Hizban wrote:Once heard in a frat:
A- "Do you think there is a god?"
B- "I'm right here."
A- "What?"
B- "I look like one."
This is the funniest shit, no cap. And it's funnier that it's true! At risk of sounding like a youth pastor, I digress.
The Holy Spirit (HS), for those who are unaware, is the oft cited third portion of the Trinity, co-substantial and co-equal. It's the part of God that reveals itself most easily to humanity and is what makes humanity special. This was actually the first section that I thought of and the other revelations stemmed from this one.
Catechisms of the Catholic Church wrote:No one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now God's Spirit, who reveals God, makes known to us Christ, his Word, his living Utterance, but the Spirit does not speak of himself. The Spirit who "has spoken through the prophets" makes us hear the Father's Word, but we do not hear the Spirit himself. We know him only in the movement by which he reveals the Word to us and disposes us to welcome him in faith. The Spirit of truth who "unveils" Christ to us "will not speak on his own." Such properly divine self-effacement explains why "the world cannot receive [him], because it neither sees him nor knows him," while those who believe in Christ know the Spirit because he dwells with them.
The Catechism Lists some further responsibilities of the HS:
- The inspiration of the Scriptures and Traditions
- Assisting the Magisterium
- Bringing us into communion with Christ during the Sacraments
- Interceding during Prayer
- Revealing Himself in the work of missionaries and apostles
- Manifesting Holiness and salvation in the Saints
If you have a different interpretation/definition of the Holy Spirit, we can discuss your heresy later, for now, I will be using this definition. Parable time!
The Parable of the Mormon wrote:Two young missionaries of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints had been going door to door. They had been particularly successful that evening and were running low on fliers and gas. Stopping at a station to refuel, Luis, the blonde, started to muse on their last stop.
"I swear, I've never seen a woman so eager to accept Christ and his Word. At this rate, we will have this whole town converted by sundown!"
Jay, a thinner, dark haired kid two years Luis' junior, just smiled weakly and nodded at Luis. He stared out at the distant mountains and the purple and red creeping into the sky.
"Hey, do you think I could convert the gas station clerk?" Luis asked, putting the pump hose back in its holster.
Jay shrugged.
"I'm going to try it!" Luis said with a wink.
Jay followed him slowly into the building.
"Hellooo... Carver." Luis said, reading the cashier's name-tag. "Do you have a moment to talk about your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?"
Carver looked at the youth, it had been a slow night at the station and no one was around, "certainly." He replied.
"Do you believe in God?"
"Absolutely, don't you see him?"
"See him?" Luis literally stepped back, wondering for the first time if it takes a certain mind to work a gas station counter on the town's edge.
"Look into my eyes and tell me you do not see the Lord." Carver answered.
Across histories and cultures and time and space and continents and the rest, humans have always shared one thing in common: humanity. That may seem like a bit of a cop-out, especially when you start to look at our early cradle-mates
denisova and
neanderthalensis. Weak statements can still be true, and this is a fine enough starting point. Human's are really good at working together, it's our defining feature. Neanderthals, for example, were likely more robust, more muscular, better suited to their environment, and yet humans interbred/out-competed them. Neanderthals weren't necessarily less intelligent and they had larger brains, they simply had smaller tribal sizes, greater interbreeding, and a smaller propensity for recognizing God. Humans, as God's chosen people, recognize their shared blessings and have larger communities as a result.
Many in this thread were quick to jump on the many many wars fought on behalf of religions, this is true and sad. I make no justification for war and I do not believe God wishes (or ever wished) for us to kill the heathens but to have us reveal Him to them. These wars were fought by polities for glory and riches and land, by people who were kept together by a shared religion and annealed against the enemy by their hatred of the other. If only each side had realized the pointlessness of glory and riches and land compared to the Kingdom of God and the importance of the life of their common man, then they could be united as easily as the crusaders et al. had been united with eachother.
Indeed, in more modern times, and I must assume this happened in ancient times as well, during moments of crisis and disaster, humans are pulled together and work together in a way that can only be described as miraculous. Neighbor helps neighbor, stranger lifts up stranger. It's an extremely hopeful sight. Indeed, our vast networks of cooperation make our species incredibly, evolutionarily fit. Our ability to share and pass on knowledge in the form of memes has in places stunted the process of evolution altogether. We are made in God's image, we can learn to wield God's tools, like a daughter slipping on her daddy's giant shoes. We may not be good at it at first, but we will learn.
Between being made in our Lord's image and the Holy Spirit and soul within us, we can do unnatural things. A natural thing is a predetermined thing acting in a predetermined way based on the atoms inside of it and the forces upon it. God and humans can do unnatural things, manipulating the environment to our benefit or destruction in a way fundamentally more esoteric than any animal (a server room to an ant hill), creating new systems from the forces of physics that do not exist in the natural world (economics, sociology, marketing), and using these tools in complex and nuanced ways towards our own ends (rights, ideologies, medicines). This is the stuff God does, but instead of it being just Him, now He is coupled with our own humanity. This is the importance of the Holy Spirit.
A brief theological point. When God came down from heaven and became man, Jesus was fully human, but He didn't have a human soul within Him. Also strange is how God made covenants with humans beforehand, and how the Holy Spirit seems to need to be spread like a fire through a population from the origin point of Jesus Christ. This doesn't disparage my point much, humans are special and unique because of our souls, we are special and unique because of our ability to create exceedingly complex and manipulative tools that are too high to be grasped effectively without understanding them first. God shit.
Many people disparage God as being evil or mean for putting suffering into the world, and I want to turn my attention to that using the story of Adam and Eve.
The Parable of Adam and Eve wrote:God finishes making the heavens and the earth, decides to make a totally handsome, ripped man in His image. Gives the man some sweet digs and a neato job of naming all of the animals on the planet. He runs around all naked, but gets lonely. God puts Adam to sleep and steals a rib, crafting a totally hot bombshell babe. God tells them they can eat whatever they want but don't eat the Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. A slithery danger noodle tricks Eve to eat the Fruit, Adam gets in on that action, they learn what good and evil are, and God banishes them from the sweet digs with a bitchin' flaming sword.
Why He do that? He knew that they were going to eat the fruit, why did he make it so easy for them? How does this relate to proving the existence of the Holy Spirit?
God expelled us from the Garden of Eden because we knew what Good and Evil were, we stopped being animals and started being humans who could suss out problems in the world and recognize good things. The Garden of Eden was perfect, however. Our knowledge of good and evil was in-actionable within the Garden and I would argue that when we chose to eat the fruit, what we were really choosing was a life with pain and suffering in it, and also one with joy and true happiness.
This was a choice we had to make for ourselves. God doesn't want to see us suffer, He gave us a paradise, and He promises another paradise for those who do good (i.e. help decrease the suffering of the rest of His flock). The tree was easy to access because everything in the Garden of Eden was easy. There was no hardship. If God had placed the Tree on the opposite side of the planet surrounded by hurricanes and tornadoes eternal, then the fruit would be meaningless, because along the way Adam and Eve would learn suffering anyways.
This is important to the Existence of the Holy Spirit because it shows us our calling in life: to reduce Evil and promote Good. Societies that do so live longer, with happier, more fulfilled people, and as a reward for making the lives of those around us better, we can experience eternal Joy in Heaven. When we turn away from God, or otherwise promote Evil in the world, the amount of suffering increases. When we do the opposite, it decreases. All of the suffering in the world isn't God's fault, it's ours. He certainly could wave away all suffering, but in order for our actions (and inactions!) to have meaning, they have to have consequences.
Someone once said, "I can't believe in a just God in a world where children with cancer exist." and I think that this mode of thought is a mistake. The assumption is that the child did some terrible wrong thing, and for it, the child is being punished, but that's not true. What is happening is that everyone hasn't dedicated enough resources to ending childhood cancers, and so we have to live in a world where children die of cancer and the discomfort that causes. We are being punished for doing nothing when there is good we could be doing. If only we had done more, sooner, little Timmy might still be alive.
That empathy, and the discomfort it causes, is the Holy Spirit. That call to good is the Holy Spirit. Your ability to do something else is your soul.
Thankfully, Jesus laid out a really nice step by step guide for decreasing world suck!