Owning the young mind

[Skybird]

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

In principle ,the most profound essence of what is needed, is the golden rule. Which all too often gets violated by religions' greed for power and influence and control. Some of the most immoral acts and episodes of barbary were triggered by morals told according to religions, mono- and polytheistic alike. The argument that it takes religions to get moral behaviour else the beastly nature of man breaks out, has been proven wrong by history so very often.

Man does not like to face the fact that in this giant universe his presence is unimportant, and that he has no total control and power over his fate, that is life is easy to break, and that he can all to easily get lost in the abyss of this void, and one day finally will. Man needs to form at least an illusion of some minimum control and influence he has, to make life bearable and add his existence a meaning that else he fails to see. These religions then function to a principle of: I offer a donation to the deity, and deity then does something for me. In the end, religions basing on this, are a bartering place where the devout is not that devout at all, but has power over his deity - by bribing it he can make it to do what he wants it to do. Great god that is, eh?

The most complete system of explanations of the human psyche that I know of, is not the Western tradition of modern psychology, but Buddhism. It is because it is not only radically empirical, but also combines a precise description of how the psyche, or say: the ego, functions, and why and how it comes into existence in the first, it combines this with a cosmological model of explaning mind and space, their relation to forms (matter) and what we - falsly - consider to be our ego. That is something that the Westrn tradition of psychology usually igores: the hunger for meaning, the crave of man to get answers when yelling his questions out into the void out there. The dualistic separation between mind and matter we have in the Western tradition, has a lot to do with that as well. It has enabled the western temporary conquest of parts of nature by science and engineering - but also has led to a deepening split inside our inner being (to call it like that in absence of a better idea of how to express what I mean), that has the dramatic consequence of us now perverting these capabilties of ours into tools of destroying the very basics of our natural survival in this planet's environment. We are, I have no better word, we are hopelessly "splintered". Some of us who hungrily search in the philosophy of the far east for something that eases their hunger, even take these Western patterns and enforce them onto for exmaple the Eastern symbology on Yin and Yang - then interpreting it as the Asian way to express a battle between the forces of the Light trying to defeat the forces of the Darkness, a monumental conflict. But the early taoists in china had a very different view of it, and that is the real reason why the round Yin-Yang-symbol is so harmonic and gentle and round. They thought of Yin and Yang not as Heaven and Hell, Light and Darkness entangled in bitter hostile fighting, but as two kids friendly wrestling with each other in a child's play. No bitter conflict in an eternal struggle for power and dominance, but a light-hearted playing around, and as a result of this play the myriads of forms emerge from the void and come into existence for some time, before they dissapear again - like kids sooner or later get tired of playing always the same game.

The real idea behind taoism is something very different than what many Westerners think it is. It is absoutely no surprise that early taoism and early Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism entered a mutually so very fruitful symbiosis once a long time ago in China. They complement each other quite well.

Okay, long lecture again, sorry. What it comes down to: Golden Rule. If we would learn to play by that alone, already more would be won than all religions together have ever acchieved in all their history. The world would be a very different one. And a much better one, you can bet your life on that.

[Skybird]

You guys have a very erratic view of what an atheist originally is. I would recommend to stop thinking of an atheist being somebody who is something explicitly special: being atheist, that is. Better think of an atheist as someone who is somethign not: a theist believer. If you are atheist, its not as if you claim a certain characteristic that you have subscribed to, its just that you refuse to do right that: to subscripe to the characteristic feature sets of theism. Seen this way, atheism is a natural state of man, while every religious state of man is an un-natural, an artifical, an "added" state of man.


Atheism is no belief in itself, atheists do not believe in "something" that just is different from Christian or Islamic belief. It is no conviction. It is the rejection to take over theists' beliefs and concvictions on the basis of hear-say. Its healthy empirism, so to speak, and a non-membership for the theistic club. Does something like a "non-membership" even exist, does it make sense to think in such a term? Hardly. Atheists are people who have not joined the club of theism and thus reject to follow the house rules of the theistic club home. Simple as that.


The relation between political leadership and religious leadership is very old. Both, politics and relgions, always have used each other to mutually autorize themselves before the people and then claim power and control over that people. Its a cooperation in abusing the people, and keeping them locked in slavery.

[Rockstar]

"If all men were friends, there would be no need of justice". - Aristotle

[Skybird]

^ Could have been by any socialist as well. "If only man were this or that, then socialism would function".

[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.

[Dowly]

Originally Posted by August

Says who? Humans have lived under various forms of religious mandated morals ever since the stone age.

The Romans, that's who.

Their religion didn't offer moral advice or guidance, instead personal morality was based on characteristics of past people that were deemed to be "proper Roman" values that everyone should strive for and what was good for the public and the state.

So, your claim that human moral behaviour has been dictated by religion ever since the stone age is a wee bit incorrect.

[Catfish]

Originally Posted by Dowly

The Romans [...]
Their religion didn't offer moral advice or guidance, instead personal morality was based on characteristics of past people that were deemed to be "proper Roman" values that everyone should strive for and what was good for the public and the state. [...].

And as soon as some former tyrant was dead or fell from grace, there was the Damnatio memoriae, trying to wipe this man and his deeds out of the public conscience.
This has changed, however. Now even the idiots of yesterday continue to be worshipped and praised, 'forever'. Maybe for the lack of better successors.

[Dowly]

Originally Posted by Catfish

And as soon as some former tyrant was dead or fell from grace, there was the Damnatio memoriae, trying to wipe this man and his deeds out of the public conscience.

Oh yes, that is very much what happened during the Imperial era which makes it rather difficult to ascertain whether some emperors were as bad as they were made to be by writers writing after their deaths.

[Rockstar]

The arguments here about how its religions fault reminds of the story in the garden of Eden. When Adamah and his wife were confronted about their actions they immediately began to blame each other and everyone else but themselves.

I agree with Skybird, throughout history man has used religion to justify his actions, true. But lets not forget about the death and destruction following the state imposed atheism by Stalin, Tito, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot. Today the news is littered with reports of politically motivated vandalism and assaults on other people just because of the shirt they wore or point of view.

The criminally minded person group or herd will always try to find a way to absolve themselves of responsibility for their own actions. They'll use religion, politics, environment, science, race, you name it.

The way I see it, I am responsible to my creator, my faith is mine, my belief in God or the great quantum fluctuation if you will is mine. I do not demand you do the same nor would I attempt to impose it upon you. As Skybird suggests open your eyes to the possibilities make your own decisions based on what you have learned yourself not based on what others tell you is truth. Don't get wrapped up in rhetoric or anything that would cause harm to another. If a monkey can offer comfort to its own we should be able too as well. But as history shows we need to be governed over. If my religion has taught me anything its that we, humanity, are capable of doing exceedingly beautiful, good and righteous things and exceedingly, depraved, dishonorable and evil things. Looking at my bible as a history book it must have been utter chaos. I can't even imagine how awful it must have been if laws had to be written prohibiting murder, incest, robbery, rape, eating animals while they're still alive, and human sacrifice. My evil impulse needs to be ruled over and held accountable otherwise as the saying goes all hell would break loose. Teaching right from wrong is necessary and in this regard religion can be acceptable.


"[Religion and] Government must not ever make laws for the simple sake of control; it ought to never interfere with its citizens with a "law" unless there is a public policy reason to do so."