On Discussing Religion

Discussion in 'Religion' started by Tiassa, Jun 22, 2021.

  1. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    Debatable

    The post in general is crap with an occasional nugget worth a reply (comment)

    Write4U has a writing style which paints me a picture of a finger wagging teacher

    Your, Tiassa, post: 3689891, paints me a picture of a high highfalutin person looking down nose at Minion plebs

    Not going to waste time combing through post post to comment on each nugget

    I will contend you cannot call people trying to make sense of the world and in doing so reach erroneous explainations religion

    You can say some people noted this aspect of storytelling and created (abused) this aspect and created religion

    Another aspect of dying (the process) it began the day you were born. So yes most people do not think about dying

    Euthanasia came to be wanted as an option to release people from dragging out a process of dying causing suffering for a person. Do not even mention Palliative Care

    Some may choose such as option, some not

    Unfortunately some religious people (mostly) hold sway over laws citing the sanctity of life for the the people who have no belief in anything being holy or sacred

    My 10 cents worth

    PISS OFF AND KEEP YOUR SANCTITY OF LIFE OUT OF MY LIFE

    Boy I need coffee

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    lots

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    PS we need a sarcastic font and would not hurt to add a rant font

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    PPS may as well add - do not understand why cannot Iggy staff members POST

    Obviously not stuff related to official site operation

    Going for coffee now

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    Last edited: Jan 3, 2022
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  3. foghorn Valued Senior Member

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    A laugh in every line with old Tiassa.
     
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  5. arfa brane call me arf Valued Senior Member

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    Why do humans strive for perfection, and what exactly is it?

    The search for this particular, in works of art, probably goes back to before the Egyptians; Stonehenge appears to be an attempt to achieve a perfect alignment of standing stones, and certainly the builders must have had some idea of how permanent it would be.

    Leonardo da Vinci spent many years painstakingly constructing a "photographic" image of a woman, using a paintbrush with a single hair, which is known as the Mona Lisa.

    Why this endeavour towards perfection, and how do we know when something is perfect? So far, the JWST mission has performed . . . perfectly. But that isn't really art, it's science and science needs to be . . . accurate.

    I once heard someone say perfection isn't a thing that comes to you, it's somewhere you're going. I'm still trying to get my head around that one, and sometimes I wonder if it's true.
     
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  7. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    If I just stay with the short form, would you believe it really is: Because we are capable of recognizing the idea.

    I know, I know. But yes, really, I promise.
     
  8. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    You have a weird sense of humour

    Religion is not a problem

    It's the money sucking leeches who run religion. Con artist the lot

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  9. foghorn Valued Senior Member

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    As long as it stays out of politics and hence pushing for laws and changing of laws. Texas and perhaps Missouri comes to mind.
    I'm funny that way.

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    Last edited: Jan 4, 2022
  10. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    Ah well if it moves into those areas and starts doing that stuff it becomes POLITICS and not religion

    And the religious nuts out there can cut the crap about "doing the lords work"

    He doesn't PAY you, the people who elected you do

    Unfortunately many of those who elect the politicians think they elect politicians TO THE LORD'S WORK

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    Last edited: Jan 4, 2022
  11. foghorn Valued Senior Member

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    What you call religious nuts don't think of themselves as such.
    It's their belief and one way is to use politics. The fact that scumbag 'politicians' prostitute themselves for their vote is a minor issue for such believers so to speak.
    The workings and ways of the Lord and the tools (politicians) to fulfil that working are mighty mysterious.

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  12. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    The ol' lying for jesus ploy

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  13. Sarkus Hippomonstrosesquippedalo phobe Valued Senior Member

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    That "touch" is actually a number of distinct senses, all using different receptors. e.g. the basic touch that gives you an idea of form, shape etc, that uses one set of receptors, while temperature is another, and pressure is yet another. And that we may be finding more distinctions still.
    Then there's the sense of space that the body occupies: proprioception; and then the sense of balance: equilibrioception, although this latter is a combination of systems, including proprioception and vision.
    As to how many I was taught there to be, it was the 5 classical, plus about 7 others, I think, but I can't recall them all. I think it was taught more as an example of how science keeps progressing while classical ideas are so ingrained and hard to overturn.
    Anyhoo - off-topic. So I'll stop there.
     
  14. arfa brane call me arf Valued Senior Member

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    The idea of perfection; but in relation to what?

    Perfection of form, particularly the human form in works of art, is one of the whats, I guess.
    In religions we find the idea of a perfect life, perhaps. In Buddhism we find possibly the idea of being perfectly aligned with each moment, or something; the alignment here appears to be a process of divestment of attachment to the world and its moments, perfect or otherwise.

    Then there's the idea of having a perfect understanding, something Zen might be appropriate in that the understanding of 'nothing' is the understanding of 'everything'. You are this thing which is not a thing, because it can't be conveived or understood with a mind. It cannot be named.
     
    Last edited: Jan 4, 2022
  15. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    A lack thereof.

    There is, in human perception and experience, all manner and magnitude of what we might describe as adverse information; to some degree recognition of discomfort, fear, and pain are essential survival tools. And given how many lives that made it through how many days over the course of how many years, we can expect that the basic idea of a lack of this alarming, threatening, even painful and harmful data input should be possible did eventually occur to someone.

    But in this we are considering a question of comfort; the idea of perfection seems to require some additional value assessment. If I mention a small sculpture called Bison Licking Insect Bite, part of what is fascinating is that it is adapted from a broken spear-thrower, and maybe most days I might overlook a very basic point about what this relic represents: A simple expression would have to do with when humans or their ancestors developed a comparative idea of broken and whole, or recognize healing insofar as what is broken can be made whole, or at least functional, again.

    Among modern humans, we often recognize explicitly that nothing is perfect, and if we consider the rise of human thought and function, we might think of a moment akin to disappointment, recognition that something is not whole while wishing it was. Compared to this wish for completion compared to what is incomplete, the prospect of perfection seems nearly an inevitable thought.

    And, honestly, at what point in human development did it occur that someone asked, "What's wrong?" and someone else answered, "Everything!" And if, at the advent of writing, some took the time to record their disappointment about how their lives were going, that can't really have been when such existential comparisons first arose in human conscience. Was there never an adolescent at Göbekli Tepe who would rather have been out hunting instead of putting holes in aunty's skull in order to hang it from the ceiling? And if, sometime between someone in Botswana, seventy thousand years ago, believing that taking the red pill burning the red arrowheads would keep the snakes away, and someone in southeastern Anatolia drilling skulls to hang them from the ceiling for reasons that probably made a good deal of sense in their moment sixty thousand years later, someone had said, "Y'know, I feel like we've sort of lost our way, here, gotten away from the essence of what we're doing," it would have been extraor―... oh, right. Anyway, somewhere between a limbic experience of making noise and fire to scare the snakes away, or drilling skulls for reasons we might describe as significantly more neocortical, it seems clear that not simply had the focus changed, but also the underlying context.

    Anyway, yeah, something about the short form. I would expect propositions of perfection precede monotheism itself. Observe that diverse philosophical periods—e.g., ancient Greek, Christian, and modern scientific—consider differentiation. Prior to questions of the Big Bang, philosophers struggled to understand the nature and implications of the fact of basic differentiation, such as why the Universe existed at all, or how anything was related to or separate from God. Indeed, if God is perfect, what is the rest of this all that is not God? A more familiar version of the question is to wonder why God bothered with Creation in the first place.

    In the moment, the notion of zero occurs to mind, and something about how it compares to the idea of nothing. The quick note on the idea of nothing is that it is around the sixth and fifth centuries BCE that the concept of nothing starts to appear in the philosophical record. But much in the way that the basic idea of counting zero would seem to inevitably demand the idea of nothing, there are so many comparative pathways drawing humanity toward the idea of everything, wholeness and completeness, lack of wrongness or negative information, or, as such, perfection.

    Try to imagine the first person in our evolutionary lineage to weep in mourning because the offspring was dead. And then imagine the first person in history to say that in a perfect world the child would live. We can also wonder what all went on in between. But if neocortical humanity might writhe and wail and empathize with the suffering of other animals, the suffering of human kin might raise extraordinary sympathy. The prospect of a lack of suffering, incompleteness, and brokenness seems not simply inevitable, but very nearly requisite. Combined with the idea of a spear-thrower that doesn't break, a roof that doesn't leak, a cave without the cold draft, or a day and night without the damn snakes, the idea of a circumstance in which none of these challenges beset and befall seems more than just something that will eventually occur, but something that must occur.

    Our idea of perfection, though, evolves alongside our capabilities. Consider the idea of affluence, and what technology brought prehistoric and ancient people; perhaps we might consder the idea of luxury, inasmuch as a society might think itself able to afford some odd ritual obligation like poisoning women of childbearing age for the sake of jealousy. And maybe it seems a petty, even awful, juxtaposition to consider the luxury pompous authority demanding perfection of construction labor, but the thing about mathematics is that we can therein express particular and achievable assertions of perfection. If the experiential prospect of a lack of adverse information had not completed a transition into an assertion of perfection, then the math of a circle, the idea of a real and perfect thing, ought to suffice. Human creativity could easily paper over the gaps until experience and philosophy could fill them in.

    (Flip-side: We can try telling ourselves, no, humans wouldn't transform technical and precise concepts and reapply them in alternate contexts, and, moreover, that it would be foolish to suggest of our species such wildly deviant behavior it has no history of displaying.)​
     
  16. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    Anyone out there get anything out of the above?

    Anyone???

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  17. gmilam Valued Senior Member

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    Just the image of someone who hasn't taken their meds in a while typing away furiously in their mother's basement.
     
  18. arfa brane call me arf Valued Senior Member

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    I've just been re-reading some Khalil Gibran.

    His take on it seems to be that happiness and sorrow go hand in hand; without both, would we recognise either?
    So then, his writings are about finding a perfection in happiness and in sorrow--being happy because you understand what sorrow is, an understanding that, I believe, is a kind of holy grail.

    A long time ago, we didn't have the time to sit around and talk about it or think about it, possibly. Life had too many immediate demands to meet, being happy or sad probably wasn't particularly relevant, being cold or hungry, or warm and well-fed, those were things that could change day to day.
     
  19. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    Recently the Pope said

    Pope Francis says choosing pets over kids is selfish

    The practice "is a denial of fatherhood and motherhood and diminishes us, takes away our humanity", he added.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59884801

    ***

    This is the boss of a money making machine who dictate priest should not marry

    https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/69

    The belief that religious figures should be celibate began long before the birth of Christianity

    Catholic church made no marriage for priests a rule

    The Church was a thousand years old before it definitively took a stand in favor of celibacy in the twelfth century at the Second Lateran Council held in 1139, when a rule was approved forbidding priests to marry. In 1563, the Council of Trent reaffirmed the tradition of celibacy.

    ***

    So The practice *has denied* "is a denial of fatherhood and motherhood and *has* diminishes us, *has taken away the priest humanity* takes away our humanity", he added.

    My *bold* inserts

    Would seem to be reasonably to abolish the no marriage rules after more than 450 years

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  20. arfa brane call me arf Valued Senior Member

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    Straight from the mysticism of Gibran to a particular religious practice, eh?

    Why don't I throw in (this is sciforums after all) that humans experience grief (aka sorrow) when a pet dies, and it's just an animal. So how come? Is that something that adds to, or takes away from, that other thing?
     
  21. arfa brane call me arf Valued Senior Member

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    Right, nothing appears to have not been useful until a certain level of sophistication arrived, for all those anthropological reasons.

    --including the appearance of temples and so on, or permanent locations of interest to humans, say.
    --rather than wandering around like nomads as we did for all those millenia while ice sheets came and went. What need back then for philosophy, or even gods or places of worship? but perhaps the beginnings were there.
     
  22. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    https://www-mamamia-com-au.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.mamamia.com.au/hillsong-church-music-festival/amp/?amp_gsa=1&amp_js_v=a6&usqp=mq331AQIKAGwASCAAgM=#amp_tf=From %1$s&aoh=16422770436254&csi=0&referrer=https://www.google.com&ampshare=https://www.mamamia.com.au/hillsong-church-music-festival/

    The face of Religion for the youth (and some oldies - Australia's Prime Minister for one)

    Hold a rock concert but call it a church service

    Edit to add Extract from article

    But what I’m really thinking is - why were churches exempt from the no singing and dancing rule in the first place?

    Why indeed

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  23. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Intoductory Notes: On Christian Nationalism

    Here are two paragraphs about politics:

    The motivating dream of the movement is the restoration of an imagined Christian nation. With a revisionist history that claims the founders never intended to create a secular country and that separation of church and state is a lie fostered by conniving leftists, Christian nationalism rejects the ideea of government religious neutrality. The movement argues that the absence of religion in public is itself a religion—the malign faith of secular humanism—that must, in the intereest of fairness, be balanced with equal deference to the Bible.

    ... However, the ultimate goal of Christian nationalist leaders isn't fairness. It's dominion. The movement is built on a theology that asserts the Christian right to rule: That doesn't mean that nonbelievers will be forced to convert. They'll just have to learn their place.

    "Christian nationalism", explains Michelle Goldberg, "tells a story". The idea that political movements tell their own story ought not be surprising; nor is the tale that Christian nationalism tells unfamiliar. It is the story of a former age gone awry, blaming Darwin and evolution for "eroding people's faith in man's dignity and God's supremacy". In Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (W. W. Norton, 2006), Michelle Goldberg examines a Christianist politic both steeped in American values, and fundamentally anti-American. In the Christian nationalist telling:

    The great universities that once saw Christianity as the root of all knowledge turned away from scripture and toward the secular philosophies of a decadent Europe, which put man at the center of the universe. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal brought socialism to America and began the process by which government, rather than churches, became the guarantors of social welfare.

    A generation of intellectuals and attorneys, educated to discount the centrality of God, fought a vicious campaign against America's Christian heritage. Atheist judges scorned the Lord by outlawing prayer in public school, striking down bans on contraception, and, most ignominously, forcing states to legalize abortion in 1973's Roe v. Wade.

    An angry God began to withdraw his favor. Crime and discord increased. Children turned against their parents and wives against their husbands. Hedonism and licentiousness ruled. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the foces of darkness threatened to turn America into Sodom. Homosexuals, symbols of everything unnatural and decadent, marched out of the closet, spreading perversion and disease. Even as they cavorted in public, Christianity was banished to the private sphere, an exile encouraged by liberal pastors in mainline churches where worldliness blinded them to the pure truth of God's word.

    But God didn't give up on America ....

    It is, as Goldberg notes, an imagined history. But this part is important: The restoration of an imagined Christian nation. If we consider Riesebrodt's description of fundamentalism rising through perception of rapid change impressing a sense of crisis demanding affirmation of authenticity leading to a regress toward revealed and realized ideal order, it seems pretty obvious that the Christian nationalism Goldberg considers is a particularly American fundamentalism.

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    (Riesebrodt, 17)

    "The refrain that Christians are under siege," Goldberg explains, "creates a sense of perpetual crisis among the movement's grass roots." It is an affecting belief, perhaps too easily characterized by the recollection that:

    In the aftermath of September 11, only two significant American public figures blamed the country for bringing the calamity on itself. On September 13, Jerry Falwell appeared on The 700 Club, Pat Robertson's television show, and said, "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, 'you helped this happen.'"

    "Well," Robertson replied, "I totally concur."

    Or maybe hindsight makes it seem so easy. Fifteen years ago, Goldberg described that, "on a personal level", many of the Christian nationalists she encountered along the way were "thoughtful and amiable". And if sometimes it is "hard to reconcile" this accessible humanity "with the violence of the movement's rhetoric", it was once upon a time easy enough to suggest it was "just harmless hyperbole". Still, Goldberg wrote, "it is wrong, I think, to assume that people must not mean what they say just because they are friendly."

    Ironically, the trade paperback edition includes a December, 2006 epilogue, which Goldberg opens by acknowledging, "It all fell apart so fast." And if fifteen years feels like a lifetime ago, consider that the rest of that paragraph recalls Ted Haggard, Mel Gibson, Ralph Reed, Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, and Bill Frist. Even then, some legitimate context of crisis seemed apparent, but part of what stands out about the idea that it all fell apart so fast has to do with how badly American evangelicalism and the politics of Christian nationalsm have fallen apart since.

    "I am not arguing that America is on the cusp of religious totalitarianism," Goldberg wrote at the end of her introduction, reflecting that, "as Christian nationalism gains influence, it is changing our country in troubling ways, and its leaders say they've only just begun." These years later, the last line of the introduction rings clarion: "It is up to All Americans to decide how far they can go."

    †​

    It seems important to recall earlier notes on Barthel (see #11↑), and what hindsight might describe:

    • If we consider the idea of an historical period in which traditionalist and Christian supremacism wrapped itself in a pretense of literalism that was never actually genuine, perhaps it might stand out that the whole time—that is to say, since even before the Reagan Awakening—literalism had already been ceded as an anti-historical relic of faith. In its way, the period can describe people disputing over the wrong question.​

    The Christian nationalism Goldberg examines is, after all, produce of that anti-historical Christianist period.
    ____________________

    Notes:

    Goldberg, Michelle. Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.

    Riesebrodt, Martin. Pious Passion: The Emergence of Modern Fundamentalism in the United States and Iran. Oakland: University of California Press, 1993.

    See Also:

    Barthel, Manfred. What The Bible Really Says. 1980. Trans., Mark Howson, 1982. Avenel: Wings Books, 1992.
     

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