Adam and Eve's children...

[Cliffy]

Methinks you have no idea what I think. I'm edging towards 5000 posts here, read them all and then try to justify that claim. In particular, count how many times I've said I don't know.

I have read a lot of your posts and most of the time they are well thought out and researched. But there are some subjects, like dowsing, Edgar Cayce and such that you have an absolute certainty to your opinion that I had that knee jerk reaction to.
Nothing is certain. Everything is subject to belief, opinion and perspective. I do not believe in anything but I am open to possibilities. I may not believe something someone says is true but I do accept that if they think it is true then it could be true in their reality.

The only example I can give at this time is that I was at one time deeply immersed in a culture that was very foriegn to the one I grew up in. Because I entered into that experience with an open mind, I was able to experience a reality, although quite different from anything I experienced before, that they accept as "normal". Anthropologists experience similar culturally differing realities as part of their studies.

It is difficult to explain unless you have been in situations that are completely outside your normal waking experience. For example, a suburban house wife suddenly finds herself out in the desert of Australia depending on a primitive group of Aborigines who subsist on grubs and lizard meat. After a while her perception of reality will change. She will begin to see things that she has never seen before, perhaps so foriegn to her belief system that they take on mythological proportions. But to the people she is with, what she sees is just an accepted part of their reality - like the Dream Time.

All I am saying that I think certainty is a dangerous game to play with your mind. As a scientist you know that rules change, what is true today will not necessarily be true tomorrow.

 

[MHz]

Yeah, there *is* a rational explanation for it. It's confirmation bias, selection bias, the ideomotor effect, magical thinking, post hoc fallacies, self deception, and a variety of other common errors in perception and thinking. No dowser has ever passed a proper test protocol. EVER. Not even with $1 million at stake and a protocol the dowsers agreed was fair and reasonable. Dowsing provably doesn't work. Not even a little bit.

And that's all I'm going to contribute to this hijack of a thread about Adam and Eve's children, even though I more or less started it by mentioning dowsing in a list of nonsensical ideas.

Try the method I mentioned in some back alley where you know there is a gas line, walk up from the side slowly and the ends on the long part of the wire will swing so they are pointing at each other. At that point you are right over the line. We used to dig up alleys, we never used our method to mark anything we did it to help the gas company when they showed up, we just said try here and here and here, every time they painted right where we suggested. No reply needed.

Willow is only good for about 50ft. Today the drillers have autocad maps and GPS of all underground streams and rivers and aquifers. You cannot afford a dry hole when you are going down close to 300ft

 

[MHz]

I'm not saying the Bible's accounts are true. Only that there were two creations. Bishop Usher's statement refers only to Adam's creation in 4004 BC. He did not refer to the earlier creation or to the time span in the ''generations'' that followed.

Therefore, there are no grounds for saying people did not exist prior to Adam.

4004BC was when they started having children outside of the Garden.
There is 1 creation. There was one Adam and there was one Eve. The Adam of Ge:1 is the same Adam as is in Ge:2. Ge:1 is the physical birth (how the dust got there) and Ge:2 is the spiritual birth. God let Adam know how the world was made from the sprouting of the first seeds (mist being the 1st step). It is the wisdom (about his home and about God) the breath of life. Nothing shows Eve ever met God in the same way Adam knew Him.

If the story can be soo far off track in just the 2nd chapter no wonder the ending is so different. (actually that makes a 'reasonable sounding ending' pretty much impossible)

 

[JLM]

Dexter,

Me thinks you suffer from Black & White disease. There seems to be the whole spectrum of grays missing in your reality.
Life is exactly the way you believe it to be or at least that is how you will perceive it. I kinda like grays. Makes life more varied and interesting.

I think you are right, Cliff- what you are referring to is called the self fulfilling prophesy. A lot of "disease" is "cured" that way. The problem is a lot of people refuse to change their views about something they don't understand because that is easier for them than understanding it. A lot of western people don't believe in acupuncture and it probably won't work for them for that reason, Chinese use it and in works for them. Like you say nothing is black or white- what is the true reality? It changes with the calender.

 

[L Gilbert]

lol Speaking of blacks & whites, eithers & ors, etc. There are two kinds of people in this world: people who think there are 2 kinds of people in this world, and people who don't.

 

[MHz]

lol Speaking of blacks & whites, eithers & ors, etc. There are two kinds of people in this world: people who think there are 2 kinds of people in this world, and people who don't.

Wow, that actually appears to be original, well done.
Don't give up the day job, lol.

 

[L Gilbert]

Actually, it is pretty old.

I haven't given up anything. That includes posting as I wish.

 

[Dexter Sinister]

...there are some subjects, like dowsing, Edgar Cayce and such that you have an absolute certainty to your opinion that I had that knee jerk reaction to.

There are proven ways to test the truth content of claims. Passing the tests doesn't mean a claim is true in any absolute sense, only that you're justified in placing considerable confidence in it, or to put it another way, you've sold your belief for a fair price. Claims that don't pass the tests you're justified in rejecting as false, and if you continue to accept them as true or possibly true, chances are you've been tricked or you're fooling yourself. The items on that list I gave in post #79 all fail the tests, repeatedly and consistently. So does Edgar Cayce. If you, or anyone else, has better evidence than I've seen in support of any of them, I'll be glad to inspect it , and if it passes the tests, I'll change my mind.

That's how I think.

 

[JLM]

There are proven ways to test the truth content of claims. Passing the tests doesn't mean a claim is true in any absolute sense, only that you're justified in placing considerable confidence in it, or to put it another way, you've sold your belief for a fair price. Claims that don't pass the tests you're justified in rejecting as false, and if you continue to accept them as true or possibly true, chances are you've been tricked or you're fooling yourself. The items on that list I gave in post #79 all fail the tests, repeatedly and consistently. So does Edgar Cayce. If you, or anyone else, has better evidence than I've seen in support of any of them, I'll be glad to inspect it , and if it passes the tests, I'll change my mind.

That's how I think.

I think Cliff is on the right track, D.S. I don't have any first hand knowledge about Edgar Cayce, but I've read several books about him and I can accept that you think he's a fake, but in other's minds he is a great healer and who is to argue with someone who is alive to prove the point? There is also a good chance he cured them because they thought he could..........but does that really matter? A lot of things are mind over matter & I've proved that myself a dozen times.

 

[Cliffy]

I think Cliff is on the right track, D.S. I don't have any first hand knowledge about Edgar Cayce, but I've read several books about him and I can accept that you think he's a fake, but in other's minds he is a great healer and who is to argue with someone who is alive to prove the point? There is also a good chance he cured them because they thought he could..........but does that really matter? A lot of things are mind over matter & I've proved that myself a dozen times.

The mind is an incredibly powerful tool. Too bad we are not taught that in school. But most people do not use their mind consciously more than 10% of the time. But if we focus our intent on something we want to occur, we can manifest almost anything including healing ourselves. Nobody ever really heals someone else but if someone is convinced you can, they will heal themselves and blame it on you. A true healer helps a sick person understand that they can heal themselves with the same energy they used to make themselves sick.

I'll let that sink in. I'm sure I will get a lot of flack about it. I will try to explain it if anybody is interested.

 

[JLM]

The mind is an incredibly powerful tool. Too bad we are not taught that in school. But most people do not use their mind consciously more than 10% of the time. But if we focus our intent on something we want to occur, we can manifest almost anything including healing ourselves. Nobody ever really heals someone else but if someone is convinced you can, they will heal themselves and blame it on you. A true healer helps a sick person understand that they can heal themselves with the same energy they used to make themselves sick.

I'll let that sink in. I'm sure I will get a lot of flack about it. I will try to explain it if anybody is interested.

Right on Cliff- and not really that hard of a concept to understand.

 

[Tonington]

The mind is an incredibly powerful tool. Too bad we are not taught that in school. But most people do not use their mind consciously more than 10% of the time. But if we focus our intent on something we want to occur, we can manifest almost anything including healing ourselves.

You're not supposed to use anymore of your mind consciously than you already do. It's wired that way. How would you ever get anything done if you had to think about beating your heart, breathing, pumping bile around, filtering your blood, secreting hormones, regulating heat, and so forth?

You can't heal cancer by thinking it away. You can't think away AIDS. You can't think away blocked arteries.

What you can have is a good outlook on life, which will make your time more enjoyable. Maybe you will live longer if you aren't stressing your body anymore than it already is under these types of conditions. It can't hurt...though for some people I'm not sure about that either! :lol:

 

[Cliffy]

You're not supposed to use anymore of your mind consciously than you already do. It's wired that way. How would you ever get anything done if you had to think about beating your heart, breathing, pumping bile around, filtering your blood, secreting hormones, regulating heat, and so forth?

You can't heal cancer by thinking it away. You can't think away AIDS. You can't think away blocked arteries.

Tonnington,

That is not what I meant. If you sit still and pay attention to the dialogue going on in your head, which we rarely do, you will be amazed at the crap that is going through your mind. We are not always planning or plotting our next move. Much of the time your mind is rehashing old memories, grudges, nasty things people did to us or we did to them, past relationships, regrets, all sorts of useless, counter productive crap. Most of that negative stuff is what attracts negative events into our lives such as accidents, disease and theft.

There is a basic law of physics that says for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. A thought is an action. It puts out a vibrational energy into the universe that attracts stuff into our lives. If you are not paying attention, being conscious of your output, you will be attracting stuff you do not really want into your life. But if you are thinking consciously, you can change the dialogue to more positive thoughts and change the outcome.

Now, you may say that this is just a bunch of superstitious mumbo jumbo and write me off as another weirdo and life will go along just the way it has always done for you. If you are happy with the way things are, then you don't have to change anything. But if you are tired of repeating the same types of events in your life, like having trouble holding down a job, or a relationship or being sick or even banging your knees on tables every time you sit down, or whatever, then perhaps if you change your thought patterns, you can alter your reality a little in your favour.

There was a time that I thought this was all mumbo jumbo, but then I realized I was "accident prone", I sucked at relationships and a bunch of other stuff, but then I started paying attention and changing the internal dialogue and my life changed. This isn't a new concept.

 

[JLM]

You're not supposed to use anymore of your mind consciously than you already do. It's wired that way. How would you ever get anything done if you had to think about beating your heart, breathing, pumping bile around, filtering your blood, secreting hormones, regulating heat, and so forth?

You can't heal cancer by thinking it away. You can't think away AIDS. You can't think away blocked arteries.

What you can have is a good outlook on life, which will make your time more enjoyable. Maybe you will live longer if you aren't stressing your body anymore than it already is under these types of conditions. It can't hurt...though for some people I'm not sure about that either! :lol:

RIGHT AND WRONG- Blocked arteries can be reversed- which can be done partly by lots of exercise, but that takes a certain mindset. People have beat cancer through sheer determination. Our immune system fights cancer and the healthier you are both physically and mentally, the better it works.

 

[Tonington]

RIGHT AND WRONG- Blocked arteries can be reversed-

Not by sheer will.

which can be done partly by lots of exercise, but that takes a certain mindset.

Right, a lifestyle change, not by "using more than 10 percent of your brain."

People have beat cancer through sheer determination.

Who? Beating the prognosis is not the same as defeating the disease. Who has willed the cancer out of their body?

 

[JLM]

Not by sheer will.

Right, a lifestyle change, not by "using more than 10 percent of your brain."

Who? Beating the prognosis is not the same as defeating the disease. Who has willed the cancer out of their body?

Lots of people have had a terminal diagnosis, only to be found cancer free on subsequent tests. Who says "not by sheer will"?

 

[Tonington]

Or, never had cancer in the first place...false positives?

 

[JLM]

Or, never had cancer in the first place...false positives?

Yep, there's lots of those- for instance one of the bad downsides of the P.S.A. test for cancer of the prostate, BUT I wasn't talking about test results but of people whos bodies have been ravaged by cancer. Check out Richard Bloch of H & R Bloch for just one example.

 

[Tonington]

Yep, there's lots of those- for instance one of the bad downsides of the P.S.A. test for cancer of the prostate, BUT I wasn't talking about test results but of people whos bodies have been ravaged by cancer. Check out Richard Bloch of H & R Bloch for just one example.

Yes, but for every person that does somehow "beat" cancer, there are countless others who also try hiking, eating healthy, and living life like they probably should have been all along, and don't beat it.

Simply ascribing it to a change of life outlook is unfounded. We don't know what these individuals might have biochemically in their bodies that could be the cause. The positive outlook causality is falsified by all those who have done so, and didn't succeed.

 

[JLM]

Yes, but for every person that does somehow "beat" cancer, there are countless others who also try hiking, eating healthy, and living life like they probably should have been all along, and don't beat it.

Simply ascribing it to a change of life outlook is unfounded. We don't know what these individuals might have biochemically in their bodies that could be the cause. The positive outlook causality is falsified by all those who have done so, and didn't succeed.

Yep, lots of possibilities, maybe they didn't try hard enough. Hey, we are all going to die, but even the ones who succumbed, may have succumbed at a later date than if they hadn't changed their life style. A lot of things keep us alive- some people have completed a huge project while very ill and then as soon as it was complete they died within days.