What if God is basically what we have been taught he is? An entity with all the powers normally ascribed to him. We, on the other hand, are maybe not what we think we are, at least in the physical sense. We are supposed to be made in his image. That begs the question, what is his image? What if he is an entity that, perhaps has no physical properties in the sense we normally think about, and therefore we also don't really have a physical body? In order to test the limits of our loyalty to him, we are set up in a VR world and made to believe we have a physical body with all the sensory input that we have. It would certainly explain some of the strange passages found in the Bible. It would also explain how things could be known beforehand. I find it rather ironic that we can watch Star Trek episodes with various alien beings with just as varied powers and abilities and not even bat an eye. Yet we find it so hard to believe that God is what he says he is. Just some ideas.

I suppose God could be a human being. I presume you mean a physical being. The only problem that occurs to me with that is at least one passage in the Bible that states we cannot inherit heaven with our current physical body. Even people that haven't died at the time of the second coming must be changed in order to go to heaven. This to me implies, either some other kind of physical body or even no 'physical' body. Pure energy. Some people use the fact that God knows the future as an excuse for us not having free will, everything is pre-destined. I believe we do have free will, God just knows which choices we will make ahead of time. Almost like, all of time, is a VCR recording, and He has already watched the movie. We, as characters in the movie, only view the section of it that we are actors in, and everything else is out of our experience.

Funny how it works, Poet1960's post inspired me, a newbie to the 'programmed reality' arena to type in a few key words which led me to the above. Am I right in thinling that I hit paydirt?! That site has certainly got me thinking in new ways.

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There is no spoon.

- digestion time needed. (just ordered Jim's book today, hopefully that will help.)

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There is no spoon.

Jim, Jim, tell him to stop! (erm, what's that theory called?)

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There is no spoon.

There is a book called 'Chaos Theory' I think. It deals with that sort of thing. Take for example this situation, You draw a circle on a piece of paper. Hang a plumb bob over the circle and start it in motion. The volume of the circle is finite, but, there are an infinite amount of spaces that the plumb bob can be pointing too within the circle. So, in effect, there is infinity within a finite boundary. How is that possible?

Well, I don't know if you know this but you definitely seem to be alluding to Nietzsche and his theory of 'Eternal Recurrance'. I've posted on this topic here already, so I'll word this reply differently.

In "Of the vision and the riddle",Zarathustra describes two roads:

"One leads from the past, the other frrom the future, meeting at a gateway where I now stand."

The portal or entrance to this gate is inscribed "The Moment". Zarathustra ponders the enormity of this; an eternity may lie behind him - or before him. To both he may be inextricably tied/linked/connected to. He concludes that the events which form his life will recur - again and again, recreating him again and again. He is part and parcel of this 'eternal recurrance'.

Anyhoo, you've given me plenty to ponder, only fair that I retur the favour !

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Neo,

In a programmed reality these do not necessarily have to be in sequence, meaning one after the other in linear progression. Instead the universes happen together in the main program and we live in a subroutine or batch file. We can with training learn to "walk upon the way" meaning talk to the programmers.

If your screen name is an indicator, you should be able to teach me how to do this. Have you ever walked upon the way at will, i.e. without a Near Death Experience (NDE) or drug induced trance.

If, however, through your prayers, you can feel to seek to that other realm, and you believe that you can receive a revelation through that Spirit who establishes the truth of all things, and you live your life in a way befitting of entering upon the way. then God (or that great programmer) may let you see the larger program. You can "walk upon the way" meaning see outside this reality and move among the ancestors, talk to the programmer, see the beginning from the end, etc., but we just can't remember it while awake and back in this program. According to Jim's book, you can obtain states like that in near death experiences (NDEs), through hallucinogenic drugs, or other unnatural ways. But I'm going to say that obtaining this unnaturally always gets a little confusing to us and we don't remember much when we get back. You most likely also go there at some point every night when you go to sleep. Remember the linear timing of this world may have very little to do with the timing in the bigger program. You could live a full life time in just that short time where you began to fall asleep and for some reason jolted back awake (this is called the "hypnic jerk" reaction). There is some purpose that this life (batch file) has to be run independently. I also believe that we agreed to this before we came here and that part of us still exists "upon the way" in that bigger program all the time and we still agree that for this batch routine it is best that we don't remember. This shroud or veil as to other life memory makes this world a very important part of our eternal progression.

Upon the way, is both a spiritual and physical realm just like this world. Some faiths, like the Mormons for example, would call this world telestial and that place upon the way is called the terrestrial. From a scientific view terrestrial is also reachable. Even in a perfect vacuum at absolute zero you have fluctuating fields known as "vacuum fluctuations", the mean energy of which corresponds to half the energy of a photon. Also called the Casimir Force, or Casimir Effect. Thus, there is a difference between “real” empty space and “imaginary” empty space. Jim's book explains that this could very easily be that programmed reality like you see in the movie Matrix. In another section Jim explains that the nonvirtual reality isn't the only means that this could be accomplished. It is also possible that our reality, meaning our observations of it, could also be manipulated on an individual basis.

I think, therefore I am … and, we think, therefore we are. In this we are not alone. If God exists, then He is no deceiver and the material things that we perceive are real. To all those things we have discussed and which we can fully comprehend as truth and right, without equivocation, to all those things we are not deceived.

My take is that you are absolutely correct.

I would agree that there is no such thing as "absolutely stationary" for one particle in relation to another. Of course if you accept the reference frame of the particle (or particle system like us) as the reference frame from which you are observing than we are stationary, as in only with respect to ourselves.

… recall the corny anecdote about Einstein, the physicist, arguing with, Pythagoras, the mathematician at a high school dance party. Pythagoras insists that if he walks half way over to a very cute girl on the other side of the ballroom, and then half way again, and repeats this process for an infinite number of times, he will never reach her. Meanwhile the Einstein, the physicist is already more than half way across the ballroom, turns back to the mathematician and in that German accent says, "Yah, but I can get close enough."

In other words, our reality is what it is. Don't mistake programmed reality to mean that these laws of physics don't hold true. They do for us. And don't mistake our reality to mean that this is all happenstance. There is just a whole lot bigger reality than what we can perceive. Furthermore, whenever you try to completely quantize anything (quantum physics) you have no other choice or explanation except to accept the fact that this is a reality created for us.

Once you arrive at that quantum conclusion, there must be a God. The only question left on that topic is just what the form of that deity is. Does he have dark skin, or light? Is he fat? Tall? Pretty? And we certainly don't all look like him, because we all look a little bit different. That image from which we were created (looks) is merely relative to our own perceptions anyway. Even man's height and stature has constantly evolved over time. Records clearly show that the average height of mankind is a great deal taller than he once was. So, is God then the short man with dark skin, or is he a tall freckled fellow with a receding hairline? I am most amused by the portrayal of Jesus as a Scandinavian blonde haired blue eyed man with a flowing beard. I'm sorry, but it escapes me how a Scandinavian happens to be born in Bethlehem.

But let us continue to explore how this VR fits in the story of creation.

But because it is vane and difficult to rid one's self of the concepts of reality that we have become accustomed, and lest we become convinced in our pride that it is our own self centered minds that are the cause of all existence, it will be desirable to tarry for some time at this stage, that, by long continued meditation, we may more deeply impress upon our memory this new knowledge. In other words, lets just stop and think about it for a moment, because a priori, we are thinking beings.