pagan Greeks understood this. For instance, Aristotle said that both deduction and induction ultimately were based on the “intuitive grasp” of first principles of thinking itself. [Hebrew for Christians]

5.14.18 • Facebook

every thought is a seed of something.