Welcome to General Chat - GAW Community Area
This General Chat area started off as a place for people to talk about things that are off topic, however it has quickly evolved into a community and has become an intergral part of the GAW experience for many of us.
Based on it's evolving needs and plenty of user feedback, we are trying to bring some order and institute some rules. Please make sure you read these rules and participate in the spirit of this community.
Rules for General Chat
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Be respectful to each other. This is of utmost importance, and comments may be removed if deemed not respectful.
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Avoid long drawn out arguments. This should be a place to relax, not to waste your time needlessly.
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Personal anecdotes, puzzles, cute pics/clips - everything welcome
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Please do not spam at the top level. If you have a lot to post each day, try and post them all together in one top level comment
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Try keep things light. If you are bringing in deep stuff, try not to go overboard.
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Things that are clearly on-topic for this board should be posted as a separate post and not here (except if you are new and still getting the feel of this place)
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If you find people violating these rules, deport them rather than start a argument here.
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Feel free to give feedback as these rules are expected to keep evoloving
In short, imagine this thread to be a local community hall where we all gather and chat daily. Please be respectful to others in the same way
Disclaimer: feeling meditative this morning. Your comment here has inspired a few thoughts. Read on, if you dare. :p
Anger is an emotion and has an important function. All emotions have important functions, but when they leave the sphere of correct balance, they can become toxic.
A beautiful analogy is respiration within the body. Cells breaking down sugars in the presence of oxygen will produce energy and carbon dioxide. The body uses the energy and dispels the CO2 via the lungs. Cells breaking down sugars without oxygen enter into anaerobic respiration, which produces lactic acid, which accumulates in the cells and drags them down, eventually becoming toxic because it cannot be dispelled as effectively as CO2.
When our emotions function in the presence of love (their natural environment) in the heart, they produce clear and healthy results, but when they function in an absence of love, they produce toxic results which, if accumulated enough, can really mess things up.
This is one fundamental reason why love is so important. We are meant to be conceived in love, born in love, raised in love, and live in love. Originally, it should be perfect love. That's how we were designed and created.
But through tragedy, we lost our connection to perfect love. So we are conceived in less than complete love, born in less than complete love, and are raised and live in less than complete love. So, for each and every human, we struggle through the course of our lives with emotions that sometimes work properly, but at other times are out of kilter.
Even a faithful person who strives to be one with Christ is (not yet) born, conceived, raised or lives in complete love, because although the spirit can be reborn via Christ, the flesh is still under the dominion of the enemy. Which is why the Second Coming is necessary; the purpose of the second coming is to liberate the flesh from the dominion of Satan. This will be done when our lineages are physically reborn so that as parents, we can conceive, give born to, and raise our children fully in God's presence, because our flesh is no longer under the devil's claim. (Paul talks about the redemption of our bodies, etc, quite a bit).
When we, the descendants of fallen parents, are reborn in both spirit AND flesh, so that both are under God's true governance, then the life cycle for each new child will start on the right footing. The kingdom of God will then begin to emerge naturally in both in heaven AND on earth. (Up until now, we've only experienced the kingdom spiritually, not in the physical realm.)
As for hate, well, that too is an emotion, but there is 'hate' and there is 'hate. God utterly detests evil and abhors 'love' that has been twisted for evil purposes, but this will never prevent God from loving even his enemy. One might say that God 'hates' evil. But 'hate' out of kilter is irredeemable toxicity. So in that sense, that sort of "hate" is a dark shadow of the emotion that 'abhors evil, but still has the capacity to love'. "hate" in the toxic sense means the capacity to give love has been lost.
The 'hate' that one might experience towards evil is not actually the same as the 'hate' that evil has towards good. One of these still has access to God's love, the other, only dust and ashes.
In conclusion, we should always remember that what defines the value of our human experience is whether we are, and how much we are, plugged into the source of love, life and lineage: God and God's love.