muso wrote on Mar 13^th, 2013 at 9:32pm:


I'm not sure I could be friends with anybody who called themselves a theologist. Most professions and trades build up their own esoteric language. I can understand that, when you're making a good living from a procedure that's very simple it makes semse to be secretive. Medics really need the shroud of naming to disguise the fact that they know very little.

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Sounds really learned, in comparison with, 'the pump broke'. God knows Doctors have to justify their pay scale somehow. But theologians, that's a whole different kettle of fish. I've got a friend who's a baptist missionary, but at least he's also an agricultural economist.

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That's meaningless tosh Muso. I expect better from you.

muso wrote on Mar 14^th, 2013 at 5:51pm:
There's more than a dozen versions of Christianity, each with their own version of the nonexistent entity. 

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'I am the/that I am' can mean just about anything you want it to mean. It's mumbo jumbo waffle.
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The god of theists is just a lie, a con perpetrated on the ignorant and superstitious to gain power and money.   

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theology is the study of a lie dedicated to perpetuating and obscuring. You do not need any mythology to study the idiosyncracies of humanity. All the god myth achieves is the blowing of smoke over the truth. Add theology to fascism and what do you have?

I see no point in bending over backwards to accomodate these charlatans in any way, shape or form.

Since we are a great deal smarter than horses, this little quip from a rhetorician was foreseen and the formulation therefore is that god created us in his image, not vica versa.

Anyway, about being. The I am that I am in Hebrew is more like 'I am who is being' (a verb). In other words the name of god is he who is doing, actively, the being. The name in hebrew is the essence of things. Adam named creation according to the essence of each. This is a great source of fun and jokes but the gist is that god's essence is his being, hence Being.

There can be endless fulmination against dogma but the inescapable fact remains that we live in language ("Language is the house of Being" as Heidegger put it) that is not our own making and so the concepts and the mental horizons as well as the mental furniture that come to us via language have given to us, established in us, the concept of god as the ground of all creation (ie all being).

As every dictator has seen, what needs to change is language if minds are to be changed. When this is grasped, the antennae go up for all the little linguistic undermining and violation of a commonly accepted meaning of words and concept and notions.

Saying that god i just an invention may be seen as clever and transgressive but it is really a boring and low-brow avoidance of the question. If not 'god' what then is the ground of being? To declare the very question verboten (the next easy step of the unthinking) is too stupid to waste time on engaging with. It is a case of the horizon being wiped away with the silly flourish of declaring all horizons unnecessary.

But there is no wiping away the horizon. Even as all worldly establishments including the churches (clericalism) are challenged and are continually subject to reformation.

Yadda wrote on Mar 14^th, 2013 at 10:44pm:



I feel sorry for the poor things, that feel a need to take 'recreational' drugs, or that feel the need to get absolutely 'blotto' on alcohol every night.

Wow!

There is so much to experience, so much to learn.

And they, well many of us, choose to get 'blind' [drunk, or 'out of it', with drugs].

They can't see, because they wont look.





Meditation, is a doorway.

But that is 'boring'.          



Instant gratification, is their drug, and their god.

Soren wrote on Mar 14^th, 2013 at 9:32pm:

Verboten? (German?)

Horizons being wiped away?

(Wer gab uns den Schwamm, um den ganzen Horizont wegzuwischen?)

Ah, Nietzsche!

Gott ist tot... Nicht wahr?

Soren wrote on Mar 14^th, 2013 at 9:32pm:


Language brought us a concept of the Earth being flat and held in space by turtles; the latter not being a widely held view admittedly.  But the important thing is we've had the big bounce in knowledge, (the enlightenment) and the post-enlightenment has no reason for hanging on to archaic creation myths.

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I don't know what you're driving at here. Language evolves, some dictators might drive the evolution along, some might use what's there, a pope for example.

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It's neither, saying 'there's no god' is just a statement of fact. 


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Who chooses to do this? If you want to discuss, 'the ground of being' I'm quite sure you'd find some takers, myself included.

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Churches are not horizons, outdated ideas are blown away like morning mist. To listen to you Soren, you'd think that for the fundamental and underlying opposition and argument against religions to emerge from science and scientists is mere coincidence.

Soren wrote on Mar 15^th, 2013 at 5:05pm:


I'm sorry you find the truth so hurtful Soren, nothing personal 

Yadda wrote on Mar 14^th, 2013 at 10:44pm:


The Christian religion gave a completely new version of "god" compared with what came before. Christianity was the usurper - the intelligentsia.

Pantheism is hardly a new concept. It goes back to Spinoza and centuries before him in the remote and bucolic past. A form of Pantheism (or nature worship) predates Christianity.  It's an all-pervasive immanent form of "god".

Do you honestly think that anything I'm saying here is in any way "new" ?

Jaina dharma has been around for longer than Buddhism, but it's remarkably close to what I was talking about. 

Don't kid yourself. This is just old wine in new bottles.

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Absolutely. That's exactly how Christianity grew in political strength. Christianity (in many of its mutations) has always been a highly political movement.

The story of Hypatia of Alexandria comes to mind, and the various inquisitions through time. They even managed to reinvent "evil" to suit their own political ends and win their arguments. A stroke of genius. I wonder if it still works?

Soren - you are the personification of evil.... 
(in a euphemistic sense of course)