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Deutsche Version | Wiki Start | Topics Collection iv

A crazy story ...

Wednesday, July 4, 2012. Who is man? We have talked about the animal part of us. But is that all, are we just animals? Somehow we know that this is not true. Humans are more than animals … yet it seems difficult to say what exactly it is that makes us different!

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Humans, Spirit and Faith …

Humans have spirit. Animals might also have spirit - that is not the point here. But the human spirit is somehow special. Our mind enables us to argue, to communicate, to think, to plan, to reason …! Our mind enables us to be creative and to shape our world according to our ideas. We find a little bit of this in animals as well, but on a completely different level. Humans are very different from the rest of the animal world!

There is a long philosophical and medical discussion about our mind, about spirit and reason, about faith. I have been working on this for quite a while now within our activities in cognitive neuroscience. We try to understand the mind, we try to build structures which explain how it works. But the more you try to understand it, the more fascinating it gets. The human mind is truly fascinating.

Humans are much more than logic. They are much more than arguments. They are also trust. They are faith. They are belief. Humans have dimensions which are beyond pure planning. We can act in categories beyond simple logic - but of course our plans, our faith, our belief also uses logic, yet it is not bound by it. It cannot completely be reduced to logic or arguments. It is about facts beyond what we can put into current models!

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The completely crazy Christmas Message …

There is the old New Testament message of Christ Jesus, of a baby which is born in Bethlehem. It is Jesus, the son of the most high. God became human. “He lived among us!” The Christmas story tells us about God coming into mankind.

If we are honest, we need to admit that the Christmas story is completely crazy. Reality can be beyond our usual categories, and it often is! But this event changes our understanding of mankind. We are not only animals, we are not only beings with reason, we are not only beings with faith. We are beings which had the creator of the universe among them. God became human also means that humanity is something even more special. God chose to take human form, to live as a human, to be human.

I have known the Christmas story for many years now. But every time I come back to it, it gets more fascinating. It gets more relevant. It gets more exciting. God really wants to be with us - he became human! What a story, what a truth. (Roland Potthast) ... more texts

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