David and all,

You probably already know this but I just wanted to say it out loud (so to speak).  Please remember that the thread "eyewitness" was born of the Kierkegaard thread "Why believe the Bible is the word of God?"  Kierkegaard is very subjective thought.  It is great thought but very subjective.

That is all.  Do have fun and know that the truths of the faith provided by Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit remain regardless of the approach one takes (subjective or otherwise). 

Some people thrive or need or rely on subjective train of thought.  They can handle it via God's grace.  Others do not take to it at all.  I think both ways of thinking are a gift from God but they are not very compatible in the same search for truth.  It is a problem for analytical thinkers like myself.

Therefore, I have slowly come to see subjecetive philosophies as a live and let live reality.  What I have experienced is that I do best with objective thought.  But I respect subjective thought and see it as very true and reall.  In fact my own thoughts are subjective because I think them myself, even though most are what I consider to be based on objective thought processes.  So, everyone has subjective thoughts and we all live in our own subjective reality. 

Therefore, I have taken the following stand on subjective philosophies and discussions.  I work with subjective thoughts and processes in discussions because they are reality and many people base their entire lives soley on their own subjective grasp of reality.  And it is a very legitamate and good manner of seeing the world and does not rule our Christ or the Catholic Church by definition.  I'll even completely avoid objective thoughts so as not to scare people away.  It is really a great and powerful way to explain and understand things.  For example, you probably already know that Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body and many of his writings are based almost exclusively on subjective style thought.  That is why he was so good for our modern world.  He use Phenomonology.  Phenomonology is really a great approach to our modern minds!

Most people are open to subjective thought, even if Christ is the center of it.  They accept it because it is based on a subjective reality (or lived experience).  Christ is the center of my subjective life as it is Iwall's (at least it appears so, I can only base this on my experience of Iwall's posts).

Iwall has done us all a service by bringing these topics up on CE.  We can then experience subjective thought here in a pro-Catholic environment.  Then we can take this knowledge out and use it when needed and not fear it or worry that it will take our faith or anyone's faith away.  In fact it might help us see a new way to reach people and understand people.  Because in the end, all of us are called by God.  Even if not all of us take the same path.  (Subjectively speaking).

GK - God is good!

Christ our divine God is present in the Eucharist.  At times I do see Him and taste him.  At other times I fail because I do not accept the grace.

I know Christ is divine and see Him as divine, versus a regular man like myself.  The Bible is clear.  Our Church is clear.  Christ is divine.

GK - God is good!

Ipioch -- from a purely natural standpoint you are talking about a human brain trapped without physical sense.

 Would the person still not yet dream? What types of dreams would they have? God does in fact talk directly to each human soul and we are born with his law in our hearts correct?

There are two types of knowing are thier not.

The knowing by which I know a fact from my enviorment

and the knowing of feeling or sense, the way a 'husband knows his wife'.

Someone without senses is deviod of one , but the absense of one sense often causes an enhancment of the next.

 Do you think the holy spirit would communicate themselves to that person or not?

Your question is realated also to , are still born babies in heaven.  For which receantly it was declared we have good reason to hope.

yes, but which was more important the seeing or the believing?

Jesus told Thomas , "happy are those who have not seen yet believe"

You'd think the halo would be a dead give-away.

ok - I guess someone is going to have to provide a complete list of what can be taken literally and what can not be.

2 Peter 1:16: For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.

Maybe Peter, the apostle didn't write this, or maybe he did. Sacred Tradition and sacred Scripture holds that he did and that's good enough for me.

Are all these things listed in the back of The da Vinci Code?

Seriously, if Christianity is untrue, then we are pathetic.  Worse than pathetic. And if it is true, then nothing is more important.

Not to be a complete pill here, but is it possible for any one person to "know" anything...to "see" anything no matter what definition one uses for "know" and "see" - if they do not have, nor never had, all of the 5 senses?

What of the blind, the deaf, the smelling impaired{not trying to be funny, just don't know the word for it}, those whose pallets are destroyed{smokers, as I was one}, and can someone not feel?

Are the deaf unable to see? Are the blind unable to know?

PTR halo LOL, for about a solid minute:-)

David: I used to receive Holy Eucharist almost exclusively on the tongue that is until one time the Holy Eucharist fell from my tongue onto the floor. The extraordinary minister of Holy Communiona and I both bent down and I don't know who reached our Lord first but I would have received him had He fallen in the mud. Now to prevent that from happening again I receive in the hand unless there is a server with a platen present. It was actually an act of humility for me to take him in my hands and He in his divine humility allowed me to handle Him in so familiar a manner.

My point, yes we should pray to "see" with the eyes of the soul Who is truly present but we also acknowledge Him in our bodies by the way in which we approach Him and reverence Him, by preparing before and after Mass with prayer and thanksgiving and in every way showing Him how important He is to us. This we can do even if we don't feel any consolation or are largely distracted and along the way we try to not loose sight of why we do all these things (there's that sight word again.)

But that is just the beginning as we are sent to bear witness to the world the good news! Whether you should continue to take your medicine is between you and your doctors! As long as the medicine you are taking helps or has promise of helping it would seem prudent to continue.

Whatever happens it is your response, your witness, that is important. You need not be happy about it, the cross was not an appetizing thought to our Lord in Gethsemene "yet not what I will, but what thou willest."Mk14:36 echo's the fiat of Mary "be it done to me according to thy word."Lk 1:38 In these two responses we see agony and joy and in both hope!

Know that I will pray for you.

Dado

AMDG

I never said man is just flesh and blood.

But man is also NOT without flesh and blood.

When you pray, you would be unable to pray as you do now if you never had your 5 senses.  Your thoughts, words or no words, your imaginations...images you use in your prayer...everything within you THAT THE HOLY SPIRIT then takes and perfects...depends first on sensory input. 

The Spirit is not a 6th sense.  He is the perfection of our imperfection and limitations. 

I don't disagree with you - that God can "speak" directly to us in our soul.  But I wonder if you have given due credit to the physical aspect of our being (which is both body and soul) that prepares the soul to "hear". 

A mere baby cannot thank God with words for his existence.  His mere existence is pure thanksgiving.  Does this mean that we need not thank God with our hearts and minds (yes...including words and thoughts and images we are capable of because we have our senses) as we grow "old enough" to know to?  Jesus was in perfect communion with the Father.  His mere being gave perfect glory to God.  However, he still spent hours upon hours of his physical being in conversation with the Father. 

The USUAL is to worship and to know - both with physical and with spiritual.  And I still firmly believe that we are meant, by God our creator of both our physical and spiritual aspects, to develop our relationship with God using both the physical and the spiritual....the physical being the lesser...nevertheless...the USUAL building blocks of the spiritual. 

This is all in response to the ridiculous "witness" vs "eyewitness" debate from earlier.  Just because photons do not bounce off of an object into my eye, is my eye useless and completely irrelevant in being able to "see" God?  Of course not.  Because my spiritual has been informed by my physical.   

Of course, God made us a bit redundant.  :-)

If we lose the power of one sense, the others go into overtime.

However, if we lose all 5...more importantly...if we never had them to begin with...then what?

Should I stop taking my medicine because I have lost hope in being cured?

sorry - should be taken as, should I not believe what others have seen because I have not seen it myself?

"However, if we lose all 5...more importantly...if we never had them to begin with...then what?"

The soul is capable of a type of knowing, which does not need or invovle the senses.  It also is capable of a TYPE of feeling, that our overstimulated bodies are only aware of when we sit it silience and 'listen'.  It is a feeling and a sense that is outside of time. 

Fishman, you wrote,

The soul is capable of a type of knowing, which does not need or invovle the senses.  It also is capable of a TYPE of feeling, that our overstimulated bodies are only aware of when we sit it silience and 'listen'.  It is a feeling and a sense that is outside of time. 

How do we know this?  How do we know what the soul is capable of if it has been deprived of anything and everything the physical "aspect" of a person can inform it of?  We cannot separate the soul and the body.  I agree that the soul is capable of a knowing that does not necessarily involve the senses at a particular time (like you said...in silence).  However, is it not still possible that this relies on past experience of the senses? 

David, this really is an exercise of "what if"...not based on any actual reality that I know of.  Maybe it is my "scientific" side of me...test the extremes to make sure that the "theory" holds.

In this case, the extreme is the complete absence of all human senses for all time.  From all that I know regarding our wills, we need these senses to inform the intellect and the imagination.  Without that...where is our soul? 

I already admit that I have no problem with an EXTRA-ordinary act of God touching the soul...but it is not something that would be the usual way of any human.  This gets back to "the eye".  I still personally wish to assert (I have no "official Church teaching of any kind here) that in the USUAL case of humans, you cannot merely separate the 5 senses from the experience of KNOWING God.  It's part of how he made us.