by WolfVanZandt » June 4th, 2006, 6:53 pm
Robert, what Jesus said was not an analogy; it was a direct answer to the discipes' request to see the Father. Jesus said that you can't see the Father because He is spirit and you can't see spirit but you can see Jesus and He and the Father are One. In other words, the only way you can see spirit is if it's clothed in body.
The Bible didn't say that it was Samuel being conjured up. It indicated that the medium certainly believed that it was Samuel. And Saul probably believed it too. In light of Jesus' words, I would question it.
Like many since Plato, I really question Plato's sensibility in coming up with that whole forms thing. He believed that you cannot at all experience realty but must know it through intuitions gained by your spirit long before you were born - that's made rather clear in the Meno. :) You should know my stance on old phiosophers.
Now, I do believe that we're able to "see" subtle entities in the world simply because our brain is able to form a virtual reality in which we can virtually interact with them (it's, in fact, the "shamanic world") but I have quite a few reasons to believe that ghosts are not (usually) human spirits, demons, or angels - some of them I've already stated.
I may have been unclear about Berkeley - I didn't mean that he was agnostic about God. Despite the fact that he never proposed any logical basis of a belief in God, he doggedly held to the belief that God was the source of ideas. Berkeley was totally agnostic about the material world. He held that abstract ideas have no reality and sense impressions and other ideas about the material world were abstract ideas: therefore, they have no reality and we reall can't know anything about the material world.