What is the inspiration " to act, to motivate, to aspire, to live."?
The Word of God is the proper context of life. IOW, it gives valuable information.
Also known as the “breath of life”, the very cause of life being different than mere clay.
What does that mean?
Hmmm, doesn’t say much.
The context given by the Word of God :
-A human being as the intended creation of God.
-A human being exists beyond the limited time of birth to death.
-A human being has certain divine attributes, such as an interest in truth, wisdom, honor, justice.
-A human being has a unique role to play and an importance.
That changes human attitudes and behavior from dog eat dog, survival of the fittest, zero sum game.
Well okay, now that I understand what you meant, those things are the result of “receiving the word of God”, right? They aren’t actually about what the “word of God” IS, but rather what comes from the reception of it?
My point is merely that WHAT the “word of God is”, is not all of the very complex and profound things that come from it’s actual reception/understanding, but rather, if one understands the consequences of PHT, there is nothing that has ever been attributed onto God, that isn’t within one’s grasp to utilize.
If that is still unclear (much like RM:AO), keep questioning until it is.
And here I thought religious worship in the west was singing songs about how cool you think God is and reading the Bible.
Since when? Did it become the Victorian era again while I wasn't paying attention?
Anyway, people at religious worship talk about their vices for the same reason they talk about their sick relatives or their financial problems or whatever- they’re seeking intervention and understanding. I’m having a hard time seeing what reason there is to be critical of this.
I’m writing in this way because I don’t think that the Word of God can be summed up by one word like ‘hope’. I don’t think that it be accurately expressed in words.
If I look up at the sun, I don’t know what it is. I know that it is the source of light and warmth. I feel and understand the effect of its presence. I know it by the results. And that’s as close as I can get.
I understand. And that is the way it is with the majority of people. That is why I said, “In modern analytical terms”.
People prefer that such things remain a mystery anyway. I don’t consider that a problem until too great a percentage know nothing but it being a mystery. Without at least a few holding onto the reality, fantasies, denials, and hatred go very wild (as this forum very clearly displays).
There is a good reason why the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. It remains beyond modern analytical terms.
I see there was a lot happening in this thread while I was away, and my initial post was the cause of some confusion. Thank you AD for your attempt at making some sense of that post. I will now try to clarify what exactly it was that I meant, by addressing a few points raised by Uccisore.
Yes, there is that aspect of it, as well, and it could depend on exactly where you attend services. When I said religious worship is like an AA meeting, perhaps I should have said services can be like an AA meeting. At the time, I was thinking of a scene like we see in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, where Huck and his buddies wander into this hillbilly backwoods town, and into one of these revival meetings. One of Huck’s gang, “the king” gets up and gives a talk, confessing all his sins, living as a pirate for the past 30 years, plundering, thieving and murdering, but now, thanks to this little congregation, he has had a conversion, and is now going to travel to the Indian Ocean to help his fellow pirates to see the light. The congregation then promptly takes up a collection for him, to get him started on his mission.
But to further clarify this, when I said “religious worship”, that could include, as I just explained, the ceremonies themselves, but also religious worship in the more general sense of how one walks the path of a faith. AA has been criticized as treating the symptoms, but not the cause of alcohol addiction. See, for example:
theatlantic.com/features/arc … us/386255/
So when I was comparing religious worship to AA, I guess my gripe was that there is too much emphasis on avoiding sin, and not enough on having a true change of heart, so that the person no longer feels the compulsion to commit all those wicked deeds of his or her past.
This was a statement about the hypocrisy we see in religious worship. Do people really hate a flesh hound and adore virgins, or do they simply say these things because they wouldn’t dare say otherwise, especially in a church, in front of a bunch upright worshipers. And I don’t know why, because, as I said, I don’t think that a the road of sexual puritanism is necessarily going to help you find God, although there are a lot of pitfalls associated with a life sexual debauchery. Like I said, “everything in moderation”. That story from Huckleberry Finn is another example. “The king” isn’t a king at all; nor is he a pirate. He and his buddy, ‘the duke’, are a couple of swindlers out to make a few bucks off of the town folk, willing to donate to the cause of saving sinners. In the novel, Twain uses different examples of how religion is often just a pretentious display of piety.
Being critical is not generally very constructive, is it? Yes, and my reason for posting that was more to express my own growing dissatisfaction /disillusionment with our traditional western style of worship. Anyways, that was a couple weeks ago since I first posted that, and my disillusionment is more or less complete now. I now see that humans are a naturally wicked species, and the most you can expect from them (generally) is if they can simply refrain from stealing, murdering, fighting, etc. If the average human can manage that, he or she is doing well. To expect much more is unreasonable, I guess. And this is why our traditional notion of God is flawed. We’ve personified God with human traits. This God we’ve envisioned is one who is going to draw a circle around himself and his friends, and everyone outside that circle is going to be his punching bag. Typical human behavior being ascribed to a supposedly superior being. No, I think that if there is a god, he’s going to be less human, and more rabbit like. Why can’t God be somebody like that 6’ 3.5" tall pooka known as Harvey?
OK. Do you have a particular faith or denomination in mind? Because I’m sure some groups are more guilty than others and deserve the criticism more or less than others.
Yeah. I mean, that was a fictional account written by somebody specifically to criticize religion, but I’m certain stuff like that happens for sure.
I can’t agree with that. The change of heart is precisely what the term ‘repent’ means, and the entire point of Protestant Christianity is to be born again as a new person. That’s practically all they talk about in the churches I’ve been to.
Err…Neither? Again, what century are you writing to us from where people in the Western world are demonstrating any public respect for chastity as a virtue?
It’s often very constructive. We have a term for that - ‘constructive criticism’, and all.
It’s interesting that you say that, because that’s exactly the sort of observation people make that bring them to religions in which Salvation is a core concept.
Why would God have a height?
Twain may have been prone to stretching things a bit, but I think his novel was intended to give the reader an idea of life in the slave states, before the emancipation of the slaves, and the characters in the book probably take their inspiration from real persons and events.
As I said, criticism is generally not constructive; nevertheless, when it can be constructive, there are usually better ways of addressing an issue, as I will demonstrate with your next comment, Uccisore.
I will try to deal with these two comments at once. As I just said, there are usually better ways of addressing an issue than through criticism, and when I compared religious worship to an AA meeting, I was, admittedly, being critical. So I’ll now try to approach this issue from a different angle, using what I sometimes refer to as “the sum of all wisdom” -The Wizard of Oz (1939).
Now each one of us is ultimately forced to make a decision in his or her life. That decision is whether to serve good or evil. To try to serve good requires courage, because those who serve evil will try to make you do otherwise, and often with threats of harming you or people you care about. Now religion is kind of like a suit of armor, and since this is an invisible suit of armor, we can compare it to Dorothy’s magic slippers, which she wore to protect herself from the witch (the evil one). We never see the slippers actually do anything, except shock the witch, when she tries to remove them from Dorothy. Nevertheless, because Dorothy believes in the protection offered by the slippers, she is not afraid to choose good over evil. For those who choose to serve good rather than evil, religion is like those ruby slippers, allowing a person to resist evil, believing that there is a power much greater than whatever evil he or she may run up against.
When people try to serve good, but just don’t have the courage, they are like Dorothy going up against the witch, missing one slipper. Now you might say that Dorothy didn’t really need the slippers, and it was her own courage that gave her victory against the witch. I would tend to agree this, but perhaps a better way of putting it is to say that Dorothy needed courage to defeat the witch, but it was the slippers that gave her that courage.
When Dorothy is a prisoner in the witch’s castle, she begins to lose heart. Exactly why she loses heart here probably has something to do with the fact that she has been separated from her friends, and begins to focus on herself. Dorothy once again takes heart, when she shifts focus from herself, when the witch tries to kill the scarecrow. Dorothy forgets her own fear, and rushes to the aid of the scarecrow.
So when I said religious worship can be like an AA meeting, what I was getting at is that there can often be too much focus on fighting one’s own personal demons, so much so that a person can forget that there is a much broader struggle going on, and the way to overcome is when we all help one another. And after all, Is this not a core concept in Christianity? And does the decision to serve good or evil not boil down to the question of whether you are just going to serve your own interests, or if you are going to try to help others as well?
So I guess it doesn’t really matter if your religious worship can sometimes feel like an AA meeting. The question is, Does religion make you feel like Dorothy with her ruby slippers, when you are trying to resist evil? or, do you feel like Dorothy with one slipper missing? If a person does feel unprotected in the struggle against evil, perhaps he or she is too focused on fighting personal demons.
Maybe things have changed since I last used to go to the clubs. Some of the TV shows I’ve seen would suggest they have, but I’m never too sure about what I see on TV.
I would hope so.
Harvey -he’s 6’ 3.5" rabbit from the movie Harvey. I imagine a god who is more like this rabbit, than the image of God we’ve created in western theology.
Huck Finn, The Wizard of Oz, Harvey…
Does all your wisdom come from fictional books, movies and TV?
Synchronicity actually. Wisdom always starts with a question. But the answer to that question comes through a process similar to what Jung termed synchronicity (meaningful coincidence). I don’t know if Jung ever compared this synchronicity to providence, but it was through my own investigations into synchronicity that I concluded that it can function as a kind of providence, when one is confronted with a question, to which there does not seem to be a solution. But if one is persistent, the solution will come, and it can sometimes come in the form of movies, TV, or novels.
My investigations into synchronicity started with The Wizard of Oz. As you may have heard, the movie can be synced up with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Some have credited this phenomenon to Jung’s synchronicity. Nobody seems to know who discovered this, but I thought I would try syncing movies and albums up myself. I decided to stick with Pink Floyd, since Dark Side of Oz had worked so well. So I bought all the Pink Floyd albums, and began the process of trying to sync them up to various movies. One of my best discoveries was that Pink Floyd’s The Wall could be synced up to Lifeforce. Now I was going to give you a long story about how I discovered this sync, and how I eventually discovered the connection between the album and the movie -a story which involves more examples of synchronicity -when I realized that synchronicity was at work in this very thread. So I’ll skip that long complicated explanation, and just say that the connection between the movie and the album has to do with something Freud called a Madonna-Whore Complex:
(Madonna-Whore Complex: Wikipedia)
The Wall is a concept album by Pink Floyd, that relates the story of Pink, whose difficult relationship with his mother growing up eventually leads him to build a metaphorical wall around himself. It was while I was contemplating this Madonna-whore complex that I realized that your first comment to me, Phyllo, concerned the statement in my original post: “Everybody loves a virgin; everybody hates a flesh-hound”. You said that this didn’t make any sense, and then you and AD got into a discussion about it. But anyways, there you have it … we got synchronicity happening right here in this thread. So, if you’re still confused by my statement, you might want to look up Madonna-whore complex -synchronicity may be trying to show you something.
I think I saw a youtube video called ‘The Pharmacratic Inquistion’
Why do you think monks used to shave the tops of their heads 
It’s still a work of fiction from a hostile source from over a century ago. Seems to me there must be a better source for what religious worship is like in the West.
Yeah, I get the point you're making, and religions shouldn't boil down into self-help groups and therapy sessions. I just wish you'd actually ground it in some way so I could see that this is actually a rampant problem in "Western religious worship" such that your criticism is justified. And no, it's not all about 'helping one another' or 'choosing to help other over your own interests'. Those things are nice, but what you're doing is trying to wash the spiritual message out of religion and replace it with a "Be good people in some, general, unspecified way" message. No, the point of Western religion is to become closer to God- the actual God that there is, not some metaphor for goodness. At the rate thing are going, 'good' will mean to the godless masses something completely different five years from now than it means today, and somebody completely different again five years after that. Why chase it?
Do you actually attend some religious worship service where this regularly happens?
Refer to Astrotheology and Shamanism Christianity’s Pagan roots By Jan Irvin and Andrew Rutajit
Really, sounds like a delusion to me.
If you disagree, you should just say so, and then you could just offer your contrary proof. But since you are saying I’m wrong and also suffering a delusion, you’re going to have to prove both.
But to suggest that a flesh hound is more trusted, respected and admired than a virgin is just bloody ridiculous, and I’m not going to waste any more time arguing this, unless somebody has some proof to back him up.