I'm wondering if one can truly become a better or worse person as a result of other people. I mean a change of heart in its deepest core. I would think this doesn't make sense. It's like changing the most fundamental thing about you, and this motivation starts with you, not someone else. This has implications for things like religion which claim to help improve people's morality by rewarding them. Is this possible?
>>18486381Yes. We effect eachother.
The only one who can change the heart is the Holy Spirit
>>18486387but it uses a huge reward to change the heart. eternal life in a paradise. take that away and the person is not changed. so did anything really change? it's conditional love. maybe unconditional love is something we can only conjure up ourselves for no reason other than we want to
Everything begins with choice. Other people can influence you for better or for worse, but only you know what's in your heart and only you have the capacity to act on it.
>>18486390What about Saint Paisios of Mount Athos?He faced temptations and doubts influenced by a skeptical acquaintance who viewed Christ merely as an important, righteous, and virtuous man, hated out of envy and condemned unjustly, but not as God.Exhausted from prolonged prayer and prostrations, young Paisios reflected: >Even if Christ were only a righteous man (not divine), He deserved total love, obedience, and self-sacrifice. He declared he wanted nothing for himself, not even paradise, and was willing to make every sacrifice for Christ's holiness and kindness.At that moment of humble surrender andgenuine love, Christ appeared to him in a great light. Jesus looked at him with tremendous love and said: “I am the Resurrection and the Life; he that believeth in Me, even if he dies, he shall live”What does it mean then, to live?
>>18486390The schism can be seen here, when concience is confused with conscious. Eternal concience, not conscious, is a gift you recieve. If you accept the gift, you recieve eternal concience, but you have to choose to accept it. After your life, the next generation will judge your concience, and choose to select their gift. The gift that keeps on being accepted, is a gift that never ends.
>>18486381Your inner core is a battlefield of many desires that each fight eachother to dictate your actions. The things you see in life provide information to these desires that they use to better fight eachother, sometimes it reveals a weakness in a desire, other times it reveals a strength. If one of those desires win, what you then change is your actions to fit more accordingly with that stronger desireIt cant really happen without an outer influence because your inner core would be left in the same stalemate it was in when you were born. Either you are born with a good character, are brainwashed into it or are incapable of it
>>18486390When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.You are badly mistaken.
>>18486454this makes sense. without information there's no change. of course it's still oneself who makes the change of heart but it wouldn't happen alone
