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 integral part of the GAW experience for many of us.
Based on its 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
Continued... (3)
The key point here to understand here is that we are created with a purpose, and that purpose is originally designed to be fulfilled by our growing our own hearts and minds aka capacity to give and receive true love, by understanding and following the 'word' given to us by God. The purpose of our creation is to become a perfect object of God's love, so that God can experience joy together with us through love.
How do we grow our hearts? We ourselves need objects to love, right? So as a child, I have my parents, whom I can love and (as we all know) learn to love more as we mature. (It's not always easy, because our parents are not perfect or unfallen, so they cannot love us perfectly either.) I have siblings to love, and I can grow my heart by learning to love them. As a man, I can grow my capacity to love via loving a woman, and visa versa. Then, as a parent, I can grow my heart by learning how to love my child.
What is true and mature love? True and mature love is unconditional love. It is love that does not change, even if the object of love is imperfect, or changes. etc.
What would Adam have been like if he had not fallen but instead had grown into the full capacity of love? Adam's heart would have grown to become fully mature just like God's heart, and Adam would have come to resonate with God and God's love 100%. If God felt sad, Adam would feel sad. If God felt joy, Adam would feel joy. Then, Adam's mind would become the individual expression of God's own mind, and God would live through Adam, and love the universe through Adam. When Adam loved his wife, God would feel that and experience that 100%.
(This then becomes basis for beginning to understand just who Jesus actually was. Jesus is the one who came to restore Adam's failure, and to grow and reach the original perfection that all humanity was destined to grow to and experience. (That's why Jesus is called 'the first fruit', the 'second Adam', the 'true Adam'.) Where Adam actually disbelieved in God's instruction not to eat, Jesus himself believed in his Father and thus grew to full 100% perfection and completion and became the perfect expression of God's love on the individual (man) level.)
The blueprint for the purpose of creation is actually given to us in the scripture. Genesis 1:28
What does it actually mean to be fruitful? When is a tree 'fruitful'? It is when it bears fruit. It bears fruit when it is fully matured, when it has passed through the growing period properly and becoming mature, it begins to bear fruit.
So that first blessing: "be fruitful" actually means "grow to completion/perfection". If Adam had not fallen but instead had kept faith and grown to completion of his heart/mind/spirit, then he would have been 'fruitful'. His heart and his love are the fruit of that process. He would be the embodiment of God's masculine love. Likewise for Eve. If she had kept faith, not done what God guided her not to do, and grown to perfection, she would have become the embodiment of God's feminine love.
Second blessing: multiply. So if Adam had become a perfected man with a heart fully 100% resonating with God, and he loved as God loves, then how to multiply? If AFTER having completed the first blessing and through perfected (unbroken) faith, Adam and Eve reached 100% unity with God's heart, then if they were blessed in unity aka married to each other under God's blessing, they would love each other as God loved each other them, and the children who were born would have been born to parents who embodied the perfect love of God. Such children would have very naturally grown up protected by their parents, raised in God's full love, and themselves would pass through that growing process safely. Such a family would embody God's love on the family level, and multiply out in to a God-centered clan, God-centered tribe, God-centered society, and God-centered humanity.
Third blessing: Have dominion over the earth. If 'Adam and Eve', and their offspring (aka all humanity) embodied God's love and resonated with God's love, and God's purpose and intent was naturally expressed in their actions and choices, etc, then there could be no concept of exploiting the natural world for destructive selfish gain. Rather, humanity would cherish the precious creation God had given us, and love the creation with the heart of a parent, the heart of one who cultivates and protects nature to enhance its beauty, and enjoy nature, n a manner that would give God the greatest joy.
Thus, be fruitful, multiply and have dominion is a coded blessing, a blueprint for a) reaching self-perfection by faith in God's guidance (aka fulfilling our responsibility to unite with God and his direction) b) multiplying that in a family, clan, community and society and c) living in, loving and nurturing the creation with God's own love.
Such a world would be a perfect object of love for God, and return the greatest joy and love to God. That's the purpose of creation.
What I've outlined here is, I think you'll agree, quite logical and rational. Does this mean it isn't heavenly? Not at all. Rather, when one takes this particular prism and begins to re-examine the Judeo-Christian scriptures (aka Bible), many things become a lot clearer.
Why, for example, does evil exist? If God is all good, he could not create evil, because he doesn't have evil in him, so how could evil come into being? Were Adam and Eve created already perfected? If so, how could they sin? etc.
End: You ask about the spiritual war, and the purpose of our life in conjunction with it. Although there is a lot required to flesh that particular question out, the short answer is, in my understanding, that since the fall of Adam and Eve, God has been directing and guiding a process of restoration, wherein humanity are restored from our fallen position in a fallen lineage founded by 'Adam and Eve', where fallen parents give birth to fallen children and our original capacity to grow our hearts to love as God loves' is short-circuited.
This is why we have to be 'reborn' through Jesus. Why? Because we are born in a fallen lineage.
Gradually, through human history, God has been building a foundation to restore and reverse the mistakes of the original family - Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, etc. Jesus came to reverse the mistake of Adam and complete the purpose of the creation on the individual level (the first blessing) for the first time in history.
I know you're not a 'Jesus guy', but I've tried to describe some of the key biblical concepts in a way that is less about 'theology' and more about a simple, logical understanding, hopefully to make some of those ideas more accessible. I think folks need to realize that over 2000 years of theological theorizing, many, many ideas and ways of viewing Jesus and the scripture itself have evolved in ways that actually may miss the mark more than we realize.
In my view, the scripture really has one and only one central purpose. It is to open a doorway for people to establish and grow a real relationship with the 'True Adam', aka Christ. Because it is not scripture or theology etc, or faith in these that are the doorway to restoration, but rather, it is the man himself, Jesus, and what is needed for us to grow and restore ourselves and the world is to engraft ourselves on to him, through a real relationship.
Jesus himself said a LOT about how what he was sharing was limited because they could not even bear the more 'heavenly' things he had to say. Somehow, believers fell into a condition where we assume we have the whole picture. We clearly do not. To really grasp who Jesus is, and what is behind what he's telling us, we need to realize that theology is the imperfect attempts of imperfect people with frankly, limited intellectual and logical capacity over the last 2000 years.
We need to become open to realizing that how God understand and intends the scripture may not be exactly what we think it is. Only when we are open to that possibility will God be able to come in an teach us through the heart.
In response to your question re: the spiritual war and our facing evil to develop our souls, I'll say the spiritual war is the one that has been raging since our ancestors failed their responsibility to believe in God and then acted on that disbelief (aka 'fell'). To unlock the doorway for our own spirits and souls to grow (aka to grow our capacity to love as God's loves) we have to overcome the enemy that stands in the way and do what our ancestors could not.
(From a Christian perspective, that means first believing in Jesus, because we have to be 'reborn' spiritually through him to be moved from the satanic lineage of 'Adam and Eve' (who created a satanic lineage through uniting with Lucifer, aka 'Satan') into God's lineage, manifested through Jesus, thus restoring our position, at least spiritually, as God's children. (aka we are born from fallen parents (father and mother) who are all of Adam and Eve's lineage, but through spiritual rebirth through Jesus and the Holy Spirit (as our spiritual parents) we are adopted (restored) back into the lineage of God.)
Once the war is over, and humanity has been reborn both in spirit and in flesh (aka Satan's claim over our bodies is liquidated), then we will gradually recover, over generations, our capacity to grow to perfection like Jesus (Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect. Matt 5:48) and finally be restored as God's family in our capacity to fulfill the purpose for which we are created: the embodiment and manifestation of true unchanging and absolute love.