snip: Fascinating; you have presented two very different definitions from Webster and claim that they are the same
Spirited: There is no one so blind as he who will not see.
Scientistic materialists are disconnected fom reality. Like moles they look ever downwards, seeing dirt, rocks, and roots yet irrationally, never realizing that what they see is spiritually comprehended.
After ignorantly lumping monists such as Buddhists and Jains in with Christians Mark opines: Either the world is real and objective or else it isn’t
Spirited: Buddhists, Jains and Western Neo-Platonists are monists, in this case, spiritual pantheists. This means that all that exists is a self-creating, self-sustaining substance that is non-living spirit; that all things are diverse parts of this substance, and that what we take to be a material world is really an illusory projection of the one substance.
Scientistic materialism is also monism. Being that it is merely the flip-side of spiritual pantheism it teaches that all that exists is the Cosmos, as Carl Sagan used to teach. Like Karl Marx, Lenin, and before them the Chinese and Epicurean Atomists, Sagan was saying that all that exists is a self-generated, self-sustaining “one substance” and that it is matter and the energy that flows through it.
No spiritual dimension exists and all things are nothing but diverse parts of the irrational substance that is matter.
In that materialism reduces all things...including man...to aggregates of irrational matter, it must deny the existence of the unseen (metaphysical and/or spiritual) dimension and explain away man’s spiritual endowments: mind, conscience, and will. In other words, materialists must outwardly deny what they really do know is self-evidently true.....that they think, freely choose (will) and feel guilt.
That materialists cannot live by what they teach is made evident by their boasting. They love to boast of their “intellectual superiority,” yet by their own stupid preachments, they are nothing but mindless material bodies——wooden puppets mindlessly dancing to the tune of equally mindless nature.
The Biblical worldview on the other hand, teaches that though man’s body and brain are indeed material, his mind-soul transcends the material. The brain, as Sir John Eccles has observed, is a computer used by the “ghost in the machine.”
Though not a Christian, Eccles has nevertheless posited the mind-body dualism unique to the Biblical worldview. In short, he is agreeing with the Bible that man is both material and spiritual.
The mind-body dualism of the Bible is not to be confused with monist Gnostic Manichean dualism.
Only with Biblical dualism is the world real and objective while men, who are both material and spirit, have spiritual minds that allow them to transcend and therefore objectively observe the irrational material.
It is only from within the Biblical worldview that the two definitions-—faith/belief and knowledge-—can be fully comprehended as complements rather than as antithetical units, as you erroneously “believe” them to be.
As long as you remain imprisoned within and are a part of the earthen-tunnel of materialism your comprehension will be truncated, blind-sided and peculiar.
In that worldview, the mind is merely an epiphenomenon of the physical brain. An epiphenomenon is a secondary phenomenon which cannot cause anything to happen.
Thank you oh so very much for your excellent essay-post, dear sister in Christ!