My 'world view' is underpinned by values that in no way bring God into the equation. I just do not believe in God. So we stand in very different places in terms of how we frame everything about us.
You are right to bring God into the political ideology debate because it is very much present within politics anyway, whether I believe it should be or not. Many voters in the US divided over whether candidates were pro-life or not and voted according to those kind of values.
In the UK we've seen Cabinet Ministers make policy based on religious framing of issues. On Opus Dei MP was in charge of the equalities portfolio, which is fundamentally in conflict with protecting gay rights.
You are right where you say a lot of damage has been done in the name of God, not just in the past but still now. If God exists, I'm sure that wouldn't be His will, but you can't control how some people will choose to interpret their religion and implement that view.
I think that is one of the reasons why religion should play no part in politics, in the development of the values that underpin political choices and ideologies.
Some religions enforce values that oppress women, shame disability and kill gay people - it is a fundamental conflict with the human rights we are all born with.
I respect the fact that you can discuss your religion and not try to force your beliefs on others - I (and I'm not the only one here, I'm sure) have bitter experiences of people who have damaged me with their religious beliefs.
I see nothing objective about an ideology based on religious Truth - because it means you cannot question and challenge in a way that is free from a strict framing of issues, or to take into account the nature of people as social beings who may not wish or be able to conform to whatever interpretation God's word is put to them. Ad astra per aspera
OTOH I feel free to question and challenge everything. I believe that faith* doesn't begin with observing dogmatic requirements though upon 'finding God' some may want to change immediately and learn about whatever seems to be known to men about pleasing God, but this doesn't mean that he (or she) will want to or be able to change 100 % overnight, or there might be aspects that he simply cannot embrace deep down in his heart, not even on the third day of being a believer. So be it.
The core issue is that it doesn't really help for the adulterer to stop seeing other women when he keeps desiring them. He'll "conform" to God's word when his heart will have changed. As much as it is good to give rules to children when we raise them and to have something called law and order in a state what is more important for the individual is this change of heart that cannot be imposed, not even our own idea of what that change would have to look like. So, any dogma can be imposed but faith in God never.
* For many 'faith' begins with going to a church, and any religious society will be governed by at least some or more elaborate rules, essential to the functioning of the group or crucial to religion itself.
---
"religion should play no part in politics, in the development of the values that underpin political choices and ideologies."
In the political landscape, many ideological currents are based on religious convictions, principles, ... - If religion played no part in politics at all, there would still be ideologies - but they would all have to be atheist ideologies. Now, can atheism be "objective"? You'll still end up having ideologies focusing on personal enrichment, favouring one over the other and reflecting all the virtues and vices mankind has been afflicted with since the beginning.
France is probably more atheistic than most other European countries. Religion doesn't officially play a role in politics, yet the country is permeated by its Christian tradition/Catholicism that are reflected in national politics.
I believe that it is unrealistic to ban religion from politics. The reason for this probably is that religion/faith is, more than any other abstract, rational ideology, very much identitarian, so much part of any believer's existence that it is inseparable from his human-ness and his role in society.
I believe that it is unrealistic to ban religion from politics.
no, no, no...
religion and politics make a lousy combination, as history makes only too painfully clear.
cuz 90% of religion is bad religion, and people need a certain security in order to have a decent life.
that should take precedence over religion.
keep religion personal, not political, just don't try and exterminate it.... the blowback from that is as bad as bad religion was, or worse...
golden rule...unless there was a completely new religion, baggage free and symbiotic with modern times instead of trying to resurrect the middle ages, ala taliban. The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it. Chinese Proverb.
It's not undesirable to seperate spirituality/faith and religion in its worldly manner from politics - but it has proven unrealistic.
Do you sincerely believe that this can be changed?
Thus, religious people are not dangerous in politics, but organised religious beliefs are most dangerous - if you have God on your side, and are acting on his behalf, then nothing you can do is wrong, and that brings all sorts of nasty results. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
Faith is to be encouraged, even if it contains elements that a religious institution has once used or continues to use in an abusive way.
Faith is to be encouraged
----
Well, I'd also say that if you experience something very good it's nice to see others find or have it, too.
I didn't say that it is undesirable to ban religion
wow, three negative formulations in a row!
makes my brain hurt!
yup, i think pols using religion to get votes is sick politics, and while i want to know the candidates spiritual values, he/she should be able to make them abundantly clear without resorting to religion to make them for him/her.
because religions divide people in the worst way, which is spiritual abuse, btw.
politics should be about humanity.
i though obama played it perfect, he let voters know his belief system, then got on with the rest of his campaigning.
all religions have beauty, but they're like a drug, and cause people sometimes (often) to absolve themselves from responsibility under cover of religious groupthink.
any religion that doesn't encourage doubt and questioning one's own faith for over-simplification, or over-mystification, has jumped the tracks, imo.
because in this world of lies, our critical thinking and intuition are the biggest gifts from god we have to use to stay sane and share a good life with our neighbours.
people are so gullible, and unwilling to look at themselves deeply, so religion throws them a life raft. this can be helpful, but at the end of the day, any assumption that you have taken second hand from others and left unexamined will be useless.
my grandmother was one of thise catholics who went to mass every day, if we took her on holiday, we had to call ahead and find out if there was a catholic church nearby first, she lived till she was 102, with her half inch of gordon's gin every sundown, her bible and her young priest friends, who came to pray with her, and look into her serene blue eyes.
her faith, which had been such a crutch to her her whole life, abandoned her on her deathbed, the very moment she needed it most...
a wooden nickel!
i learned a lot from that.
my dad died an atheist, a miserable, terrified man, all his bullying, snide bravado crumbling when he finally realised there was no way out, and his old sidekick denial had left the building.
heartbreaking. it's been 9 years since he passed away.
i still feel his angry spirit wandering around...
three months before he died, he confessed to me he wished i'd never been born.
so i believe the religious impulse is in us, or some of us, and yet it is absolutely not a prerequisite for any attainment. it is an illusion of separation, from a buddhist perspective. there is no difference at root between a religious person and an atheist, life tests for character both subsets, and all souls are equal in light.
it's just another in the infinite disguises game we play here on earth, where being real is the rarest jewel, and life is precious.
abortion is the big one, when it comes to politics and religion, and that was the issue that caused me to understand how something could be right politically yet felt so wrong spiritually, and how in the end, unless we had a solution to give every unborn child a loving home, and the conditions to set the foundation for a decent life (which we are failing miserably to do with the children alive here already), we have no right to insist that others live by our moral lights.
when i see the vatican's attitude to contraception it's...painful.
thanks for acknowledging the chinese proverb.
here's another one not from china:
religion is for those afraid of hell, spirituality is for those who have been there.
have a good one, lily, good rappin' with ya! The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it. Chinese Proverb.
her faith, which had been such a crutch to her her whole life, abandoned her on her deathbed, the very moment she needed it most... a wooden nickel! i learned a lot from that. my dad died an atheist, a miserable, terrified man, all his bullying, snide bravado crumbling when he finally realised there was no way out, and his old sidekick denial had left the building. heartbreaking. it's been 9 years since he passed away. i still feel his angry spirit wandering around... three months before he died, he confessed to me he wished i'd never been born.
Incredibly sad - one seeking to embrace faith by the standard approved method, and losing it, and one denying love, and realising too late there is no alternative. Perhaps he saw in you what he had denied all his life. You proved him wrong by being there for him despite everything. notes from no w here
yes my 'family constellation' is quite the challenge.
my father saw me as his nemesis, for him sensitivity was the most unpardonable of human weaknesses.
my grannie was a kind person, but fell for the pablum.
she was very sane, and never proselytized, tried to live by example, without spiritual pretensions, just a few normal middle-class ones...
it's quite paradoxical, how sustaining her spiritual practice was for her during her long life, and how it vaporised the last year.
i think the wars took an incredible psychological toll on both generations, they were all ptsd, before the word was invented.
i had no axe to grind with dad, with regards to proving him wrong, my sorrow was far too strong. i tried to reach him through his sense of humour, which was excellent, but unfortunately usually twisted and cruel. in his jokes, someone always paid, you know?
overdog stuff.
tenacious mofo, though, gave the phrase 'dying with his boots on' new meaning.
at least i have that to model on, and the desire to make people laugh!
grannie was just plain decent, too bad she got sold a bill of goods. The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it. Chinese Proverb.
The story about your grandmother and your father are both heart-breaking, especially since they have left you with this feeling of deception, maybe grief for your grandmother and this late and extremely painful word of having been 'unwanted' by your own father. You wouldn't be here if you hadn't been wanted. ;) It would be interesting to know why your father harboured such bitter feelings; the reason was in him - not in you. I hope that you can find peace. He is no longer there, and - maybe - they'll both still have their chance to find God.
"we have no right to insist that others live by our moral lights." - I disagree though I believe that the killing of an unborn child is so painful to the mother that I'd be very reluctant to want to see her judged. When something feels spiritually wrong - it is wrong, and not just by our "moral lights". - I am in disbelief to see mothers sentenced who kill their newborn child, and may yet take the life of their unborn child. Both is wrong, and in both cases, the mothers need help, more than judgement, and it is a shame that these children are not welcomed into our societies.
---- I like this Chinese proverb a lot, too. ;)
i said it wasn't chinese! afaik, anyway, but i guess it may as well be...
I'd be very reluctant to want to see her judged. When something feels spiritually wrong - it is wrong, and not just by our "moral lights".
yes well, there you have it in a nutshell.
first of all, it's her body, not anyone else's. this point cannot be emphasized too much.
and secondly 'our moral lights' are only universal if we declaim them to be, and since we are fallible, (last time i checked!), how can we ever be sure that our morals are good for everyone else?
that way lies madness...
of course the mothers need help, if they had that they probably wouldn't want to abort, in most cases.
but all this will come out if you do that diary on abortion you said you might.
It would be interesting to know why your father harboured such bitter feelings; the reason was in him - not in you. I hope that you can find peace. He is no longer there, and - maybe - they'll both still have their chance to find God.
yes it would be interesting, that has been the most time-consuming mental activity life has thrown my way. the side effect of studying it has given me a clue or two about 'anglo disease', so there's a silver lining. he was so totally unwilling to 'know himself' on any other level that material...
i have found a rough peace, but it is patched and tattered. he is very much still here, though his body ain't.
god is found when we surrender our pride, for some that's an option they do not entertain, for some reason unknown to my dim self.
how to welcome others into faith when they would rather live without it?
we can't control, but we can exemplify. i am quite willing to entertain the idea that my knowledge of god is simply singularities occurring in my neurochemistry, then things take a distinct turn towards more interesting, contemplating that fact.
step by step, science and spirituality are converging. i see absolutely no mutual threat to either.
much so-called religion, on the other hand, has a lot to lose... The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it. Chinese Proverb.
i said it wasn't chinese!
:o - well, yes, it probably sounded so Chinese that I decided to ignore the not and took it for that. ;)
This is not a debate of one life against the other. The baby would never want to see his/her mother dead. 'Her body' holds life's largest miracle.
The topic has been so much over-argued that I wouldn't want to roll it all out again. There will always be opinion against opinion. There is little room for discourse or compromise. One either wants to protect the life of the unborn child, or what will be considered the best (better) interest of the woman.
it's just that life ain't linear, and to enforce this belief on others, no matter how convinced one is about the justness of the act, is to pretend the woman is not the decider of her future responsibility.
women have it hard enough already, some get pregnant because they're basically too nice to say no, and the men don't have anything like the same set of consequences to face, so should definitely not be the arbiters.
subscribing to this belief is great, and acts as an affirmation that we will work this out eventually to the satisfaction of all, but using legislation to regulate morality can be taken far too far, far too soon.
it's the loons this attitude aligns one with is a pretty big clue... no offence...
it comes back to the nigh-insurmountable challenge of guaranteeing that child a future good enough that the mother would willingly make that choice, over her own maternal instincts to keep the child, or abort it to save it from a horrible life. at which point such legislation wouldn't be necessary...
i really see a fork in the road between humility and arrogance here, and i've puzzled long and hard about it, because if one could square that political circle, one could create a huge, good-hearted voting block, that is presently blindly clinging to the right, and would probably, without that fly in the jam, swell the ranks of the left considerably, thereby upping the chances of creating the very type of society that might, one day, see fit to accord the Great Miracle more respect, by not men legislating putting women in such a 'sophie's choice', especially when most of said men subscribe to wars at whim, and show no sign at all of legislating much to protect the rights of children already born.
that's the soulsucking cognitive dissonance at the kernel of this argument, imo.
if one is so moved by the rights of a foetus, let one go take care of all the hungry, roofless, abused children already members of the born, and by the time we sort that out, the new Golden Age will have snuck right up on us!
it sucks, i know... it's one of those 'lesser evil' deals, methinks...
all this worrying about CAPITAL, when the real waste is in every undernourished child, and each clueless, undereducated pregnant mother-to-be cramming junk food and alcohol into her benighted bloodstream needs a bailout... imagine what it would do for the future generations if those fabled billions used to flush the toxic debt down the crapper were invested in prenatal education and care, it'd the no-brainer BEST investment we could ever make in the future happiness of mankind.
sometimes it seems anti-abortion activists miss the forest for the trees, and even remind me of those hindus who walk slowly with a soft broom, sweeping the dust in front of them in case they step on some innocent life form...
noble, but disproportionate.
abortion is a terrible thing and should be limited to an absolute minimum, and especially kept away from the coathanger, back alley brigade, whose black market always immediately fills the vacuum created by such short-sighted legislation.
christ, people are people, and they have so much to learn, making legal criminals moralistically just rubs salt into an already painful wound.
believing in reincarnation helps me here, every child of god will have as many chances as it needs to come learn the lessons of living here, in the fullness of time... that's what eternity means, i submit...
thanks for an interesting discussion, lily. this is a very important issue, how to reconcile spiritual conscience with political consciousness, in fact i don't think it gets any more important...
plus anything that gets colman to gift us with one of those witty one-liners this kind of diary tends to evince from him, well they're priceless, the one in this thread about being afflicted with faith...LOL
there truly is something divine about this type of humour, i sometimes think it must be god's favourite, since i think (s)he likes a good laugh at hir own expense, that's one bank that'll never fail!
you go colman! you might be even funnier than even you think!
:) The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it. Chinese Proverb.
Islam and Christianity however... - both claim The Truth for themselves.
Buddhism and Hinduism are mostly about how to live ones life, about values - and not focused on one God = Truth.
There seems to be a much wider range of beliefs within "Buddhism", ranging from folk religion focused on saints and gods to the far end of Zen-type stuff that barely seems like a religion at all, than in all the various bits of the Abrahamic faith. Hinduism is something I know less about, but there seems to be a pretty wide range of belief there as well.
Hindusim seems to have so many Gods you seem to be able to choose your own and do your own thing. It is as much a cultural as a religious identity.
Judaism has the Prophets and a wide variety of ancient and more modern scriptures, but there are many different traditions of interpretation and Authority and thus for what constitutes a faithful life.
Islam has Mohammad, but after that you have various streams - Sunni, Shia, Sufi etc. - and various National Heads in some streams - Ayatollahs etc., but little in the way of centralised authority or universally accepted interpretation of scripture. Conversion has usually been by conquest or inter-marriage and there is very little concept of ongoing theological development.
Christianity seems to be a lot more historical than the others, with the claim that God became a Man and an actor in history and subsequently with the development of an organised authority structure (often both spiritual and secular) and a developmental process for theology as various controversies were adjudicated upon at various synods. At one point the founding documents almost lost all relevance and were known only to a few scholars. Theology/church policies became an adaptive process to the political/social realities facing the authorities of the day.
In reaction to this the Reformation sought to re-establish the primacy of the founding texts - and,in its more extreme forms - challenged almost all forms of religious hierarchy and authority. There is a case to be made that this later inspired the adoption of democracy, universal suffrage, the abolition of slavery, and ultimately the development of the concept of human rights although almost all were fought tooth and nail by the Church establishments who, rightly, saw them as a threat to their authority.
The flip side of this is that an insistence on the primacy of a "literal" modern day interpretation of ancient scripture seems to rule out any ongoing development/change in the understanding of Christianity, although strangely, this has not prevented fundamentalists from accepting widespread divorce, moving from antisemitism to rabid pro-Zionism, developing a militant homophobia, and creating new literalist doctrines of creationism and intelligent design to try an explain/obscure the yawning gap between Science and Fundamentalist Christianity.
This splintering of Authority has undermined the credibility of the whole tradition - how can you claim to be the one true religion when the Church down the road has a distinctly different take on things? Thus we now see the ending of temporal authority within Christianity as well - but not the sense that Christianity is part of a historical process - whereas Buddhism often seems almost indifferent to what happens in this life. There is always the next. notes from no w here
I think that there is a very useful distinction to be made between believers and mystics. Mystics are those who have, have had or claim to have had direct, personal experience of the Divine or of God, Jesus or the Holy Spirit, of the Virgin Mary, a Saint, or of the equivalents in other traditions or simply of the inner Self. From what you have written above, I would call you a mystic. It is a compliment from my point of view.
Paul said that faith is the evidence of things unseen. This is a very confusing statement to those who have not had a mystical experience, speaking from personal experience. Those who have had mystical experiences may be able to relate, as many, if not most mystical experiences are non visual, with the exception of some dreams, and hence are "unseen." It would have been clearer to have said that faith derives from personal mystical experience, the Gift of The Holy Ghost, in Christian Terminology. But it would have been a lot less useful to an organized religion.
But, as the Upanishads say, it is not given for all to hear of the Self. Perhaps this is not given even to the majority of the faithful! Yet these benighted individuals may well still want to be members in good standing of their congregation. So, in the Protestant Christan tradition, they profess to believe in Jesus Christ as their personal lord and savior, hoping that saying it will make it true. These are the ones to whom I propose that we refer as believers. Absent direct personal experience and the inner guidance deriving therefrom, they can always fall back on the literal word of the Bible or upon observance of ritual and upon correct behavior.
The Catholic Church has, at least since the Council of Nicea, been very wary of mystics. The Emperor Constantine offered the Christians the opportunity to become a recognized religion within the Roman Empire, but he wanted them to iron out differences and come up with a common set of beliefs for the entire Empire. Jesus said: "render unto Ceasar that which is Ceasars." For the Church Fathers this was an offer they couldn't refuse.
A lot of early Christian traditions were suppressed along with a number of gospels. Mystics lost big time. They are impossible to control. Can't have dogma changing every time some mystic has a new revelation. The theology was standardized and the dogma was adopted. Christianity was packaged for mass consumption by the standards of the day. There were a lot of religions extant at the time and many of them made fantastic promises. I suspect that the Church Fathers got caught up in a "promise race." Do as we tell you and believe as we instruct you and we will grant you Life Eternal in the World to Come. Much of this is a long way from anything Jesus could reasonably be believed to have said. Surely Procrustes was the patron saint of the Council of Nicea!
Similar dynamics occurred in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions. As interpreted by gurus sent to the west by, for instance, the Vedanta Society, the Vedic traditions are a sublime path of self discovery leading to an awareness of your inner Self, or Atman, and union, (yoga,) through meditation and study with the Divine, or Brahma. They see a spark of the divine in all living beings--all of whom are united in some way with the Universal Self--a Being with billions of eyes peering out at the universe. Hence all life is sacred. Those with great souls, (maha or great + atman or soul = Mahatma or great souled person, such as Ghandi), could unite with their own inner self and through that with all life and all creation.
On the level of the common believer there has always been a variety of Gods. The sages see these as aspects of divinity. Their godhead is also a trinity. Brahma, the Creator, Vishnu, the Preserver and Shiva, the Destroyer, but they were different aspects of the same divinity. Popular religion came to focus on specific Gods, such as Ganesha, Lakshmi, Agni, demons and human incarnations of divinity or atvars. This is functionally analogous to the Christain Trinity, the Saints, and Jesus as an avatar.
The Buddha emphasized the personal quest for enlightenment, which could be found in union with the divine. In at least one tradition he was an athiest, come to free men's minds from demons which had possessed them by binding the demons, best accomplished by increased understanding and insight, sort of like psychoanalysis. The Buddha was an athiest to a polytheistic religious society. He struggled to teach his followers, through study and meditation, to see through the anthropomorphic projections that men made onto gods. This is the same struggle that was expressed through Moses in the Commandment to make no graven images of God. Islam takes this much more seriously than does Christianity.
For those who are more knowledgeable about any of the religious traditions I have discussed, this is the best I can do in the available time. I consider myself something of a mystic but ever far from enlightenment.
If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.
They see a spark of the divine in all living beings--all of whom are united in some way with the Universal Self--a Being with billions of eyes peering out at the universe. Hence all life is sacred.
This perfectly fits Christianism too.
could unite with their own inner self and through that with all life and all creation.
Isn't this said much like that somewhere in the bible too? Amazing. There was a book making a comparative history of religions, by one Mircea Eliade, if I'm not mistaken. I think I'll look it up again.
"belief was an electro-chemical phenomena occurring in the brain" - You must be more than a mystic...
avoiding quote boxes and other formatting tools...
If you use Firefox (rather than internet explorer) and install the tribex extension click here - see new user guide - then quote boxes and embedded links to the stuff you are quoting is just a right mouse click away.
It takes time to get used to embedding links, videos and the like - pity we don't have a slightly more user friendly interface, but the techies are working on it. notes from no w here
Heh, look at that pretty quote box! ;) I'll try to figure it all out the hard way with Internet Explorer. If it gets too annoying, I'll switch to Firefox. - Thanks for pointing it out.
(You should put the hint into the New User guide! Is it already there?)
How do YOU think about this? (as a mystic)
>How do YOU think about this?
But mind is an electro-chemical phenomena that occurs within the brain. Perhaps it has a sub-section that, crudely put can function like a transceiver via some aspect of reality which we do not yet understand. But our minds develop from conception to death in a social context. Basic aspects are laid down before we can even speak, one of the most basic being the nutritive relation of dependency between child and parents. I believe that this basic brain pattern and subsequent, more elaborate brain patterns based on family structure and social structure are used by people as the filter through which they perceive information from the depths of their being. This is especially true when they are taught from an early age that this is how they should understand God.
But my father was an agnostic. His mother was the daughter of a Free Will Baptist Preacher and farmer who had homesteaded a plot of land in the Boston Mountains of Arkansas after the Civil War. His father had been orphaned at the age of 10 in 1860, on the eve of the civil war, in the boot heel of Missouri and grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas. I strongly suspect he was ill used and abused as a child. My father was a strong willed individual and came to see the frequent physical discipline he received from his father, for such things as using words he heard his father and other adults use, etc. as sadism justified by passages from the Bible. In short, he had his butt beat too many times in the name of God and Jesus and came to see religion as a justification for anything those in control wanted to do. As he put it, he went to church until he was too big for them to make him go. (His father was 40 years old when he took my 18 year old grandmother as his second wife and was 60 years old when my father was born.)
My mother was the next to youngest child of a well to do businessman and merchant in north central Oklahoma, a "Sooner" who had been in the Indian Territories since at least 1892. As a young man, my maternal grandfather had participated in cattle drives from the Rio Grande to the rail head at Wichita, Kansas with Charlie Goodnight. He paid the salary of the minister at the First Christian Church in Wann Oklahoma until 1929 and my mother grew up in that church. The moral and ethical teaching of Christianity were more important to her than the dogma, so when she was being courted by my father in the late 30s she could accept his agnosticism. The result was that religion was not pushed onto me at an early age.
My parents were married in January, 1942 and I was born in December. My father was drafted into the army at age 32. They had a saying in the army: "The bader you are, the further you go." He ended the war in Kunming or Kunching China, having traveled in the first convoy over the Lido Road. He arrived home weighing 140 lbs, about 50 lbs lighter than his basketball playing or fighting weight when he left for the army. I was almost three years old when he returned and had been raised almost entirely by women. Things did not go well and I had a troubled relation with my father until he died at age 45 in an auto accident.
From the third grade on I read constantly. My father prized intellect and was at least pleased that I was smart, if not athletic. My mother sent me to Sunday School from about age 8. My father didn't object. When I was nine I was reading Genesis and asked my father where Adam and Eve's wives came from. He said: "They don't say much about that, do they?" So I might be going to Sunday School and Church every Sunday, but I had permission to be critical, and knew that not every one believed the same way.
I became a major challenge for the Minister's wife, who was often the Sunday School teacher for what ever class I was in. Damage control, I suspect. But the Minister and his wife were in Divinity School and gave me a good grounding in the Bible and in Church History, for which I remain grateful. I absorbed the moral and ethical teachings of Jesus, but never really bought the theology. I scandalized the minister's wife by telling her that, while there may be a Heaven, I couldn't believe there was a Hell.
As I became a teen, the Sunday School Story became more and more unbelievable. When, at the urging of my mother, in the year after my father's death, I joined the Church and was baptized, I felt very bizarre confessing my faith in Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior. I wasn't at all convinced of this. I did it for my mother, but it has always been a thorn in my side. I did not have any experience like those described in the Bible and I wasn't going to just accept that it was because I was a bad person. When our minister got his Doctor of Divinity and went to a much larger church in Tulsa, he was replaced by a more fundamentalist preacher. I stopped going to church.
When I was about 25 and living in L.A. I came into contact with some people who were into Vedanta. From them I got a recommendation to read The Autobiography of a Yoga by Yogananda. It was a revelation. Yogananda lucidly described the teachings of Jesus as being about human consciousness. With his explanation, much of what I had been taught now made sense. From that point of view, the fundamental teaching had been valid, and Jesus could affect men's lives, but the message had been mangled by the institutionalization of Christianity. I think you would also find Yogananda interesting. Hope this answers your question. :-) If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.
I understand that "graven images of God" are meaningless to you - since you describe yourself as an atheist. I also believe that images of God are deceiving, lead away from the truth, not towards it.
I understand that "graven images of God" are meaningless to you...
The version of Christian theism commonly presented in Sunday School and taught in the home via Bible books for children presents an omniscient, omnibeneficent, omnipotent, immanent deity who knows the innermost thoughts of each of us. Small children are taught to pray to God every night as well as to fear his wrath. It is this conception of a personal God, combined with the assertion of the Bible as the literal truth and the infallible Word of God, combined with the actual contents of the Bible and the world as it is that I found unbelievable as a 9 year old child.
It is that formulation of theism that I reject and find monstrous. Any plausible conception of divinity must be impersonal and non-anthropomorphic for me to find it worthy of consideration. The fundamentalist view I find intellectually and ethically stultifying and largely responsible for the inability of the polity in the USA to function on a more effective level. We have a form of government that has come to be a representative democracy, but it is constituted of a citizenry of which more than half have a theistic world view which sees the world in monarchical, hierarchical absolute terms. These views do not match our type of government. Going back to a form of government which fits the structure of the views doesn't seem likely to help. Our choice remains either to limp along as best we can as we are doing or to try to encourage more functional views of the nature of religion. This is our greatest challenge. If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.
pray to God every night as well as to fear his wrath. It is this conception of a personal God, combined with the assertion of the Bible as the literal truth and the infallible Word of God, combined with the actual contents of the Bible and the world as it is that I found unbelievable as a 9 year old child. It is that formulation of theism that I reject and find monstrous.
It is that formulation of theism that I reject and find monstrous.
What comes to mind is neither a theological nor a spiritual, rather the psychological reply of looking for explanations in our respective childhoods, since I could believe the above without any effort. My father was very present and caring, and to know of this God-father was most comforting to me. I believe that I rejected the idea of having to fear his wrath.
The fundamentalist view I find intellectually and ethically stultifying and largely responsible for the inability of the polity in the USA to function on a more effective level.
Yes but it is not really the idea of a powerful God-father but the patronizing and the arrogance that some Christians have falsely deducted from it. Radical views are not at fault; I rather see the problem in a dramatic and damaging perversion of Christian values that is due to the institutionalised power of 'Christians'. I fully agree with you on that. It is what happens when form wins over content, arrogance and pride over humbleness.
