I don't think secularist education, per se, is the answer. Turkey has had a secularist constitution and a pretty high level of education, by Middle East standards, for decades. Islamism has done well there, in the last 20 years, in part because Islam connects more to the lives of ordinary people, outside the college-educated metropolis, than anything in secular education.
The answer is probably going to come from European Muslims who can feel the instinctive attachment of ordinary people to their faith and integrate a message of tolerance and mutual support as a fulfilment of Islamic ideals.
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The attributes of God
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Re: The attributes of God
Last edited by Harry Marks on Thu Dec 03, 2015 3:34 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The attributes of God
YOUKRST QUOTE "Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of the least of these brothers of Mine, you did it to Me.
so Nixon authorized for the first time use of long range B-52 heavy bombers to carpet bomb Jesus "
Come on Guys, Carpet bombing in a war was not what Jesus was talking about.
Jesus was talking about that the principals applied to treating children should also be equated to God. How should parents treat children - manipulating, conniving, lying, misusing or abusing, etc.
You sound that God is to blame that life is not a paradise. Oh Ya, that is what he provided for man and we chose our selfish desires over being loyal to him. But an unfaithful dog is not at fault, but the loving owner who gave him FREE WILL. Come on man, you have to be fair.
so Nixon authorized for the first time use of long range B-52 heavy bombers to carpet bomb Jesus "
Come on Guys, Carpet bombing in a war was not what Jesus was talking about.
Jesus was talking about that the principals applied to treating children should also be equated to God. How should parents treat children - manipulating, conniving, lying, misusing or abusing, etc.
You sound that God is to blame that life is not a paradise. Oh Ya, that is what he provided for man and we chose our selfish desires over being loyal to him. But an unfaithful dog is not at fault, but the loving owner who gave him FREE WILL. Come on man, you have to be fair.
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Re: The attributes of God
I thought the idea was that we should consider the most vulnerable, whether children or otherwise, to be Jesus. That is, what we do to them, we do to Jesus. So yes, when people get caught up in these ego-driven, ideology-driven slaughter contests we call war these days, they are doing it to Jesus.brother bob wrote:YOUKRST QUOTE "Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of the least of these brothers of Mine, you did it to Me.
so Nixon authorized for the first time use of long range B-52 heavy bombers to carpet bomb Jesus END QUOTE
Jesus was talking about that the principals applied to treating children should also be equated to God.
That is exactly the sort of "we had to do it" logic that led Pilate to execute him for calling himself Messiah and riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, then upsetting the tables in the temple. Jesus was killed because of the unthinkably sinful arrangements by which humans were ruled, and still to some extent are ruled.
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Re: The attributes of God
oh that's right i forgot, God gets all the glory we get all the blame.You sound that God is to blame that life is not a paradise.
usually when i meet a bad dog i take one look at the owner and all mystery is instantly dissolved.But an unfaithful dog is not at fault
most trees will grow just fine when given what they need
wonder what happened to this one
it's a bit hard to grow straight in a constant 100k crosswind, i hope my metaphor is not too subtle.
christians often start with the premise "man is fallen in sin and alienated from holy god, look the evidence is all around"
i disagree
i think the vast majority of people would be fine if they weren't lied to from the time they could parse language.
the average person is hit with so much bullshit in their life it's a wonder we survive at all.
i think the current state of affairs is a testimony to the hardiness of this life form
like this one
Sol Invictus
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Re: The attributes of God
I believe we begin "in sin" and are alienated from our holy God. I would unpack that in a much more nuanced way than the average traditional theology. To put it in dualistic, self-alienated terms, we are an amalgam of both a cooperative and a competitive spirit.
The cooperative spirit is a core biological basis for God. The competitive spirit is "chaos": the raw material from which God is shaping civilization and fulfillment. It includes many instincts which are not conducive to fulfillment, or for that matter civilization, and we experience these as chaos - fight or flight reactions, pervasive anxiety, withdrawal from involvement, discouragement about our ideals, and on and on. Our task and calling is to integrate these chaotic impulses into an overarching sense of meaning, which permits both rational processing and cooperative institutions. Along the way to this integration we experience a re-uniting with our "natural" self, as we learn to "walk on the water", that is, to experience the emotion without our ability to think and choose being swamped by it.
It is one of the remarkable insights of the Christian religion, inherited from an older strand, that this re-integration proceeds more effectively if we perceive ourselves to be responding to a higher power. This is the inner "king" of depth psychology, or the mysterium tremendum, or the Absolute, or the Ground of Being, or the spirit of Love, depending on what part of the elephant we take hold of in our blindness.
We often long for a paradise in which, if we educate people carefully and systematically and supportively, the integration of emotion happens naturally. I suspect this hope is forlorn. Despite the clear evidence that repeated trauma makes most of us incapable of "walking on the water", meaning that the spirit of cooperation has almost no chance of pervading our choices, avoiding that PTSD will only get us so far.
I think we will always run into external challenges and resultant internal conflicts which tend to return us to relying on the partial version of cooperation, which is cooperation within our "in-group" against outsiders. Such a reliance will always put chaos back in charge, leading us to choose irrational options like strong leaders or scapegoating of the vulnerable, or rejection of aspects of reality, as supposed solutions.
Youkrst points out an important aspect of putting chaos in charge, which is the reliance on falsehood. If we feel we must lie, either to authority, or to our children, or to ourselves, we have lost faith. We have abandoned the path of integration and reason, even if this seems to be only partially. If it seems I am parsing authorities, and designating things to be "sin", it would be a good idea to go back to non-dual basics. Choosing to lie to authorities, for example, can be an act of reason and a choice for the most rational action in the circumstances. But if we feel we have no choice, we have abandoned the path to integration.
For my money, only the ability to trust the higher power who insists on meaning transcending threat can save us from that repeated surrender to chaos.
The cooperative spirit is a core biological basis for God. The competitive spirit is "chaos": the raw material from which God is shaping civilization and fulfillment. It includes many instincts which are not conducive to fulfillment, or for that matter civilization, and we experience these as chaos - fight or flight reactions, pervasive anxiety, withdrawal from involvement, discouragement about our ideals, and on and on. Our task and calling is to integrate these chaotic impulses into an overarching sense of meaning, which permits both rational processing and cooperative institutions. Along the way to this integration we experience a re-uniting with our "natural" self, as we learn to "walk on the water", that is, to experience the emotion without our ability to think and choose being swamped by it.
It is one of the remarkable insights of the Christian religion, inherited from an older strand, that this re-integration proceeds more effectively if we perceive ourselves to be responding to a higher power. This is the inner "king" of depth psychology, or the mysterium tremendum, or the Absolute, or the Ground of Being, or the spirit of Love, depending on what part of the elephant we take hold of in our blindness.
We often long for a paradise in which, if we educate people carefully and systematically and supportively, the integration of emotion happens naturally. I suspect this hope is forlorn. Despite the clear evidence that repeated trauma makes most of us incapable of "walking on the water", meaning that the spirit of cooperation has almost no chance of pervading our choices, avoiding that PTSD will only get us so far.
I think we will always run into external challenges and resultant internal conflicts which tend to return us to relying on the partial version of cooperation, which is cooperation within our "in-group" against outsiders. Such a reliance will always put chaos back in charge, leading us to choose irrational options like strong leaders or scapegoating of the vulnerable, or rejection of aspects of reality, as supposed solutions.
Youkrst points out an important aspect of putting chaos in charge, which is the reliance on falsehood. If we feel we must lie, either to authority, or to our children, or to ourselves, we have lost faith. We have abandoned the path of integration and reason, even if this seems to be only partially. If it seems I am parsing authorities, and designating things to be "sin", it would be a good idea to go back to non-dual basics. Choosing to lie to authorities, for example, can be an act of reason and a choice for the most rational action in the circumstances. But if we feel we have no choice, we have abandoned the path to integration.
For my money, only the ability to trust the higher power who insists on meaning transcending threat can save us from that repeated surrender to chaos.
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Re: The attributes of God
I think part of the human problem is trusting in things we cannot know to be true. If it were as simple as trusting in a higher power, that would be great. But that trust doesn't exist without all the various accoutrements of belief, and they are often at odds. I think we should limit ourselves to trusting in only what we can know, but to do this properly we need to create a moral system that is both sticky and truthful. Truthful without having to venture beyond the borders of knowledge. At least, where the borders are crossed, it's acknowledged as assumption.Harry wrote:For my money, only the ability to trust the higher power who insists on meaning transcending threat can save us from that repeated surrender to chaos.
Trust should remain within the borders, it's the only way to make it homogenous and reduce competing factions. As long as there is education on the best methods to parse the truth, most things will match. If you choose to go beyond what can be known, that's a personal perogative. But the biggest issue we have is going beyond what is known, then trusting those unknowns to the point where we discard what is known. It's dangerous to trust beyond what is known. Does our ultimate concern need to be supernatural or omnipotent to be sacred?
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Re: The attributes of God
More importantly, do we trust others who claim to base their principles and morals and otherwise defer to "God" on important questions? Ben Carson, for example, says his actions are guided by God. To me this is dangerous, delusional belief. Does anyone really think Ben Carson can talk to God? Carson is confusing his personal beliefs with the real world, which is why he is prone to making up his own answers.Interbane wrote:If you choose to go beyond what can be known, that's a personal perogative. But the biggest issue we have is going beyond what is known, then trusting those unknowns to the point where we discard what is known. It's dangerous to trust beyond what is known. Does our ultimate concern need to be supernatural or omnipotent to be sacred?
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Re: The attributes of God
Why is someone's action supposedly being directed by God so alarming? If I give $40 to a poor person are you so distraught? If I invite the poor homeless person to sleep in my house for a week so alarming? Stopping and picking up a person who is hitch-hiking or their car is broken down? Giving groceries to a neighbor who lost their job? What is so stinkin' disconcerting about these events that God has prodded me to do? Maybe you should not speak up about something you have no knowledge about! Just like I don't tell women that they are wrong about thinking and saying they never want to have another child, right after child birth, and then, a year later, tell their husband, "how about another kid, dear?" Just because you don't know their experience does not make them delusional. You sound much more delusional than them.
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Re: The attributes of God
i think we are ALL delusional to one extent or another BobYou sound much more delusional than them.
it's just a question of degree
i suppose the idea is to minimize as much as is reasonably possible the delusion factor.
like you are trying to minimize our delusion that the God of the bible can't speak out of a burning shrubbery, heavens to Murgatroyd! how delusional must we be to doubt that the creator of the universe goes around talking to people out of burning bushes
i'm always reminded of the lunacy of literalism, how to take a perfectly artful metaphor and stupid it up by taking it literally.
hence the injunction, cast not your pearls (inner meaning of metaphor) before swine (people who take metaphors literally)
"swine" being the language of the bible writer not mine
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Re: The attributes of God
As a technical matter, yes, that trust does exist without belief systems. As a practical matter, this point is more or less the same as mine. People seem to need an imagined version of their Higher Power, preferably with anthropomorphic characteristics, in order to interact with that Higher Power.Interbane wrote: If it were as simple as trusting in a higher power, that would be great. But that trust doesn't exist without all the various accoutrements of belief, and they are often at odds.
I still don't think this is well specified. Only what we can provide evidence for? That kind of rules out Universal Consciousness, but does it also rule out the (philosophical) Absolute? Must we be able to conceptualize a "thing" or "entity"? I would think that rules out the Ground of Being. And yet these are three conceptualizations which seem to work for large numbers of people, and have modern-friendly social structures around them. So I have a second concern about this, which is the reasoning behind it. What is the reason for that rule?Interbane wrote:I think we should limit ourselves to trusting in only what we can know,
Interbane wrote: but to do this properly we need to create a moral system that is both sticky and truthful.
Well, I think Enlightenment thought has pretty much produced that. The project of universal education is gradually establishing Social Contract morality as firmly as religious morality ever was, and, through economic advancement, weeding out many of the traumas which have led people to fail to live by their moral principles.
I think that works pretty well. "Assumption" translates to "conceptualization" in practice, and a great number of educated religious people are perfectly happy to acknowledge limitations of their conceptualization of a Higher Power without ceasing to relate to it.Interbane wrote:Truthful without having to venture beyond the borders of knowledge. At least, where the borders are crossed, it's acknowledged as assumption.
This expresses, somewhat more modernistically, the monotheism project. No worshipping artificial idols. No competing factions. A single version of truth.Interbane wrote:Trust should remain within the borders, it's the only way to make it homogenous and reduce competing factions. As long as there is education on the best methods to parse the truth, most things will match. If you choose to go beyond what can be known, that's a personal perogative. But the biggest issue we have is going beyond what is known, then trusting those unknowns to the point where we discard what is known. It's dangerous to trust beyond what is known.
Myself, I prefer to acknowledge the partial and mysterious nature of any such grand system, and insist that the various versions tolerate one another. It isn't the discarding of knowledge that feels threatening to me, foolish as that is, but the discarding of civility. What you call the personal prerogative of going beyond what can be known can, if recognized as such, be done humbly and thus without leading to uncivil behavior.
The short answer is no. Even within fundamentalist churches there is a recognized progression from appealing to the supernatural as a "special deal" that followers get, to make life easier, onward to aligning themselves with God's will as a way of being the people they seek to become. The supernatural and omnipotent version becomes mere scenery.Interbane wrote: Does our ultimate concern need to be supernatural or omnipotent to be sacred?