wellwisher
Well-Known Member
There is a difference between signs and symbols. A sign is a specific thing or specific piece of data, such as the Statue of Liberty is a large copper statue in NYC. As a symbol, this statue represents the concept of liberty, which is more esoteric and can take a book to exhaustively define. Religious books often talk in symbols and signs. Liberty as symbol is not a fact, but rather a fragile state of mind.The "logic of miracles"? And it is creationists that cause the Bible to be put down by abusing it. It can be properly used as a source for lessons on how to treat your fellow human beings. The value of faith, and other areas having to do with a belief in God. But it fails if one takes it too literally. Creationists are the ones that make it just a book of myths.
Jesus would use parables, such as the kingdom of god is like a mustard seed. It starts small and grows into the largest plant in the garden. If you take that literally as a sign, the statement seems weird to talk about the Kingdom of God being at the quantum level. But if you think of it a symbol within the parable, it has deeper meaning. The sign is more for the left brain; 1-D or 2-D, and the symbol; 3-D, is more for the right brain.
The value of this style is the over simplification, caused by the signs, make it easier even for children to remember. Everyone remembers †he story of Adam and Eve. As you get older and more mature, you can learn to decompress the sign into the symbol. The style was designed for easy transport; zip file that took less memory space, but was always ready for decompression. It is also designed to get more of the brain involved. The right brain besides processing symbols is also connected to processing emotions, which is part of the writing to memory process. Faith is a type of integrating feeling in space and time; right brain. The left brain is more about differentiation; compressed file.
A good analogy is mass and gravity. Mass is more tangible due to having substance, while gravity emanates from the mass in all directions and not easy to see but is invisible and has to be inferred from its interactions with other things. Faith is like gravity; symbols, that expand from the signs of the times; mass. This type of thinking helps one learn to process data in the corpus callosum that connects the two hemispheres. God the symbol is the ultimate 4-D symbol that integrates all in space and time. God the sign has many names; zip files.