Jack,
An interesting read on the Greek influence in Christianity is Gilbert Murray’s; The Five Stages of Greek Religion; http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30250/30250-h/30250-h.htm
One of the points he makes is the Trinity came from the Greek year gods, which were analogous to the passing of the seasons/time, as in Father, Son and Holy Ghost as past, present and future life. That the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ was the year god dying and being reborn. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, seeing itself as the eternal institution, did its best to obscure this meaning, with its own translation(s) of the meaning of the Trinity. Requiring Martin Luther to come along and try to push the reset button, as Jesus tried to do with Judaism.
Which gets to the issue of time and knowledge.
As mobile organisms, we experience reality as flashes of perception, in order to navigate. Then narrate our journeys and build civilizations out of the collected knowledge. So we think of time as the point of the present, moving past to future. Which physics codifies as measures of duration and correlates with measures of distance, to formulate “spacetime.”
The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Potential, actual, residual.
There is no “dimension” of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform it. Aka, causality and conservation of energy.
Time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, etc. We could use ideal gas laws to correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, not the sequence of thought.
Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think frequencies, or metabolism. That much of human history has been about getting everyone following the same story, reading from the same page, dancing to the same tune, using the same measures, playing the same games, following the same rules, trading with the same currency, etc, might create the assumption of a universal flow of time, but there is rabbit time, turtle time, tree time etc.
When everyone has to play the same game, it becomes a race and everyone is on rabbit time. Though the turtle is still plodding along, long after the rabbit has died.
Which argues against the view that everything can be distilled/reduced to a singular entity/being/state. Other than the flatline between all the ups and downs. The absolute as zero.
As you may notice, monotheism and religion in general, is quite subject to sectarianism, as everyone is loathe to give up their uniqueness for someone else’s version of universality. Then it ends up with multitudes of sects, each insisting they are the one and true religion.
To break the dynamic down, process churns along, past to future, while the patterns generated rise and fall, future to past.
Consciousness goes past to future, while thoughts go future to past.
Lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.
Products go start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product.
The feedback is the patterns define and direct the process, as thoughts affect our actions. Motor and steering.
So while the element of being that is consciousness might shine through us and our senses, the storing of that knowledge is a constant process of reconfiguration. It is not omniscient, in the sense of knowing all perceptions of everything, as it is dynamically breaking down these forms, as it is building them. The light is not static. It is constantly creating the present out of the past. It is a bottom up process creating the forms we assume are top down and eternal.
So when our religions value tradition over desires, they are trying to give form and structure to elements that resist. It is this constant, dynamic tension and friction between energy and form, desire and judgement, which makes reality real.
Think of knowledge and thought as cresting waves. They are only fully formed as they are cresting and so what we see most clearly is passing. We can only feel and sense the waves starting to build, but they don’t have the clear form of frequency and amplitude and they override our perceptions, as they continue to build. Like watching a market bubble building and knowing from past experience that it will eventually pop, but only after consuming all possible resources available to it. Possibly even yours, if you get too close.
As for “empirical evidence,” the scientific consensus is still built around some basic conceptual biases. Keep in mind, epicycles were brilliant and predictively accurate math, as a modeling of our view of the cosmos. Which still could be valid today, since we remain the center of our point of view. So when they insist the math is valid, even if reality doesn’t cooperate, be very cautious.
Here is my view; https://medium.com/@johnbrodixmerrymanjr/the-confessions-of-a-cosmic-heretic-5cd4c044b8ea
