JR, I don't think you get it. If you do your own research, you find out things, if you just accept what people tell you, you don't find the answers. Exactly what are the same questions Barry has been asking for years? He seems to have come to his own conclusions about many things. If you say to someone 'You've been told the answer', then accuse them of not accepting it, the reason for not accepting it is 1) they intend to research it further before coming to a conclusion or 2) they have researched it and found that what they were told was mistaken, or unprovable, or just nonsense. I think your brain is scrambled because to do your own research means you cannot first believe what someone tells you. You just use it as a spring board for an investigation, a starting point. What you are told is not the finish line. You are making the fatal assumption that when someone investigates what they are told they will come to the same conclusion as what they were told, and this is the Achilles heel of bad reasoning, that someone will always find what you think they should find.
If I think something is correct, that does not mean that I am not mistaken. If you want to counter Barry's comments and arguments, you have to respond to them in a reasoned way that demonstrates you know what you are talking about. It is not clear that you do. When dealing with facts, the situation is a bit easier than dealing with abstractions like 'enlightenment' for which most information is not factual, for one is discussing something that literally cannot be described with any real precision. That might lead one to conclude it does not really exist. Suppose that were true? Suppose that 'good' and 'evil' do not really exist, but that those ideas were just something you were told and you bought into the ideas? How would you begin to research this, to find out if they did nor did not exist? How would you go about finding out if enlightenment exists? What are the requirements that would have to be satisfied for finding out if enlightenment exists? Have you found the answer yet? For if not, you would not know that it exists. In this thread Barry asked the following questions, and they do not seem to be questions he has asked for many years: 'What's in the big pink box, man?' (a quotation from a movie) Now, JR, please tell me. Was that "good" or "evil?" (a question he asked you about the body count in the Iraq wars) ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <jr_esq@...> wrote : Pastor Barry, You've been asking the same questions for many years now. You've been told the answer, but you don't listen. You should do your own research and find out for yourself the true answer.
