Your brain runs your body using something like a budget
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I'm not a neuroscientist -- and am interested in opinions of those better informed than I am -- but I've read that executive function is controlled by the "upper brain" (cerebral cortex) while our baser flight/flight instincts are controlled by the "lower brain" (amygdala).
While most of us think that the executive part of the brain is always in control, in practice we are very much influenced by the lower brain, especially in conflict situations -- we have instinctive responses around whether a person is someone to nurture, to attack or to run away from. And this is all occurring at sub-executive levels.
In couples counselling, the goal is often to mitigate interpersonal conflict by employing techniques to quickly move the interaction from the "lower brain" (fight/flight) to "upper brain" (executive function). The usual techniques prescribed are to slow things down by mirroring the other person's words (i.e. restating and asking if they got it right), validating them without agreeing, etc. By doing this, the interaction turns from an antagonistic one to a cooperative one. (I've personally tried applying these techniques to heated online discussions and have had some success).
This might also explain why when folks are under stress or under threat, their executive function is impaired -- possibly the brain is spending all of its "budget" on the lower brain.
//> emotions are strongly connected to our physical body - most emotional episodes are initiated by physical stimuli (see danger - fear) and also our internal states influence our emotions (that 'hangry' feeling)
//> most theories on emotions argue around what role the cognition plays; secondary and social emotions require cognitions, but most primary emotions are rather independent
//> there are 2 kinds of neural networks guiding behaviour - approach and avoidance networks - that span wide. The distinction between the 3 brains is not necessarily supported by physical evidence, other than the fact that avoidance nets tend to stay in the lower brain, while approach start there and end up in the upper brain
//> decisions are mostly taken by the subconscious, our conscious mind is mostly a witness with some influence.
//> spot on the counselling - the goal is to move from avoidance schemas to approach schemas.
Happy to provide further info
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will...
Those thoughts you have (“WHO THE HECK calls at 4am?”) is driven by a physiological need (sleep) not logic, as it might be during the day.
In the age of cell phones - is the old adage of 4am calls a dying thing?
Speaking for myself I can remember when that was a thing and now that you mention it, it’s no longer a thing because my phone is on silent all the time.
What’s counterintuitive is that in the age of instant access to everyone, always connected living, it’s significantly more difficult to get my attention at 4am than it used to be.
Same for everyone else?
Basically I see a lot of observations like this, where people reminisce how things "used to be" based on the technological limitations of first gen tech. One guy was complaining on my Facebook about how the battery went dead on his car remote and he misses the day when you could start the car with a physical key. Well, from a UX perspective, the key was never intrinsically desired. What is actually desired is that "only authorized users can access the car and start the engine, and without any delay in doing so". Unfortunately for him, his new car didn't have as expensive of tech as mine. In my Lexus even if the battery is completely dead, you can hold the key fob close to the steering column and it can still read the chip. The ultimate version of the technology will have no flaws or caveats and just always work for authorized users without them needing to remember to carry an object or have batteries.
So yeah the first versions of phones had terrible UX, they sounded when the owner shouldn't have been disturbed. But what we must remember is that this state of affairs should have never come to exist in the first place. It's just at the time, no one knew how to remedy it.
This type of thing will soon be forgotten except for an obscure reference in history books explaining why some time period story makes sense (why the father got enraged at being woken up). Meanwhile, until then, bringing it up in conversation will be a good way to signal to young people that you are "really, really old". It is barely a blip no the radar once humans have had phones for 1000 years.
What I’m curious about here is the fact that I can’t be woken up at 4am now. It’s an interesting artifact that I kinda see as a missing feature. Do I want to wake up at 4am for the right call, yes. But unless I’m missing something the caller priority can’t override my default silent mode. Before now, we trusted known and sometimes unknown people to not call at 4am unless it was critical, now I can’t do that. Maybe the unknown people broke the social contract for known callers but I kinda miss it. As my kids age, I kinda feel like I’ll need it at some point.
This actually has been solved on my phone at least, there is an option that it will ring through on silent if the caller attempts multiple times within a certain interval. This will result in you being 15 mins late to the emergency, but is pretty much guaranteed to work since in any big enough disaster they're sure to try multiple times. :)
I think the phone should just explain to the person "press 1 to override silence", then you could enable it for known callers only.
Personally I find myself in a bad mood if I ate something too spicy the previous night.
The story that I remember was of an awake portion of a brain surgery, where doctors were stimulating parts of a patient's brain to make sure not to cut anything too important. The doctor stimulated one spot and the patient suddenly laughed. The doctor asked "why did you laugh just then?" and the patient replied "well, you all just look so funny standing around in your doctor outfits!".
It was the best explanation the brain could come up with for the laughter, the closest thing to "funny" or "things that might explain my laughter" in that moment. But the guess was completely wrong, even though the patient felt certain it was the truth.
I.e. the thesis of such approaches (or at least some of them) is that if you define "you" narrowly as the things exposed to and controlled by your consciousness, then "that you" does not include a lot of your behavior and there is a bunch "decision-making hardware and software" both in your brain and your gut that is less "you" (for that definition/understanding of "you").
I can recommend a pop-sci overview of some of these ideas in a book by R. Kurzban "Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind" - there's a bunch of speculation, and we don't have a consensus on many (most) consciousness-related things, but it raises some interesting ideas that seem reasonable from that perspective.
Available for free here: https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
People that believe this have the hardest time with psychedelics. There is a reason so many people other people accept an interconnected network that doesn't have a central nexus, only nodes. [1]
[1] If you want a source for that, you will need to advocate for the studies or even sponsor one yourself to the standard of review you prefer.
What are you trying to say in this part? Did you leave out some words?
Personally I don't think the feedback exists but it's a very powerful view
Where else would they originate? I can't imagine a brain without any senses having any thoughts at all. I think it's more that a lot of us are secret dualists.
How do you live a good life past like 10 years old without knowing this? Isn't this a basic understanding of your own body that you get after your first stressful moments and notice that you don't feel as sharp or energetic, even though you didn't do anything physical?
Isn't that the same exact thing that all the doctors talk about whey they say "less stress" to recovering patients etc.? What is the new thing here?
"Consider what happens when you’re thirsty and drink a glass of water. The water takes about 20 minutes to reach your bloodstream, but you feel less thirsty within mere seconds. What relieves your thirst so quickly? Your brain does. It has learned from past experience that water is a deposit to your body budget that will hydrate you, so your brain quenches your thirst long before the water has any direct effect on your blood."
IMO the point she tries to convey is that the budget doesn't track actual, objective resource use, which also means that individual budget constraints are not only constrained by the actual physiology, i.e. with training (mindfulness and so on) one can move the baseline and thus e.g. stress resistance.
Not a new point either, but you'd be surprised how many people don't know their own feelings. My psych professor told countless anecdotes of patients who didn't know that the disquieting feelings they experienced when e.g. being inside an elevator were actually a panic attack.
Probably grew up in abusive-ish households where the parents didn't respect the child's emotions. I only found out I have severe anxiety when I was like 27 years old. It took me a year of having full blown panic attacks to realize what it was. I thought I was just being "weak", because that's what I was taught my whole life.
Of course, it gets trickier as you get older, accumulate experiences. Now the same event can carry a unique meaning for every unique individual that experiences it, and that meaning is sometimes very difficult to infer by simple observation.
Most of the time what's wrong with them is simple. They are being lazy in their thinking, or they are ignorant of the importance of empathy and acknowledging people's experiences, and helping them through it, even if we don't approve of (or even understand) why they are having that experience. That's not an obvious lesson, and its not "written on the tin" of any baby I've seen!
(Caveat: A very tricky case is when someone seems congenitally devoid of empathy or self-reflection (e.g. NPD, or generic sociopath). In that case you're better off not engaging them emotionally at all, and treat them as a rational actor responding to incentives. A variant, the rational actor who clearly understands the power of emotions, who can learn to simulate them, and has no scruples about doing so--this is the nightmare person because not only are they "manipulative", their existence makes life harder for the rest of us with real emotions, who sometimes get accused of being them. BTW I've read some really interesting stuff about successful psychopaths who are totally open about their qualities, good and bad, and have decided to integrate with society in a classically healthy way! So even here, there is hope.)
That doesn’t surprise me at all. Why would anyone instinctively know the terms a psychologist would use to categorize their feelings?
That’s like saying you’d be surprised at how many people don’t know the key of their favorite song.
We have learned over the last decade or so that there are some rather significant direct connections between gut and brain via direct neural signalling. Chemical signalling can occur within about 60-90 seconds--ask a smoker how quickly nicotine can hit their system.
It is not proven/disproven AT ALL that the brain isn't responding to direct neural/chemical detection of the water by both the mouth and the stomach.
If that is the case, no, this CAN'T be trained.
The problem I see is that there is no institutionalized way to educate about emotions. For abstract knowledge and training rational thinking we have schools and universities. For feelings/emotions, though, we were are all effecively just getting homeschooled: We can learn from our parents etc., but that's pretty much it.
Perhaps there should be something like a school for feelings. This obviously is a hot topic, though, with different cultures having different ideals etc., especially when it comes to things like purpose in live, like we could already experience in another thread :)
I find one of the fundamental ones is pain. It's not an emotion, but it's not that easy to classify what is actually painful and what isn't. Holding a phone in my hand isn't painful, but at some point I managed to do it so much that it did become painful. I don't know how to describe the pain, but I know that I am apprehensive of holding a phone in my hand for extended periods of time.
Another one is stress. People might not know they are stressed, but they are. They just can't recognize what stress is.
What I'm getting at is that a lot of things aren't taught explicitly. We don't even know how to teach some of that, because we don't have a good classification system for the feeling/emotion.
What I mostly meant was similar to your stress example. Many people don't actually know what stress is, how it manifests, and most importantly, what you can do about it. Many also don't know that people can have very different thresholds of tolerable amounts of stress, and that those thresholds can siginificantly differ for the same person doing different kinds of work/studying etc. (e.g. some people have very low tolerances for arguing/discussions in work groups but can effortlessly dig themselves into research for 8 hours, others can do meeting marathons but have problems with physical work affecting their mood and so on).
In these cases many aspects of both the basic knowledge, ways of prevention and methods of coping with stress are well known, they just aren't taught in regular school. There is slow progress, though. In my country there often are e.g. social pedagogues in primary and secondary schools, helping with these kinds of things - though often only when they already manifest themselves as problematic behaviour.
In this book you could read that "your thoughts are your own and your feelings come from your thoughts and nobody can think for you and you may have feelings but it's ultimately your thoughts about it that matter and that you control so you control how you react to everything and anything under the sun, thus your feelings are entirely under your control and your responsibility. Isn't that liberating ?" You are a musheen, Harry.
Being exposed as a kid to this kind of reasoning can distort things. It was written by an adult and read by adults.
There's a lot of coaches out there who still put out those kind of reasoning. People try to behave like cold machines and then they break down.
Big expensive machines, which require training to operate, and have big manuals full of pages and pages of "Danger: failure to follow correct operating procedures may lead to injury or death."
I would really love to have a custom manual showing correct min/max/optimal operating parameters for sleep, warmth, hugs, food, etc. Especially if people would have to keep to it.
And then instead of getting angry when someone doesn't do what they want (or getting angry at themselves for failing) , people would have to accept that they violated the commonly accepted operating procedures -thereby exceeding the tolerances of the system- and should do better next time.
Wouldn't that be a huge improvement over how things work now?
I do personally like it, though. Explaining how, for instance, your food intake has tolerances which can be exceeded in either direction temporarily but will eventually catch up to you is exceedingly useful.
I'm always surprised how many adults think they can "just push themselves" to get more out of their life, whereas studies are pretty clear you only get a few weeks before regressing not only to the mean, but below it.
If you are in love with someone did your thoughts cause that love? Or did feeling of love, arousal cause those thoughts?
Secondarily, the article lightly advocates for holistic medical care, using the negative example of the same pain being treated by different specialists depending on the circumstances. I do not believe that approach is obvious to many people, or agreed with by most people aware of it.
When they're getting fatigued, it doesn't mean that they're out of energy at all, it's just a warning sign.
The fact that each subsystem evolved in that environment to get cues from common signals does not mean there is a thing that is aware of the fact that it has communication lines to, say, kidneys, and lungs etc.
Given that every single thing is subject to constraints, the things that evolved to work together must be, by necessity, relying on a signaling mechanism so one part does not fall apart trying to fulfill the demands of other parts.
Otherwise, the thing we are looking at, in this context, brain in a body, could not have existed in this arrangement.
> A bad stomach ache that follows an indulgent meal may send us to the gastroenterologist, but if we experience that same ache during a messy divorce, we may head to a psychotherapist instead.
This certainly echoes my experience, but can just as easily speak to the difficulty of deduction.
> In body-budgeting terms, however, this distinction between mental and physical is not meaningful.
But surely going to a gastroenterologist for help with your (non-existent) divorce or a psychotherapist for (unnecessary) diet ideas, means you are not fixing the underlying problems. That just suggests that obscuring the distinction between mental and physical is not so helpful.
Other cultures are not immune, but they might instead get e.g. stomachaches.
However, if you go higher up the ladder of abstraction the story changes I think. Thinking in terms on software design and architecture you can start using a similar vocabulary.
We can talk about systems and sub-systems, foreground and background jobs, interfaces and telemetry, sequential and parallel processing, latency, efficiency versus accuracy, overfitting, etc.
The underlying implementation might be completely different there are similarities and thinking about them can be useful.
But I think that's exactly the example of where the metaphor starts to give us bad information.
The biggest difference between the brain and a computer is that the brain is fundamentally parallel. Not more threads in a GPU parallel, but rather the processing the brain does is the manifestation of the parallel actions of a mass of information processing units interacting with one another.
To give an example of where using the computer metaphor gives rise to very misleading assumptions because of this: in many cases with a computer, more data equals more cost. If you need to iterate through a million data points to get a result vs. a thousand, it's going to take a lot more time to reach the answer. But with the brain it's precisely the opposite. More data points means a denser network of interconnections which can give a better answer sooner.
One of the fascinating and useful ideas I was exposed to early on was the concept of self-programming the mind, using hypnosis and various techniques.
In a sense, reading an article like the OP is priming the brain for higher-order functioning, by self-reference.
It's as well to remember the brain isn't a Turing machine, but the brain is an information processor, and it makes to sense to use the language and concepts of information processing to talk about what it does.
Consider the idea of "time". We only think of time as movement in space, with either us moving or the time moving. I left that experience behind me. Looking ahead to the future. She has a great future in front of her.
I'll remind myself that from now on giving the fact I'm always feeling guilty for not doing too much thinking.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/How-Emotions-Are-Made-Secret-ebook/dp...
As the above linked article points out, "Keep in mind that this is just one way of categorizing emotions."
Some emotions don't have English names!
It's been said that each muscle in the body has a corresponding emotion in subjectivity. Look up something called "Body Scan" meditation, it might help you get more in touch with your emotions.
No. This is such a dreadful, and terrible and empty perspective that disembowels life of deeper meaning and of true purpose. It’s another one of those sad perspectives that tells people that they are nothing but automatons, that their lives are fundamentally meaningless, and that they are a product of “accident or chance”. It’s a highly depressing, and a dark and empty way of looking at life. (For full disclosure, I’m a Christian and believe in God and in a higher purpose for all that exists in this universe.)
It's quite incredible.
You are born out of stardust, your life in its beginning is indeed free of any deeper meaning and true purpose. You are a brain fighting for survival, against the monstrous odds.
What you now choose to do with that shell is up to you. You can train that brain, you can choose habits that are good or bad, and you can decide how to apply the bag of random accident that is you and your life to deliver on a purpose.
You may have certain privileges over others to help you on your way - richer family, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc. can all make certain doors open or shut for you - but your meaningless life, born with no purpose, is yours to shape as you see fit.
You don't need God to find purpose. In fact, defining your life as being in service to a deity narrows your potential. You might be happy with that, and I won't try and convince you otherwise.
But your stance that not grabbing life for what it is and needing to believe in God to give yourself a sense of meaning and purpose - that's the dark and depressing version of the story for many of us.
I see this argument used, but it always feels forced to me, trying to make lemonade from the lemons given. Or stardust, in this case.
I don't think it's necessarily "depressing", but neither it's "incredible". It is what it is.
>You may have certain privileges over others to help you on your way - richer family, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc. can all make certain doors open or shut for you - but your meaningless life, born with no purpose, is yours to shape as you see fit.
Well, in this version, you still age, decline, and die forever anyway, so one can argue there's no much meaning into this "shaping". Temporary struggle (and often hard struggle) for no great reward, just ultimate old age and death.
I mean, maybe it was just important for the brain to have a model of threats. Once we created models of obvious threats, the human capacity for abstract thinking generated abstract super-threats and then began to model such potential threats in the manner to which it was accustomed — via personification in the beginning, and then mathematically.
Really, physics replaces God as the dominant belief system because physics is scarier than God.
[0] https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/438/013/8ad...
Yes you do, or at the very least some higher axiomatic meaning that people refer to by "god" and you demonstrate it with your own post: it's just that instead of using the word "god", you use the words "stardust" or "good habits".
Implying that stardust is somehow a good thing (which is your own interpretation, which you assume for some reason is obvious to everyone else? Why exactly is stardust a cool thing, and not a dead meaningless dreadful thing?), and that "good habits" is a meaningful thing to pursue. Those become your deities. There is no difference except for which words are used.
The stardust itself doesn't give you any meaning. It is you that fill those words with meaning. People do exactly the same thing with the word "god".
[0] Don't want to start a flamewar here, but there are so many contradicting ideas of god out there that at least most of them must be wrong. So regardless of some conception of god being true, the purpose is still felt by all the faithful.
It's funny that you would write something like that as if it was a useful statement. Reducing that much complexity in such a nonchalant way... But nevertheless...
> that humans give meaning to their own existance.
If you have time can you share what you think is the reason for why humans have a capability, the will to give their life meaning? Where does it come from? Why is their ability to give life meaning able to produce actual tangible results in their lives and lives of other people? If that ability even implemented through some genetic mechanism, why does the world work that way that it produces this type of genetics, that can create meaning? Genetics could have worked in any number of ways, why this one?
Would you say that love "exists"? Would you say that an integral "exists"? What about if there are no mathematicians that know about it or use it? Does it still exist?
Why humans actually do this is of course a hot topic in both philosophy and psychology, for at least a few thousand years now. I think the cognitive root lies in us being social animals. Being social means needing to keep the group together, which makes communication necessary, to align individual actions to a cohesive whole. Communication is hard, though, misunderstandings lurk everywhere. We therefore have to interpret the signals we got from the others, fill the gaps of the unsaid. We necessarily have to infer intentions, meaning, relations to us and so on. If we couldn't to that, we couldn't form cohesive groups, and therefore cease to exist as a species. We could become some other species, but not the current one, having discourse over the internet, sitting in different parts of the world.
All higher order concepts like "love", "purpose" etc. are more elaborate functions to sucessfully and peacefully live together. They actually exist, even physically, as processes in our brains and bodies. But they aren't necessarily ojective. If we as a species would have originated in a physically different world, say as spherical creatures living in the oceans of Titan, we would also have different sets of feelings and emotions. The idea of "love" of such a species could be a completely different one than our human concept.
> do I know a single religious person, yet most of those people feel some kind of purpose or meaning in their live.
Ah well yes, :). Being religious - vs - having an inner meaning/{what some people call god}/aka being spiritual - is like having gone through a CS program in an expensive university - vs - actually knowing how to code.
If that's all we're talking about then there are barely any true atheists.
However, a deep understanding of that gives you freedom. Because if everything is objectively meaningless, then just by virtue of finding something interesting, you have just given that something MORE meaning than everything else. Thus, whatever you find interesting is almost infinitely more meaningful than anything else.
That's pretty cool - your choice changes the entire universe, for you. If you manage to be persistent enough, then for others as well. Kind of makes you all-powerful ;)
Don't worry winter_blue. Your soul is not your brain! Life begins for us when we don't have brains after all. God also exists outside our brains and bodies. God has given our souls tools (brain, body) which work in marvellous ways. What motivates you and gives you meaning isn't something that is conjured up by your brain to just to budget energy in the body.
For those who don't believe in souls: Your heart is not your brain. Love is not your brain. What you feel deep down to be right, good and true is our heart. What motivates you and gives you meaning isn't something that is conjured up by your brain just to budget energy in the body.
To those who don't believe in (one or more of:) heart, soul, love, meaning, motivation, or anything higher: Assuming your thoughts are that humans are a bio-robot, the system itself creates meaning and motivation. The system, as if in a simulation, creates these sub-systems which for all intents and purposes are designed to be as if they are real. These sub systems are present in nature also to a lesser (or at least more opaque) extent. If you believe that X is not real because your body, brain and the robot you are in, simulates X, then X is at the very least functionally real if not fundamentally. Thus, similar to the question about what we should do if we were in a simulation, it's probably going to be best to go along with the ride.
> Social conformity or not, Mr. Zuckerman was deeply impressed with the matter-of-fact way in which many of his interviewees spoke of death, without fear or anxiety, and their notable lack of existential searching for any ultimate meaning of life.
> A long list of thinkers, both believers and nonbelievers, have posited something like an innate religious instinct. Confronted by the mystery of death or the puzzle of life’s ultimate meaning, humans are said to be hard-wired to turn to religion or something like it. Based on his experience in Scandinavia, Mr. Zuckerman disagrees.
I'm sorry to break your feelings, but your belief can't survive the logical analysis, even if we accept the existence of higher conscious entities.
It's more reasonable to believe that we are free to pick a purpose.
Meaning isn't out there to be found in the universe, it is a purely human concept. We can't find meaning, we must create it.
If this article prevents you from doing that, then your sense of meaning may need shoring up.
That would be irrelevant if it was also true. The universe doesn't guarantee/care for meaning and/or true purpose.
What exactly falsifiable indications do you have of that?
I don't know why you would phrase it that way. What does "believe in" mean?
That they are a tool that can be used for some purposes? Yes sure.
That they are the only tool that has any meaning, the only one that matters, or even the one that produces most truth? In that case - no, not even close.
I wrote that your original statement is more of an opinion/spiritual statement than a falsifiable scientific statement. Then by extension and simple logic, of course the exact opposite of your statement (does care vs does not care) is also obviously an opinion/spiritual statement. As such, it of course doesn't neither have falsifiable indications. How could it be any other way?
It just didn't sound like you realize that what you wrote is an opinion, and not some hard-cut proved and obvious statement, so I was wondering whether you realize it? Or do you have an illusion that you have provable grounds for it?
It's just a casual way to say "If you're all for theories and falsifiliability".
(It's also pedantically correct. In the end everything comes down to believing it).
>I wrote that your original statement is more of an opinion/spiritual statement than a falsifiable scientific statement.
It's also empirically consistent. The observed universe is mostly gas, rock, nuclear reactors we call stars, and so on. Where are the proofs that it has a "purpose" or "meaning"?
>It just didn't sound like you realize that what you wrote is an opinion, and not some hard-cut proved and obvious statement, so I was wondering whether you realize it? Or do you have an illusion that you have provable grounds for it?
No, I have the certainty that it's the only empirically matching to observables conclusion, and that it's the less extraordinary claim (and the simplest one).
It's any further claims that need to bring proof. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, Occam's razor, and all that.
Where are the visible proofs of love? Of mathematical formulas? Of radio waves? Where is the tangible visible obvious proof that the earth is not flat? Where is the tangible proof that your life has any future that makes any sense for you to get up in the morning and do any work?
"There is no meaning because I can't physically see an old guy in the sky" has to be one of the least developed arguments in this sphere...
Physiological changes in the body/brain consistently assosiated with said self-reported state.
>Of mathematical formulas?
We can reproduce most of their results with physical objects (adding 1 and 1 rocks makes 2 rocks, the shortest line between two points we can draw with less ink on a piece of paper is the straight line, in a sphere it's the geodesic and it indeed saves planes gas, and so on...)\
>Of radio waves?
Err, plenty of visible proofs of radio waves. You can very easily scan a room with a portable scanner, not to mention we hear the sound they carry.
>Where is the tangible visible obvious proof that the earth is not flat?
Photographs from space?
>Where is the tangible proof that your life has any future that makes any sense for you to get up in the morning and do any work?
There's none, since that doesn't exist.
Ah, I see. Sorry about that. If you feel that way in your life, then it makes sense that you believe the things you write.
Yes.
>they are a product of “accident or chance”
Yes.
>they are but MeetMe automatons
Hahahahahah no, only if they choose to be.
Deeply understanding the implications of points 1 and 2 give you the freedom to not put up with bullshit, and can lead to, dare I say it, salvation?
Where science and religion merge into a coherent whole is the true kingdom of heaven.
There are different periods for different focus as well.
Spirituality is a system built up inside every individual that fills their life with meaning and expands their consciousness. The common spiritual texts, including the new testament are a good tool to build up this spirituality, inside each particular individual, that works for a large number of people. It has been selected by the group consciousness as a particularly good tool, good aid in helping people this way. It is not the only tool, and for a particular individual might not even be the best one, but it is a good one that has stood the test of time.
The religion on the other hand usually refers to the outside structure that is often built on top of a spiritual tradition/text. It includes structural elements like the network of churches, some additional practices, political movements, attempts to control population, hierarchy systems between priests, reputation etc. It is this additional structure that much more often gets corrupted by the natural human corruptive forces, just like governments, corporations or large open source frameworks do. When people get power, they sometimes corrupt, and they do it with whatever the underlying structure was.
The law of Moses in the Old Testament for the Jews was such that if you broke one law, you broke all, essentially making it impossible for anyone to achieve salvation by following the law or by working for it.
The Gentiles (non Jews) who do not have God’s written law, show that they know his law when they instinctively obey it, even without having heard it
Enter New Testament: Jesus Christ of Nazareth, comes not to abolish the law, but to fulfil it, such that every man (being) receives the FREE gift of salvation, and eternal life.
Now this life bears good fruit in all that believe.
Image you owe someone else money. An anonymous stranger pays your debt. Why would you have to acknowledge that, for that someone else to receive said payment?
God in the form of Jesus paid your debts you have with God, but unless you believe that, God won't recognize that, will still kill you at best, torture you forever at worst, depending on who you ask. You can call that love or salvation, but I won't.
Look, If your debt was paid, and no one told you that the debt was paid, or you had no knowledge of it, would your conscience be free of that debt? No.
The Gospel is preached to bring man to the knowledge that they are free, and live freely therein.
> Truth is something so noble that if God could turn aside from it, I could keep the truth and let God go.
-- Meister Eckhart
I know next to nothing about Christianity, but I know a few things about Judaism. And I've never encountered this idea in Judaism. Do you have a source for this? Is this actually a teaching of the Law of Moses, as you call it, or just something Christians think Jews believed?
Seems like a straw man.
> Enter New Testament: Jesus Christ of Nazareth, comes not to abolish the law, but to fulfil it, such that every man (being) receives the FREE gift of salvation, and eternal life.
Pardon my cynicism but this seems kind of ridiculous. God made a bunch of laws about how people should behave, presumably because there's right and wrong and the particular things God cares about matter, and then Jesus renegotiated the deal on behalf of everyone? So we can all do whatever we want, like rape, steal, homosexuality[0]... it's all cool. Jesus paid your debt, go sin.
[0] Intentionally grouping murder and gay sex together because the Old Testament calls these things bad behavior. If Jesus renegotiated the deal by arguing that some of these things are not really bad, so maybe some of the rules should be changed but others should be kept, I'd get that. But that's not the claim you're making.
Well, If you are familiar with the book of James (a Jew) in the bible, he says this, "For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it." The law is a single unit.
> God made a bunch of laws about how people should behave, presumably because there's right and wrong and the particular things God cares about matter
Sin precedes the law and not the other way round. The law was given because of transgression. Look at the law as a guardian, a schoolmaster, to protect, and to preserve for a time, till the Saviour should come. God did not intend to relate with man through the law because by the law, is the knowledge of sin.
>... it's all cool. Jesus paid your debt, go sin.
If anyone is living in sin and claims that he or she is living under grace, let me be the first to tell you that this person is not living under grace. How can he or she be when God’s Word clearly states that “sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law but under grace” (Rom. 6:14)? Based on the authority of God’s Word, a person who is under grace will not be dominated by or want to continue living in sin.
He Who Is Forgiven Much, Loves Much.
The book of James is not part of Jewish canon and is not read by Jews. It's a Christian book. That James was a Jew is irrelevant, Jesus was also a Jew, does that mean the teachings of Jesus are Judaism? Woody Allen is Jewish too, but you can't quote his movies and call them Jewish teachings.
> Sin precedes the law and not the other way round. The law was given because of transgression. Look at the law as a guardian, a schoolmaster, to protect, and to preserve for a time, till the Saviour should come. God did not intend to relate with man through the law because by the law, is the knowledge of sin.
Ok, I can kind of understand this. It's a fundamentally different idea of the purpose of the rules and the nature of right and wrong. Seems foreign to me because I thought the law was to protect people from doing inherently bad things, and sin is just a fancy word for bad things. So I didn't understand how Jesus could make doing bad things suddenly ok. But this sounds like a more relativistic approach. Ok, I can get behind that I guess.
> If anyone is living in sin and claims that he or she is living under grace, let me be the first to tell you that this person is not living under grace. How can he or she be when God’s Word clearly states that “sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law but under grace” (Rom. 6:14)? Based on the authority of God’s Word, a person who is under grace will not be dominated by or want to continue living in sin.
I have no idea what this means, sounds like a lot of jargon that I'm sure makes sense to someone who is familiar with it but I don't get it.
The obvious question is: why? Why was it ever necessary, if God is omnipotent? Why was it so late, so that people living earlier had no chance? And so on.
The Gnostics, Marcions and so on came up with another interesting idea: there were two Gods, one from the Old Testament, and another from the New Testament. The former was the creator but wasn't really caring for his creation. The latter was the God of Love and he sent his son in order to save mankind - Jesus was a kind of ransom paid to the former. This theory has slightly more sense than the one presented in mainstream Christianity.
To answer this, God is a just God. If the penalty of sin is death, then surely someone had to die to pay the price. God could have just swept all mankind's sins under the rag, and acted like nothing ever happened. But such would not be considered integrity or righteousness on God's part.
Also if by one man (Adam), sin came into the world, and all men were considered sinners, then justly, by one man (Jesus Christ)'s death and resurrection, the price was fully paid, all men (mankind) can now freely claim the gift of righteousness.
>Why was it so late, so that people living earlier had no chance?
Well just like you stated, God is omnipotent, and not limited by time and space. It's never late or early in God's eyes. We would not explicitly say they had no chance, then or now, goes back to God being Just.
In my opinion though, the relationship nature of Christianity holds up well both in the Old Testament and New Testament.
Parts are forever apart.