The middle path (redefined.)

The middle road.

I often wonder why more people don’t aspire for moderation. But, I’ve come to realize moderation isn’t really moderate. It’s radically different. We as a human globule keep doing things the same way expecting different results. It’s the very definition of madness.

The atheist believes in utter humanism. That all desires are of the flesh and nothing exists besides the flesh. Is this the truth? Or is it merely a partial truth? Has any “wisdom” been gained from following the desires of the flesh?

The theist believes that desires of the flesh are okay, but we shouldn’t focus on them too much or else we’ll be slaves to sin. They beat the drum against sinning, all the while sinning to live. In order to live, we have to commit sin. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be true with our words…

The “mystic” (for lack of a better word, buddhist would fall here.) believes that “nihilism” (again for lack of a better term.) is the best path. That suffering is bad. And how does suffering come about? from conflict. From desire. From living. They claim some mystical “dharma” that can arise from ending desire and approaching nirvana.

At a certain moment in one’s life you reach a fork. You can follow the humanist path and pursure the purile. The natural… One’s own desires will lead your heart. But, we already know that our desires are flawed and cause suffering.

The next fork leads down the path of the theist, They tell you to give your will to god. The idea of god is great. You bow to his will, he tells you what to do, and you no longer are a slave to your desires, but a servant of an all powerful all wise god. Suffering is part of living, and following god can help lessen suffering. Conflict is necessary as evil exists all around us. But, Who has seen god?

And who has been to heaven?

The next fork leads to the path of the relativist/nihilist. All paths lead to the same place (which we know they don’t), All truths are equal (which we know they aren’t). Desires are bad, and suffering is bad…

The best way to live? Curl up into the fetal position and meditate until you die.

Someone give me some asphalt, it’s time to make a new path. It’s time to shake shit up, and make a new fork.

On atheism’s madness:

1. giving over one’s heart to the purile, will taint it, and make us into unfeeling (towards others) assholes.

2. It completely ignores our “spiritual” (for lack of a better term) side. There’s more to the world than we know… (but that doesn’t mean we don’t know anything…)

3. Atheism is merely another form of suppression and the opposite extreme of relativism.

On theism’s madness:

1. No one has been to heaven. For all we know it doesn’t exist.

2. No one has seen or heard god. The will of god, is merely the will of the founders/leaders of that particular theism.

3. We need to feel… though not as extreme as the next path (nihilism/relativism), it still tries to suppress completely what is natural.

On relativism’s madness:

1. Conflict is necessary. The only way we can grow is to have conflict. (there are other ways, they occur less often though)

2. related to this is the problems of post-mods. They think the only way to deal with problems is to “cut and run”.

3. Pleasure is also necessary.

4. having an opinion and knowledge is necessary.

5. No one has reach Nirvana, or an enlightened state… unless you’re willing to believe the myth of buddha, while not believing the myth of christ… but then you’d be forgoing your sacred cow.

Conclusion:
Atheism and Relativism are opposite extremes. Both are the maddest forms forks to follow. (i’m not calling you crazy… I’m just saying don’t expect something different from what people have found before following the same path.)

But, that isn’t forgiving the middle path of theism. People who are religious are not skeptical enough, and also are following a path where the results are obvious:

C1) there is not going to be a return of christ.

C2) There is not going to be a return of mohammed, or a “hidden imam”.

C3) prophets are always false.

So where does that leave us?

The bold frightening path of thinking for ourselves and forging a new path.

I agree with you, for the most part. It is best to combine what you’ve been taught with your own thoughts and opinions, because that inspires growth. Atheism tends not to support any morals, so people can’t work together. Theism, and relativism? support tradition over progress. A small item to consider about theism (christianity in particular) is that religions change over time. The ideas of many christians are more moderate now, and some outdated practices are elliminated for the sake of progress, thus combing the best aspects of all thought.

Well I could add that sometimes we look too much at how much each “path” has been “tread”. Just because a lot of people follow the same path, doesn’t mean the ending is good or bad. It just means that for some reasons (illogical or logical), a whole bunch of people decided to follow that.

Besides that, you have to look at where each path looks to be coming from. The backgrounds of atheism, Christianity, Buddhism, etc. You can’t look back and tell me that whatever they came from doesn’t exist. They are there for a reason. So good luck to all of us (I guess). Use common sense, knowledge, and for all of us, we need to be open. God knows (lol) we all need a good whack over the head. Bad wording there, but you know what I mean.

When you say on theism’s madness you say that “no one has seen or heard God” — how do you know this? You can’t prove that statement can you? What about Moses? Adam and Eve? Isn’t all you’re saying by making a statement like this is that the bible is a lie?

Mysticism and Buddhism have nothing to do nihilism. They are more like the opposite of nihilism. Before you criticise a “path”, you need to know the basic stuff, like the meaning of terms, first.

Such a misrepresentation of mysticism and meditation merely demonstrates your lack of understanding of the subject.

the bible isn’t a lie… it’s a myth. Now, myths are not lies, they are humanities story to understand the struggle.

All we have to look back is books. Who records what? There was a religious scholar in the late 1800’s that believed mohammed was himself an invention of the religion and such a caricature couldn’t really exist.

No doubt that’s a bit far fetched, but the myth of the person has been retold so many times that the story of the person becomes a caricature of the person. Vlad the Impaler for example was no doubt horrific to the Turks who were trying to take over Romania, but I doubt very much that he was as horrible as the stories make him out to be.

Think of it this way as well… the history that we have is a combination of oral story telling, and copyists. There were no copy machines or printing presses until the 1600’s. And even then many books were still copied, because it was a cheaper way to distribute.

Do we know this for certain?

Certainly. A museum in the UK has the oldest copy of the Torah ever found, and it is significantly different than even the modern hebrew Torah. Copyists and additions have been made to the book over time. The torah used to be far more organic.

Even the story of Buddha was organic, until they decided that no more redactions or additions could be made. Myth is our power, religions (even those that stand against religion) lock up this power.

Yes, but they can and will slip back in to their literalist thought patterns. The muslims were far more secular 50 - 100 years ago than they are today. There were many more branches of muslim beliefs.

Today? Most have slipped back into a fundamentalist literalist belief of the quran and hadith. I think it’s completely possible for christianity to do the same, and I expect it will be a reaction to the atheists and secularists pushing against it.

Absolutely disagree. Buddhism criticizes suffering, as if it were a bad thing… and it simplifies suffering into simple desires.

1. not all suffering is caused from desire.

2. without suffering we cannot grow.

The ultimate goal of mysticism and buddhism is a withdrawal from the world, and from it’s beliefs. The ultimate goal is to be the monk in the lotus position in the corner meditating your life away, lest you be tempted back into the “path” of suffering.

hardly. Tell me that your goal is not to remove suffering and to remove yourself from the world, even if only slightly?

Tell me that your goal is not to remove desire, to remove yourself from feeling pain, (and hence joy as well.)

You can’t, because the ultimate goal of meditation IS to remove these things, and is thus nihilism.

the bible isn’t a lie…it’s a myth

please explain? because you’re calling the authors liars when they claim its the truth. heck, you’re calling all Christians liars (mistaken or not) for believing a “myth” or a “lie”.

oh sorry the little quote thingy didn’t work. I’m no good at HTML.

myth does not = lie.

Myths contain truth. consider shakespeare. His stories are another form of mythology. They aren’t “true”, but they have basic, truths. Something doesn’t have to have happened to make it true.

And sythe comes out in favour of truthiness.

Bravo, knew you had it in you.

Shakespeare’s work=fiction

Bible=nonfiction

I don’t see what the problem is. Also, tell me what truth YOU think the Bible contains. explain the “myth” of it, because right now I don’t see it.

So caesar didn’t exist?

So Job was real?

Jonah WAS swallowed by a whale?

The myth IS it. There’s nothing wrong with that.

The truth is in it’s reflection of our souls. It’s truth is in our violence. It’s truth is in our love. It’s truth is in our sorrow.

You agree with me?

God, what universe did I land in.

I’m not quite sure how you can proclaim biblical stories to be myth’s. If a God does exist, who can create this universe, who can create man, can probably do what he did to job and jonah and the whale…I wouldn’t really doubt that.

And even if you kept with this idea, you might as well believe Jesus didn’t perform miracles, then Jesus might as well not been God.

Do you see where you’re heading with this? Soon it’s going to head straight to the bible isn’t real and niether is God.

I can back it up even more and say Christ rising from the dead would be myth, God creating the earth would be myth, a burning bush would be myth, and in all this it is very possible all of this actually is possible, even more so with a God who exist in the first place.

So see how do people get off on declaring the bible as myth? I can see discriptive things, such as pure truthful testimonies that may not be accurate or may only describe what that disciple saw and his best way of describing it. But as I feel I’m repeating with, a bible with myths might as well have a Jesus would couldn’t perform miracles, might as well have not been perfect and might as well not been the son of God. Then as we go further might as well not be Just God in General.

The bible doesn’t have to be word for word non-fiction to pass along important ideas: do unto other as you would have them do unto you, love thy neighbor etc. It could use basic truths and add more depth with a little bit of fiction to make the ideas more acceptable to people who can’t understand those abstract ideas without concrete stories.

Because they are, and the authors wrote them as such?

If a god does exist we wouldn’t have so many visions and differences of him. A difference in interpretation simply would not exist. If god cannot make himself clear… than what kind of god is he? if it’s myth to connect us to ourselves and to god, it changes everything. No longer is the tale of Jonah and the whale, literal, it’s a story of rebirth and of death. The same is true of christ, and of many other biblical stories.

That’s not a problem for me, because I’m not christian. Ask yourself a question.

1. Am I forcing you to re-interpret the bible?

2. Am I suggesting an alternate interpretation?

3. Am I christian?

But also think about this… The Torah before the christians locked it into it’s current status, was constantly changing… stories (apocrypha) were constantly added into the mix, like the apocrypha that describes where the women that were needed for procreation came from, or the midrash apocrypha that says, Adam had two wives, Lillith, and Eve.

These are all interesting tales, and myths. But because of your strict literal interpretation… they mean nothing to you.

Why believe something is so static that obviously isn’t?

The “book” that the scribes found in (judges I believe) was the redacted book of deuteronomy to bring back a priestly state. The last part of mark, doesn’t exist in the oldest manuscripts.

Two redactions that stand alone? I would think not. And there should be nothing wrong with that… the problem comes from fundamental belief. Believe something is either the word of god, or the inspired word of god, and the whole thing suddenly becomes fact… the Earth becomes 7000 years old (depending on how literal you take the bible) and Jesus is god. (which the gospels never claim, Paul does though.)

The stories in the bible are as real as shakespeares story of Julius Caesar.

yep all myth. Some of it is based on something that happened, and some of it is allegory of what happened.

Let’s look at it from another angle… The stories in the bible, had more involvement with god, the further away from the writers time they got. So you could tell that the earliest stories in the bible were farther away from the author’s time, and even the stories of moses, were he interacts with god (but we have more detail) were in the recent past (for the author). Then we get to more current time (Joshua) and God’s interactions change to mere influence of Joshua. There’s nothing extraordinary about the goings on of the book of Joshua, it merely is the doings of a supreme militaristic leader.

Then we get to the P(r)o(ph)ets, where they predict horrible things for Israel’s immediate future unless they change their ways and become devoted to god. Then come the gospels… stories of jesus from the present looking probably at least 200 years into the past. Paul, writing fromt the perspective that christ rose in a spiritual plane (he doesn’t make references to a physical christ, and not to physical disciples.)

So myth or fact? It’s a combination of all of the above. The bible is an extremely complex literary work, composed by many copyists, authors and redactors.

Somewhere different than where we are today.

I think you made some good points, but I wanted to address this one. I’m not sure what you mean by “conflict”. Does this mean “conflicting ideas?” or “conflict in the sense of strife?”

I can gain a whole lot of personal growth by reading conflicting ideas without needing the lesson of ACTUAL conflict within my life.

How does your description of buddhism (which is inaccurate) reflect the ideas of “nihilism” and “relativism”? Can you quote an online definition (eg. Wikipedia) of nihilism that has anything to do with what you wrote?

And your description is inaccurate, because the purpose of meditation is not to withdraw from the world - the purpose is to attain wisdom. Another important aspect of buddhism is compassion for others, as in, for example, the concept of Bodhisattva: “A being who is dedicated to assisting all sentient beings in achieving complete Buddhahood.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhisattva Selfless helping of others, to remove their suffering - that is quite at odds with the idea of removing oneself completely from the world, isn’t it?

Both.

Of course, and you can come to an agreement to disagree, if it’s not a matter deserving physical conflict. There are matters that do.

Tell me again how you gain wisdom by pulling inward and not interacting with the world?

sometimes real people can be written into fiction

yes, and yes.

please explain that last part? I didn’t ask where the truth was, I asked WHAT it was.