Santa V God

I see a number of polarized beliefs here:

1. People can / can not change.
2. People are enabled by / victim of what they hear.
3. Words are communicated in faith / faith is communicated in words.
4. Religion is for being / is for feeling.
5. Belief is a risk / is a stability.
6. Profit is given for religion / religion is given for profit.
7. Man is a creation of God / God is a creation of man.

I'm sure there are more...
 
cyberpi said:
I see a number of polarized beliefs here:

1. People can / can not change.
2. People are enabled by / victim of what they hear.
3. Words are communicated in faith / faith is communicated in words.
4. Religion is for being / is for feeling.
5. Belief is a risk / is a stability.
6. Profit is given for religion / religion is given for profit.
7. Man is a creation of God / God is a creation of man.

I'm sure there are more...
Click to expand...

Every coin has at least 3 sides ;)
 
Alex P said:
I think it has smoothly run along the speed of "same car, different badge." Which is right :D And I think a few people are now trying to kind of take it off track :D
Click to expand...

Off track? Is it not then a train or a tram? :rolleyes:;)
 
To me the goal is to understand myself and understand how things work. I'm not interested in worshiping some deity, or becoming more Buddha or Christ-like. I'm not looking to become like the horse whisperer, or some kind of Indian shaman. I don't care for kumbaya spirituality. I'm not trying to become one with all the fuzzy little critters. And I don't care about past or future lives. Basically, I want to manipulate Murphy's law. I want to understand the power structure so I can undermine it. I've found that there's no way to hang on to the fluffy blanket and do that. All the institutions and entities that want to control me are banking on the fact that I won't have the balls to undo myself. They're wrong.

Chris
 
See, now that's different. Although, now that I think of it, Alex did admit to wearing a skirt. Groovy mortarboard by the way!

I never get any satisfaction out of these God debates. Things always devolve into impossibly simplistic dichotomies, and I just never feel good about any position I take because I can never think of how to say what I'm thinking. Oh well....

Chris
 
China Cat Sunflower said:
To me the goal is to understand myself and understand how things work. I'm not interested in worshiping some deity, or becoming more Buddha or Christ-like. I'm not looking to become like the horse whisperer, or some kind of Indian shaman. I don't care for kumbaya spirituality. I'm not trying to become one with all the fuzzy little critters. And I don't care about past or future lives.....
Click to expand...

That is a good way to put it. Something that has cropped up on this thread and is a common response is that I am somehow 'missing' something, that I am deficient or incapable. Its like people saying how dare you come to the teddy bears picnic without a teddy. Or you aint a black man so you cant say the word *****. Well you do not have do be a theist to understand exactly what God is in the human psyche. The example you give there Chris is superb because you could choose to label yourself anyone of them and everybody here would give you respect. You have virtually unlimited scope to adopt or even invent a paradigm and people will be, or will at least act, credulous. Yet present all paradigms as stemming from the same source, the human mind, and qualify it with the simplest examples of why this fact is indeed fact and you get nothing but derision, irrelevant point picking and accusations that it is you with the closed mind. This reads as though I am angry. I am not. It might read as though I feel I am not respected here. I do not feel that either. But I do feel the burden of 'proof' that is demanded of me far surpasses that which the theist feels adequate to support their beliefs. I never expected the almost rhetorical question at the head of this thread to run like this. I have put forward my case as far as I care to go with it. I think I will retire now to the politics threads where I am more naturally at home.


;);););););););););););););)'s for everybody


tao
 
Tao_Equus said:
That is a good way to put it. Something that has cropped up on this thread and is a common response is that I am somehow 'missing' something, that I am deficient or incapable. Its like people saying how dare you come to the teddy bears picnic without a teddy. Or you aint a black man so you cant say the word *****. Well you do not have do be a theist to understand exactly what God is in the human psyche. The example you give there Chris is superb because you could choose to label yourself anyone of them and everybody here would give you respect. You have virtually unlimited scope to adopt or even invent a paradigm and people will be, or will at least act, credulous. Yet present all paradigms as stemming from the same source, the human mind, and qualify it with the simplest examples of why this fact is indeed fact and you get nothing but derision, irrelevant point picking and accusations that it is you with the closed mind. This reads as though I am angry. I am not. It might read as though I feel I am not respected here. I do not feel that either. But I do feel the burden of 'proof' that is demanded of me far surpasses that which the theist feels adequate to support their beliefs. I never expected the almost rhetorical question at the head of this thread to run like this. I have put forward my case as far as I care to go with it. I think I will retire now to the politics threads where I am more naturally at home.


;);););););););););););););)'s for everybody


tao
Click to expand...
It sounds like you agree with Dhammapada 1, Tao, and this post seems to highlight verses 11 & 12
11. Those who mistake the unessential to be essential and the essential to be unessential, dwelling in wrong thoughts, never arrive at the essential.

12. Those who know the essential to be essential and the unessential to be unessential, dwelling in right thoughts, do arrive at the essential.​
 
seattlegal said:
It sounds like you agree with Dhammapada 1, Tao, and this post seems to highlight verses 11 & 12
11. Those who mistake the unessential to be essential and the essential to be unessential, dwelling in wrong thoughts, never arrive at the essential.

12. Those who know the essential to be essential and the unessential to be unessential, dwelling in right thoughts, do arrive at the essential.​
Click to expand...

Thank you. The 'essence' of anything can be exceedingly difficult to pin down. And the temptation to be drawn into contextualisations can be hard to resist. But like Chris I am not searching to be any Guru or teacher nor set myself up as having some sublime insight. What I see and what I say here is highly reductionist, it is an endeavour for essence. Many people of faith are quick to point out that all faiths are essentially the same, in that I am no different. But I do not attempt to remove what is the most essential ingredient of any faith worth having, a sense of common humanity. Quite the reverse I would love all people to reclaim that from the religions that have hijacked and abused it. The religions that narrow it down to only be common amongst their own kind.

The reason I care at all about this subject is because I have travelled widely. I know in the profoundest sense that the child in Morocco has exactly the same feelings as the child in Thailand and that if put together then without even a common language they would be playing and laughing and having fun. But we adults burden them with superstitions and ill logic and within a few short years they are fully prepared and self-justified to pick each other out in the cross hairs of their rifles. The cost of religion is too great. It is far too easily manipulated and abused. Our technology has reduced our world to an intellectual village, yet our religions still carve up the map with unsafe regions that proclaim 'here be monsters'. But there are no monsters that are not made so. There are only children, and people that were once children.

Most of us here sit nice and comfortable and we can afford the luxury of time to think, ponder, contemplate, reason or whatever. And we live in societies where the vast bulk of our neighbours idea of a good read is some glossy gossip magazine or a mail order catalogue. We live in a bubble of our own making which is not truly reflective of the experience of reality most people choose or, as is globally more common, have thrust upon them. It is easy for us to only focus on what can be described as the selfish search for enlightenment. But what good is self enlightenment in a world where a child dies every 4 seconds of hunger. What good soapboxing when your taxes are used to fund the private armies of murderous dictators. Or to spread radioactive waste across large swathes of distant lands, polluting them for the next 9 billion years.

Our talk is cheap. No prayer, no meditation is going to help put an end to the huge volume of suffering that is a daily reality for billions of people. No appeal to a deity is going to put bread on the table or remove the bullets from the breech. Religion may help the individual cope with all the hardships but it most definitely does nothing to help the masses. And they are not designed to. They do not even bother trying, they do not even bother saying you will benefit in this life but promise you will reap the rewards when you are dead. And so the masses abdicate their responsibility for the living except as a hedge bet on the ever after. Religion is damaging on every level and will destroy us if we do not destroy it. Only by caring for the present and admitting that our only path to immortality is in the future of our children, and by truly recognising we are solely responsible for the stewardship of this beautiful planet can we hope to survive as a species. Religion and politics work hand in hand and always have done and religion works as a fog to keep people from thinking that they personally have the power to do anything. It teaches deference to authority and to accept the corruption. I do not expect it to change any time soon but if this does not change, well then the clock is already ticking on that day when the fog of ideological madness ends it all.

tao
 
Tao,
Are religious beliefs chosen, or socially programmed?

You appear to have decided that they are socially programmed and that they must be eradicated in order to save children from themselves.

Does a child choose between good and bad deeds, or does a child duplicate whatever is given and taught to them whether it is good or whether it is bad?

Same question with emphasis on the mind of a child.
 
Tao, I would say that we have several testable hypothesis that arise from your theoretical views about the cultural means of transmission for religious ideology.

I think we agree that religious ideology we were talking about before has had ample chance of being distributed via cultural inheritance (within family systems) and via cultural acquisition (religious institutions including church-operated schools, pamphleteers, and various other religionist media). Yet as we've observed, contrary to Biblical injunctions, people raised in Western societies have drifted toward astrology and other occult ideology. This tells us that people don't take the normative Biblically based ideology very seriously. This is especially noteworthy considering the number of people put to death by the Church for witchcraft. Even if the relevant Biblical passages were mistranslated (which they apparently were), the Church's stance on the occult is evident.

You write: "as the cuisine of a country is inherited by successive generations so are its beliefs." The above example raises questions about the long-term stability of the ideology and also about the immediacy of the effects of a traditional mindset on behavior.

One would expect widespread acceptance for a common set of beliefs and values that have legitimacy simply by virtue of their normativeness. The transfer of the values and beliefs would be largely self-perpetuating as long as the cultural means of transmission are operative. In this connection, I would agree with you that someone is less likely to become religious in an nonreligious culture. It is from this perspective that I view some interesting research findings. In particular, the available data show very clearly that the UK has a secular majority. That is, the vast majority -- 60% -- do not believe in G-d. As one might surmise given the aforementioned finding, two thirds (="66% or 32 million") people in the UK have no religious affiliation or church membership (2006 data).

Other findings for your interest: "In 2000, 60 per cent of the population claimed to belong to a specific religion with 55 per cent being Christian. However, half of all adults aged 18 and over who belonged to a religion have never attended a religious service." Further, 59% of those surveyed report that they "practically never" attend church!

Pray tell, Tao, how can there be a process of cultural reinforcement for ideology and behavior when people do not avail themselves of opportunities to learn these things from church services?


A truly effective mechanism of indoctrination and enforcement would be largely self-perpetuating, Clearly, no such mechanism is effective in the UK. Have a look:
In the twenty years between 1980 and 2000 the Church of England suffered a 27 per cent decline in church membership. The Roman Catholic Church suffered a similar decline in the same period in mass attendance. Between 1979 and 2005, half of all Christians stopped going to church on a Sunday. Religion in Britain has suffered an immense decline since the 1950s, and all indicators show a continued secularization of British society in line with other European countries such as France. ​
If the social programming was actually effective, one would expect a "well developed acceptance" for normative religious beliefs and values. Based on the foregoing findings, the empirical support for it is lacking, at least in the UK and other European countries. I would go so far as to say that the Religious Factor actually is quite weak in Western society in general.

The picture you have pained about the role of ideology does not seem to have the best fit to reality. Clearly, traditional religion has little appeal and probably exerts little influence on public and private ritual behavior and social behavior in general. The data indicate massive declines in church memberships. I don't see how a religious community of any size is possible under these circumstances. This is an issue because a community of believers is the "sales force" for the ideology.

Recent history has been marked by a large-scale erosion of institutionalized religion. But even now church memberships continue to decline. Traditional religion is on its way out and may soon be become extinct on its own. I would therefore say that the cultural means of indoctrination or "social programming" (cyberpi's term) has been a dismal failure.

I think you have overestimated the importance of these processes with respect to their ability to keep the masses in a state of religious delusion. You might argue that the "New Age" drift toward the occult indicates the development of a new religion. My comeback would be that people dabbling in these things may not qualify as "Religion." But of course that's an empirical question.

My position is diametrically opposite yours. The trend we should be concerned about is the widespread secularization of all world cultures by means of a pervasive post-industrial ambience of barren utilitarianism, self-interest, and consumerism. For one thing, the disappearance of traditional religious ideology has the potential to undermine the social and moral code that once had a religious basis. The trend could mean big blows to human ecology in terms of losing a sense of unity, community, and continuity that are part of the meaning of life.
 
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