one of the things that has greatly influenced how i feel about religion is what i have read in the bible...

and living under the influence of doctrines based on this book. not quite understanding it all, and not feeling free to question certain fixed ideas based on it or to wonder and say about some passages, "what in the world???" (a fairly fruitless endeavor as i recall) and not knowing how to reconcile....(to question would indicate a faultiness or a being in disfavor...based on scriptural learning) ???

notice i am talking only about the ideologies and doctrines...the bible being the source

my thoughts are that they are not as healthy as they are cracked up to be for people

You're right Agnes. The Bible is the one I've studied the most. I've done some looking at the other ones too lately. None of them seem to preach hate. Actually if you live your life as a good decent person, you seem to fall within the parameters of all of them.

I dunno Zap. I like to think that love is the only thing that lasts. That was certainly a perfect place for that song, though.

Edited to say:

I think if PSB were here, he would say:

All them gods are just about the same

(From a John Prine Song)

Well to me spirit does not have anything to do with the bogey men or god or any other demon. Human souls don't go floating off into the ether toward heaven or hell. To me, spirit and spiritual are extensions of communication and thought. An example, Albert Einstein's conceptualization of relativity was a spiritual act. He did not do it de novo. He built on the spirit of Newton, Helmholtz, Faraday, Plank, Bohr etc. etc. It came from intense study and meditation that resulted in epiphanies (true and false)...In the same way, Gandhi used spirits and spiritualism to persuade the British to leave India. He used it as a means of communicating what was wrong with the way things were so that the individuals of the world could feel it. Woody Guthrie did the same with his dust bowl songs and teaching people about the plight of those affected.

Information is meaningless unless it can be transferred and comprehended and developed between individuals. The human mind seems to be unique in its capacity to conceptualize and communicate complex ideas. It is my opinion that humans have yet to adequately manage the superstitions and fantasies that have naturally evolved as a consequence of the mind. That is why the term spiritualism is linked to gods and demons and such. Yet I can consciously meditate about time as a river of life flowing through my soul that I share with so many family and friends and not have to be weighted down with gods or demons and all the nightmares they can bring. I can also meditate on the god as a fantasy if I choose and realize it (god) is nothing more than a projection of myself and therefore subject to all my weaknesses. God is just a character in a vivid fantasy shared by millions and as such he has been manipulated and his part rewritten many times to satisfy our collective desires and needs and he has therefore accumulated many contradictory persona's. Now people argue over which of these fantasy gods is right or wrong. People mold god to fit their needs and quote from this great historical fantasy with the conviction that causes others to concieve of blowing up buildings and starting wars.



So, what does your faith tell you about the presence of muslims and atheists in heaven? Yey or ney?

What? I don't know what you are saying here? Is it the old zoroastrian good and evil battle of the spirits? Come on Ahura Mazda, save us from evil.

I am not saying religion causes wars. People cause wars. A fundamental property of religion is to create a barrier. There can be political, economic and traditional barriers but religion brings that emotional level. Religion in alliance with the political, that can be too deadly. Christians have fought christians and muslims have fought muslims for years. Sometimes the disputes involved god and sometimes they didn't. I agree with you that there is always an underlying evil that precipitates these things. Evil can be a spirit as I define spirits and spiritualism but it is a creation of man, not god or the devil.

On spiritualism

There is a collective consciousness. It exists as a result of communication, education, art, literature, history, tradition and all the other things that fill our minds. This is the great spirit pool of humanity because we all contribute to it and we all use it for our own purposes. Bob Dylan tapped it in the sixties and wrote all those songs. Like I said before, Einstein taped it and came up with relativity. You interface with it through study and meditation and experience. This is spiritualism. It exists without god. The "believers" have co-opted it as their private realm (particularly when it comes to things that may be considered cosmic) and that their ascetics are the only ones who have access and built scary stories around it to limit dangerous interactions (dangerous to their beliefs anyway). I don't believe them.

i also wanted to mention that i appreciated the thoughts about education expressed both in the clip eileen posted and the thoughts that heraclitis posted.

My faith? Nothing really about that. On the other hand, Rowan Atkinson had a good go at it.

http://wordsum.blogspot.com/2006/07/rowan-atkinson-welcome-to-hell.html

heraclitis wrote:

"On spiritualism"

"There is a collective consciousness. It exists as a result of communication, education, art, literature, history, tradition and all the other things that fill our minds. This is the great spirit pool of humanity because we all contribute to it and we all use it for our own purposes. Bob Dylan tapped it in the sixties and wrote all those songs. Like I said before, Einstein taped it and came up with relativity. You interface with it through study and meditation and experience. This is spiritualism. It exists without god. The "believers" have co-opted it as their private realm (particularly when it comes to things that may be considered cosmic) and that their ascetics are the only ones who have access and built scary stories around it to limit dangerous interactions (dangerous to their beliefs anyway). I don't believe them."


Kurtz & Ketchum wrote:


"The game of baseball teaches us that errors are part of the game and perfection is an impossible goal. Spirituality teaches us, or has taught most of us, how to deal with failure. We learn at a very young age that failure is the norm in life.....errors are part of the game, part of its rigorous truth."
"Discovering spirituality in the game of baseball is not so strange as it sounds. For literally thousands of years, sages and saints have explored the ordinary and everyday in the attempt to understand the extraordinary and divine. The ritual of the Japanese tea ceremony – simply carrying and serving tea – is a profound spiritual exercise. The posture of kneeling in prayer conveys acceptance and mindfulness. Standing up in a crowded room and saying, “My name is John, and I’m an alcoholic,” calls forth the spiritual realities of humility, gratitude, tolerance, and forgiveness.”
“Spirituality takes many forms, and all spiritualities do not look on failure and imperfection in the same way. But through the centuries a recurring theme has emerged, one that is more sensitive to earthly concerns than to heavenly hopes. This spirituality – the spirituality of imperfection – is thousands of years old. And yet it is timeless, eternal and ongoing, for it is concerned with what in the human being is irrevocable and immutable: the essential imperfection, the basic and inherent flaws of being human. Errors, of course, are part of the game. They are part of our truth as human beings. To deny our errors is to deny ourself, for to be human is to be imperfect, somehow error-prone. To be human is to ask unanswerable questions, but to persist in asking them, to be broken and ache for wholeness, to hurt and to try to find a way to healing through the hurt. To be human is to embody a paradox, for according to that ancient vision, we are “less than the gods, more than the beasts, yet somehow also both.”
“We are not ‘everything,’ but neither are we ‘nothing.’ Spirituality is discovered in that space between paradox’s extremes, for there we confront our helplessness and powerlessness, our woundedness. In seeking to understand our limitations, we seek not only an easing of our pain but an understanding of what it means to hurt and what it means to be healed. Spirituality begins with the acceptance that our fractured being, our imperfection, simply is: There is no one to ‘blame’ for our errors – neither ourselves nor anyone or anything else. Spirituality helps us first to see, and then to understand, and eventually to accept the imperfection that lies at the very core of our human be-ing. Spirituality accepts that “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”
The spirituality of imperfection speaks to those who seek meaning in the absurd, peace within the chaos, light within the darkness, joy within the suffering – without denying the reality and even the necessity of absurdity, chaos, darkness, and suffering. This is not a spirituality for the saints or the gods, but for people who suffer from what the philosopher-psychologist William James called ‘torn-to-pieces-hood’ (his trenchant translation of the German Zerrissenheit). We have all known that experience, for to be human is to feel at times divided, fractured, pulled in a dozen directions…..and to yearn for serenity, for some healing of our “torn-to-pieces-hood.” ---------- The Spirituality of Imperfection – Storytelling and the Search for Meaning (Kurtz & Ketchum).

"Spiritualism" is the wrong term. The term you're looking for is "spirituality" and in H.'s description, "secular spirituality".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_spirituality

In one definition at that site, religion is the form of spirituality given by civilization although then one could say what H. embraces is 'uncivilized'.

"Spirituality" is the term I used. "Spiritualism" is another's term......

Quite so.

http://lamammals.blogspot.com/2010/09/aroma-party-interview-with-devil-part-3.html

i appreciate the difference in meaning, but let's not get overly hung up over the two words.

But Agnes, hang ups are the essence of religion, aren't they? I mean, look at what religion does to sex.

And why does Dave insist on square brackets instead of pointies like the rest of the web? Hang ups...

random...