Now I understand Jesus

Ah, finally it's clear what the difference is between Jesus, Dracula, Frankenstein, and a zombie.

Thanks, Pharyngula blog.

Comments

[e]

Very funny and naughty.

[guesswho -zombiezoo]

seems you don't understand nothing whatsoever

[Roger]

I desire to learn and understand something about nothingness. Could someone help me?
Thanks for any help,
Roger

[Blogger Brian]

Roger, I can't help you. But I can share a few thoughts about nothingness.

If nothingness existed, it would be something: a nothing.

So I guess nothingness doesn't exist. Just a guess, but that's something.

Alan Watts says that reality, for us, is nothing other than what we are beholding at the moment.

That's a way to look upon nothingness: there's nothing other than the something we're aware of.

Hmmmm. Maybe the notion of nothingness points us toward a realization that something is the real deal, not nothing.

If there has never been nothing, then the cosmos always has been, is, and will be.

No need to believe in God, then. Just in something. Though there is nothing else to believe in, nothingness having been taken off the belief table.

[John]

Hi Roger,

Take a look at the colors in the diagram again, because they're an illusion. The color orange is pure white light after every other color in the color spectrum, except orange, is filtered out. We refer to a blank white page or pure white light as nothing, when in reality it is everything.

A pictorial entity is not created by adding something to nothing, but by taking something away from everything, in a similar manner as a color slide takes away something from the white light in the slide projector in producing a perceptible image. If we look at a screen when there's not a slide in the projector we say, "there's nothing there."

Our perceptions, whether physical or mental, act as filters just as the slide acts as a filter. Our mind, or the slide, creates a duality between what is and what is not, (orange and not orange) and we mistakenly call what is not, nothing. So instead of thinking of creatio ex nihilo, we can look at things as creatio ex omnia.

Pure white light contains all possibility and potentiality of colors, yet ironically doesn’t create a particular color, because what that particular color is, is simply a delimitation of pure white light.

By placing a primacy on what is, we create the duality of what is not. However, we can avoid this by placing a primacy on potentiality, whereby we'd have the undiffused all (white light) versus what is not the all (a particular color).

What 'is' can be looked at as a subtraction from everything rather than an addition to nothing, and hence, we can dismiss the concept of nothingness as a false duality.

-John

Note: reading, "Return to the One," and stumbled across this site.

[Blogger Brian]

John, nicely said. I enjoyed your creative philosophizing. "Placing a primacy on potentiality"... I like the alliteration; also the notion of an undiffused all. (Very Plotinian.)