Religously, I am very much alone.

[Lisbeth]

If you can't follow the most basic rules of debate then don't bother opening your yapper.

My partner keeps talking about how we should discuss and not debate.

I am correct.

By definition, religion is the acceptance of a set of beliefs.

No, actually it's not. "The term 'religion' refers to both the personal practices related to communal faith and to group rituals and communication stemming from shared conviction. 'Religion' is sometimes used interchangeably with 'faith' or 'belief system,' but it is more socially defined than personal convictions, and it entails specific behaviors, respectively." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion

[Constance]

I went to Catholic schools for 13 years. "Religion" was a class we all studied, whether we were believers or not.

In religion class, I was taught that "religion" is more than just a set of beliefs; it was a way of life. So, it could be argued that religion is a way of life that's based on a set of beliefs. This is the definition I use for myself.

Community comes into play when people of similar beliefs look for or create religious communities. There could be various reasons for this. Some might seek/create community to not be alone. Some, like my wife and daughter, seek/create community for purposes of social justice ministry. And, yes, sadly, there are those who seek/create community for purposes of control. I've been fortunate so far and haven't had much dealings with this third group since leaving the Roman Catholic Church 20+ years ago.

[lisagurl]

Secularism and Freethinkers created the community we live in the U.S. , that has all the factors such as social justice in our laws without having to believe in a deity. The difference is it is based on facts rather than beliefs.

[Constance]

Yet, how are the Secularists and Freethinkers helping rebuild New Orleans? Behind the lines, saying it's too expensive, that secular dollars can't be spent in this way. My daughter has been part of church groups to help with the rebuilding process.

Secularists argue that altruism and helping those in need is not a good use of time or money. Yet, this is exactly what my wife does as a ministry fellow with San Francisco Night Ministry. People on the streets who have trouble getting help from shelters and programs have nowhere to turn to. It's these ministers who literally walk the streets at night who offer them help.

Secular law in California says that same sex marriage is not acceptable. Yet, there are churches in California that will perform wedding ceremonies for same sex couples even if the state will not recognize them. These religious communities are giving their support where the secular community does not.

Secularists and Freethinkers might have gotten the country started, but they are not the be-all-end-all of social justice.

But, all of this is off-topic.

[lisagurl]

social justice

It is a matter of opinion. New Orleans should not be rebuilt. It has been an ecological disaster from the word go. It should be wetlands which would be much better for the world majority.  Marriage is just religious dogma. People can qualify for those rights in less taxed states.

These religious communities are giving their support where the secular community does not.

LOL ask the majority of churches and what church put the money in the defeat of rights.

People on the streets who have trouble getting help from shelters

The world is over populated, keeping some people alive only takes food from others.

[Miniar]

As usual, I feel like mentioning the simple fact that religious debates often dance close to the edge of arguments. Try and stay respectful the the rights of each other to his or her own religious beliefs and opinions and if you find yourself getting annoyed or talking in circles, just walk away.
On another note, how about we get back on topic. Okay?

[Suzy]

Yet, how are the Secularists and Freethinkers helping rebuild New Orleans? Behind the lines, saying it's too expensive, that secular dollars can't be spent in this way. My daughter has been part of church groups to help with the rebuilding process.

Secularists argue that altruism and helping those in need is not a good use of time or money. Yet, this is exactly what my wife does as a ministry fellow with San Francisco Night Ministry. People on the streets who have trouble getting help from shelters and programs have nowhere to turn to. It's these ministers who literally walk the streets at night who offer them help.

Secular law in California says that same sex marriage is not acceptable. Yet, there are churches in California that will perform wedding ceremonies for same sex couples even if the state will not recognize them. These religious communities are giving their support where the secular community does not.

Very good points.  Let's just hope nothing bad ever happens to Lisagurl's home town.  I would not like to live in her kind of world.

Secularists and Freethinkers might have gotten the country started, but they are not the be-all-end-all of social justice.

The very assertion here is one of the most ridiculous, historically inaccurate statements I have ever seen made.  Lisa, I wonder if you believes the Holocaust is a hoax too.

Kristi

[lisagurl]

Philosophy we should question the belief that life is more important than the quality of life.  We can not keep producing more life without understanding the whole point of it and the whole earth rather than just what pops in front of your eyes.

Yes I lived near New Orleans and there is a lot of public sentiment to remove all commercial development and let it go back to nature. Beauty is not man made development ask the creator.

Social justice is much more than keeping people alive. Freedom is to be free to be successful or fail, live or die as you want. Freedom is not force feeding people that do not want to be free to make it on their own.

[Miniar]

Beauty is not man made development ask the creator.

2 things..

1. Man Made Art, including architecture, can be extremely beautiful.

2. Not everyone believes in a creator.

[lisagurl]

It is a matter of opinion.

People are taught to admire man made things. Nature does not need any marketing.

[tekla]

People are taught to admire man made things. Nature does not need any marketing.

Interesting point.  Though I'm not all that sure about it.  I mean I've taken people to places of spectacular natural beauty (Lake Tahoe, the Pacific Coast, Yosemite) and it blows them away.  However, the first time some people go to an art exhibit, and really see real art (as opposed to reproduced art) it seems to have a similar effect.

[Miniar]

Nature does not need any marketing.

And that's why flower-shops never run any advertisements.....

[lisagurl]

And that's why flower-shops never run any advertisements.....

Most flowers in stores are man made. A creator can be your own mind or even a quantum particle. Do you ever think outside the box?

Things that are domesticated needed human intervention.
Today's world does not even know what is natural anymore.

[NicholeW.]

People are taught to admire man made things. Nature does not need any marketing.

Interesting point.  Though I'm not all that sure about it.  I mean I've taken people to places of spectacular natural beauty (Lake Tahoe, the Pacific Coast, Yosemite) and it blows them away.  However, the first time some people go to an art exhibit, and really see real art (as opposed to reproduced art) it seems to have a similar effect.

And rather interestingly, at least in my recent experience is how passing through a gallery or museum and observing the paintings can color the vision afterwards.

Sunday I spent the day at the Philly Museum of Art with the "Cezanne and Beyond" exhibit that's there til May 30 (The show was extended about 2 weeks so disregard the end-date listed in the link.)

In kinda drinking in Cezanne, Mondrian, Emanuel Kelly, Picasso, etc when I exited I walked around the drive from the east exit to the west parking lot I observed rather closely the skyline and cityscape. One is more attuned, or at least I was, to the lines and planes of the city, the intersections of shape and the muting of natural life within the cityscape. Form became easier to contemplate just for it's own sake.

An interesting circumstance that after, for instance, coming out and doing the same walk after seeing the Pennsylvania Impressionists a while ago I didn't recognize. The eye can be tuned, or affected by the experience.

I think the same thing tends to be true with religion, the heart and mind can be affected by the context of the person's religion. Those of us who "worship" in groves see, perhaps, things not as clearly man-made as being paramount, including our belief in religion. A forest, perhaps, having a beauty and power in nature that a "god" cannot ever possess. Oth, a suburban mega-church surrounded by acres of parking lots enclosing a corrugated metal building with a gigantic roof and some sort of plastic-y windows stained in some fashion and all placed beside a major highway or street or interstate perhaps leaves one with a different view of both humanity and the nature we are all encased with.   

Different strokes, indeed. But some prolly more conducive to human-feeling and the recognition that humans are worthy as simply being a part of that nature than are others. Of course, I could be wrong. But give me a grove to dance and worship in any day in any weather over the rituals performed under a roof inside a building. 

Secularists and Freethinkers might have gotten the country started, but they are not the be-all-end-all of social justice.

The very assertion here is one of the most ridiculous, historically inaccurate statements I have ever seen made.  Lisa, I wonder if you believes the Holocaust is a hoax too.

Kristi

Actually, it depends on what one is talking about. If one is talking about "The United States" then, indeed, the "Founders" were perhaps the only distinct American generation that valued civil government and reason to any great degree and took great pains (seeing the harshness of religious suzerainty as practiced in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticutt and Virginia) to limit the effects of religion on the conduct of civil government.

Like I said, the only generation. The ongoing erasure of the strict lines between the two came about as the nation grew older and today the idea is that somehow Puritans and Southern Baptists founded the civil goverment. They did not.

Puritans did however found some of the colonies as did other religious who appeared, under the name of "freedom of religion" to mandate the "freedom" to practice their own religion while stringently preventing others from the practice of theirs within the confines of those colonies.

Huge differences.

N~

[Miniar]

Most flowers in stores are man made. A creator can be your own mind or even a quantum particle. Do you ever think outside the box?

Things that are domesticated needed human intervention.
Today's world does not even know what is natural anymore.

It's poor form to suggest I don't think out of the box simply because I don't agree with you. And I still do not consider there to be any one creator.

The assumption that something man-made is unnatural is a little strange. It requires man to be unnatural.
That is to say, if man is natural, then man's creations are an extension of man's nature, and so man's creations are "natural". If man's creations are unnatural, man is not natural.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, no object, "natural" or man-made is beautiful in an of itself, it's beautiful because "you", a "human being", observes it and deems it beautiful. So without man (or a being of similar sentience) perceiving an object as beautiful, there is no beauty.

Man, as the end result of centuries of natural evolution, is natural. Man as a being able to perceive beauty, attributes beauty to objects. As such, not only are we a part of nature, but all that we create is an extension of our nature. And as such, man made objects can be just as beautiful as objects that have never been touched by human hand, if man deems it so.

[tekla]

I think there is a huge difference between what is natural (common to all) and what is unnatural - or a learned behavior.

It does not surprise me that people feel alone and isolated in most western religions, based as they are on a death cult, and why people like Nichole (and countless generations over the centuries before the death cults came into power) feel a common bond in what is loosely defined today as pagan beliefs, specifically those beliefs that find a common bond in all of nature, a connection beyond ourselves, and in that, celebrate, not death, but birth, not men, but women as the mother goddess.

A whole lot of art needs to be learned.  Nature does not.  I could take people to the Sonoma Coast, and they can frolic in the waves, pick up seashells and all that, but after a while, they settle down and let the sound, the rhythm, the smell, the taste and the entire experience not just overwhelm them, but suck them into it.  That is the true sense of what we would call the sublime - to stand in awe of how big the world is, and how we are still a part of it.  And no one needs to be taught it.  No one needs to be told (or as in Nichole's example of the art and the buildings 'guided' or perhaps, even more properly 'informed') how to feel about it, or how to see it.  It is, and in just being we know what it is.

I always, or at least as an adult, once I put away childish things and all, like fairy tales - came to believe that the basic point of Xian thought was to make people lonely, to cast them out from each other, to isolate them on the point of death, rather than bringing them communion as part of something larger, i.e. the natural world and their part within it.
 

[NicholeW.]

...

It does not surprise me that people feel alone and isolated in most western religions, based as they are on a death cult, and why people like Nichole (and countless generations over the centuries before the death cults came into power) feel a common bond in what is loosely defined today as pagan beliefs, specifically those beliefs that find a common bond in all of nature, a connection beyond ourselves, and in that, celebrate, not death, but birth, not men, but women as the mother goddess.

...

I always, or at least as an adult, once I put away childish things and all, like fairy tales - came to believe that the basic point of Xian thought was to make people lonely, to cast them out from each other, to isolate them on the point of death, rather than bringing them communion as part of something larger, i.e. the natural world and their part within it.
 

I agree with the art points and the natural world points as well, tekla.

But, the "death cult" point I think may be the actual focus of how I perceive xtianity. Death is most certainly a part of the "life process." But it isn't the primary part of it, it's just another part and there is most certainly life-after-death in the very real-ist way possible. A living thing's energy is released and it's body (matter) changes to energy and differently structured bits of matter. If actually placed within the earth or burnt it becomes part of the life-process again. (It does in western burial cultures as well just takes a good deal longer for the return to occur given the slowness of disintegration of caskets and concrete vaults, etc.)

When I was being raised I have to admit that I worried a lot about death and "the hereafter." Over time and by embracing life in all of it's intricacy (or at least those parts I can grok) I believe that I've discovered a much healthier and positive (at least not death-centered) way of being in the world.

The xtian cult took a concept, at least after Jesus and with the domination of Paul early and the bishops after 120 CE or so, and managed to do something that most cultures (won't say all, but certainly not many) had done before. That was to abstract humanity from the rest of life. And we in the West and everyone we successfully proselytize has been cursed with it ever since: nature and life are just dead matter, of little or no value except as resources to be exploited fully and discarded by first xtian and then scientific (colored with xtian) povs.

Life itself and consequently anything human is completely alienated from meaningfully being "tied together." The "Great Chain of Being" and our current & traditional xtian "last days" syndromes have exiled us from the rather un-frightening cyclic existence our cultures have previosuly known.

Personally, I find xtianity to be more definitely implicated in that from Ireneaus, Jerome, Augustine and Aquinas right through Bacon, Descartes, Pascal, Newton through the present day than I do Jewish religion. Muslim povs in that regard appear to me to be xtian derived. I often wonder if that isn't one of the largest reasons why xtians seem prone to dislike Darwin so darned much: he positied a world of change through time, but a basically never-ending process rather than the "three-score and ten years and then gone forever" approach of xtianity.

O, well, whatever. My way works for me. I feel rather intimately tied in to "Life" in all it's forms, from viruses and minerals right through humans and whatever else may be beyond us. To quote one of Alyssa's favorite writer's titles: An eternal golden braid.

N~

[tekla]

I've always liked Lynn Townsend White, Jr, "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis", Science, Vol 155 (Number 3767), March 10, 1967, pp 1203–1207.

I personally doubt that disastrous ecologic backlash can be avoided simply by applying to our problems more science and more technology. Our science and technology have grown out of Christian attitudes toward man's relation to nature which are almost universally held not only by Christians and neo-Christians but also by those who fondly regard themselves as post-Christians. Despite Copernicus, all the cosmos rotates around our little globe. Despite Darwin, we are not, in our hearts, part of the natural process. We are superior to nature, contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim. The newly elected Governor of California, like myself a churchman but less troubled than I, spoke for the Christian tradition when he said (as is alleged), "when you've seen one redwood tree, you've seen them all." To a Christian a tree can be no more than a physical fact. The whole concept of the sacred grove is alien to Christianity and to the ethos of the West. For nearly two millennia Christian missionaries have been chopping down sacred groves, which are idolatrous because they assume spirit in nature.

The gov he was speaking of, was Ronald Regan.  And the underline is mine, not the good doctor's.

You can read the entire article here, very interesting - if not for its time, revolutionary - stuff.


And you can look it up on your own, its reproduced all over the net.  What'da think I am, your personal researcher?  Besides, I'm guessing White's argument is over the heads of most people, though his language is clear and simple.

[NicholeW.]

Wow, what a wonderful essay!

And I especially liked the conclusion:

The greatest spiritual revolutionary in Western history, Saint Francis, proposed what he thought was an alternative Christian view of nature and man's relation to it: he tried to substitute the idea of the equality of all creatures, including man, for the idea of man's limitless rule of creation. He failed. Both our present science and our present technology are so tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature that no solution for our ecologic crisis can be expected from them alone. Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not. We must rethink and refeel our nature and destiny. The profoundly religious, but heretical, sense of the primitive Franciscans for the spiritual autonomy of all parts of nature may point a direction. I propose Francis as a patron saint for ecologists.

Always did think Francesco was one of the more human and human-realists of xtian practice and thought. He didn't get bogged down in the "death-cult" so much, although those stigmata!

It's rather interesting to compare Francesco with Teilhard de Chardin as "before" Baconian scientific hegemony and "after" Baconian scientific hegemony. 

http://www.uvm.edu/~jmoore/envhst/lynnwhite.html

N~

And I'm sure that Ginsburg just loved this!

What we do about ecology depends on our ideas of the man-nature relationship. More science and more technology going to get us out of the present ecologic crisis until we find a religion, or rethink our old one. The beatniks, who are the basic revolutionaries of our time, show a sound instinct in their affinity for Zen Buddhism, which conceives of the man-nature relationship as very nearly the mirror image of the Christian view. Zen, however, is as deeply conditioned by Asian history as Christianity is by the experience of the West, and I am dubious of its viability among us.

[tekla]

Yeah but it really was Gary Snyder who really first saw that.