Splenda is Supernatural

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 10:32 pm by Ambaa Choate

Splenda is Supernatural 2015-03-13T22:32:31-04:00 Ambaa Choate

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My friend Beth was visiting recently and we got into an interesting conversation. She has been a loyal reader of my blog since it first started on Blogger in 2010 and so she always asks me interesting philosophical questions. This time she asked about the word “Supernatural” and it was something that I had never thought about before.

If everything is God and the world is created from God, how can something be more than natural? What does it mean to call spiritual things such as God or angels “supernatural”?

I told her I’d need to think about that for a while.

It’s a word that’s kind of used for anything outside our every day experience. Angels, Gods, Demons, Big Foot (?), Vampires, Werewolves. It seems a little weird to me to lump all these things together I guess because some of them seem more likely to be real than others.

An Atheist might say that there is no convincing evidence for the existence of any of these things, so while the concept of “supernatural” exists, it is likely that the things themselves do not and nothing is outside of the natural world.

From what I’ve learned of Islam, I could see “Supernatural” making a lot of sense there because the belief is that the world and the divine are entirely separate.

I suspect that the people who coined the word believed that God is above nature. He created it but was outside of it in some way.

I never thought before about how when you break the world down it means more than natural. As a Hindu, that doesn’t make any sense.

For me there can be no such thing as supernatural because nature IS God. Everything in creation is a part of Him, you and I included. Gods, Devas, Asuras, Rakshasa, Apsaras…they are not supernatural. They are natural. They are within nature just as we are. There is nothing outside of The One Divinity who split itself into many parts to make the world.

To say something is above nature is to suggest that the natural laws of the world don’t apply to it. But dharma applies to every one. Even demons operate within the same world of consequences that we do. Krishna did some things that seem undharmic, but I don’t think it is because he is above the law. I think it’s because he has a wider understanding of what is dharmic than I do. He is able to see a much larger picture than I.

It seems like it would be a lot more appropriate to use the word “supernatural” to refer to man made things not found in nature. Like Splenda. In a way that is beyond nature because it would not be naturally occurring. In another way it is still part of the One Divinity that makes up everything.

http://www.steviavssplenda.com/

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