a rare time that I post here....

For once, I shall be posting in the religion/spirituality board…
but why this change? I have been thinking about why people hold to religions,
or I have called them superstitions, childhood indoctrinations, prejudice,
bigotry or bias…

I am not going to challenge the usual religious hypocrisy and cant,
I live in America the home of hypocrisy and cant… you know those who
pretend to be pro-life but they aren’t… you know that hypocrisy and cant…

no, I have been thinking about something free spirit wrote…about how
we should hold to the Christian religion because of the “evidence” that
shows us the existence of the god, Jesus…that we can believe the “evidence”
of the 500 people who saw Jesus after his death… his resurrection…
we can believe in that…Miracle…and that must compel us to believe…

now, the day to day stuff, of the parable of the good Samaritan for example,
that isn’t the stuff that drive people to hold belief in Christianity…
the hard moral questions, am I my brothers keeper? that type of stuff,
isn’t what bring in the crowd for Christianity… no, it is the miracles,
raising Jesus from the dead, feeding the multitude with a few loaves of
bread and turning water into wine…that is the crowd pleaser, the stuff
that raises money for the Christian churches…

what is Christianity without, without the miracles? Joshua stopping
the sun and the moon, so he can win his battle? The raising of Lazarus from
the dead… take away the flashy stuff out of Christianity and who would believe?
would you still believe if, if you weren’t given an eternal life and a place at
god’s side? would you still believe if all you had of Christianity was the moral lessons
and the cute homilies?

I think the answer is pretty clear…the Christian religion survives because of
a couple of reasons, first, the miracles and secondly, the promise of eternal life,

remove those from the Christian religion, and you have a dead religion…

and that is my point, believer’s believe because of the extraordinary
and quite implausible miracles…take away the miracles and Christianity
is no more…take away the implausible and no one holds to Christianity…

and why should I hold to a religion that only exists because of
ridiculous claims to being right because of miracles?

if we hold to Christianity only because of the miracles, then
why haven’t we seen any such miracles like those in the bible in
thousands of years? why should I hold to a miracle based religion
that hasn’t had a miracle in thousands of years?

Can defenders of the faith even defend Christianity without
any reference to miracles? Can we defend Christianity without
any reference to the two talking points… one, eternal life,
and two, the miracles of the bible?

defenders of the faith hold that they believe because
the miracles of the bible are miracles… that “proves” the
existence of god…the miracles are what drives belief in
Christianity, not the moral stories of the bible, but the
belief in the impossible… with the key word being “belief”…

the holding of Christianity requires belief… and that is what
is important, the belief, the facts, the evidence is unimportant…
what matters in Christianity is the holding of belief, the faith
is what matters in Christianity…in other words, the object of belief
is less important then the faith itself…Christianity survives because
of faith, not because of the object of faith, miracles, are implausible
and unrealistic… have you or anyone you know, witnessed a miracle?

in thousands of years, no one has seen a miracle…a miracle by
definition is something that cannot be explained rationally…
the work of divine agency…

(I point out that even in my lifetime, there have been events
that has, to this day, caused people to wonder… I point out, even with
cameras and film, we still can’t definitely show who shot JFK… we have
theories and other faith based materials, but we cannot say for sure who shot
JFK, but does that mean the assassination was a divine event because we cannot
say who did it? it cannot be explained rationally and thus is divine?)

so can you Christians say you believe in Christianity even without
the miracles? Is Christianity as a moral base religion, enough for
you to hold faith in it?

can you defend Christianity without any type of engagement with miracles?

no, quite simply no…

Kropotkin

so to extend this thought, can we hold to a religion like
Buddhism even though it too is faith based?

and Kropotkin, how is Buddhism faith based?

the entire religion of Buddhism requires one assumption which
is based on faith… the idea of reincarnation… that we are
continuously being reincarnated… that is the beginning point of
Buddhism…and the point that all other points of Buddhism
requires to be true…and to accept that we are always
being reincarnated requires faith in reincarnation…

if I accept that point, then and only then can we hold to
Buddhism… it requires, demands that we first accept the idea
of our constantly being reborn/reincarnated…

if you don’t accept this point, then you cannot hold to Buddhism…
for then Enlightenment, the seeking of Dhamma, makes little sense…
for Buddhism is overcoming suffering/dissatisfaction… which is caused
by two things, reincarnation and the wanting of things…the craving of
goods, money/material things… or wanting such things as fame or immortality
or power also leads to suffering and discontentment…

so the removal of desire removes suffering and dissatisfaction/discontentment
and the removal of being reincarnated over and over again, also removes
suffering/dissatisfaction…

and to achieve reaching the one which means one will no longer be
reincarnated, begins with the removal of desire or attachment to things…

so what is the point of no longer being reincarnated? that exists
mainly as a point similar to the Christian belief in if one if good, then
you will spend eternity in heaven…it gives incentive to people to
become good to spend time in heaven or in Buddhism, not to be reborn…

notice that neither religion depends solely on good behavior as being enough…
that there must be some incentive to force people to become and stay good…

in Buddhism the honey is the end of suffering and of being reborn over and over again,
in Christianity, the honey is to be good to go to heaven and enjoy immortality…

and we can see the stick in both, in Buddhism to continue to suffer is the stick
and in Christianity the stick is hell… where there is more suffering…

and that is the connecting point of both Buddhism and Christianity…
the removal of suffering by being good…

but remove the carrot and the stick, and does anybody hold to or believe
in Buddhism or Christianity?

this shows us that what drives us or motivates us isn’t being good or evil,
but avoiding pain and punishment or being rewarded…that is what drives human
behavior…and until we change that, acting without any type of reward or
fear of punishment, we cannot, cannot take the next step into becoming fully
human… we will remain animals or animal/human until we act without
recourse to reward or punishment…we act because it is the right thing to do,
not because we will be rewarded or punished…

and until we get to this point, we are stuck… we cannot grow as human beings until
we move beyond reward or punishment as a means of correcting our behavior…

we have to make this next step… to act regardless of our reward or punishment…
to simple do the right thing… no matter what the cost…or reward…

Kropotkin

Very well said.

I do believe it is possible to be an ethical Christian, believing in certain tenets that Jesus allegedly espoused in the books that were written about him long after his death, without believing in Christ’s divinity or any kind of God. I have long thought, for example, that based on his novel the Brothers Karamazov, that Dostoevsky was likely a Christian atheist — a believer in ethical Christianity without the divine encrustations.

Dostoevski as a novelist wore many hats. I think "Notes from Underground’ expressed his point of view at the time he wrote it. But that was but a moment in his life. In Brothers Karamazov the older brother Ivan is an atheist. He’s the smart one. But the younger brother, (Misha is it?) embodies the compassionate loving spirit of Christ. Those two modes of being I think coexisted in Dostoevsky.

There is Dmitri, the sensualist, Ivan, the atheist intellectual, and Alexei, the youngest brother, who is a theist who enters into the orthodox church and is mentored by Father Zossima. They each have alternative names because in Russian it apparently is common to have many different nicknames. Like the triune God, I think these characters are the triune Dostoevsky, who exhibited elements of all three brothers in his life.

Well I don’t know about you guys, but I have experienced miracles, and am half way , secure in that fate, which supports my belief

Not that even the beating of my heart not a miracle come true to realization.

K: which is kinda my point, would you still believe without these miracles you write of?

I doubt it… belief requires something extraordinary like a miracle to make it work…
and who has experience a miracle? I am taking your word that you have had a
miracle… (and yet, I hold that in fact, what you have experienced can be explained,
in some rational manner, not as a action of the divine… which is what is required
to be a “miracle”…a miracle by definition must have a divine explanation…
only god could have done it… anything else is not a miracle)

Kropotkin

I have experiened and it is yet ’ unproveable, 'even to my self- for the moment it is experienced ,
the need for proof has to be replaced by faith. And the miraculous disappears.

It is the person who becomes responsible to keep that acquired faith in his heart, otherwise it becomes as allusive as the constant pray of the Rosary. Which to my mind is similar to an obsessive need to avert a shot into delusion.

Alexei… That’s who I meant. It’s been 50 years since I read the whole thing.

I just found this article, and while I haven’t finished it, it looks awfully interesting so far. It speaks of the Book of Job and its relation to Dostoevsky’s work. In The Brothers Karamazov, Alexei’s mentor, Father Zosima, is an extremely beguiling character, and there is some wonderful writing by Dostoevsky in which Zosima explicates the Book of Job and many other things besides pertaining to his faith.

Eventually Zosima dies, and Dostoevsky’s irrepressible humor and sense of satire resurfaces. It is expected that Zosima’s corpse will not rot, because he is essentially a saint, and indeed people bring in their own sick to be healed by the incorruptible corpse. Instead Zosima’s rotting corpse stinks up the joint. :laughing:

To me the two greatest scenes in the Bros. K occur back-to-back, first Ivan’s “I return the ticket” to heaven, even if God exists, because nothing can justify the oft-unimaginable suffering of little children, followed by the Grand Inquisitor scene.

Another magnificent scene occurs when Ivan meets the devil and discovers he is a shabbily dressed little man who laments that he is the “necessary minus sign,” and wishes that he could praise God like anyone else, but he’s got a job to do and it’s that minus sign! The devil becomes sort of like Job himself.

I do believe Dostoevsky intended his massive novel as representing an existential showdown between religion, specifically Orthodox Christianity, and atheism.

Have you read The Idiot? The protagonist is an epileptic. I’ve got to believe it was somewhat autobiographical. Perhaps Dostoevsky’s idealized portrait of himself. When I was 20 I read Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Notes from Underground and Brothers Karamazov. I’ve read few novels since that are as profound.

A couple of years ago I read The Trial by Kafka and was spellbound by it. Everything in that novel is always on the edge of surreal without going overboard into total absurdity. It evoked the feeling of being on the threshold of paranoia in me.

I’ve read the Idiot and most of what Dostoevsky wrote and most of what Kafka wrote, too. I think Dostoevsky was prismatic, with different facets of his own character broken up into a rainbow. He puts these different facets into his fictional characters. For example, his novel Crime and Punishment clearly mirrors his own life experience, drawing on the fact that he was sentenced to death for socialist revolutionary tendencies but his sentence was commuted at the last minute to long imprisonment in Siberia, where he seriously studied the Bible. In so doing he moved away from revolutionary political ideas to the idea that if one wants to save the world, one must first save oneself, and to the extent that each person saves himself through salvific Orthodox Christianity, so too will the world be transformed into a kind of heaven on earth. This is the stance of Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov, that to save the world you must first save yourself.

Have you read Kafka’s Metamorphosis?

Read ‘The Castle’ by Kafka , before the ‘Metamorphosis’ and that convinced me that the passage to Faith was real, and the dark night of the soul was no longer as allusive as before, and the weight lifted and dropped reversely .

That , that is an experience through study and meditation left no doubt in my mine of the change overcame by other then a singular effect done without the help of a guru

That others’ cannot do it except through such tortuous method laden with doubt, assured me that even a guru can not do it for one, only to help guide and reassure a safety net.

Than the veils of illusion reveal only an allusive center of pure empathy.

Years ago. My impression then was that it was about self-loathing. I can’t imagine it now without thinking of the despised self-image Kafka received from his father’s contemptuous gaze.

His books evoke powerful moods. But as I reflect on it now, The Trial was more evocative to me for not going full on surreal than Metamorphosis which does.

Metamorphosis then becomes subject to one-to-one allegorical interpretation. The Trial never does.

Of course there’s the priest’s parable toward the end which can be interpreted as a reiteration of the same theme as the novel. K is always standing at the threshold of the mystery that’s going on around him but never able to enter in like the protagonist in the parable who stands at the gate but is never able to enter into the Law.

And this from Kafka who was a lawyer. A narrative within a narrative within a narrative, almost like a fractal pattern.