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Goodbye Jesus

Where Does Bible Say Non-believers Are Fools?


JohnZain

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(continued...)

 

You are that creation. All you need to do is look within.
Our being created in His image means we share certain of His attributes (will, intellect, soul, emotions, etc.), but that image has been damaged and marred, so it is not sufficient for correct spiritual insight; we suffer from spiritual macular degeneration, as it were. See, what if "my" spirituality says, "We need to slaughter group X bec. they don't believe the way we do?" and you're part of group X's view? Who's going to be the arbiter as to which spiritual views are legit? Again, this runs into the question I posed on the "Create Your Own Meaning" thread.

I'll have to look at your other thread later. I may consider moving it to the debate areas of the forums as it doesn't seem like a Rant and Reply sort of topic....

 

To your point above, I think it's a pessimistic philosophy that sees us as damaged and marred. One can easily say we are also evolving towards Light, and just as a child born from the womb is not a "damaged and marred" adult, he is rather becoming who he is destined to be. Isn't that a lot more realistic and optimistic a view?

 

Now as far as "my spirituality" saying we need to murder other groups, I would say that has really nothing to do with spirituality itself, but rather the painful and destructive acts of social and cultural evolution growing towards a mature state of being; a spiritual realization that does not act in such ways. It is not a "spiritual" act.

 

Who is the arbiter of good vs. bad? What is it within us that tells us what is 'better'? People figure this out from something inside them, and we create 'laws' that try to embrace higher realizations of it, which by default are always further reaching than just serving the few, the group. Do you think the stories of genocide of the Hebrews against the Canaanites reflect an evolved spirituality? Or is that much more part of social and cultural evolution?

 

I love what "Jesus" says in the "Heretical" Gospel of Thomas, vs 70,

"If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you [will] destroy you."

We have to evolve. And that comes from within us, listening to an responding to that, like a plant reaching towards light. Our nature is spiritual, and Love is the fruit of it.

 

What happens though is that as you mature, hopefully, if you allow yourself to listen to the heart of another human being, listen to what is in fact within them talking out to us trying to penetrate that glossy veneer of doctrinal rightness we put on us as a shield from life itself, that what happens is we begin to grow from within, not from a set of truths outside us.
That's slightly contradictory: on the one hand, you argue that it has to come from within your own heart, on the other hand, you're listening to the heart of another human being, which then changes your own heart/views.

Yes, it's difficult to communicate all this in this form. Nothing is isolated. We grow and exist within an interaction of the subjective, inter-subjective, and objective worlds. What I mean is that by not listening to what is inside, and rather looking to authorities externally, we become out of balance, and can spiral into dissociation, or dysfunction. Religious and political atrocities owe their existence to just this. People turn over their own truth to another, which then becomes distorted into some other form. At the same time, being isolated is also to not be part of the whole and leads to dysfunction. It's not simple to express all this in a few short paragraphs.

 

veneer of doctrinal rightness we put on us as a shield from life itself
It might have been a veneer in your case, and a shield from life, but you can't generalize that for everyone who's a Christian. One could also argue that in a lot of cases, most of them actually (going by what one reads here on this site), deconversion is a shield from the pain of doctrine somehow gone wrong. {shrugs} If I grow up under someone who throws plates at me when they're in a foul mood, should I therefore eschew using plates for the rest of my life?

Myself I didn't use religion that way. But I do see it is just that for so many others who become inhuman in their religiousness. These are substitutes, projects, to avoid facing the end of ourselves and the realization of a higher nature. They are driven by fear of death, existentially, not physically.

 

As for the plate throwing you mention, I see that as part of the differentiation process. It's part of the grief process to distance oneself from the past in order to sift through the ashes to build anew out of it. Sometime you have to put up walls for a time. If bitterness then defines the rest of our life, then I would think that to not be the best thing for someone. Growth is the goal.

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