When everything turned upside down in 2020 I started looking for answers - I read/listened to Jordan Peterson, Sorab Amhari, Patrick Dineen, Ben Shapiro, Rod Dreher and especially Paul Kingsnorth. The common thread was that the only answer to the insanity was organized religion. I went back to my Protestant church and it was completelyโฆ
When everything turned upside down in 2020 I started looking for answers - I read/listened to Jordan Peterson, Sorab Amhari, Patrick Dineen, Ben Shapiro, Rod Dreher and especially Paul Kingsnorth. The common thread was that the only answer to the insanity was organized religion. I went back to my Protestant church and it was completely captured. I am in the process of converting to Catholicism - rediscovering the Church has re-ordered my life and helps me make sense of what is happening in the world.
Glad that you have found a home. But religion (of any stripe) is founded on a fallacy - all of them, every last one, are โconstructsโ of Man. They deserve no special consideration in the public sphere, and the Founding Fathers got it right. And Barry Cooper, your obsession with โLeftistsโ as being worse than just about anyone looks foolish - letโs just mock them for their pomposity, but be very afraid of radical Muslims who will kill us. The fatal flaw in Islam is that itโs not permitted to condemn a fellow member of the umma (the faithful). So, confronted by yet another mass murder bomb attack, muslims take refuge in pious protests that Islam is a religion of peace. They simply sound ridiculous.
I respectfully disagree, Fannie. Organized religion is not the only answer, though it is for many. A very large component of adhering to any religion is faith (I would call it suspending your disbelief, but that's just me). I have faith in only one thing, my self belief in the logical, rational side of my brain. I leave it to that to sift through the 'insanity', to find the wheat through the chattering chaff - and work it out for myself. That has not always been easy.
But to me, I'd rather not have an organized anything guide me anywhere, especially one in which the central premise is the existence of an all knowing prophet who will do your thinking for you.
Same thing happened to me. While i remain steadfastly Protestant, the average age of our church is 60+. The progressive churches I used to long for hold little appeal for me anymore.
Hi Fannie, welcome home! You might like a wonderful book by Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity. If the Church (and to some extent any of the Abrahamic religions) see the world as it actually is - created by and watched over by the Almighty, then to deny Him is to deny reality and to deny reality is, well, not sane.
Yes, a few years ago, I seriously considered converting to Catholicism too, and began talking to a priest about it that had been recommended by a friend...only to discover that the priest was a transparent phony whose main aim was to keep me from figuring out that the modern priesthood is little more than a floating gay orgy, full of "retreats" and fancy costumes. It quickly became obvious that guys like me, who would notice things and ask questions, was the last thing they wanted in the Catholic Church.
Blessedly, not all priests are like your experience. That being said, finding a priest that is a 'true' man of faith is not easy. I was fortunate to find one. Interestingly, I didn't realize that when I met him 4 decades ago. I came to that conclusion after meeting up with him again and speaking with him about his journey, and mine, back to faith. I hope you find one; his faith and gentleness is a true gift to me in my journey.
I once lived in a small dispersed residential community in the Cascade mountains. Across the street was a large mansion that had a number of men living in it. We eventually figured out that it belonged to the Catholuc church and was used as a retreat. The house next to it was not close (5 acre parcels) and had a hot tub in the back yard. I was talking to the wife of that household once who told me she'd stopped going in it by herself because she kept seeing one of those men hiding in the trees within her property watching her and it creeped her out. She had small children. She claimed the retreat was for priests who had been accused of sex crimes.
Thanks for your comment! I thought the article would be about people like you. Iโm much more curious about your real embrace of religion than โฆ whatever this article is about.
Until the first grade, my family had no religion. Then my dad became a born again Catholic and gave up boozing. I got sent to Catholic school, which I loved for a while. In an earlier comment, I mentioned my first grade teacher, a nun, who introduced me to a more mystical and less dogmatic interpretation of Catholicism.
I've always been curious, and have little desire for answers to the "big" questions. I believe that we can't ever really, truly know the nature of existence. Maybe through contemplation / meditation / prayer we might get a glimpse. It's fun for me to explore all of this, which is why strict religion holds no interest for me, although I do find other people's religious beliefs interesting.
To RTโs comments I think human conscience is not enough because itโs still driven by human nature and sometimes human failure. And I get thatโs why people leave organizations and organized religions. At some point faith has to become a personal and individual relationship with God thatโs hopefully supported by a strong community of faith. That relationship adds a depth to conscious alone.
For Jeff I think the Methodist church declined over decades. I noticed it over the last decade where as an institution they sort of forgot about their overarching mission and just started worrying about other things - generally political. But the human condition is the human condition and the needs are the same regardless of skin color or or other physical characteristics. Iโm really sad about it actually.
RT, I share your admiration for Sufism...but can't it be said that Sufi "masters" are themselves a sort of priesthood? I certainly see them in this way.
Actually, I sensed the presence of Thoreau in your brief discussion of Sufism. The Sufi poets, along with the Bhagavad Ghita, are, to me, the two most important sources for the naturalistic philosophy Thoreau articulates in Walden. That text was my pathway to Sufism, which I think you describe very well.
But I will suggest that both Thoreau and the Sufi poets see an intense connection to the natural world as the pathway to transcendence, as a means of being in the presence of God. So maybe you and I still are going to "kirk," even if it takes a different form than what were raised with. The theology and the architecture may vary, but the desire to be in the presence of God remains undiminished.
I feel like that by living in sight of the ocean. It isn't so much like 'church' to me; but an appreciation of miracles. Might not make sense to a lot of people; just my impression.
Wouldn't it be great to see someone ask Huckabee at her next news conference if she believes in evolution, better still if it was a reporter from Fox..
That is interesting. I assume by "captured" you mean by woke ideology? If so, it might explain a trend I think I'm reading of conversions to Catholicism (even though it seems to be drifting along on the tide of woke also, but enjoys a reputation which has been more anchored in tradition).
Your path is very similar to mine. I found conservative thinkers (after being very leftist) and I went back to my church, fortunately not captured, and a renewed sense of community and conservatism has also really helped me find peace in troubled times.
My story is the same as yours. After a hiatus from my birth religion, Catholicism, I returned several years ago. It has helped me as well through hard times and a family tragedy. I often wonder what people who have no faith do, or what to they turn to when the worst happens. I pray for them as well. Take care.
I was raised in the Methodist church and wanted to find peace solace and answers during these last few turbulent years and couldnโt, because they too, are โcapturedโ and so we switched to a non denominational Bible church for the same reasons you are converting to Catholicism. Itโs wonderful so far.
As a Catholic, I am fearful that this current Pope is undermining the Catholic faith. He is, in my opinion, a communist and a lot of other Catholics think as I do. Fortunately, there are still some priests that are 'true' men of God and faith. But you have to search.
I too went looking among Congregational (New England Protestant) churches to attend during the past year or two- most are woke - but a few remain loyal to the traditional doctrine, that said, they are not well attended....when did Protestantism lose the plot and get side-lined?
We definitely see this trend within Judaism with secular Jews or Jews affiliated with less observant movements embrace (or return) to more Orthodox Judaism. As these werenโt my exact reasons for becoming more religious, I canโt comment directly, just wanted to affirm this is a pattern that plays out regardless of the religion involved. Iโd be curious if thereโs a similar pattern within Hinduism or Buddhism?
My wife is Buddhist and we go to the ceremony on holidays. Currently in Thailand and seen or heard nothing embracing the woke culture. From what I have seen, the Buddhist stay pretty true to the teachings. Unfortunately most of them align Democrats for voting in the US. In Thailand, most would just be happy for an opportunity to get to America and care less about politics.
I was in the process of exploring reform Judaism as a religion that I might want to convert to. But I found exactly what youโre talking about. It has been captured by the woke and the progressives. When they wanted to know pronouns before I could take a class, I knew it wasnโt for me.
Thatโs the tendency for people to return to uncompleted tasks. (And maybe partly why I remarried my second wife!). The experiment I heard described was to give subjects problems to solve. Half were allowed to complete the solutions, the other half were stopped part way through. At the follow-up interview at which they got paid for participating, they were left for a little while in a waiting room. On the coffee table there were magazines and also a copy of the problem they were working on. Subjects who hadnโt completed the problem had a much higher tendency to pick it upโrather than magazinesโthan did the ones who had finished solving it.
I suspect that the same effect happens in people who return to religion after taking a respite from it. Probably part of the human operating system, latest release OSH 5783.5.
Religion is a series of rules and regulations built around a core of nonsense, similar to astrology. "The sun goes around the earth," "the earth is 6,000 years old" etc. These pronouncements sound ridiculous to many people NOW but when they were made you had to accept them or else.
I understand that it's good for the spirit to sit in a beautiful building in quiet and contemplate life, the universe and everything else but the same thing can be accomplished sitting by a stream, watching the stars, or even looking out over a city.
I still have memories of being smacked on the face in Catholic school for asking "why?" too many times and not accepting the response "because god says so!"
I had an awesome nun as my first grade teacher who approached religion from a more mystical and less dogmatic place. I can track my free thinking, wide ranging spirituality back to her.
She was sweet and a great teacher. My life has definitely been better for having known her.
Absolutely! But a lay teacher in a public school would not have had license to talk to children about spirituality and the mysteries of life.
Side note, because I love to talk about her, "mystery" was one of her favorite words. She was a curious, inquisitive person and encouraged that in us. "Mystery" was a way of talking about things that could never really be settled, only contemplated. Of course she said this in a much more rudimentary way to us / me and other kids who were responsive.
I agree conscience is key to living an ordered life. But if you have no Higher Authority than yourself or society's mores I think conscience can easily end up manipulated by the ego to confirm that things we really want are "good" and "right."
The higher authority you speak of always reflects society's mores at the time. Go back through history. And those mores are often misled by egos - maybe some else's if you aren't being misled by your own.
The largely aggregate consciousness of my peers, I suppose. The kind Leah and others are mentioning is a kind of a middleman in my opinion. It doesn't really add anything to the discussion - it just blocks the view.
Ever read Nisargadatta Maharj's "I Am That"? It's very interesting in a weirdly related way.
โYou do not need religion to re order your life. All you need is a conscienceโ
And how do we acquire a conscience? The people that surround you. I was raised a Methodist and it was the people that made the church, not the religion. It was primarily my parents and grandparents that shaped my conscience but those wonderful, caring souls still influenced it in a positive way. I have many fond memories of hayrides, summer Bible school, dinner fund raisers, Wednesday night choir practiceโฆ
I get what youโre saying about religion, itโs been twisted many times by evil men and women but itโs the sense of community that is the universal attraction and even though I no longer attend church, I firmly believe that the vast majority of those that do make the world a better place.
Religions are a product of human nature and a reflection of the people from whom they are drawn. They go in lock-step together. Read history from the middle ages and you'll find the barbarism exhibited by religion a mirror of the commonly accepted beliefs and practices of the people who are members - all with what they felt was good conscience, or at least aspiring toward those values at the time. We look at them as barbaric and savage but we are not them. Future generations will no doubt look at us the same way. Still there will be religion because it is a unifying social force that allows people to work organizationally together in much larger groups than they can in simpler tribes. Tribes can't stand against it.
Maybe I need a simple tribe. I have felt a tribe might not be a bad place to be! Or a cult, or the armed services. I do agree there is a lot of control in these groups. I am sure the government would like to control us this way, under the guise of goodness ha ha ha,...I think they have shown their hand through the pandemic for me to know the government doesn't care about me. When they told me to wrap my house in plastic, keep my doors and windows closed during anthrax, I said I want my tax money back. If that is the best you got, I will take my money and take care of myself ha ha ha....I must be getting old enough to become awake and cynical.
It makes you wonder what happened to the people we know (think of a person who has truly done evil things, not out of mental illness, but out of agenda, maliciousness etc.) and you have to be curious if you could see their multigenerational heritage and how that shaped their "conscience". And then contrast those whose family lineage for many generations was imbued with love and light. I am not sure I totally ascribe to being born with a conscience except to say I am at an energetic, epigenetic, subconscious level a product of those before me. So family values passed on I believe can help or hinder a person's conscience. And having recently returned to church, it is about God on one level. And I got there because my co-worker and I were discussing the renewal of the church's mission. When I heard what she was sharing, I said to self, I think that sounds lovely. And due to the negative way the world feels to me, I am choosing love, light and a community of people who care...about God and by extension are living as Christ in how they related to me.
I would not force it which is I guess what I was saying. It felt forced through previous posts, like organized religion isn't the way to being conscious. I would say there are infinite ways to being in this world, and hopefully there is enough goodness to overcome badness. No one path is truth for me. I wasn't an organized religion person, until I wasn't. And who knows, this may change. I firstly get my sense of god in the earth, animals, my dog of all things. My hope is probably like yours, that the light will obliterate the dark. And there is a lot of people all over the place denying one's experience...just turn on the TV or go to a store and look at the go this way arrow or stand here arrow. It's pervasive in my experience. I work to hopefully not allow others to deny my experience and also to allow others theirs.
Just want to say I really love this conversation. The two of you talking about your beliefs is so much more interesting than the snarky, shallow article above. Thank you!
I think the common trait that psychopaths/sociopaths lack is empathy. They have no ability to put themselves in the position experienced by another. It allows them to imagine and carry out unimaginable cruelty to the rest of us.
Incidentally, apparently highly successful men and women often score very high on the the scale of psychopathology. Some guy wrote a book about it awhile back.
Oh, man, RT, you must have gotten out of bed on the wrong side to jump into this rabbit hole. Sort of like the guy who goes into an Irish bar and starts swinging.
Your comments would be more powerful if you didn't deny people's beliefs/needs/wants. You state "you don't need" and then go on to tell others what they should do/think/believe. I am curious if you restating your beliefs in terms of "I don't need" and "I believe". I found it interesting that you had to in ways preach to us here to convert us to your way of being?
| Isnโt every day that we are alive on this planet a miracle? |
That's the paradox, isn't it. I look at an ant, for example, and think "this is absolutely amazing, an incredible creature with millions of cells doing whatever it's supposed to do" but then, boom, it's gone with a push of the thumb.
If there is some higher power, I'll concede it's more powerful than humans, but it's definitely not all-powerful because it can't make anything that lasts. Also, most of the known universe is cold and dead. Wouldn't a higher power want a universe teeming with life?
"it's definitely not all-powerful because it can't make anything that lasts." You seem to be assuming that God would want to make something that lasts but can not. Seems to me to be an unwarranted assumption. Also unwarranted is the assumption that said "higher power" hasn't made anything that lasts . . .
I am reading the book God Light and the author discusses the intertwining of science and religion. I guess my comment was more about, for me, feeling you were obliterating my experience of maybe wanting/needing/believing in the concept of organized religion. I do try to realize my experience isn't the experience of anyone else and not to force my ways on others. I guess that's how I felt, like your way of not needing religion was the way we should be. I might view the miracle of today as a god done deed...or maybe not. It can be both/and.
Ekklesia was originally a political, not religious, term as it means "called-out gathering" and referred to the political assembly of citizens in Greek city-states.
The connection to something similar to 'Circe' is rooted in the name Cappadocian Christians in 5th century modern-day central Turkey gave their communities, 'Kyriakos oikos' (house of the Lord). They significantly influenced the translation of the Christian Bible into Gothic, wherein 'Kyriakos oikos' is rendered 'ciric'--which is 'kerk' in Old English and 'church' in modern English.
When everything turned upside down in 2020 I started looking for answers - I read/listened to Jordan Peterson, Sorab Amhari, Patrick Dineen, Ben Shapiro, Rod Dreher and especially Paul Kingsnorth. The common thread was that the only answer to the insanity was organized religion. I went back to my Protestant church and it was completely captured. I am in the process of converting to Catholicism - rediscovering the Church has re-ordered my life and helps me make sense of what is happening in the world.
Glad that you have found a home. But religion (of any stripe) is founded on a fallacy - all of them, every last one, are โconstructsโ of Man. They deserve no special consideration in the public sphere, and the Founding Fathers got it right. And Barry Cooper, your obsession with โLeftistsโ as being worse than just about anyone looks foolish - letโs just mock them for their pomposity, but be very afraid of radical Muslims who will kill us. The fatal flaw in Islam is that itโs not permitted to condemn a fellow member of the umma (the faithful). So, confronted by yet another mass murder bomb attack, muslims take refuge in pious protests that Islam is a religion of peace. They simply sound ridiculous.
I respectfully disagree, Fannie. Organized religion is not the only answer, though it is for many. A very large component of adhering to any religion is faith (I would call it suspending your disbelief, but that's just me). I have faith in only one thing, my self belief in the logical, rational side of my brain. I leave it to that to sift through the 'insanity', to find the wheat through the chattering chaff - and work it out for myself. That has not always been easy.
But to me, I'd rather not have an organized anything guide me anywhere, especially one in which the central premise is the existence of an all knowing prophet who will do your thinking for you.
Same thing happened to me. While i remain steadfastly Protestant, the average age of our church is 60+. The progressive churches I used to long for hold little appeal for me anymore.
Hi Fannie, welcome home! You might like a wonderful book by Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity. If the Church (and to some extent any of the Abrahamic religions) see the world as it actually is - created by and watched over by the Almighty, then to deny Him is to deny reality and to deny reality is, well, not sane.
Yes, a few years ago, I seriously considered converting to Catholicism too, and began talking to a priest about it that had been recommended by a friend...only to discover that the priest was a transparent phony whose main aim was to keep me from figuring out that the modern priesthood is little more than a floating gay orgy, full of "retreats" and fancy costumes. It quickly became obvious that guys like me, who would notice things and ask questions, was the last thing they wanted in the Catholic Church.
Anybody else have this experience?
Blessedly, not all priests are like your experience. That being said, finding a priest that is a 'true' man of faith is not easy. I was fortunate to find one. Interestingly, I didn't realize that when I met him 4 decades ago. I came to that conclusion after meeting up with him again and speaking with him about his journey, and mine, back to faith. I hope you find one; his faith and gentleness is a true gift to me in my journey.
I once lived in a small dispersed residential community in the Cascade mountains. Across the street was a large mansion that had a number of men living in it. We eventually figured out that it belonged to the Catholuc church and was used as a retreat. The house next to it was not close (5 acre parcels) and had a hot tub in the back yard. I was talking to the wife of that household once who told me she'd stopped going in it by herself because she kept seeing one of those men hiding in the trees within her property watching her and it creeped her out. She had small children. She claimed the retreat was for priests who had been accused of sex crimes.
You sound like a man who's been there!
Where music and passion are always the fashion!
I understand completely. It's tough to find that 'comfort'; but when one does, it's another little miracle. :-).
Thanks for your comment! I thought the article would be about people like you. Iโm much more curious about your real embrace of religion than โฆ whatever this article is about.
Do it. I've been down lots of rabbit holes that other people find dark, but I find fascinating.
Religious background?
Until the first grade, my family had no religion. Then my dad became a born again Catholic and gave up boozing. I got sent to Catholic school, which I loved for a while. In an earlier comment, I mentioned my first grade teacher, a nun, who introduced me to a more mystical and less dogmatic interpretation of Catholicism.
I've always been curious, and have little desire for answers to the "big" questions. I believe that we can't ever really, truly know the nature of existence. Maybe through contemplation / meditation / prayer we might get a glimpse. It's fun for me to explore all of this, which is why strict religion holds no interest for me, although I do find other people's religious beliefs interesting.
To RTโs comments I think human conscience is not enough because itโs still driven by human nature and sometimes human failure. And I get thatโs why people leave organizations and organized religions. At some point faith has to become a personal and individual relationship with God thatโs hopefully supported by a strong community of faith. That relationship adds a depth to conscious alone.
For Jeff I think the Methodist church declined over decades. I noticed it over the last decade where as an institution they sort of forgot about their overarching mission and just started worrying about other things - generally political. But the human condition is the human condition and the needs are the same regardless of skin color or or other physical characteristics. Iโm really sad about it actually.
RT, I share your admiration for Sufism...but can't it be said that Sufi "masters" are themselves a sort of priesthood? I certainly see them in this way.
I sense in you a fellow Thoreauvian. Am I right?
Actually, I sensed the presence of Thoreau in your brief discussion of Sufism. The Sufi poets, along with the Bhagavad Ghita, are, to me, the two most important sources for the naturalistic philosophy Thoreau articulates in Walden. That text was my pathway to Sufism, which I think you describe very well.
But I will suggest that both Thoreau and the Sufi poets see an intense connection to the natural world as the pathway to transcendence, as a means of being in the presence of God. So maybe you and I still are going to "kirk," even if it takes a different form than what were raised with. The theology and the architecture may vary, but the desire to be in the presence of God remains undiminished.
I feel like that by living in sight of the ocean. It isn't so much like 'church' to me; but an appreciation of miracles. Might not make sense to a lot of people; just my impression.
I like how Sarah Huckabee Sanders put it in her SOTU reply--- we arenโt divided by left and right, weโre divided by normal and crazy.
So very insulting.
Wouldn't it be great to see someone ask Huckabee at her next news conference if she believes in evolution, better still if it was a reporter from Fox..
That is interesting. I assume by "captured" you mean by woke ideology? If so, it might explain a trend I think I'm reading of conversions to Catholicism (even though it seems to be drifting along on the tide of woke also, but enjoys a reputation which has been more anchored in tradition).
You might want to read up on Catholic Social Teaching.
Your path is very similar to mine. I found conservative thinkers (after being very leftist) and I went back to my church, fortunately not captured, and a renewed sense of community and conservatism has also really helped me find peace in troubled times.
My story is the same as yours. After a hiatus from my birth religion, Catholicism, I returned several years ago. It has helped me as well through hard times and a family tragedy. I often wonder what people who have no faith do, or what to they turn to when the worst happens. I pray for them as well. Take care.
Good choice Felina hope you find peace there, itโs a good place to start
I was raised in the Methodist church and wanted to find peace solace and answers during these last few turbulent years and couldnโt, because they too, are โcapturedโ and so we switched to a non denominational Bible church for the same reasons you are converting to Catholicism. Itโs wonderful so far.
As a Catholic, I am fearful that this current Pope is undermining the Catholic faith. He is, in my opinion, a communist and a lot of other Catholics think as I do. Fortunately, there are still some priests that are 'true' men of God and faith. But you have to search.
Enjoy!!!
The Methodist Church has been totally taken over by the "woke" crowd. Decent people should abandon it.
I too went looking among Congregational (New England Protestant) churches to attend during the past year or two- most are woke - but a few remain loyal to the traditional doctrine, that said, they are not well attended....when did Protestantism lose the plot and get side-lined?
Actually, a long time ago. Social activism became the religion.
Welcome home!
We definitely see this trend within Judaism with secular Jews or Jews affiliated with less observant movements embrace (or return) to more Orthodox Judaism. As these werenโt my exact reasons for becoming more religious, I canโt comment directly, just wanted to affirm this is a pattern that plays out regardless of the religion involved. Iโd be curious if thereโs a similar pattern within Hinduism or Buddhism?
My wife is Buddhist and we go to the ceremony on holidays. Currently in Thailand and seen or heard nothing embracing the woke culture. From what I have seen, the Buddhist stay pretty true to the teachings. Unfortunately most of them align Democrats for voting in the US. In Thailand, most would just be happy for an opportunity to get to America and care less about politics.
I was in the process of exploring reform Judaism as a religion that I might want to convert to. But I found exactly what youโre talking about. It has been captured by the woke and the progressives. When they wanted to know pronouns before I could take a class, I knew it wasnโt for me.
One of my Jewish friends referred to the local Reform Synagogue as "The First Church of Moses. " I always found that amusing.
Thatโs an interesting observation, Chaim. It has strong overtones with the Zeigarnik effect:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeigarnik_effect
Thatโs the tendency for people to return to uncompleted tasks. (And maybe partly why I remarried my second wife!). The experiment I heard described was to give subjects problems to solve. Half were allowed to complete the solutions, the other half were stopped part way through. At the follow-up interview at which they got paid for participating, they were left for a little while in a waiting room. On the coffee table there were magazines and also a copy of the problem they were working on. Subjects who hadnโt completed the problem had a much higher tendency to pick it upโrather than magazinesโthan did the ones who had finished solving it.
I suspect that the same effect happens in people who return to religion after taking a respite from it. Probably part of the human operating system, latest release OSH 5783.5.
Religion is a series of rules and regulations built around a core of nonsense, similar to astrology. "The sun goes around the earth," "the earth is 6,000 years old" etc. These pronouncements sound ridiculous to many people NOW but when they were made you had to accept them or else.
I understand that it's good for the spirit to sit in a beautiful building in quiet and contemplate life, the universe and everything else but the same thing can be accomplished sitting by a stream, watching the stars, or even looking out over a city.
I still have memories of being smacked on the face in Catholic school for asking "why?" too many times and not accepting the response "because god says so!"
I had an awesome nun as my first grade teacher who approached religion from a more mystical and less dogmatic place. I can track my free thinking, wide ranging spirituality back to her.
She was sweet and a great teacher. My life has definitely been better for having known her.
would you have the same feeling if she were not a nun?
Absolutely! But a lay teacher in a public school would not have had license to talk to children about spirituality and the mysteries of life.
Side note, because I love to talk about her, "mystery" was one of her favorite words. She was a curious, inquisitive person and encouraged that in us. "Mystery" was a way of talking about things that could never really be settled, only contemplated. Of course she said this in a much more rudimentary way to us / me and other kids who were responsive.
I agree conscience is key to living an ordered life. But if you have no Higher Authority than yourself or society's mores I think conscience can easily end up manipulated by the ego to confirm that things we really want are "good" and "right."
The higher authority you speak of always reflects society's mores at the time. Go back through history. And those mores are often misled by egos - maybe some else's if you aren't being misled by your own.
The largely aggregate consciousness of my peers, I suppose. The kind Leah and others are mentioning is a kind of a middleman in my opinion. It doesn't really add anything to the discussion - it just blocks the view.
Ever read Nisargadatta Maharj's "I Am That"? It's very interesting in a weirdly related way.
โYou do not need religion to re order your life. All you need is a conscienceโ
And how do we acquire a conscience? The people that surround you. I was raised a Methodist and it was the people that made the church, not the religion. It was primarily my parents and grandparents that shaped my conscience but those wonderful, caring souls still influenced it in a positive way. I have many fond memories of hayrides, summer Bible school, dinner fund raisers, Wednesday night choir practiceโฆ
I get what youโre saying about religion, itโs been twisted many times by evil men and women but itโs the sense of community that is the universal attraction and even though I no longer attend church, I firmly believe that the vast majority of those that do make the world a better place.
Religions are a product of human nature and a reflection of the people from whom they are drawn. They go in lock-step together. Read history from the middle ages and you'll find the barbarism exhibited by religion a mirror of the commonly accepted beliefs and practices of the people who are members - all with what they felt was good conscience, or at least aspiring toward those values at the time. We look at them as barbaric and savage but we are not them. Future generations will no doubt look at us the same way. Still there will be religion because it is a unifying social force that allows people to work organizationally together in much larger groups than they can in simpler tribes. Tribes can't stand against it.
Maybe I need a simple tribe. I have felt a tribe might not be a bad place to be! Or a cult, or the armed services. I do agree there is a lot of control in these groups. I am sure the government would like to control us this way, under the guise of goodness ha ha ha,...I think they have shown their hand through the pandemic for me to know the government doesn't care about me. When they told me to wrap my house in plastic, keep my doors and windows closed during anthrax, I said I want my tax money back. If that is the best you got, I will take my money and take care of myself ha ha ha....I must be getting old enough to become awake and cynical.
It makes you wonder what happened to the people we know (think of a person who has truly done evil things, not out of mental illness, but out of agenda, maliciousness etc.) and you have to be curious if you could see their multigenerational heritage and how that shaped their "conscience". And then contrast those whose family lineage for many generations was imbued with love and light. I am not sure I totally ascribe to being born with a conscience except to say I am at an energetic, epigenetic, subconscious level a product of those before me. So family values passed on I believe can help or hinder a person's conscience. And having recently returned to church, it is about God on one level. And I got there because my co-worker and I were discussing the renewal of the church's mission. When I heard what she was sharing, I said to self, I think that sounds lovely. And due to the negative way the world feels to me, I am choosing love, light and a community of people who care...about God and by extension are living as Christ in how they related to me.
I would not force it which is I guess what I was saying. It felt forced through previous posts, like organized religion isn't the way to being conscious. I would say there are infinite ways to being in this world, and hopefully there is enough goodness to overcome badness. No one path is truth for me. I wasn't an organized religion person, until I wasn't. And who knows, this may change. I firstly get my sense of god in the earth, animals, my dog of all things. My hope is probably like yours, that the light will obliterate the dark. And there is a lot of people all over the place denying one's experience...just turn on the TV or go to a store and look at the go this way arrow or stand here arrow. It's pervasive in my experience. I work to hopefully not allow others to deny my experience and also to allow others theirs.
Just want to say I really love this conversation. The two of you talking about your beliefs is so much more interesting than the snarky, shallow article above. Thank you!
I think the common trait that psychopaths/sociopaths lack is empathy. They have no ability to put themselves in the position experienced by another. It allows them to imagine and carry out unimaginable cruelty to the rest of us.
Incidentally, apparently highly successful men and women often score very high on the the scale of psychopathology. Some guy wrote a book about it awhile back.
Oh, man, RT, you must have gotten out of bed on the wrong side to jump into this rabbit hole. Sort of like the guy who goes into an Irish bar and starts swinging.
I hear you. I have to avoid cabbage too. ;-)
Your comments would be more powerful if you didn't deny people's beliefs/needs/wants. You state "you don't need" and then go on to tell others what they should do/think/believe. I am curious if you restating your beliefs in terms of "I don't need" and "I believe". I found it interesting that you had to in ways preach to us here to convert us to your way of being?
| Isnโt every day that we are alive on this planet a miracle? |
That's the paradox, isn't it. I look at an ant, for example, and think "this is absolutely amazing, an incredible creature with millions of cells doing whatever it's supposed to do" but then, boom, it's gone with a push of the thumb.
If there is some higher power, I'll concede it's more powerful than humans, but it's definitely not all-powerful because it can't make anything that lasts. Also, most of the known universe is cold and dead. Wouldn't a higher power want a universe teeming with life?
At most, you could only say what such a being hasn't done, not what said being cannot do. Lack of evidence isn't tantamount to lack of ability.
How do you know the universe isnโt teaming with life?
"it's definitely not all-powerful because it can't make anything that lasts." You seem to be assuming that God would want to make something that lasts but can not. Seems to me to be an unwarranted assumption. Also unwarranted is the assumption that said "higher power" hasn't made anything that lasts . . .
Not just that nothing lasts, but also the tremendous amount of energy required to keep something alive and even then it slowly decays and atrophies.
I am reading the book God Light and the author discusses the intertwining of science and religion. I guess my comment was more about, for me, feeling you were obliterating my experience of maybe wanting/needing/believing in the concept of organized religion. I do try to realize my experience isn't the experience of anyone else and not to force my ways on others. I guess that's how I felt, like your way of not needing religion was the way we should be. I might view the miracle of today as a god done deed...or maybe not. It can be both/and.
Ekklesia was originally a political, not religious, term as it means "called-out gathering" and referred to the political assembly of citizens in Greek city-states.
From this source
https://earlychristiantexts.com/should-ekklesia-really-be-translated-as-church/:
The connection to something similar to 'Circe' is rooted in the name Cappadocian Christians in 5th century modern-day central Turkey gave their communities, 'Kyriakos oikos' (house of the Lord). They significantly influenced the translation of the Christian Bible into Gothic, wherein 'Kyriakos oikos' is rendered 'ciric'--which is 'kerk' in Old English and 'church' in modern English.