As religion slowly embraces science, the potter has now formed us out of particles and evolution, but did he really make anything at all?
“Our bodies and every-thing that can be seen in the universe are made of such particles”—Isabella
By observation a particle is “an excitation of a field”. There is no atom made of conceivable “stuff” which is the imagined building block. The statement might very well read, “Our bodies and everything that can be seen in the universe are forms of energy fields, eg; apparitions”. This is the illusion. Man is nothing (no-thing) and just as likely, life is a dream of apparitions—it simply depends on how you choose to frame it.
Yet can anyone escape the illusion? Are not the objects in a dream state or a projection on a screen of equal composition under a microscope? The projection of a hologram is made of the same substance of what we deem physical. So what are we??
“We are talking about discrete natural units, or packets of energy hence the word quanta. It is why it was called quantum mechanics/physics in the first place” —Isabella
So god has tricked us—used deception to animate his sims, and you an illusion made of the same stuff he is made of. What would that make you, real or an apparition?

You’re not far from the realm of God Jim- ‘Jesus Christ is come in the flesh,’ revealing, ‘a God who hides himself.’
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Actually this doesn’t add up to Jesus. Please explain flesh in the context of the piece
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Jesus claimed to be God incarnate.
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@Arnold.
A number of individuals over the years have made similar claims.
Others have claimed to be Napoleon while others swore blind they were Elvis.
Aside from the fact that there is not a single text where the character Jesus of Nazareth assert such a preposterous statement only a small fraction of what is claimed to have been spoken by him in the bible is adjudged by scholars to be his genuine words .
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Jesus pooh-poohed scholars, he waved the irreligious flag, he scolded his own family and disciples.
All our discussions dance around him- why listen to a worldview? I’m content walking with him.
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His own family thought he’d gone mad.
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Doesn’t everyone’s?
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No, but this sounds personal.
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Yes, “beside himself!” perhaps as am I to you? Jesus openly lived his reality in walking and talking his Father. God’s mission and glory is to put his Spirit in us and so live among us, whether we receive him or not.
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“He has lost His senses.” “He is out of His mind.” “Besides himself” is reserved only in the King James Version. The Aramaic context is mad, like a crazy person.
He’s promising something we already have, so what’s the point?
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The point is relationship.
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“ God’s mission and glory is to put his Spirit in us and so live among us, whether we receive him or not.”
So your message makes no difference. You’re promising something you believe everyone already has.
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It’s not my message, or promise.
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Your belief contradicts its utility or necessity. This is the inherent problem with belief. It is its own barrier to truth
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Yes, we’ve already agreed that Christ is not rational, ‘a stumblingstone.’
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I see how you are😁. Grab on to the most improbable and unlikely and run with it. If Jesus is the god of the Old Testament you might want to watch your back. When the other shoe drops you may just find how lonely and abandon one can possibly feel. But I suppose for the Christian you’ll go down with your stripes. Pride is a funny thing.
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I believe the other shoe dropped on Christ.
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That is not self evident or useful. How many dead and buried will it take before we can see it never will come to fruition? Besides, he was supposed to come back in his lifetime.
This might interest you. Don’t be fooled by the title. https://youtu.be/DsrxbqFo41k
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No doubt, he’s a good speaker with a clear, familiar message: ‘You are god.’ I’m not buying it.
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Not sure where he says you are god at all. Ok then. Can you stop reading and looking for things that support your view. Quit whistling past the graveyard ignoring anything you can plainly see?
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I heard him plain- “Don’t believe.” And I see an unbelieving world on a road trip without God. We’re broke!
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No, he said believe in your doubt. Don’t you think (considering the state of things) that we’ve been completely wrong for some time?
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Really? And how exactly do you know what the character Jesus of Nazareth said or did?
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I don’t.)
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Exactly! What you read in the anonymous gospels could be almost entirely fiction!
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‘Almost’ leaves lots of wiggle room. I focus on Christ alone, now.
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My phrasing may be poor. We know that the gospels are anonymous.
Scholars know they suffer from interpolation and fraud/ forgery. Consider the Johannine Comma, long ending of gMark,woman caught in adultery etc.
We know gMatthew contains most of the material found in gMark, some part are almost verbatim.
The Q document is hypothetical. No evidence exists for it.
I’m sure I don’t need to explain the significance of this?
Only a small fraction of the words supposedly spoken by the character Jesus of Nazareth are considered genuine by modern scholars.
The virgin birth tale is nonsense, lifted from Isaiah and the prophecy for King Ahaz.
When an individual decides to exercise integrity and examine the gospels in a truly honest and dispassionate manner one can see they are nothing more than supernaturally laced historical fiction, almost entirely devoid of verifiable evidence.
For the same / similar reason you write off most of the religious claims made by a Muslim, Jew or Hindu they will largely disregard all your claims about the character Jesus of Nazareth.
When you write you follow Christ,then based on the evidence and / or lack thereof you are,in fact, following a narrative construct.
Ark.
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Everybody needs an imaginary friend, Harvey.
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Okay, NO wiggle room; let’s say there’s no record of anything- I can live with hearsay. I’ve heard and seen the narrative, and believe and live it. Now what?
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Well, I’ve always understood that ignorance can be ‘cured’ whereas stupidity is another matter altogether.
You have to decide which category you fall into first, I suppose?
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9 years ago I decided to fall into Christ. He’s my category.
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As we are dealing with belief in a narrative construct, which one do you feel best describes your current position, Arnold, stupidity or ignorance ?
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Stupidity, Ark. Stupendous stupidity.)
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If a job’s worth doing …
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.. do it 100%.
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No-one’s ever accused me of shirking stupidity.
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Well, you sure know how to communicate.
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I like to spread the stupid around. Not everyone is as moronically gifted as me.
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Ha, perhaps WordPress is a stupid-magnet.
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Name calling is much more effective than offering better solutions
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And by encouraging each other to ever greater heights of stupidity we could be nurturing a future POTUS.
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Twas meant a harmless, group tease, Jim. We’re all somewhat defective.
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You’re right. Everyone is on the scale somewhere.
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Or off it.
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Well boys (and girls), I’m off for kindergarten class, playground, lunchroom- for to be a warm somebody. I love these kids.
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Thenks. Now I know how to address you in any future comments.
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You can still me Arnold.)
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You can still call me Arnold
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“an excitation of a field…”
I drove past a field of cosmos yesterday, glorious sight, and saw a gymnogene hawk fly over. That was pretty exciting!
Apparition? Illusion? *Shrug* Who knows?
😉
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I can’t think of a single point of Christianity that isn’t at odds with what we discover or observe. I think existence, creation, ego (that you are a free agent separate from the universe) and the concept of the whole thing would most likely be the opposite of what Hebrew religions teach as well. Out of all the claims that stem from a faulty premise, this is the starting point. No?
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Your first sentence says it all.
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Please explain what flesh is, in relationship to this post.
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It’s what we’re made of.
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I think you may not have read or understood the article. You are not made of anything.
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Okay, I do not understand. I’ll follow others’ comments.
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Physically speaking you are an apparition, conceived of space. There is no creation of materials. There is only form of energy and frequencies that exist.
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Perhaps you use “apparition” where I use “spirit.. breath of life.” If so, we’re not on the same page.
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Well spirit, or breath of life would be invisible though, wouldn’t it? An apparition, a hologram, a projection on a screen is made of the same substance you are made, so is there a difference?
For years science has searched for the building blocks of the physical world. Now they have found it and pretend like they haven’t. It goes against what we believe and what is deemed the common sense of the day, which inevitably is wrong.
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Jim, your posts are often so esoteric, is it any wonder that some people don’t understand? Not saying it’s a bad thing, but there are those who simply don’t “think” so deeply. I know I don’t. At least not anymore. More so in my younger days. When I was still pondering “life.”
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This is actually about physics, not esotericism. Can the two be separated though? Are you real or an apparition? You are composed of no inertial dirt of any kind. This is pretty obvious yet foreign to the common sense of the day. Nobody is willing to reason beyond the accepted norms.
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I used the word “esoteric” as defined thus: Intended for or understood by only a small group, especially one with specialized knowledge or interests. NOT esotericism, as in the study of “esoteric doctrines or practices.” 🙂
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Donald Hoffman is a cognitive scientist and postulates with evidence, that we perceive the least amount of reality suitable for evolutionary fitness. That we see only superficial part, and the simulations concur—is it possible we’ve been seeing it wrong all along, based of the Hebrew interpretation of the physical world, most still cling to it long after they don’t believe it. Is it possible this view is 100% the opposite of reality, just like every other Christian dogma?
There are other cultures that don’t see it this way, but I can’t think of a single point of Christianity that isn’t at odds with what we see. And that Nan, supports fitness—a faulty sense of reality.
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Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. 🥱
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For someone who doesn’t care at all about these things, you spend a lot of time saying so. You may think you have given up seeking anything, but it certainly doesn’t seem like it. Or are you just a critic?
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Oh I continue to seek … just not for the same things you do. I long ago settled –for ME– much of what you ponder about. As for commenting … why not? It breaks the monotony of the day. 😈
Solider on, Jim!
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Jim, if we are but apparitions,why do we need to eat? I suppose, so we can continue to wonder if we are real or not? GROG
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What are you eating? Calories…Your body is not protecting you from the outside world but connecting you to it. What is food but more bits of energy as form? Everything is interdependent as a single organism.
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My skin protects me from many things. By interdependence you mean everything came from the same source? Is that the reason for interdependence? GROG
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Everything and the source are the same thing.
Let’s take it back to the Big Bang. Are you separate from it, or are you it, still going, way out on the edge of it?
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If panpsychism is true, then as you rightly point out, fields must also contain some modicum of consciousness. And that then brings my thoughts back to the many questions as to how consciousness’s fuse to make another (more complex) consciousness while simultaneously retaining their own state. It’s a headfuck… but a fun one!
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Maybe there is only one single consciousness and only the apertures and receivers are different?
As brains evolved consciousness became more apparent, but it alone is the steady state and will remain so after we are long gone.
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Now you are getting somewhere. We know nothing! Nothing is real! Even epirit is real. Spirit is nothing too!
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How can “we” be long gone if the core of “we” is the ever present consciousness? Maybe it decides to keep the apertures for a purpose the apertures don’t, in fact can’t, fully grasp. If so then apertures must have faith in order to be sustained or …… oblivion, steady state of despair…?
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Hey Frederic, nice to see you. Maybe you are right, but that would require belief, and why do we have to believe if anything is as it seems to be real?
I think more likely is the Tao. It is of itself so. That isn’t laden with the contradictions incurred by adding a boss at the head, especially when that supposed boss is simply another apparition of the maya.
And of itself so, fits really nicely that you are it too—a mindful apparition of the whole consciousness. It also solves the problem of good and evil, which is our way or dividing the world into classes that don’t exist from the 10,000 foot view.
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Not much of a headfuck really. Well, no more than consciousness itself is.
Individuals can and do fuse into groups with (more or less) shared objectives but often with emergent behaviour that doesn’t reflect the intent of any of its individual members. Corporations, armies, political parties, etc. We’re quite used to thinking of behaviour that way.
Colony organisms – from slime molds up to hive insects – seem to express both individual and group consciousnesses. Sometimes simultaneously.
So we’ve got plenty of metaphors with which to model group consciousness and metaphors are pretty much all we have when trying to articulate abstractions. The trick is to avoid overextending the metaphors to conceal gaps in understanding.
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More like “as the religious slowly capitulate to the post-Enlightenment zeitgeist”.
A few centuries ago anyone who wanted to propose a natural law or principle needed to come up with some way of making it compatible with the dominant theological discourse or risk ridicule or worse. Now religious statements of belief are supposed to be scientifically justifiable if they’re not to be dismissed as superstition.
So you get ridiculous displays such as ‘Creation Science’ or the invocation of quantum indeterminacy to try to ‘scientificate’ anything and everything that lacks a scientific evidence base.
In the Middle Ages if it couldn’t be shoehorned into the Bible it wasn’t real. Now if you want credibility you have to elbow some room between physics formulae for your ideas.
Everything we perceive is an apparition. Some things are real. I doubt there’s much intersection between those sets.
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”Some things are real”. Like what?
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The mental phenomena I experience are real – though “I” may not be so it’s a stretch to call them my thoughts, emotions, perceptions, etc.
It’s more conjectural to suppose they’re influenced by something else that’s real – I can’t disprove solipsism – but my guess is they are. What relation that might have to the mental phenomena so arising is anyone’s guess.
As to whether you’re real … well that’s a shaky hypothesis at best. If I were a Scottish lawyer I’d call you ‘unproven’ – except I seriously doubt the existence of Scottish lawyers, or True Scotsmen of any persuasion.
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So, since the perception of your mental phenomenon can change over time, is it really real?
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Of course it is.
Time, on the other hand …
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Can you look back on some of your abandon beliefs and still consider them accurate?
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Heck, I only abandon the ones that are accurate.
You won’t catch me trying to pin reality down with my opinions. It might get offended. And I might get bored.
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BTW, I don’t subscribe to the New Age maxim that what’s real cannot change.
Even Iggy Pop has changed and he’s definitely God.
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Only to a certain degree. Interpretations end where the bleeding begins. It’s an interesting notion in a vacuum – but the amount of suffering in the world is quite palpable.
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So where do we draw the imaginary line between suffering and contentment? Are good and evil separate entities, or just our usual way of dividing the world up into categories?
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Consciousness is categorisation. As I said I think perception bias has its limits. If I stamp on your foot or hit you with a wooden bat I imagine you’ll have no trouble drawing the line.
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Speaking of perception bias, I’ve done even worse—I hung several paintings off centered and crooked.
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So shorten one of your legs.
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#bastard
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“They had been Promotionaries, on their respective sides of the Wars (which were not, of
course, between Good and Evil at all, as non-combatants of every species always assumed, but
between Banality and Interest).” – from ‘Walking on Glass’ by Iain M Banks.
If there was ever a True Scotsman it was probably Banks.
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who is Isabella?
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An old friend. https://redressedforlife.wordpress.com/2021/12/31/in-the-name-of-science-my-case-for-christ/
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By faith we understand that the worlds were set in order at God’s command, so that the visible has its origin in the invisible. Hebrews 11:3
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In relation to this post, that is probably the closest Christianity has come to a morsel of truth.
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it doesn’t help to understand what a dream is made of. we cannnot know the the real by understanding a dream. we understand the dream, ONLY by knowing the real.
it’s like when you wake up from dreaming you are hunted by a tiger, and you realize it was a dream. do you worry about what the tiger was made of? where it came from? where it went after you woke up?? no. you leave it to psychologists to worry about that😋
so our attention must be on what is it that never changes, the never comes and never goes. reality cannot be be anything that changes, that is the very definition of real. it must always BE. it is always present and it is always the same.
it is because we focus on the waves, that we are unaware of the ocean.
Frederic (above) said it right. the visible has its origin in the invisible, so no matter how much deep we go into the miniscule of matter, it will not be That. why, you ask?? because matter is a result of consciousness, not the other way around. 💎
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I would concur
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Jim, the gods knew well why they have given us limited vision of the world in which we live.
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I like what Professor Leonard Susskind says about a Holographic Universe. They asked him “Is the 3D projection real or is the rather 2-D media, that makes the projection, real? He said, “Take your pick.” Loran Billings (of the Chicago Museum of Holography, which no longer exists) and i used to — many years ago — laugh about how scientists would eventually (and finally) realize that the universe was holographic.
We need to leave an anthropomorphic view. There is no “He” regarding the sacred. Period. 😉
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Thank you. There’s a name I’ll look up.
I did a piece a while back “Your god is not god” just because of the Yin principle. The closest reconciliation was from a Jewish reader who stated that the name YWHY, was both masculine and feminine. But their god is definitely lacking the Yin. He’s all Yang. Impossible!
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It’s the only illusion we know.
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