Owning the young mind

[August]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Morals were there before religion. You do not need a religion to get moral behaviour handed from one generation to the next.

Says who? Humans have lived under various forms of religious mandated morals ever since the stone age. You can't claim to know what existed before nor you claim to know what behaviors would be handed between generations in its absence. It's true absence not just rejected by a minor subset of the population that nevertheless benefits by religions existence.

The truth is religion is an integral and historical part of human society. None of us knows what would happen in it's absence. Maybe everything would be sweetness and light but then again maybe it will just set the stage for a bloody resurgence as religions role is filled by radical cults all fighting for dominance.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by August

...maybe it will just set the stage for a bloody resurgence as religions role is filled by radical cults all fighting for dominance.

And how would that be different from the way it's always been when religions have ruled?

[August]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

And how would that be different from the way it's always been when religions have ruled?

Maybe it'd be like the difference between a lone car crash and a multi car pile up. All I am saying is that eliminating religion means removing the good it does along with the bad and nobody, including you, knows the consequences of such a massive disruption to human society.

[Skybird]

The fearmongering of religion. C'mon, August. Even little children of pre-school age usually all by themselves arrange their playful interactions according to golden rules and fair bartering. And I bet it was not that different with the 5 years old a thousand years back, two thousand and four thousand years.

Heck, even Bonobos, when seeing one ape of their group suffering, or sitting aside, come and look at him, check his injuries or whatever it is, touch him, stroke him gently, show signs of compassion, caring and tenderness. And there are many other higher animals doing similiar things as well. Do they do this for religious reasons?

You do not need a religious framework to see people showing social acting, seeking justice in their relations, and behaving according to what we describe in this motto: "what you do not want to get done to you, don't do to somebody else". The Golden Rule, that is.

But quite often, religion has and still does violate this golden rule, in the name of its own "moral" dogma. History, until the present, is full of examples for this.

And quite often, when religion wants to define what is moral and what not, in the end it wants only one thing: control over the people and its actions.

As I explained, there is a hunger in man for adding meaning to his life, many people cannot stand to not have that, become mentally deranged, ill at their heart, desperate, whatever. Any artificial conception of a belief system serves them the purpose to achieve this: seeing a meaning in their lives, a kind of control they have over their fragile, short, vulnerable existence. Viktor Frankl, founder of the Logotherapy school of psychotherapy and survivor of the KZs (his complete family was murdered by the Nazis), put it plain and simple in words: "He who has a Why to live for, is able to bear almost every How." ("Wer ein Warum zum Leben hat, erträgt fast jedes Wie.") Its a fact known in research since long, that in the KZs those who had not such a goal, aim, belief, sense of meaning even in this horror that surrounded them, that these people died earlier and at dramatically higher rates than those who were able to keep somethign in their heart that made them wanting to live for it, or due to it. Or as Jesus has put it: "Man does not live by bread alone."

Its highly subjective, of course. The hunger for meaning however does not automatically mean that just any belief system and what it claims, tells the truth, states facts, is right. It only means that for the believer, it serves his subjective purpose. He falls out of his belief, when it does not serve its purpose anymore (=spiritual crisis).

This all is more about psycho-hygienics than about anything else. Some years ago they erratically wrote in the media that a gene was found that made people believe in God. That is Quatsch, the results were not claiming such nonsense. What they meant and what often intentionally was misinterpreted is that due to the psychological base function of adding an imagined order to the world as we perceive it, the brain may be genetically predetermined to favour the forming of artificial mental orders/structures into which we sort in our witnessing of the world, and this categorizing, to name it as that for the moment, create these "illusions" of religious beliefs and then make people prone to take them for real.

It may be an illusions - but it may be one that keeps us from getting insane, desperate, feeling lost; it may fulfill a function vital for our mental and biological survival. It may be essential for maintaining a psychohygienical homeostasis.

[August]

Like I said people come up with all kinds of reasons why religion is bad but nothing about what will replace the human need for it. That scares me because if we just leave it to chance it we could easily end up worse off.

[Skybird]

But I think you are wrong there, August. Religion - the systematical effort to believe in something that somebody else has imagined and turned into a cult and a theoretical system, all this added up under the label "belief" - is just one way to answer that fundamental craving of man for meaning. There are many other ways. Some "flee" into excessive consummerism and enjoying material pleasure, calling it hedonism: they may not care for religions. Others may be as atheist as I am, but crucify themselves in a bid to be extremely ego-less and totally altruistic. And others again try to find out for themselves by exploring their mind and the key determining factors and conditions of it, calling that meditation, which is the path that I have used for long time. While all this can be done with varying degrees of passion, even fanatism, it nevertheless does not qualify for the real meaning of the word "religion". Religious cult is a very popular attempt tried by people, yes, because it is the easiest one: you make yourself simply believe that if you follow the rules you will get saved. It takes no courage, no responsibility for checking it out yourself, it takes no self-exploration, and you must not confront your most existential fears and tormenting doubts when staring into the universe's abyss that nevertheless refuses to take note of you, and all responsibility is handed over to the Big Boss in whose eye Christians for example claim to have been build (what does that tell us about this God'S own nature, I ask, and why then could we nevertheless be assumed to be responsible for the choices, errors and flaws of ours ?) . The popularity of religions can be explained. But belief of this kind, is just one strategy amongst many others to meet the craving hunger for sense and meaning. And it has many dangers and risks by itself, has done a lot of harm in the world.

To me, self-experience and self-realisation, realisation of one'S own mind, is empirically more valid, and leaves the responsbility for my choice and fate where it belongs: me. Because to me it makes no sense to just believe in an idol that man just imagines, a just imagined god dies when the mind imagining it dies. What mind actually is and how it functions - from the point of view presented by Christian mysticism, or Zen, or comparable traditions, learning about the illusory nature of the ego and the natural essence of mind and space, and this by my own experience, is an apparently far more precious alternative. At least so far nobody was able to show me a better one.

Because if you consequently, really consequently think it to the end, we never do touch that "world outside". We cannot. We only get sensory feedback by our senses. Neural bioelectrical energies racing down our nerves and stimulating our brain to make something of this endless storm of electrons - electrons that are just empty space in themselves, and so are their particles that form them, and so forth. We do not touch matter in a material way, we cannot, we take the illusion of matter the way we take the illusion of a solid disc when there is a fast rotating propeller. And this leads to only one posssible conclusion: the world as we perceive it, is only our brains conception. The world is an idea. It is not like we believe to see, hear, taste, and feel it. Which leads to the ultimate question of this:

What is this mind holding this idea, forming this conception?



If the world is just a dream, who is the dreamer dreaming the dream? The Hindus's idea of Brahman breathing the universe in and out over unimaginable long eons, is a poetic visualization.


Some people say the brain's activity is the reason for there being a mind. I say its the other way around: because there is mind, so there became a brain. What the brain's activity brings to life, is something different: the ego. And it is up to us how big or small this ego is, whether we allow getting fooled by it and mistaking it for our self, or not. Nevertheless, it is illusory. Like a Fata Morgana, it exists as a phenomenon, but like what the Fata Morgana shows you, it is not real, is unreal, is an illusion. The ego is our brain's habit of how it forms images about an "outside" world.

And this is the meaning of "spiritual" as I have reached to understand it. Not just believing some hearsay because the elders whisper it, and our forefathers have written it down on scripture, and everybody does it. All that means nothing. Or in the wording of Zen:

Form is space/void, and space/void is form. No trace of holiness.

Quantum physics, anyone?

In India, China, Japan and other regions of Asia, they like to compare to this metaphor: Imagine the empty space, and in it floating an infinite number of soap bubbles. You can see them floating, their spheres' glittering in patterns of vibrant colours and light, and every bubble thinks the space it embraces with its sphere makes it unique, separate, an individual entity, what it embraces of space is its individuality, its ego, and now there is inside and outside space, two kinds of spaces, and there is "me" and there is the "outside world" . But sooner or later the bubble bursts again, and then is gone. What then is left of two different spaces, inside and outside? There is not two kinds of space, and never were, there is just one space and always has been, and there is just one mind, and what the bubbles showed in glitter and colour, was just transitory, unreal, an artificial separation between inside and outside world.

Our idea of our ego - is an illusion. Nevertheless, like any Fata Morgana we take for real, it can lead us into deep confusion, and trouble. We do not suffer because the world is not in order. The world is what it is, is our conception, but we separate ourselves from it as if that would be possible, and we want to make it "real" and everlasting so that we live as long or everlasting as well. But that is a misunderstanding of who we really are. In other words, we do not suffer because the world is not in order, but because we are not in order. And since we are not in order, so is not the conception of the world we create in our idea and imagining. The world, outside - just mirrors the state of our selves "inside". We project our own ego, and then complain about the world being out of order? Really? Do we...?

And what we really are, can be said in many different ways which all mean the same, I use the words of Meister Eckhart for a closing:

In my eternal birth all things were born, and I was the cause of myself and all things, and if I had so willed it, I would not have been, and all things would not have been. If I were not, God would not be either. I am the cause of God's being God: if I were not, then God would not be God.

And in another text by him, nevertheless complementing the above:

The eye with which I see God, is the same eye with which God sees me: my eye and God'S eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, and one love.

Form is space and space is form. No trace of holiness. There is just One.

[Rockstar]

It could be said science has discovered God, they just don't know it.


God/Quantum Fluctuation
1. Created something from nothing
2. Is non-physical
3. Acts upon the physical
4. Predates the universe





“As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.” - Max Planck


“As long as you are occupied with the mathematical sciences and the technique of logic, you belong to those who walk around the palace in search of the gate… When you complete your study of the natural sciences and get a grasp of the metaphysics, you enter into the inner courtyard and are in the same house as God the King.” - Moses Maimonides

[Skybird]

The only reason why I oppose the use of the word "God" is because the term has been associated so much now with a separate divine entity actively creating by its own will and being separate form its creation and creation being subordinate to it, that it is almost impossible now to use this term now and at the same time not being eaten up by this associative context. When the church and its common dogma speak of "God" and I speak of "God", we do not just talk of two different things, but indeed we are all the universe apart. But the wording used by Meister Eckhard in the above quote should make it clear that even in the mystic traditions of theistic religions - and not just Christian but Jewish and once even Muslim tradition had a mystic lineage indeed - this dualistic nature of things hardly is what it is about. In modern cosmology the empty space, the void gets attributed certain characteristics by theoretical scientists like Hawkings, claiming that nothingness/void is not the philosophical concept of "absence of anything", but is a quality like the vacuum of space, and thus has features and characteristics (at least they can be attributed to it), one of them being that nothing/void/space could not just form matter, but even cannot avoid to indeed create somethign from "nothing", form from space. A good and understandable book on that is by Lawrence Krauss, "A Universe from Nothing", 2012.

However, lets not forget, that is good scientific practice, means: no absolute truth claimed, but a theory. Like always and everything in science.

As I have told you before, Rockstar, I do not differentiate that much between what the christian mystics were after, and Ch'an/Zen is pointing at. It makes no sense to me trying that differentiation.

Mind, space, God, one-ness. It may very well all mean just one and the same. The confusion starts where we mistake the finger for the moon it points at, take the name literal, forget the limited reach of spoken/written language, and ignore the danger that we miss what all this stuff on just the surface really is hiding. All these words, ideas, images, and conceptions are just the veil of Maya that hides the real nature of the world. Leaning on the Jewish saying and LaoTse as well: the name of truth cannot be spoken.

The Kingdom of God does not come with signs to be observed. Nor can one say "Look, here!" or "There it is!" for behold, the kingdom of God is within you. (Luke 17:21-22)

Die, before you die,
so that if you should die,
you will not die.
Otherwise, you may be ruined.
- Angelus Silesius -

I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through me. (John 14:6)

See: one, not two. One. Not two kinds of mind, just one. Not two kinds of space, just one. Not "God" and "Me", just one. Not "A does B", just one. Not "subject" and "objects", just one.

And now forget all these many words and their playful dancing, for they again hopelessly mislead you. Its about finding that question without words that needs no words to answer it. The only way to find it may be not to search for it.

[August]

Again lots and lots of words describing who God may be and in what form he may take but nothing on how the entirety of the human race will get along without a social institution as pervasive and all encompassing as religion.

[Skybird]

Ach August, try to blow away that cloud above your head that hinders you to see that the sun you asked for to shine, already shines...


I would argue that Buddhism and mysticism are not even "religions". Some profane powerpoliticians turn them into that, yes - forming cults where then the few priests have power over the many people, but that is not what Jesus or Buddha have taught or authorized.



Your answer has been given earlier, and several times. You do not need religious cult to get a humane moral code. Granted, you can also get an in humane moral code without relgion: but then you also get that with relgions at times. One could even argue that the reason to form a religion is explicitly that to destroy and overcome an earlier moral code. That can work both ways: a humane face of religion taming a barbaric morale - or a religion turning draconic to overcome a man-loving, friendly morale to institutionlise it sown claim for power.


Open your eyes, see the sun, enjoy what is laid out before you. This hairsplitting tit-for-tat with me serves you nothing.

[August]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Open your eyes, see the sun, enjoy what is laid out before you. This hairsplitting tit-for-tat with me serves you nothing.

Hair splitting? No Skybird that would assume I am talking just to you and that is not the case. I have not seen an answer to my concern from you or anyone else. You say religion is not needed but that's at best a theory and one unlikely to gain much traction in a majority of the world.


For the last time we're not talking about you, or me, or even anyone here necessarily but rather the billions of religious people who you are offering nothing but nebulous utopian visions in exchange for an extensive social system they have relied upon for thousands of years.

[Skybird]

You can read that I said earlier in this thread that religion might have an important function to keep man's psyche in balance and keeping his self-esteem intact - and still you claim in the above reply of yours that

You say religion is not needed.

I stopped there, I simply suddenly lost any further interest.

[Dowly]

Gotta keep those goalposts moving.

[u crank]

Originally Posted by Rockstar

“As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.” - Max Planck

This quote by the famous theoretical physicist is probably the reason that I am an agnostic. I am open to the possibility that there is a 'conscious and intelligent mind' behind the existence of the universe but of course we don't know. That being said, if there is a 'matrix of all matter' I don't think it has anything to do with any of the religions, present and past that exist on this planet.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by u crank

This quote by the famous theoretical physicist is probably the reason that I am an agnostic. I am open to the possibility that there is a 'conscious and intelligent mind' behind the existence of the universe but of course we don't know. That being said, if there is a 'matrix of all matter' I don't think it has anything to do with any of the religions, present and past that exist on this planet.

So, you expect contact with Vulcan civilization out there?

Karl Rahner, a Catholic German theologist of the last century, put it like this:

"The pious of tomorrow will be a mystic, one who has experienced something, against which conventional religious upbringing remains only a secondary training for the religious institutional."

Originally Posted by Dowly

Gotta keep those goalposts moving.

Now I feel - Neymarized.