Gaia: Knights & Maidens of the Roundtable - Faiths

Re: God and religion?

http://joy-within.gaia.com — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 19:29:58 GMT

Mita, Thank you for your post...it resonates so strongly with me, especially:

"Buddha taught about the value of knowing one's own mind, settle it into calm stillness, discipline and direct our wholesome thoughts in skillful ways for our own good and the welfare of all beings. The emphasis is on direct, first hand knowing in this moment with open heart than secondary knowledge, theory or past memory, which are ways to run away from being present totally now."

Re: God and religion?

http://seek2know.gaia.com — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 20:46:30 GMT

Hi everyone. I grew up as a minority buddhist in India, surrounded by Hindus who seem to have myriad Gods and Goddesses, paths and philosophies. Being a Buddhist helped me to see things as they are, without taking any position on anything and cultivate mindfulness.

Early on as a child I decided, "well if there is a God or many gods or no God" i'll be able to know or realize that for myself. For me the questions, "do we live somehow after we die, does our consciousness continue, our living spirit survive physical death...those were more important to my human existence than existence of God ;)

Anyway I could never accept the concept of a authoritarian judgemental God dispensing rewards or punishment for our deeds.

Word Buddha means 'awakened intelligence'. Most people are asleep or sleep walking with eyes open when it comes to realization of the nature of reality, mind, self, god and such. These are all related and fuse into one as one goes to deeper level of consciousness.

Truth has nothing to do with whether I believe in something or not. All beliefs tend to solidify into positions, become dogma and prejudice. Both religion and science (materialistic science) started with good intention of creating order insociety, but both can degenerate into dogma with fixation of beliefs and attitudes. A person can invest his/her whole life believing into someone's else dogma, communism, or capitalism and that belief can become one's social mage or ego-identity for which a person may even kill another.

Buddha taught about the value of knowing one's own mind, settle it into calm stillness, discipline and direct our wholesome thoughts in skillful ways for our own good and the welfare of all beings. The emphasis is on direct, first hand knowing in this moment with open heart than secondary knowledge, theory or past memory, which are ways to run away from being present totally now.

Unlike all scriptures claiming to be direct word of God, Buddha is simply a light unto himself and inviting us to be a light and refuge to ourselves (see my quotes)

That's all for now. Hope it makes sense.

Peace & joy
mita

Re: God and religion?

http://Weirdo4Christ.gaia.com — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 04:29:50 GMT

But what is the need to critique a belief in nothing? Can one even do such a thing? If one states that he/she "beliefs there is no God," then any futher reseach would seemingly go against the prior declaration of belief. Is it necessary to prove your beliefs...in particularly to yourself??? Maybe that's the question that's worth asking. For, if one has to prove it to himself, it would point to a possibility of the opposite being true. Would it not??

Re: God and religion?

http://goodworld.gaia.com — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:28:45 GMT

Interesting point. In my view, most atheists are really critiquing religion rather than the belief in a supreme God. We definitely have to separate these two concerns.

"By their fruits you can know them...".
A very significant crop of fruits from organised religion is bitter and poisonous indeed.

Community of believers is one thing; an institution with great power over the minds of individual members is another.

I believe that each individual has a direct access to God---congenitally, if I may use that word---and no intermediary should insist on being indispensable to that access (Christ may have said that of himself, but he also said that he is one with God).

It may be that the direct access to God needs to be nurtured and developed. So there may be a place for helpers in this process, just as interaction with adults is necessary for children to become decent and moral adults. However, all too often, religions prevent the individuals under their influence ever growing up into mature self-responsible adults.

As to the very concept of God being a prison, I do not know the context in which Buddha spoke of the issue, but suspect that he did not actually mean to say what atheists think he said.

One other distinction is good to make, the distinction between atheists and anti-theists.

Duplicate posts Re: God and religion?

http://goodworld.gaia.com — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 13:58:39 GMT

No problem Chris. I have taken out the copies.

Thank you for joining us. Sorry to have left it so long to respond.

Re: God and religion?

http://Weirdo4Christ.gaia.com — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 21:04:11 GMT

sorry for the duplicate posts...it froze and I didn't know it had posted it.

Re: God and religion?

http://Weirdo4Christ.gaia.com — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 21:03:16 GMT

You say we are all just prisoners in a cage...well "we" being those who believe in a religion. How is an atheist outside of the cage? I don't see one doing anything amazing. I don't see them being the envy of the world. All I see is them attempted and trying in every way to disprove God, because the don't truly disbelieve in Him. What is really going on is God is calling them to Himself, and they can't get away!

Re: Spirituality VS Religiosity

http://andrewmarkmusic.gaia.com — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 17:49:45 GMT

"The desire for absolute certainty is a deadly poison to a living mind."

Yes Janos, i tend to agree with that statement too, especially in the light of modernism and post-modernism...uncertainty is no where near as comfortable but i think it's truer to reality.

TIME: i'm hoping that time has always been a matter of evolutionary perspective. The conceptual development of early tribal cyclic notions of the Sun,Moon, Planets and Stars; to the more modern notion of time being linear in the sense of Newtonian physics; and then, the conceptual understanding of Relativity Theory; and the concept of time being 'nested', in that the past, future and present are happening simultaneously. No conspiracy here; just a lot of egoic posturing over who is right..........

Evil? well to me, it's obvious that it exists and that there are indeed people who embrace it. Supernatural evil? I don't know and that goes to the uncertainty thing. It's obvious that most religious people through-out history do indeed believe in some form of Satan. And i'm not saying that i don't believe that; it's just that i cannot prove the assertion any more than i can prove the assertion of there being a personal God. I don't think this position makes me a flake or a fence-sitter; it's just that i honestly do not know for a fact! Even if there is supernatural stuff going on on this planet; i don't exactly know what the average human is supposed to do about it. If Jesus and Satan and God and Angels are duking it out here on earth, well then, what's any human to do about it? It seems to me the war in Heaven is up to them to resolve, or not............

Re: Spirituality VS Religiosity

http://ResurrectedOne.gaia.com — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 14:17:15 GMT

Yeah...that's the ticket! We're just nuts and there's no conspiracy...LOL, LOL, LOL!!!

Oh Thank Goodness I'm not the only one, Andrew...I am feeling you on this one!!! The Time frame that we are "Given to believe and live by" just doesn't seem to...Fit.
My intuition tells me that it's all screwed up so that we never learn the proper potent times...to ensure that when we do our magic spells that the timing is wrong therefore nullified.
Oh, wait...nobody's that diabolical on this planet...right?
Right?
;-)

Re: Spirituality VS Religiosity

http://goodworld.gaia.com — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 11:46:08 GMT

...the Urantia book... what do you make of it?

It is just one of the many creation stories. It is a menu of possibilities and it is an error to take any of its dishes as solid truth. It can be used to nurture our hunger to make sense of the world but in the end, though, we need to digest it and transform these given dishes to create our own personal creation story ("belief body").

But our own story also has to be guarded against ossifying into a personal set of dogmas. They need to be firm enough as a base for active life, yet "held lightly", always open to modification if another person's story contains elements that help us interpret the world even better.

"The desire for absolute certainty is a deadly poison to a living mind."

Re: Spirituality VS Religiosity

http://andrewmarkmusic.gaia.com — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 02:15:15 GMT

Anyway Ariela, i just spent the last hour on wiki trying to figure out the time/calender issue (gotta work tomorrow so hey, i'm old and boring).
So, the best that i can tell is that the early Romans adopted a solar calender, making the new year around the winter solstice: late December early January. They say the months names came from latin: sept. meaning 7; Oct. meaning 8; nov. meaning 9;dec. meaning 10, etc.
But to me something is still not jiveing cause if it was the same folks who came up with the names that adopted the solar calender then they sure as shit couldn't count! At least not from January proper. I don't know if it's just me but my common sense from living in the northern hemisphere tells me that the proper time to hold a New year celebration is at the end of winter and the beginning of spring,i.e. MARCH! You know when Bambi twiterpates....I'm i the only person in the History of the Northern hemisphere that feels this way? What the hells the matter with me?yikes! And why does the numerical calender counting make sense then? What the hell is up with those scholars at wiki?
Hmmm, maybe we should have just stuck with that lovely feminine Lunar calender! Oh, oh, wait a minute, maybe that's a part of the issue here: the hijacking of the feminine principle of divinity..........Na, there's no conspiracy on this planet; it's all just very complex evolutionary struggles.........

Re: Spirituality VS Religiosity

http://andrewmarkmusic.gaia.com — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 00:05:52 GMT

Who ever came up with the names of the month originally new that the new year was in and around March (Aries-the astrological/astronomical New Year) cause if you count from March to October (8) and December (10) then the calender makes sense. January (named after a Roman God Janus) was obviously a later adjustment. Why and when the New Year got changed i'm not exactly sure, but it seems to me that yes, it was the Euro-centic mind-set that ran rough-shot over Earth/nature based cosmologies. My own opinion is that this was done to 'disconnect' humanity from reality; making people easier to control................
An interesting thing to consider is that our modern day civilization is still built on the roman infrastuctures of roads and sewers:pollution of air; pollution of water........

i tend to think that perception is relative, but not necessarily reality. In my thinking reality is absolute, it's just that these individual brains/minds can only comphrehend small doses of reality which tends to lead to your take on it.....

Now i can say for certain that i am nuts! but i hope in a rather good way...........

Re: Spirituality VS Religiosity

http://ResurrectedOne.gaia.com — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 23:09:25 GMT

Ahhh, yes...that IS food for thought, hey?

The fact that there are so many theories all the time concerning Jesus is a signal to me that the story has been manipulated so many times that it's hard to keep their facts (or lies) straight ;-)

BTW...why has religion even taken over Time itself? Why is the calendar based on Christ? Did time begin with Christ? How ever did THAT scam come to be? Who decided this? Did this happen with Christianity surged throughout the world, burning up everything that told other facts, other stories, other beliefs?
LOL...

Don't forget that Everything is Relative! So everyone's going to have a different take on...well, everything! LOL ;-)

Hmmm...maybe it's just one of those things designed to drive one nuts and waste their lives deciphering...

In the end...I'm just as confused about the nature of reality as anyone else...except in the fact that reality is relative, LOL ;-)

Re: Spirituality VS Religiosity

http://andrewmarkmusic.gaia.com — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 22:51:34 GMT

Hi Ariela, yes, Dr. Kellogg seemed to be involved in some form of 7th day adventism.
I guess the question i have is that if Jesus wasn't a historical figure, but rather; some sort of mythical allegory, then who keeps writing all these different notions about who and what he was? i mean there just doesn't seem to be the obssesion with writing different notions about Krishna or Muhummad (at least in the writings that i've come across) but there always seems to be some new notion of someone who argueably didn't even exist.
What's up with that? Which is why i brought up the masonry hypothesis. Is Jesus Freemasonries ace in the hole of control and manipulation? Apparently, the founders of jw's, mormonism, 7th day adventist, christian science were all members of the masonic order.................
But yeah, i am the same as you in the sense that i too, find truths that resonate with me from whatever source. i guess i'm just not a fan of blatant contradiction though, especially when it comes to writing that is supposed to be from angels, ascended masters, etc.
it's good to know that they seem as confused about the nature of reality as we seem to be down here.............................or.......................

Re: Spirituality VS Religiosity

http://psychicsurgeon.gaia.com — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 18:56:32 GMT

Yes, I know what you mean by not wanting to get paid. I learned on a TRS-80 in the eighties myself. I had to do my own programs in BASIC. Later, I upgraded to ATARI ST after pricing both Mac and Microsoft. Mac was unaffordable to anyone who was not born with a silver spoon. Microsoft was half the price with an IBM clone. My ATARI ST was $500 and it connected to both a computer monitor and a television like my TRS-80. With that machine which I bought in Berkely, California on University Ave., I could afford to learn desktop publishing, audio and video editing.

For upgrades, I could get add-ons to read mac and microsoft software. That was the late eighties. From my Berkeley sources, some of the designers left ATARI to design the Amiga, its rival. Those two facing each other off split the local users groups. Besides, I heard rumors in the San Franscisco Bay Area at the time, Atari could not expand as business model to match the competitors. Honestly, it needed a higher end pc for professionals.

Myself, after learning how to get under the hood the machine, I prefer being able to take apart my system, add and delete parts, design my own workstation and develop my own means of processing my data. I could not live in a world where my choices were limited alone to the designer's concepts. Macintosh held the NeXT OS code source for years before OS X. I know because I owned NeXT OS for Intel a few years before Mac OS X. Microsoft made the IBM clone revolution possible. Now, anyone can own one at a reasonable price. Wow, people can get laptops for $500 in the new millenium? Yes!

Not a fable but a parable; we believe what we want to beliieve, hence we subscribe to our own personal religion.

Re: Spirituality VS Religiosity

http://ResurrectedOne.gaia.com — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 13:05:06 GMT

LOL, Andrew...

Reaaaaallllly??? The Kellogg Family, huh? It really doesn't matter to me who wrote it...doesn't matter to me who wrote the Bible or the Koran or the Torah...I read all things and find the nuggets of wisdom and truth (even in fiction)...everything and everywhere contains a message and Truth for me ;-)

No, I don't agree with everything in any one book...but there are A LOT of very interesting, mind expanding ideas and concepts that I enjoyed in it...things that I file away in my mind's database for later use, as I do not live my life by any one book ;-)

There were lots of stuff I laughed off...stuff I didn't agree with...stuff that didn't seem to me like it was plausible...but between the lines and the unwritten stuff, therein lies alot of juiciness ;-)

I can't argue Urantia any more than I could argue about the Bible...both contain my underlining and notations, neither are underlined all the way through ;-)

The past and the future are always highly debatable, and highly embellishable ;-)
Only what happens NOW matters ;-)

Re: Spirituality VS Religiosity

http://andrewmarkmusic.gaia.com — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 00:38:14 GMT

I read the Urantia book in 94(yes, the whole thing) and also went out and found someone who wrote a critique of it ( i always do this-seek both sides of the story). So, my question is to any one who has read that book- what do you make of it? Is this more masonic b.s. (assuming that masonry is responsable for 'implanting' all religion on this planet-yes,huge assumption) or is there something to that book?
All humans are naturally bi-sexual..
There is no such thing as re-incarnation....
Adam and Eve really existed..........
These are just three of the many assertions of that book. Apparently it was channeled over fifty years by the Kelloggs (corn flake) family. Watch the movie 'The Road To Wellville' to get a sense of who they were.
I must say myself, even though i think now that it's complete b.s.- i still have a soft spot for what it says and even consider the possibility that it could be true............
see, i must be an idiot............

Re: Spirituality VS Religiosity

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:32:15 GMT

A friend once said that if you think that computing is not a religion ask a Windows person about Macs and a Mac person about Windows.

Another (the same?) friend said that the mistake Apple Computer management made in their decisions was not realizing that reople would be satisfied with mediocrity, so they kept trying to make the best computer they could and lost the market share.

Re: Spirituality VS Religiosity

http://ResurrectedOne.gaia.com — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 14:32:46 GMT

Borrowed from The Urantia Book... ;-)

Religion has handicapped social development in many ways, but without religion there would have been no enduring morality nor ethics, no worthwhile civilization. Religion enmothered much nonreligious culture: Sculpture originated in idol making, architecture in temple building, poetry in incantations, music in worship chants, drama in the acting for spirit guidance, and dancing in the seasonal worship festivals.

But while calling attention to the fact that religon was essential to the development and preservation of civilization, it should be recorded that natural religion has also done much to cripple and handicap the very civilization which it otherwise fostered and maintained. Religion has hampered industrial activities and economic development; it has been wasteful of labor and has squandered capital; it has not always been helpful to the family; it has not adequately fostered peace and good will; it has sometimes neglected education and retarded science; it has unduly impoverished life for the pretended enrichment of death.

Religion facilitated the accumulation of capital; it fostered work of certain kinds; the leisure of the priests promoted art and knowledge; the race, in the end, gained much as a result of all these early errors in ethical technique. The shamans, honest and dishonest, were terribly expensive, but they were worth all they cost. The learned professions and science itself emerged from the parasitical priesthoods. Religion fostered civilization and provided societal continuity; it has been the moral police force of all time. Religion provided that human discipline ans self-control which made Wisdom possible. Religion is the efficient scourge of evolution which ruthlessly drives indolent and suffering humanity from its natural state of intellectual inertia forward and upward to higher levels of reason and wisdom.

Re: Spirituality VS Religiosity

http://goodworld.gaia.com — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 14:09:19 GMT

Religion is a necessary Evil to the Greater Good like Microsoft is to the Computer.

This is interesting. The comparison is useful and works to a certain extent.

Can we say that religion to be the organizing and ordering "tool" or principle to serve "the greater good" which I take to be the inner spiritual experiences of a collection of individuals?

Like any tool or principle, religion can be used in an inappropriate way that no longer works only a useful servant -- like making tentative and emerging consensus into a rigid dogma that begins to monitor and police people's living experiences (not sure how far the Microsoft/Computer comparison can be pushed in this way).

I think the guiding rule should be that no one religion has all the truth -- by definition.