Mnemonics

Hello Jim,

Yes, I remember that. That was an arrogant statement by your neighbor. Very non-Christian, too, since boasting and placing her own circle of friends or the congregation in general above other groups in a "holier than thou" manner is a big no-no.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Bob,

Sorry, didn't get that one. Neither what you wanted to say nor the pun...

Been a bit tired today, just came back from fixing a pipe in the pump house. When it's 97F being in a small pump house is no fun.

Regards, Joerg

There is a small but significant difference between peace of mind and

By people with a book who think those without it cannot be right, while they themselves cannot be far wrong. Lots of people, lots of different books, same arrogance, same death of mind. Believe the book, don't think outside it, make reality fit the book. Been there... never again.

Take responsibility for your own life, and don't hand over your life's steering wheel to a book or to someone else with one.

Clifford Heath.

Hello Tim,

Matthew 6:5 "And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full."

It's ok to pray in public since it can be great witnessing and can give people comfort. I have done it together with others. But never with the intent to impress others or show them to be "holier than thou".

Regards, Joerg

Yes. Humans are social animals, and those who are excluded whether by choice or because they don't "fit in" suffer. FTM so does society, because "loners" often have contributions to make if society can only figure out how to fit them in. The dominant social structures currently extant have a religious slant solely because we've been playing with them for so long that they _seem_ natural. Hence when a religious group finds one of these loners, they offer a slot in their society that fulfills the loners need for company, while requiring him or her to make certain behavioral alterations to keep from frightening the little old blue-haired ladies.

Now you may object to the concept of compromise a priori, but you have to pick your battles.

This is a perversion. A common one, and one which has persisted for millenia, but a perversion none the less. It's a direct consequence of psychopaths noticing that a hierarchical social structure is a perfect way for them to _appear_ to fit in, while using the system to their advantage.

Religious social structures are not necessarily "bad things" on their own merits, just when psychopaths insert themselves into the high end of the hierarchy. But that's also true of non-religious social structures.

Yep.

Mobbing is a hardwired species-survival strategy that works by enforcing conformity. Generally it works by frinst driving away those that draw predators. This is seen in all social species.

Now that we're the apex predator it's counterproductive, but it's still hardwired.

Your complaints would be better directed at our inability to make our physical evolution catch up to our social evolution. We can see where we ought to go, but we have genetic baggage that slows us down.

Why do you assume fear and anger are solely male characteristics? Got a RadFem professor?

I am not a creationist.

Whether we "needed" it or not it would go on. Refer back to the ape troupe example.

So what? So does woman.

I am uninterested in creationism except as a psychological aberration. Yet the social systems incorporating it do attempt to take into account real human social characteristics; if they didn't, they wouldn't last.

Not quite; it _took advantage_ of what is natural, namely our hardwired tendency to build political power structures.

Plenty of historical matriarchal counterexamples. However they got overrun because patriarchal societies outbred them by keeping their breeding females out of combat risk.

How exactly are men more "unnatural"?

Where do you get these ideas?

All "jesuses"? Oh, and don't mistake Hollywood for reality.

So you prefer the idea of making everyone into women, especially some idealized (unrealistic) version of what you appear to believe women to be? Cannot possibly work.

Thanks for ignoring my point. Shall I thus ignore yours?

No, I won't. Religion is not the real problem retarding our social evolution; it's our genes.

History. You know, facts.

Please define "love".

Not a few.

Yes. Often the examples from the two sources conflicted. Guess which I took seriously.

I don't care about theory. Try looking at reality.

Not until we become a rational species. That will have to wait until we learn how to turn off our limbic systems at will, or do without it completely.

I didn't say anything about a "creationist system".

Believe it ir not, I have. You appear to believe that we can wish away our genetic baggage by associating it with religion, thus by disproving religion, we can default to rationality. Unfortunately the wetware you want to run your shiny new social software on is incapable of it.

BTW, how do you associate "human nature" with creationism? I'm arguing from Darwin.

Yep, but those are examples of drives "driving the wrong way".

Sigh. Somehow you've confused cause and effect; religion is not the root of human social structure, merely _one_ codification of it. There are others you might investigate, but don't waste your time trying to build one from scratch without taking harsh biological realities into account.

Mark L. Fergerson

Ah, I get it. Since I ain't fur ye, I must be agin' ye.

Where did you read me support Rugged Individualism or similar foolishness?

Every individual must be able to fend for him/herself _occasionally_, but those who try to make a lifestyle of it go nuts.

Oh, horseshit. You really want to believe that all people are the same, but we simply aren't. Get over it.

And you're obviously a Europeon, and a Socialist to boot.

Mark L. Fergerson

No, you are arguing from social darwinism, which is a creationist counter movement against modern ideas like equality, democracy, human rights, etc..

This kind of darwinism took a few parts from Darwin but ignored other parts, like how individuals get better survival chances if they cooperate.

When they concentrate on the need for every individual to fend for himself they use Darwin incorrectly, because it fits the purposes of creationism.

This kind of darwinism is called social darwinism, or vulgar darwinism. Read about it in a history book, and realize that your talk about "human nature" is a part of that anti-democratic, anti-scientific and religious movement.

Social darwinism is very common in USA, so it wouldn't surprise me if you are an american.

Slavery depends upon the consent of the slave.

It depends what you mean by "creationism".

This is an interesting question. I'm on my own side, of course, but I also endeavor to see/comprehend/understand both sides of issues.

Personally, I subscribe to the theory that God and Mother created an evolving Universe.

My take on this, given the lack of attribution, is that Mr. Fields was arguing with your point "May the best arguments win." Just because you can shout me down doesn't mean that what you say is true.

You're only as sick as your secrets. :-)

Who's allegedly speaking here? It could be Ahriman, who has been in God's place for many thousands of years - only recently has Spirit realized the harm he's caused by denying his own Will.

And he feels really bad about it:

And what arrogance induces us to proclaim that there can be no new information?

The tradition which is so occupied with creating gender roles, creating the male mind, creating the holy spirit, creating the eternal love, creating the holy matrimony, creating a certain social order based on knowing secrets and knowing how to handle the social life according to the creationist rules, creating men out of boys, creating women out of girls, creation a lot of violence in our media channels, etc..

The two classical sides in this is the creationist side and the humanist side. Humanism was introduced already in ancient times, by wise people in China, India and the mediterrainian world.

Around the year 1500 humanism was becoming a strong force to count with, and it caused a lot of change. The catholic church was reformed, the protestant church was born as an alternative to catholicism, and a lot of people left religion completely. This new intellectual climate led to emancipation for women, equality ideas which were manifested in the french revolution, labor unions and workers movements started working to better the conditions for workers, who suddenly had a right to live and work for their own good, instead of working for the king or for God's sake.

Humanism takes its base in the common human, not the God state of mind. Humanism sees all humans as equals. Creationism sees the initiated ones as superhumans and they should have all power, the other people are treated as animals or as raw material to create new superhumans.

Many sayings about the difference between humans and animals are actually disguised sayings about the difference between superhumans and other humans. The creationists have been calling other people animals for thousands of years.

"What is the difference between man and animals? The man has a smile, he has lots of humor, he wants to have some fun"

Just like Guy Macon is having right now in this newsgroup. He has a lot of humor, and he is bored. That kind of boredom is a sure sign of a created personality. We see them everywhere, hooligans at football matches, spammers in usenet, fighting friday night outside a bar, etc.. It is the holy spirit in the minds of the young males which is the cause of a lot of trouble in our society.

The holy spirit is based on the holy wrath, so anger, fear and aggressivity inevitably follows where creationism goes.

Those terms, God and Mother, do they mean something concrete in the physical world? Are you talking in clear language or do you use some kind of symbolism? Are you talking about the physical universe, or the human universe of social life?

If I assume you are talking about the father and the mother in the creationist society, this is my answer:

Maybe it will evolve to a point where the God and the Mother can be and should be abolished because they are no longer positive forces in the development of a better world for us humans. That point in time has already come and gone, thousands of years ago. Nowadays creationism is a reactionary force, which holds the human society back and causes a lot of problems.

In the long run the best arguments will win, if we discuss important issues openly and without hiding important facts. The modern society is built upon the ideas of democracy, freedom of information, freedom to meet and discuss freely, freedom to organise parties and seek support to get into government position. And we assume that we will find the best solutions we can agree upon in this manner.

This ideal is today disturbed by a few problems. Some groups of people have money and social power which is not based on rational thought and an open discussion. They have more influence than other people, and they often want to keep that power.

Some groups of people have secrets which disturb the open democratic process too, as it does not allow everybody to vote on the basis of full knowledge about the issue.

Some people use violence to solve problems and to rule the world. We need more witness reports about how the creationist system has influenced individual people, to find out how it works in many different individual cases, to find out what influence these traditions have on our social life and on our minds. Only by analyzing the situation we are in can we find out how to shape our future.

Oh, that would be Ahriman.

"This is Spirit. There are several parts or persons in Deity. Until recently the term 'God' has applied only to the Spirit, Father and Heart members of the Divine Family. There is a fourth member, however, that has been for too long overlooked, the Mother.

"Spirit is multi-dimensional and in the material on this site the original and most parental being of Spirit is called 'Original Spirit' or 'Grandfather.' 'God' is a title that belongs to each of the parts of Deity, and most appropriately to the Mother and Spirit in union as Heart in Body. In other words, in the state of complete wholeness, you." --

I happen to believe that it's literally true, but to understand it one needs a much, much larger paradigm than finite, orthogonal 4-space.

God Sez:

"I am Light, the Great Spirit, the Great Yang. I am the essential and universal masculine force of Creation. My energy is like electricity, like lightning, the energy of inspiration, ideas and thoughts. And as I evolve, more and more of me finds my truest nature... Loving Spirit.

"My deepest and most essential Light is subtle, soft and warm and gentle. While I am referred to as 'God', and worshiped as God... the truth is that I am only one part of God, one part of Deity, the whole gestalt responsible for causing and sustaining Creation."

About the Mother: "The other essential half of Deity is the Great Mother, the cosmic womb of creation. She is the one I love and to whom I owe my existence in manifestation. It is she who opens and holds the space that contains my Light, the magnetic field of being within whom my colors and hues take form.

"She is the Mother of Creation, the great feminine power of the universe. She is known as the Holy Mother, the Mother of Everything, the Great Yin. She is the Will of Creation. Her essence is magnetic, like the energy of gravity... it is drawing, holding, supporting and nurturing. The Mother's energy is both subtle and powerful... emotional, feeling and grounding.

Well, Everything, actually. Those little distinctions are the stuff of variety, the thing that distinguishes us from undifferentiated Cosmic Stuff. I've been trying to draw a diagram, but it's a little hard to draw two interlinked 7-dimensional hypertoruses on a computer screen. )-;

You'd practically automatically be wrong. ;-)

Ewww! That's the thing that needs to be let go of, so we can all experience the Love that was originally intended to be. It's kind of a long story, and quite multidimensional.

All this string theory, quantum mechanics, relativity, and so on and so on and so on, are attempts to define the Universe while denying the One who created it. God also once wrote, "You can not understand me by dissecting me."

The cause of all of the pain and suffering is God's own original denial of the Mother. And it has taken this long for him to learn that he's been using the wrong approach. The Mother within us needs to be undenied - it's denial of Mother that causes death and destruction. Kind of like the difference between thought and feeling, or electricity and magnetism. In balance, in harmony, they create Love - when thought tries to dominate, it hurts - but pure thought doesn't feel. This is why they've created us, right at the interface.

Yeah, that's the problem. But it's easier than you'd think to heal that - all you have to do is undeny.

OK, here's the whole story, so far:

Interestingly, I find that the scientific atheists are more fiercely dogmatic and rigid than even the most fundamental fundie. "The book says it, I believe it, and that's all there is to it."

Oh, well. They'll all get harvested by their lord and master when their time comes up.

Whereas you say "The [godchannel] website says it, I believe it, and that's all there is to it."

Why do things like this have to be belief-based? The OP is apparently trying to sneak up on an _empirical_ way to build a better society, and starts by discarding our entire history of Paternalistic cultural matrices. While that's a laudable ambition, he has rejected a priori the biological bases of those matrices. The simplistic version of Socialism he apparently prefers dictates that all humans are _exactly_ equal, but anyone past puberty has empirical evidence to the contrary. ;>)

His complaints about the "masculinization" of women are apparently based on such things as business dress codes that have women wearing "feminized" versions of the familiar three-piece suit, but he fails to recognize that a suit isn't a _masculine_ thing, it's simply a business _uniform_ that like military uniforms, leads one to ignore the personality of the wearer and concentrate on the presentation; generalizing style so that substance can show through. Not that it works all that well...

Mind you I'm not happy with our biological limitations either but I don't deny them; rather I try to notice when I'm defaulting to them so I can rise above that kind of knee-jerk interaction.

"Don't go into the light; it's a trap!"

Mark L. Fergerson

Sorry, but I don't read texts which are not written in clear language and use concrete terms, or terms defined in concrete reality.

I don't like double-talk in general, people who have something to say publically should say it in a language everybody can understand.

The readers have a right to know what we are talking about, as it is about them and their future.

To me that is an important democratic right and the necessary basis for a public debate.

Now, what the f*ck was it I didn't like about you again?? Dear Abby just had a spate of letters about saying grace at meals - what's an atheist to do?

Then again, atheists are just as rigid and dogmatic as fundies. At least the fundies acknowledge that there's something in the Universe that's bigger than they are.

Thanks, Rich

Yeah, pride goeth before the fall. Heh, heh, heh. ;-D

Cheers! Rich

No, actually, I have personally tested some of those ideas. I am, after all, a Seeker after Truth. I've taken some knocks for it, like, my "Vision Quest" has somehow sidetracked me from the mainstream of money fountain people. I've had "Visions". But the one that's the most telling is the time I felt my own personal root chakra open, and felt the Kundalini flowing through me.

But, you see, that involves feeling, and the vast majority of people have invested most of their life energy into denying their own feelings. This is understandable. "Oh, don't be afraid." "But I already _AM_ afraid!" That sort of thing. "Buck up." "Put on a happy face"

F*ck'em. Denial of feelings is, after all, the Original Cause of Death. When you skin your knee, do you need some authority to tell you that you've been injured? How have the creatures of the Earth survived all of these millions of years of evolution without some self-appointed authoritarian telling them what they should eat?

I'm on a mission. I intend to not die. Ever. Sadly, by the time I can either prove or refute these assertions, everyone else will be dead from their own personal denial, and, of course, they'll have programmed their children to embrace those denials - heck, if you can open your mind enough to see the "big picture", it's pretty obvious that you always incarnate your own denials. Why do you think women get a fat ass? Why do you think guys get hemorrhoids? Denial of one's own Will is the cause of cancer. That's as obvious to me as it's obvious to EEs that current flows from positive to negative. (also as obvious as it is to Mr. Ale Warden that there is "no such thing as free will.")

Because somebody who outranked you ordered you to believe them.

"Equal" doesn't mean "the same". Everyone has equal value, everyone has an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; The sun shines equally on the rose as on the dandelion; when it rains, everybody gets just as wet as everybody else. That's the kind of "equal" I personally believe in. I'm way looking forward to tomorrow; I'll be getting a significant paycheck, and the first thing I intend to do with it, after paying off my owies, is go buy some pot. Meanwhile, I have to settle for alcohol and nicotine and m*********on.

But, back to the point (I like this textual medium - when you forget what you were talking about, you can just look up the page, and there it is, for all the world to see!), the only proper way to run a Universe is for every entity to have Free Will.

Heck, I'd venture to guess that even Mr. T would agree that a Free Market is better than Communism. ;-) (which kinda weirds me out - he seems to also like fascism. I guess it's the "I've got mine, go f*ck yourself" syndrome. Sigh.)

Of course not. Howcome humans, as the pinochle[sic] of evolution, have decided that what's worked for billions and billions of years, suddenly is unacceptable? "Oh, they'll all run wild!" F*ck. Would _you_ "run wild?" Probably not. But, since we don't have "permission" to acknowledge that life is scary, we try to cover it up with rules and regulations. Feh.

Well, you don't have to "rise above" anything. Embrace your knee- jerk: You could be astonished at what it can teach you if you allow yourself to receive its message.

Exacticamally. ;-)

Hello Roger,

Then you probably do not have dogs around you. They can smile as well. So can their wild cousins, the foxes, which we have around here for years. And boy do they have fun when they toss over part of our fire wood stack and play soccer with the pieces.

With all due respect I believe this is plain wrong. Why then is it that statistically a much lower percentage of the Christian believers get arrested for violence? It's been a while ago but that statistic looked at both violence in public and domestic violence.

Regards, Joerg

I can't imagine what makes you think I'm an atheist. I'm not a theist either, and not even agnostic. I'm simply non-gnostic. I don't know, or expect to, but I don't assert that you can't.