The
Ground of FaithEditor: The Reenchantment of the Cosmos
Perhaps the more our Holy Communion embraces the deeper it will be. We may feel our communion to be with Christ and those others around the Holy Table, or it can include this, but also with the Christ who is in all, through all, and above all, with the God in whom we live and move and have our being. We explore this in this issue. The deeper this communion is, the wider our compassion our feeling-with, our empathy, and our love. Karen Armstrong explores this compassion. Ian Stephenson's life time of research suggests that this particular life in a physical body is not the only corporeal experience of our spirits: this widens our compassion for we see all our fellow human beings as undergoing learning experiences similar to our own. The article on Spiricom leads us to have compassion or feel with those in the next stage of spiritual growth, and understand that they take their earthly skills and temperaments with them. Sean Howard's "Very different butterflies" helps us to empathise with other cultures. Kenneth Ring's Lessons from the Light" enormously increases our feelings for things spiritual.
We have used Ervin Laszlo's book title The Reenchantment of the Cosmos in ways different from those he intended. But reenchantment is one of the results of compassion, empathy, feeling-with, and yes, love. We must love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength, and our neighbour as ourselves.
Editor: The strange lack of Church journals investigating the Afterlife
The reason for the existence of The Ground of Faith is
that the journals of the "mainline" churches do not appear to
discuss a matter that traditionally has been central to the Christian
faith, namely the Afterlife, the spiritual dimension of existence.
Probably most Christians do in fact accept that physical death is not
their end, and do not disbelieve when there are references to life
after the death. The puzzle is that there is so little
preaching on the subject, and there seems to be a taboo on the subject
in theological journals. Christians who base their beliefs more
narrowly on selected Scriptual passages, may perhaps regard heeding
scientific research in this area as surrendering to
faithlessness. Other Christians may be much affected by the
materialists scorn of the whole subject. The only Church journal of
which I am aware that
flouts this taboo is The Christian Parapsychologist . Even this journal is cautious and somewhat tentative compared with The Journal of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies <http://www.aspsi.org/> which
does not fear to look in detail at the whole field of psychic
research. The latter journal is not church based, even though
those producing it are mainly practicising Christians: that it is not
church based perhaps saves them from looking over their shoulders at
theologians who might dissent. The good news is that the Academy of
Spirituality and Paranormal Studies Inc, who produce that journal, are
happy that reproduce selected lectures and articles which will be of
interest to readers of the Ground of Faith. Then there is
the Network Review the journal of the Scientific and Medical
Network, which provides articles on "Consciousness studies and
Psychology; Holistic and Mind-Body Medicine; Frontier and Paranormal
Science; Philosophy of Science; Ecology and Sustainability;
Spirituality and Religion." See also the Network Blogspot. EVP and ITC in Australia,.the
website of Rev. Rob Smith will interest some people. In future
issues we plan to have a special feature giving our readers access to
selected material from all these journals.Read these brief notes on the most recent issues of these journals
Karen Armstrong on COMPASSION
[From TED: Inspired talks by the world's greatest thinkers and doers]http://www.ted.com/index.php/ and Other talks: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks Well-worth inspecting.
[WIKIPEDIA on KAREN ARMSTRONG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Armstrong]
Karen
Armstrong (b. November 14, 1944 in Wildmoor, Worcestershire) is a
British author of numerous works on comparative religion, who first
rose to prominence with her highly successful History of God. A
former Catholic nun, she asserts that "All the great traditions
are saying the same thing in much the same way, despite their
surface differences." They each have in common, she says, an
emphasis upon the overriding importance of compassion, as expressed
by way of the Golden Rule: Do not do to others what you would not
have done to you.
Author of several books on the Muslim tradition, she has, since 9/11, become much in demand on the US lecture circuit. In February 2008 Armstrong called for a council of Christian, Muslim and Jewish leaders to draw up a “Charter of Compassion,” which would apply shared moral priorities to foster greater global understanding. Her interfaith initiative was awarded the $100,000 TED Prize, backed by an international conference of leading figures in the fields of design, entertainment and technology, [1][2]
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/234
TRIBUTE TO PSYCHIC RESEARCHER IAN STEVENSON
LONDON. A little over a year after the death of Prof Ian Stevenson (left), the indefatigable researcher best known for his reincarnation studies, fellow parapsychologists met in London to pay tribute to him on Saturday (26 April). They were participating in a Society for Psychical Research Study Day devoted to the life and legacy of a very remarkable man.
Prof Bruce Greyson, Stevenson’s successor as Carlson Professor of Psychiatry and director of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia Health System, Charlottesville, flew in from the US to talk about the work of the division as well as Stevenson’s less well known involvement in near-death experience (NDE) studies.
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http://www.hecklerspray.com/awesome-or-off-putting-spiricom/20077283.php
Awesome
or Off-Putting: SPIRICOM
March 5th, 2007 at 15:30 by Shawn Lindseth
SPIRICOM is a machine that allows two way communication with the dead in instant time. EVPs (Electronic Voice Phenomena) have been around for a while. They're the recorded voices of ghosts that you don't hear when the recording is made, but upon playback they become evident. SPIRICOM (the name is the combination of two words 'spirit' and 'communication') is a giant step forward - if it's real, that is. On the next page we have links to pages showing SPIRICOM in action, when Bill O'Neil has full-on conversations with his long dead friend Dr. George Mueller. In the recordings, Mueller even helps tweak the SPIRICOM system a bit - from beyond the grave.
SPIRICOM is a device that allows real-time communication with the dead. It was developed by George Meek and Bill O'Neil in 1979. O'Neil was a psychic, and used his special abilities to get help from the other side in developing the machine. When the device was completed, the pair used it to communicate with Dr. George J Mueller, a man who'd been dead at least 14 years.
The thought a device allowing such ghostly contact isn't new. Thomas Edison thought he could make one. More recently paranormal investigator Christopher Moon claims to have come into just such a device called 'Frank's Box', which allows the same sort of afterlife-communication. READ THE ARTICLE
MAY
THE FORCE BE WITH YOU - NATE CULL
Kid, I’ve travelled from one side of this galaxy to the other, and I’ve seen a lot of crazy stuff. But I’ve never seen anything to make me believe there’s one all-powerful force controlling my destiny. It’s all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.
– Han Solo, Star Wars
THE REALITY TESTS
by Joshua Roebke • Posted June 4, 2008 11:10 AM
Anton Zeilinger heads up the IQOQI lab in Vienna. Photograph by Mark Mahaney.
To enter the somewhat
formidable Neo-Renaissance building at Boltzmanngasse 3 in Vienna,
you must pass through a small door sawed from the original
cathedrallike entrance. When I first visited this past March, it was
chilly and overcast in the late afternoon. Atop several tall stories
of scaffolding there were two men who would hardly have been visible
from the street were it not for their sunrise-orange jumpsuits. As I
was about to pass through the nested entrance, I heard a sudden rush
of wind and felt a mist of winter drizzle. I glanced up. Read
‘Very
Different Butterflies’: The Scope for Deep Complementarity
Between Western and Native American Science
Sean Howard, Ph.D.
This is published by the Pari Center for New Learning, led by physicist David Peat
“In the Indigenous (and Chinese) tradition, physics is still grounded in metaphysics; the Western tradition has long regarded metaphysics as ‘anti-scientific.’ During the ascent of reductionism this stance appeared vindicated. The subsequent intrusion of radical uncertainties (quantum theory, chaos theory) have spurred efforts to revise the paradigm without concession to deep philosophic review. This effort has included limited recognition of the conceptual, though not scientific, merit of other traditions. Complementarity probably cannot be deepened in this direction without an abandonment of anti-metaphysical prejudice.” Read this significant article
Michael Prescott reviews Your Eternal Self
"I've started reading R. Craig Hogan's Your Eternal Self, and
I'm finding it very interesting. It's basically a compendium of evidence for the
proposition that philosophical materialism is wrong - that the mind is something
apart from the brain, and therefore likely to survive the death of the brain. In
a way, it's like a much less academic, much more popularized version of Irreducible
Mind - though much briefer and also, thankfully, not nearly as pricey. " Read Michael Prescott's Blog
A gentler kinder purgatory
National Catholic Reporter June 27, 2008
Article by Stafford Betty who is professor of religion at California State University, Bakersfield Read
Review: Kenneth Ring: Lessons from
the Light
['While providing many accounts of near-death experiences (NDEs) from men, women, and children of all ages and backgrounds, Lessons from the Light is much more than just an inspiring collection of NDEs. In Lessons near-death expert Kenneth Ring extracts the pure gold of the NDE and with a beautiful balance of sound research and human insight reveals the practical wisdom held within these experiences.
As Stanley Krippner states, "In this remarkable book, Ring presents evidence that merely learning about the near-death experience has similar positive effects to those reported by people who actually have had near-death experiences. Kenneth Ring is one of the few authors whose gifts include the capacity to transform their readers' lives." ]
The book can be ordered through Moment Point (from whose review the above was derived or through Amazon.
Read these other reviews___________________________
Understanding Near-Death Experience
An alternative interpretation. 
Sjoerd Bonting
"In metaphoric form, I suggest that during our earthly life an imaginery webcam makes a continuous video of our body-mind unity that is digitally stored in a heavenly computer. The special feature of the webcam is that it can record both our bodily charcteristics and our mental activities. On the last day the video is transformed into a resurrection body, in which our mind and thus our individual personality is incorporated. Finally, this resurrection body is brought to life by God's Spirit....I like to believe that in this metaphorical account I have combined the findings of Van Lommel and others about the NDE process with biblical-theological and scientific data without making unwarranted assumptions or incorrect use of scientific theories."
We are most grateful for the contributions of Prof Bonting, for his highly disciplined and scholarly writing, and for his wish, (which we share) that what we learn from research reported in this journal, should be of support to people of faith, especially those who are Christians. We need more Biblical scholars and other theologians to contribute articles. Naturally. being human, such scholars can disagree with each other; and helps us all to think things through and costruct our own pictures of reality.
Read the Article
______________________________
Consciousness and freedom
Prof Richard Cocks, SUNY Oswego NY USA
Nominalism is the claim that only individual entities are real, while the categories, or universals, or Ideas under which these individual things fall are not real. Richard argues that Locke's Nominalism leads to the conclusion that the contents of our minds are unreal. Read the article----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chasing our tails
William Wu Debunks 30 Common Skeptical Arguments Against Paranormal and Psychic Phenomena
Paul Sandoval writes a 84 page Skeptical response
A must for those interested in the Skeptics' arguments
__________________________________________________________________
God, science and religion today.
Louis de Figueiredo, Sao Pȃolo, Brazil
The writer considers a number of thinkers, Freud and Jung, Hawking,
William James. Jaspers, Darwin, Dawkins, Schönbom, Polkinghorne, de
Chardin, William Wilberforce and T.H. Huxley.Read the article
_________________________________________________________
Astronomer Discusses Evidence for Life After Death
Posted
on Jun 23rd, 2008 by
metgat
Mike Tymn interviews a living astronomer, and psychical researcher Archie Roy. Mike Tymn is on the council of The Academy of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies. To get a picture of the work of the Academy see: http://www.aspsi.org/pubs/journal_and_newsletter.php
Prof. Archie Roy
Whenever psychical researchers discuss the best evidence on record for the survival of consciousness after physical death, the so-called "cross-correspondences" are often listed as number one. However, the researchers always point out that the cross-correspondences are so complex that they are beyond the comprehension of anyone who is not a classical scholar and not prepared to spend years in studying the messages. "Whatever else they are, they are eminently communications from a man of letters, to be interpreted by scholars, and they are full of obscure classical allusions," wrote Sir Oliver Lodge, the distinguished British physicist and psychical researcher.
Dr. Archie E. Roy, professor emeritus of astronomy and honorary research fellow in the University of Glasgow, has studied the cross-correspondences and written about the key cases in a book, The Eager Dead, recently released by Book Guild Publishing of England. While the cross-correspondences are the core of the book, it is also a story of love and intrigue during the Edwardian age. Chief among the characters still in this realm of existence at the time are Arthur James Balfour, prime-minister of England from 1902-06, Lord Gerald William Balfour, his brother, Winifred Coombe-Tennant, an affluent English woman (British delegate to the League of Nations) who used the pseudonym "Mrs. Willett" so that no one would know that she was a medium, and Henry Coombe-Tennant, her son, who was completely unaware for most of his life of his mother's mediumship or his own involvement in many of the cross-correspondences.
<http://metgat.gaia.com/blog/2008/6/astronomer_discusses_evidence_for_life_after_death>
Meditation:
“So radiate...” Nate Cull
So radiate
I can’t see you
You’re just too far from me
– Carly Binding
Some people may already have been frustrated by links that don't work: The links are now working.