G.O.D. is Real Being, not a being. In other words, G.0.D. is that which Generates, Organizes and Delivers: Good, Opportunity&Delight. GØD is not a being. G0D is Reality

G.O.D is how I symbolize total Being, or Reality. In my opinion, there is no supernatural and supreme being like the one we call God, one with dimensions who is served by angels, beyond the cosmos, in a place we call heaven

Sometimes, as needed, I also use the following symbols: GØD, and G0D. Note that, as needed, I also use the null and the zero. Both are symbols of where "finity" begins. I also like to use 'O' as a symbol of infinity--that in which the cosmos, including you and me, is immersed.

Google on the words panentheism and unitheism--terms which I began using in the 1980's and onwards. http://www.google.ca/search?q=unitheism+...

MATTER AND CONSCIOUSNESS -- about the basic work of Paul M. Churchland and his wife, Patricia.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpJSeLY8cWs

MAGIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpJSeLY8cWs

RevlindsayG King	12:01 (2 minutes ago)
to wmorris

Wendy:

The following is my response to a letter which Sheilah Noyes, known to me, wrote to the United Church Observer, on the Internet.

-------
From: RevlindsayG King <lindsaykin@gmail.com>
Date: 12 December 2011 11:36
Subject: She Chose to Die, Before Winter ... And did.
To: "Lindsay G. King" <lindsaykin@gmail.com>


Sheila, you write, "Should we/will we be allowed to have a physician assisted death when the suffering is great and when there is no hope for recovery? I hope so. The alternative is not to have a fulfilling life, but rather to have prolonged suffering. There is some suffering that only death can end."
=============
Good comments, Sheila, thanks. I hope the following true story--and there are others like it I could tell--written from the point of view of an octogenarian helps us all have the kind of "fulfilling life" you mention. I happen to believe that a fulfilling death is a part of the process.

The following happened several years ago, in the fall of the year, while I was the minister at Willowdale United Church.

The phone rang. "Rev. King, my name is ... I am not a member of your church, but mother is. May I come and see you at your office this evening." the young man said in a voice filled with distress. He went on, " It is about my mother. In her late seventies, she is in hospital, seriously ill and in great pain and distress about what is ahead of her. She asked if I would speak to you."

Later, in my office, the young man gave me the details of her condition. He said, "You may recall that mother is a diabetic. Awhile back she lost one of her legs. Just this week, her surgeon told her that he will have to amputate the other leg. On hearing this she said to me just this afternoon: 'Why doesn't God take me? I do not want to have to go through another winter like the one I just suffered. I hate to bother him with this medical problem, but would you call the Rev. King' for me?"

"Rev. King" he said, "I live a distance from here and am not active in any church, but through mother I have heard that, based on a program you call pneumatology, you have preached about and given many lectures on the power of what  you call pneumatherapy--something to do with a special kind of  hypnosis-based prayer. I realize you take a rational, non-magical approach to healing. So do you think this could help mother deal with the pain, suffering and distress she is now experiencing?"

I agreed to visit his mother as soon as I could.

Soon after talking to the son I spoke to the mother at the hospital. about what her son had told me. Then I engaged her in a very frank, open and even pleasant conversation about how she felt about her life and the choices we make--physically, mentally and spiritually. We talked about her family, about death, dying, and her thoughts about life eternal.

With her permission I said: Let me refresh your memory about the kind of hypnosis-based guided and meditative prayer I taught in the classes on holism. This being done I said: Now let's do it and I will give you the opportunity to add your thoughts as we go along. The process I call pneumatherapy took about twenty five minutes.

To those who ask questions about pneumatherapy and the healing arts I always make it clear: Yes, I often consult with the few medical doctors who show an interest. Some, including naturepaths, chiropractors and the like,  have even taken the program. Some are on a special board set up by the church board.

Two days later, I got the following call from the son: "Rev. King, I cannot thank you enough. This morning I got a call. The doctor's nurse called me. She said: 'Early this morning your mother died, peacefully, in her sleep.' "

Three days later, at the funeral, he and I shared with all present what had happened.

Yes, I agree: Family, friends and all, including good practitioners of the healing arts, have a role to play in how we live in and exit this physical life. But let us never forget the specific role that, by the power of the Holy Spirit (Pneuma) those who say we are servants--lay and clergy--of the Great Physician can play.

For more information you can check out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatology
http;//www.lindsayking.ca

PRIMARY COLOURS--Spirit, Mind and Body

THE PRIMARY COLOURS AND WHAT THEY SYMBOLIZE
===================================
BLUE--symbolizing our human spirit and our connection with G.O.D. It is the colour of the sky, which reflects, in the oceans and lakes, as dark blue--is the symbol of LOVE--the ability to say I am and, therefore, I choose to be.

GOLDEN YELLOW--symbolizing the human mind and our ability to learn and make use of what we learn and understand. It is the colour of the Suns, Moons, stars and Galaxies. It is the symbol for I think, understand and know.

RED--symbolizing the cosmos in its material form and filled with energy and power. Just looking at this colour stimulates us to turn on the power and energy to do, to act and get things done. It is the colour of blood that flows through our arteries and veins just beneath the skin, and of the magma which powers and energizes our planet earth.
=============

IS PNEUMATOLOGY NOW A SCIENCE? I predicted it would be, in early 1960's

Excerpt from THE NATIONAL POST

Roy F. Baumeister And John Tierney, National Post · Nov. 29, 2011 | Last Updated: Nov. 29, 2011 3:19 AM ET

However you define success - a happy family, good friends, a satisfying career, robust health, financial security, the freedom to pursue your passions - it tends to be accompanied by a couple of qualities. When psychologists isolate the personal qualities that predict "positive outcomes" in life, they consistently find two traits: intelligence and self-control. So far researchers still haven't learned how to permanently increase intelligence. But they have discovered, or at least rediscovered, how to improve self-control.

Hence this book. We think that research into willpower and self-control is psychology's best hope for contributing to human welfare. Willpower lets us change ourselves and our society in small and large ways. As Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, "The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts." The Victorian notion of willpower would later fall out of favour, with some 20th-century psychologists and philosophers doubting it even existed. Even Roy Baumeister, one of this book's authors, started out as something of a skeptic. But then he observed willpower in the laboratory: how it gives people the strength to persevere, how they lose selfcontrol as their willpower is depleted, how this mental energy is fuelled by the glucose in the body's bloodstream. He and his collaborators discovered that willpower, like a muscle, becomes fatigued from overuse but can also be strengthened over the long term through exercise.

Since Baumeister's experiments first demonstrated the existence of willpower, it has become one of the most intensively studied topics in social science (and those experiments now rank among the most-cited research in psychology). He and colleagues around the world have found that improving willpower is the surest way to a better life.

They've come to realize that most major problems, personal and social, centre on failure of self-control: compulsive spending and borrowing, impulsive violence, underachievement in school, procrastination at work, alcohol and drug abuse, unhealthy diet, lack of exercise, chronic anxiety, explosive anger. Poor self-control correlates with just about every kind of individual trauma: losing friends, being fired, getting divorced, winding up in prison. It can cost you the U.S. Open, as Serena Williams's tantrum in 2009 demonstrated; it can destroy your career, as adulterous politicians keep discovering. It contributed to the epidemic of risky loans and investments that devastated the financial system, and to the shaky prospects for so many people who failed (along with their political leaders) to set aside enough money for their old age.

Ask people to name their greatest personal strengths, and they'll often credit themselves with honesty, kindness, humor, creativity, bravery, and other virtues - even modesty. But not self-control. It came in dead last among the virtues being studied by researchers who have surveyed more than a million people around the world. Of the two dozen "character strengths" listed in the researchers' questionnaire, self-control was the one that people were least likely to recognize in themselves. Conversely, when people were asked about their failings, a lack of self-control was at the top of the list.

People feel overwhelmed because there are more temptations than ever. Your body may have dutifully reported to work on time, but your mind can escape at any instant through the click of a mouse or a phone. You can put off any job by checking e-mail or Facebook, surfing gossip sites, or playing a video game. A typical computer user checks out more than three dozen websites a day. You can do enough damage in a 10-minute online shopping spree to wreck your budget for the rest of the year. Temptations never cease.

We often think of willpower as an extraordinary force to be summoned to deal with emergencies, but that's not what Baumeister and his colleagues found when they recently monitored a group of more than 200 men and women in central Germany. These Germans wore beepers that went off at random intervals seven times a day, prompting them to report whether they were currently experiencing some sort of desire or had recently felt such a desire. The painstaking study, led by Wilhelm Hofmann, collected more than 10,000 momentary reports from morning until midnight.

Desire turned out to be the norm, not the exception. About half the time, people were feeling some desire at the moment their beepers went off, and another quarter said a desire had just been felt in the past few minutes. Many of these desires were ones they were trying to resist. The researchers concluded that people spend more than a fifth of their waking hours resisting desires - between three and four hours per day. Put another way, if you tapped five people at any random moment of the day, one of them would be using willpower to resist a desire. And that doesn't even include all the instances in which willpower is exercised, because people use it for other things, too, such as making decisions.

The most commonly resisted desire in the beeper study was the urge to eat, followed by the urge to sleep, and then by the urge for leisure, like taking a break from work by doing a puzzle or game instead of writing a memo. Sexual urges were next on the list of most-resisted desires, a little ahead of urges for other kinds of interactions, like checking email and social-networking sites, surfing the web, listening to music, or watching television. To ward off temptation, people reported using various strategies. The most popular was to look for a distraction or to undertake a new activity, although sometimes they tried suppressing it directly or simply toughing their way through it.

Overall, they succumbed to about a sixth of the temptations. They were relatively good at avoiding sex, and the urge to spend money, but only mediocre at passing up food and soft drinks. When they tried resisting the lure of television, the web, and other media sirens, they failed nearly half the time.

That track record sounds discouraging, and the rate of failure may well be pretty high by historical standards. We have no way of knowing how much our ancestors exercised self-control in the days before beepers and experimental psychologists, but it seems likely that they were under less strain. During the Middle Ages, most people were peasants who put in long, dull days in the fields, frequently accompanied by prodigious amounts of ale. They weren't angling for promotions at work or trying to climb the social ladder, so there wasn't a premium on diligence (or a great need for sobriety). Their villages didn't offer many obvious temptations beyond alcohol, sex, or plain old sloth. Virtue was generally enforced by a desire to avoid public disgrace rather than by any zeal to achieve human perfection. In the medieval Catholic Church, salvation depended more on being part of the group and keeping up with the standard rituals than on heroic acts of willpower.

But as farmers moved into industrial cities during the 19th century, they were no longer constrained by village churches and social pressures and universal beliefs. The Protestant Reformation had made religion more individualistic, and the Enlightenment had weakened faith in any kind of dogma. Victorians saw themselves as living in a time of transition as the moral certainties and rigid institutions of medieval Europe died away. A popular topic of debate was whether morality could survive without religion. Many Victorians came to doubt religious principles on theoretical grounds, but they kept pretending to be faithful believers because they considered it their public duty to preserve morality.

Today it's easy to mock their hypocrisy and prudery, like the little skirts they put on table legs - no bare ankles! Mustn't excite anyone! If you read their earnest sermons on God and duty, or their battier theories on sex, you can understand why people of that era turned for relief to Oscar Wilde's philosophy: "I can resist everything except temptation." But considering all the new temptations available, it was hardly neurotic to be searching for new sources of strength. As Victorians fretted over moral decay and the social pathologies concentrated in cities, they looked for something more tangible than divine grace, some internal strength that could protect even an atheist.

They began using the term "willpower" because of the folk notion that some kind of force was involved - some inner equivalent to the steam powering the Industrial Revolution. People sought to increase their store of it by following the exhortations of the Englishman Samuel Smiles in Self-Help, one of the most popular books of the 19th century on both sides of the Atlantic.

"Genius is patience," he reminded readers, explaining the success of everyone from Isaac Newton to Stonewall Jackson as the result of "self-denial" and "untiring perseverance." Another Victorian-era guru, the American minister Frank Channing Haddock, published an international bestseller titled simply The Power of Will. He tried to sound scientific by calling it "an energy which is susceptible of increase in quantity and of development in quality," but he had no idea - much less any evidence - of what it might be. A similar notion occurred to someone with better credentials, Sigmund Freud, who theorized that the self depended on mental activities involving the transfer of energy.

But Freud's energy model of the self was generally ignored by subsequent researchers. It wasn't until recently, in Baumeister's laboratory, that scientists began systematically looking for this source of energy.

========================================

From Willpower by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney. Published by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright © Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney, 2011.

As I have said elsewhere, I was born on January 14, 1930, and was raised--from 0 to 8--in dire poverty in a rough and ready mining community called Number One, because it was near the first iron-ore mine opened on Bell Island in 1895.

Number seven of eight children--five boys and three girls--I lived too far from the United Church, and the church-owned-and-operated School--near what is still called The Front--to attend any of the church and school activities until we moved to The Front in 1938.

As a child, despite the rough living conditions I look back with fond memories to the eight years I lived in Number One. Once I got old enough--six to eight--to take off with my very protective older brothers, or even on my own--every day was an adventure--sometimes high-life-threatening kinds of adventure--near the steep and jagged cliffs and coves, with romantic names life Grebe's Nest conve, and Ocre-Pit Cove within walking-distance of Number One Mines. Looking back, I don't remember ever having a dull moment as a child.

Sad to say, one day--I was off on my own adventure--one of my friends was killed. As he was walking along a beach near a steep cliff. The story was that a rock fell--some said that it was thrown by .......from the cliff and stuck him a fatal blow on the head. It was also rumoured that the stone was

KINGS' CASTLE IN NUMBER ONE
===========================
Living in the style of the times: We ten Kings had to live in one half of a rented-tenement-shack-like-gray-shingled building, which we rented from the company--Dominion Iron Steel and Coal Inc.

Amenities? ...[More on this, later]

NOW TO THE THEME OF THE BLOG
============================
Some time ago, Because it had no real meaning for me, I retired the serious use of the proper noun, God--along with calling him a he and a him.

In my opinion, 'god' is not a being--natural or supernatural--with dimensions.

I experience 'god' as G0d, GOD or even as G+O+D--note that I use special acronyms--as dimension-less Being in which all things, which have dimensions,

Of course, this includes human beings. As such, in GOD we live move and have our physical, mental and spiritual and indivisible individualities. As Jesus, in John 10:34 puts it: Our role is--if we lovingly choose to be so--to be G0ds within GOD.
[XXXXXXXXXXXBack, later................]

Ellis is a friendly agnostic/and probably an atheist. She lives in Australia. We write in a thread that now has over 1,300,000 hits. The Forum at www.scienceagogo.com

[quote=Ellis]How does 'god' exist? By your belief... If you don't it doesn't. Actually that is all there is to it! [/quote] I agree. However, for me, all real belief must express itself in action.

For example, I write posts to this thread. But until I hit the keys and send these electronic blips through cyberspace my faith, or belief--no matter how strong it is--is meaningless.

My daughter is a professional artist. She paints and carves. Now and then, as a amateur, I will do a painting or two.

Would our art mean anything to anyone if we just sat there and, with great faith and imagination, just stared at the canvas and the paints? Of course not!

BTW, IMO, hope and love, without action, are also meaningless. This is why I like to think of GOD as Goodness, Order and Design in action, and reality. I think of 'god' as self-evident Being of which I am a part, not any imaginary person-like being separate and apart from me, anything, or anyone.

I look upon faith, hope and love as triggers to action. James, the brother of Jesus, makes this the central theme of his famous letter (James 2).

I do not very often quote full text, but I like this modern version of the Bible:
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=James%20%202&version=NLT
===============================
Faith without Good Deeds Is Dead

14 What good is it, dear brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but don’t show it by your actions? Can that kind of faith save anyone? 15 Suppose you see a brother or sister who has no food or clothing, 16 and you say, “Good-bye and have a good day; stay warm and eat well”—but then you don’t give that person any food or clothing. What good does that do?

17 So you see, faith by itself isn’t enough. Unless it produces good deeds, it is dead and useless.

18 Now someone may argue, “Some people have faith; others have good deeds.” But I say, “How can you show me your faith if you don’t have good deeds? I will show you my faith by my good deeds.”

19 You say you have faith, for you believe that there is one God.[f] Good for you! Even the demons believe this, and they tremble in terror. 20 How foolish! Can’t you see that faith without good deeds is useless?

GØD is not a being. G0D is Being--note that I use a null, or a zero, 0

Google on the words panentheism and unitheism--terms which I began using in the 1980's onward.

http://www.google.ca/search?q=unitheism+panentheism&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq...http://www.unitheist.org

UNITHEISM

Unitheism is the name I use for a concept of theology which I will discuss later. First, I will outline the theology in which I was raised.

I was raised as a monotheist (theist for short)--a word I first heard about in Sunday school. For as long as I can remember I have been uncomfortable with the idea that there is a one all powerful, all knowing, everywhere present and supernatural human-like god, called God. But here is what we were taught in the Church-owned school and Sunday Schools:

We were taught to believe in God as a kingly, lordly and loving heavenly father. He (this masculine pronoun was always used) deliberately designed and created the universe, as it is described in the book of Genesis, and that he did it in six days. Sure he also created all the planets, stars and galaxies, but he took a special interest in our home, the planet we call mother earth. God created everything on earth, including the elements, the minerals, the plants, fish, animals and human beings.

When I got old enough to question the stories we children were told about Santa I began to question the stories we were told about God; that he is a god up and out there; that he knows all about everything and everyone--past, present and future; that he is keeping an eye on everything that is happening at all times, and that he already knows where we will be and what it will be like in the future.

We were also taught that God is a god of goodness and love and wants us to be loving and good; that if we are not good we will be punished. We were warned God is also a god of justice; that if we sinned, he will punish us for our sins--that is, the bad we deliberately do, and the good we fail to do. However, because he is loving and just, if we repent and do good, because he is merciful and loving, he will forgive us our sins and eventually take us to heaven when we die. Some teachers tried to scare student by telling us that "God know when and how we will die."

When I was quite young I became aware that not all religions taught the same things about God and the Bible. This caused me to wonder ask all kinds of questions. And I asked myself: Why would any real god leave us in any doubt about such an important issue as eternal salvation?

By the time I had finished high school I had gone beyond the above kind of monotheism. At 17 I went off to university and devoted myself finding out if there is a better way of thinking and talking about the god hypothesis. I continued my studies at the Atlantic School of Theology. After spending some time in the field, I did post graduate studies (1954-1955) at Boston, with professors from Boston University, Harvard and Union Seminary, NY.

Eventually, when I became convinced that the universe must be one great god-like unit with which all that is, including people, is connected. Because of this kind of thinking I concocted the term 'unitheism'. Later still, I found out that at least one other person--now a friend--came up with the same idea and asked me to write for his site-- I also discovered the term 'panentheism', a term with a similar meaning and which came out of the work of Alfred North Whitehead, a mathematician and philosopher who founded of process philosophy and theology http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/whitehead/

Except for when I quote others, I came to the decision that I could no longer, comfortably, use the noun God. Therefore, I chose to use the acronym G0D--with a zero, or a Ø, a null, instead of an O. The following verse came to mind:

Goodness, Order and Design

2006

===000===

I think of GØD as goodness,
As order and design,
Which lives in perfect harmony
Within this soul of mine.

GØD's not some distant person
Who lives in heaven, apart,
GØD is the One who dwells within
The open, willing heart.

GØD dwells within each one of us,
And when we give the nod,
We all become, with every breath,
Extensions of that GØD.

=========00000=========

UNITHEISM is a theology--that is, a knowledge-based concept of G0D--which actually inspires me to act on the idea that, with GOD, all good things--physically, mentally and spiritually--are possible. If the word 'GOD' offends you, use one of your own invention.The bottom line is: what you would like life to be like. It is your choice. See www.unitheist.org a site set up by Warren Farr and endorsed by me.

My interest in UNITHEISM--which says that GOD is one with us and we are one with GOD--therefore, is not just academic. It is about exploring the practical values connected with this concept, which will help us, and our suffering world, find the joy-filled and "abundant life" of which Jesus, and others before and after him, spoke.

Using the acronym FREUDE--the German for joy--let me see If I can make myself clear.

By the way, Beethoven's Ode to Joy--part of his great Ninth Symphony, begins with the words, "Freude, freude ..." In my opinion, without GOD there is no joy. There is only fear, resistance, envy, uncertainty, depression and the ego, the ultimate enemy of our peace of mind.

===================================

First the bad news about the enemy:

• F stands for ego-based fears and feelings (Sad and happy). The un-observed ego is in a constant state of fear--fear of failure and that we are missing out on finding the fun of life.
• R stands for ego-based resistance. Our pride tends to cause us to resist doing the things we need, and ought, to do for ourselves and others.
• E stands for envy--coveting things we think we can't have unless with take them from others, including our family, friends, our community and the world. It is the root of all crime, including war, terrorism and the like.
• U stands for the ego-based feeling of uncertainty. It arises out of the unobserved mind. It is the feeling of unease that we get when we feel unaware of what is truly real. When we reach a pure state of consciousness we will no longer feel unaware.
• D stands for the ego-based feeling of despair, the loss of hope. It is a very destructive emotion, leading to the depths of depression--the common cold of mental diseases.
• E stands for the ego, the enemy within--the ego-based mind, the thinker, the psyche--which is out to destroy our peace of mind.

Like fire, the ego can be a great servant, but a mean and destructive master, especially when we allow it to run our lives. Left to its own devices this man-made self, this unobserved mind, will stand between us and keep us separate from the real self, others and all that is good--GOD-like.

Egotism is a dreadful mental disease. As already indicated, it is the mother of envy, the mother of all counter-productive conflicts--crimes of passion, wars, terrorism, financial crashes, you name it ...

==============================================================

NOW FOR THE GOOD NEWS.

When our GOD-given imagination is applied FREUDE can become real joy.

Can you imagine the following?

By making the following simple choice--and that is all that it takes, a choice--one can take, "the road less traveled by" and like the poet said: "make all the difference".

Right now, I make the choice with you: "Beginning now, I choose to live in a state of conscious awareness of all my physical and mental--that is, somatic and psychosomatic--feelings.

I choose to connect with GOD--By the way, atheists, agnostics and others, choose your own word (nature, life, whatever) here--the Source of all knowledge, wisdom, power and Love.

When I make this choice this, my body and mind (soma and the psyche) will then become loving servants--no longer the enemy.