Progress

[Midnight Otter]

Thanks.
I am so not cool.

You're 1000 degrees cooler than BillBuckner.

[Midnight Otter]

Two posts in a religious thread... :Crazy:

The Steve moves in mysterious ways.

[SeaDogStat]

The Steve moves in mysterious ways.

:amen:

[heyelander]

The Steve moves in mysterious ways.

[billbuckner]

Let me ask you this: is a dude sucking another dude's wiener the same as someone eating shrimp? If not, why not?

They're both kinda salty

[GwynnInTheHall]

They're both kinda salty

not if you eat lots of pineapple.............

[Bob Kohm]

Feelings can lie to us.

Feelings can lie to us? Sure, I can feel that someone is a nice guy and later find out that they're a miserable prick. I can also find out that my feelings were right. I can also demonstrate that the Bible has lied to us-- this is a verifiable certainty from the first pages of Genesis.

Feeling something is right does not make it so. This will not mean much to this discussion, but when I put my feelings to the test of what Jesus has spoken through the Bible; it always turns out better if I do it his way.

When I talk about an "innate knowledge", Greg, I'm not talking about simple feelings. Let's take an example; many higher mammals eat their young, do they not? Bears are notorious for snuffing our cubs whether they've sired them or not, lions attack cubs sired by other males, etc. Even some of the higher primates engage in that behavior, yet we as humans don't. We have an innate knowledge that we do not have to kill male progeny to preserve our personal dominance, unlike a grizzly-- we understand our place in nature to a degree. Just as I know that, I know that there is something else out there that I can relate to. Just as I know that I love my wife and kids without someone to tell me that, I know that there is a benevolent force. It's really quite simple.

If you were really honest about religion, it is not the religion that is the problem. It is man's feelings and how he bends the religion to justify the behavior. If man truly followed the teachings of Christ, you would not have the issues that you like to bring up. You like to bring up homosexuality has a sticking point. You know alot about scripture. What does Jesus Christ himself (through the Bible) tell us to do regarding this? Regardless of what some may feel, if they are to obey their God, they have to set feelings aside and follow the instruction. So what would that look like?

With all due respect, Gregg, I feel that I am an order of magnitude more honest about religion than you are. Yes, Gregg, it is religion that is the problem precisely because it is a human construct and the most base feelings-- belonging, rivalry, jealousy, lust, desire, ambition, acrimony, inadequacy, zealousness and a host of others-- dictate not only its foundation but its practice. It is an insertion of the imperfect between ourselves and the divine and it sells itself as necessary to understanding that which, and let's be honest, it has long made a practice of obfuscating. Gregg, you and I have no idea what Jesus said about homosexuality because we've had a 20 century long game of telephone over a text that was written with clear political biases to begin with. I know we don't agree about that, that Chancellor is going to come crashing in with his usual defense of the purity of the text (which is meaningless given the source text was likely had literally thousands of reasons to be corrupted), etc.

Did you ever notice that in the universe there's always seems to be a way that things just work? Whether it's the manifestation of beautiful mathematical principles, whether it's the weather or the universal knowledge we have that murder is wrong, that sex feels great and leads to furthering the species-- there are things that just make sense. Call it common sense if you like or god's plan if that makes you feel better, but their are immutable principles that we recognize. That's where the path lies, Gregg-- there are these blazing signs marking the way that your religion and the religion of so many others try to mute and ignore in the pursuit of findign the path-- it would be the funniest thing in the universe if it weren't the mother of so many disasters.

I'll leave you with two old saws to contemplate-- the first is the old joke about the guy on the roof of his house in the flood who tells the boat, the helicopter and the raft to go help someone else because god will save him and, when he inevitably drowns god asks him just what the heck he thought the raft, boat & chopper were for. Clear, common sense signs, Gregg. The second is the old saying about the devil's greatest trick being to convince us that he doesn't exist. Maybe it was actually convincing us that religion matters, because more separation of "god's people" and the visitation of hell on earth that results from it sure seems to play to one pole in the good/evil equation.

[Bob Kohm]

I know this probably sounds dumb but I have my own relationship with God outside of an organized religion. I feel strongly connect and I am not perfect but I feel like I'm allright with the big guy.

I also have two Jehovah Witnesses in my office and they think so differently than I do that i'm pretty sure they think I am a pagan, weak-minded man who will be frowned upon.

There's your example-- what more could separate two men than one's sad love of the Red Sox and the other's proud love of the Yankees-- and yet we believe very much the same way about god

[bryanbutler]

"suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o' shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconciousness."

and, religion is mythology is religion. it's merely the terms we use to apply to a "mythos" of belief in a superior being (or beings). or tides...

[Bob Kohm]

I just wanted to add a thought to my post of last night. Religion is bureaucracy, a layer of authority and procedure placed between the end recipient of services and the grantor of those services. Suspending my disbelief of Biblical tales for a moment, God did not need a religion to relate to Adam. God does not need a religion to relate to the rest of his creation-- the mountains, the seas, the skies, the animals. It is we who needed a bureaucracy specifically because it was a bureaucracy-- the original religions served as a means of societal organization and as a hierarchal control and governance system. It is curious, then, to sit at the intersection of our more conservative brethren who decry bureaucracy in "all" of its forms and demand more freedom and less governance and their religious belief systems that are the antithesis of those core beliefs.

[Bob Kohm]

Crying the QQ are eyes with the hangy down thing as tears.

Learn something new every day around here, I do.

[Jefe]

Your belief system baffles me, Kohm. I get it when someone is an atheist, I guess — faith can be hard, and submitting to the authority of a book goes against popular thought so much. Hell, we don't like to submit to any authority. I find the fact that so many people find real, biblical faith — not empty religious ritual, or the ridiculous perversion that the Western church has become, but people who honestly orient their lives around trying to live like Jesus — I find that to damn near be proof of the supernatural. But that's me. Your take, though — the way you relate to God — what's your purpose, then? It's not about worship. You have nothing you trust to reveal God's will to you. So God is just this benevolent, tolerant being that's pretty much cool with however you want to live your life? He's like a Big Lebowski up there somewhere?

I'm not belittling you. Or trying to get into a pissing match. Just honestly curious, because you come across as someone who's put thought into this, and — correct me if I'm wrong — actually read some scripture. So I'm just asking.

[Bob Kohm]

Your belief system baffles me, Kohm. I get it when someone is an atheist, I guess — faith can be hard, and submitting to the authority of a book goes against popular thought so much. Hell, we don't like to submit to any authority. I find the fact that so many people find real, biblical faith — not empty religious ritual, or the ridiculous perversion that the Western church has become, but people who honestly orient their lives around trying to live like Jesus — I find that to damn near be proof of the supernatural. But that's me. Your take, though — the way you relate to God — what's your purpose, then? It's not about worship. You have nothing you trust to reveal God's will to you. So God is just this benevolent, tolerant being that's pretty much cool with however you want to live your life? He's like a Big Lebowski up there somewhere?

I'm not belittling you. Or trying to get into a pissing match. Just honestly curious, because you come across as someone who's put thought into this, and — correct me if I'm wrong — actually read some scripture. So I'm just asking.

I've read the major scriptures and writings of most of the world's most prominent religions and some of the more obscure from the Jains to the Christians to the Navajo. What they have told me is that if you drill down deep enough you find threads that run through all of them-- respect and kindness to our fellow men and our planet, charity, a desire for justice, pragmatism, family. When those threads show up everywhere in thoughts about god and the universe, I believe it makes sense to heed them. I consider myself at base to be a Christian first because it is my family's origin (Sicillian Catholicism, German Lutheranism and English Anglicanism) and second because in the tradition and base message of Jesus I find the best distillation of those universalist principles in one single sentence-- "You shall love your neighbor as yourself". Honestly my identification as a Christian is just a label-- I am a human being and resident of this universe before anything else and the labels are of less and less importance to me as I grow older and watch my children, who are the only testaments of the benevolence of the universe I need, grow into their places in this reality we inhabit.

Just as common threads show up in these philosophies that I will heed, there are tons and tons of situational, temporal and political differences that I regard as the interference of man. Bans on homosexuality-- homosexuality being as natural and organic a condition as having red hair or green eyes-- make no sense. The endorsement of slavery makes no sense. Flattering a god who needs no flattery through worship and ritual smacks of our human need of praise to feel good about ourselves. The religions which minimize the intellect, authority and equality of women are clearly doing so to enhance the authority of the men who created the writings and these insistences are beneath the dignity of our species. I do not blame the writers of scripture for the most part-- they sought to establish a society and give it governance b which to function for the most part and exhibited prejudice and malicious intent out of their paradigm far less frequently-- but I similarly see no need to adhere to outmoded and often cruel rules that do nothing to foster our understanding or oneness with existence. They are dross and hinder our personal journeys.

What is my purpose? Got me, hope I find out somewhere along the progression through the universe, but I trust in my knowledge, my instincts and my feelings to see the signposts along the way and interpret them not as static rules but as dynamic waypoints. In that "god's will" is revealed to me as I believe we are all a part of "god"; when Marley sang "A mighty God is a living man" he knew of what he sang, in my opinion. I don't know if there is a specific plan for each of our individual existences but I suspect there is not; as a collective being or energy we'll find the way together or we won't.

[Jefe]

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

[Bob Kohm]

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

De nada. Hope it gives you something to think about and a better understanding of where I'm coming from.