Saturday, February 20, 2010

Spiritual Truths-As the crow flies!

One of Raven's delights is to find spiritual truths admitted in outside sources of information.
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In today's Newsday, Saturday-February 20, 2010 in the relgious section, (pg. B15) a question was asked, "When was hell created?" In part, Marc Gellman of the God Squad answered....."the idea of the soul as distinct from the body emerged after the Pharisees(later rabbis) encountered Greek philosophy after the conquests of Alexander the Great in 331 BC. Alexander's tutor, Aristoltle, believed that everything was made of matter and form.
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"Simply put, matter was formless stuff, and form was what made matter into, well, stuff. Form was an idea. God, of course, was pure form (Immaterial).
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"The Jewish thinkers who were enraptured by Greek thought could not endorse Aristotle's idea of a God who had nothing to do with the world.....But the idea of matter and form was very appealing to them. So what they did was to equate matter with the human body, and form with the human soul. That is how the idea of the duality of body and soul replaced the old biblical idea of nefesh as our life, which ends when we die.
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"The idea of body and soul was the most importand idea taken into Judaism, and later Christianty and Islam from Greek philosophy. It was the major revolution in Judaism that separated and distinguished biblical Judaism from rabbinic Judaism. The heart of this theological revolution was that it paved the way for belief in the existence of the soul after death. This was easy since the soul was, like God immaterial and thus could not die."
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This is Raven-as the crow flies

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