Who said "everything?
Anyway, phyllo, it hasn’t actually been established that grace necessarily comes from God (speaking as an agnostic). It might be nothing more than being in the right place at the right time and a highly conscious realization and awareness flows into our “entire” beings as a result of some sense of qualia pervading our higher spirits. Like any epiphany, it might appear to come out of the blue, but I do not intuit that this is the way that epiphanys or transformations come to us. They have been seething and working underground for quite awhile.
If i were ever to “see” a God again, it would be a highly impersonal one so grace for me would be as i described above. More like an interface between mind/emotions being and the workings of the universe.
There are more things in heaven (deep space lol) and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio
And if there is a God and this God sends grace, again, meaning free, for me, it is presupposed that the person receiving the grace also has the freedom to reject it. How can one receive grace and be a puppet at the same time.
Doesn’t one have to see the value of something in order to accept it?
When I give a gift, especially if I do not know if the person will like it, I always keep the receipt and I tell them that naturally they can return that gift if they want to. It was freely given and it can be freely taken back for something else. If I feel that way, why would a God not feel that way?
Well, if there IS a God, that would depend on the individual but I daresay it might also depend on the omniscience (if there be such a quality) of that God and how pragmatic and non-wasteful that God is.
Why waste grace on someone who sees no value in it.Is grace simply for the use of the person him/her -self or for the whole of humanity or at least a small area of it?
I’m with Patrick Henry - “Give me liberty or give me death.”
Why would we have evolved into consciousness, conscious thought, the freedom to make our own choices - we can after all do this to more than a certain degree - if EVERTHING is attributed to a god’s grace?
That would seem to be illogical to me.
That seems to come from a “Daddy in the sky” issue to me. Daddy does everything, gives everything.
How can an individual grow and mature under the albeit even the benign control of a god?
I choose NOT to be a part of the Borg.
I prefer the deists’ view of things, the hands-off laissez faire view.
As a teacher, I predetermine the conditions for each child’s growth based on each individual child’s needs and through this hidden process the child grows and matures and hopefully, as they age, they remain as students and are lifelong learners (as I view myself).
In relation to “imagine” John Lennon himself refered to it as essentially a communist manifesto and said “us, we should have a nice … British Socialism” and so there is nothing misleading about what I said.
You are being dishonest. John Lennons full words are thus:
Further more, by “One World” he was not referring to a one world government or New World Order, but a world without government or politics, because in the song he says “Imagine no more politics”.
Britain is less of a prison system than America and at the time, Britain didn’t have the extensive CCTV system it has now, so Lennon was referring to the most pleasant and non-restrictive government that he could.
Teachers are great, that is, if they’re good and caring ones.
I don’t know, One Liner. Can YOU actually predetermine those conditions? It seems to me that they have already been pre-determined by nature, ancestry, environment, et cetera. But what you CAN do is set up a structured plan and intellectual environment towards each child’s individual needs.