What this is saying is that you are looking at this with a mortal eye, so you can't recognize Baha'u'llah or any Messenger of God. Looking at it with a mortal eye is elaborated further in this passage by saying a lifeless heart can only delight in a withered bloom.
Yes, I got that. I translate it as yet another exhortation for the critical thinker to lower his analytic filter and let belief in unexamined, in this case, to avoid being lifeless and withered. I've heard the claim, but my experience contradicts it. The lifelessness I see isn't in the critical thinker.
This is the same message another RF poster repeatedly posts wherein he disparages materialism and what he calls scientism. Those are also code for, "You need to change the way you assess reality and start thinking like I do." He and you are both correct.
The caricature of the critical thinker as an empty vessel reasoning like a computer and doing nothing else is incorrect. Here's one of my favorite examples of that. Here, the atheist is like a Roomba bumping into walls making measurements. Chopra also takes a dig at the religious, who he would probably call inauthentic and thus relatively lifeless, and he'd be talking about you (the smallest line says "is having your own experience"):
Your religion taught you to think like that. It's a self-serving meme demeaning unbelievers. But if you open your eyes around you and look at the unbelievers in the real world - the Sagans and Tysons, Twain and Lennon, Hemingway and Rushdie, Nicholson and Maher - these people are overflowing with life and passion.
This means specifically in your case that you have a lifeless heart in a spiritual sense so you see no value in any religion, but only in things that have little value in comparison.
Yes, I know. I'm a Roomba. No experience, just measurement.
Incidentally, spirituality has nothing to do with spirits. The humanist experiences nature as sacred. The god idea diminishes authentic spirituality in many cases by exporting the sacred from reality into a ghost living outside of nature which neither respects man or nature and which issues commands and threats. That's not close to spirituality. It's the opposite.
Authentic spirituality involves a connection to nature that creates a warm and pleasant feeling of belonging. Abrahamic religion breaks that bond. He is taught to feel like he doesn't belong in this world, which is fit for fiery apocalypse. That creates a sense of alienation, which, as I alluded, is the opposite of connection and a sense of belonging. The believer is an alien in his own body, which is scoffingly referred to as "the flesh." Worldly becomes a dirty word in this conception of reality.
As a result, too many people live life as if they were at a bus stop waiting for something to take them away to something better.
And you are correct. Religion has no value to me. And with all due respect, I see the Abrahamic believer as the lifeless Roomba thralls to an ideology that tells them they've found something special and the rest of the world who have not are less for it.
This is not presented as some kind of evidence, because you won't see it as such.
But it was seen as evidence, as is everything else that is evident to the senses. The skillful part is correctly ascertaining what it is evidence of. What I saw was a believer carting out flowery words that millions of others could have written and which he has accepted uncritically in the face of contradictory evidence.
Speaking of alienation and emptiness in religion (anti-spirituality), here's a verse from Dylan's Desolation Row:
Ophelia, she's 'neath the window for her I feel so afraid
On her twenty-second birthday she already is an old maid
To her, death is quite romantic she wears an iron vest
Her profession's her religion, her sin is her lifelessness
And though her eyes are fixed upon Noah's great rainbow
She spends her time peeking into Desolation Row
what would constitute evidence for YOU.
Evidence for a god is something evident to the senses that make the existence of a god more likely. I can't imagine what that would be that couldn't also be accounted for by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization, a naturalistic explanation.
Do you understand that people can look at the same things and view them differently?
Of course. Some will find value where others don't. Some will find beauty where others don't. And some will derive sound conclusions about what that which they are viewing tells us about reality while others will be unable to do that. In the first two example, there really is no right or wrong, and all opinions are as valid as any other, but in the third, there is such a thing as being correct or not. Thus, all opinions about what is valuable or beautiful to them are equal, but not all opinions about what evidence implies. Some opinions are better than others, such as those that can be shown to be correct.
What does that have to do with how much power the deity has?
If the deity can't communicate except through messengers and it wants to communicate, it'll need to settle for that. More powerful deities would have other options.
How could an All-Powerful deity communicate such that everyone could receive the message if not in words?
A deity that can create brains and program minds to, for example, have free will or not, ought to be able to download its message directly and nonverbally into minds by rewiring neuronal synapses to alter memory and change what they believe and how they think.
The deity has communicated to the satisfaction of most of mankind, as demonstrated by the fact that most people believe in God
Disagree. The majority of the world is monotheistic or polytheistic, and their thousands of religions describe different conceptions of a god. The Catholic god is not the Protestant god, and neither are the Muslim god. They most assuredly are not being communicated to by the same divine source. And the communication that makes people theists is not scripture or messages from messengers. It comes from other people exhorting them to believe and then handing them a book and a set of religious beliefs that they absorb uncritically. That was the case for me as well.
It is interesting how you interpreted that image. The point being made does not require that they are both the color black because the point is not about the color black.
My understanding is that the pot and kettle are both black: "The pot calling the kettle black - used to convey that the criticisms a person is aiming at someone else could equally well apply to themselves." If one is going to draw a cartoon, I think both should be shown as black. Otherwise, it means nothing more than the pot calling the kettle a kettle.
