The Concept Of Being "God Fearing"

[martin48]

Trish - Well argued. I can not hope to compete with such a superior being (though still finite). I offer this quote in reply

“How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.”
― Christopher Hitchens

[buttslinger]

I have no interest walking arm in arm with religious zealots who would force others to believe as they do. Conversation and thought are tools enough. As far as I’m concerned people can believe and will believe what they wish. That doesn’t mean I respect all religious belief, or will not criticize some religious beliefs or belittle some religious beliefs.

Here's the thing: religious zealots have no interest in walking down the street with a mixed race guy in a dress, either. Judging someone with your eyes or judging someone with your mind only states the obvious. Congratulations. How can a SCHOOLTEACHER lecture anyone on grading people? Are you claiming that they shouldn't judge you, or they shouldn't judge you WRONGLY???

A group of religious zealots are all on the same page, just like a group of outlaw bikers or a bowling team. I'm glad they found each other.

Have you people EVER listened to a Dylan album? Music, Art, Literature?

They have put SPECT and PET scans to yogis in deep meditation. They showed that the brains were asleep. Conversation and thought are way too slow for God. So are brains. And the World. This place is a shithole, get out while you have the energy.
In Life, EVERYTHING counts.

Criticize what you don't even understand HEATHENS!!!!!!

Who's got it better?
The transsexual call-girl who make 5 grand a night?
Or the Fat-Cat Republican who can afford to pay?
You can't have one without the other.


image hosting websites

[trish]

Are you claiming that they shouldn't judge you, or they shouldn't judge you WRONGLY???

Neither. What part of “people can believe and will believe what they wish,” don’t you understand? Judging, as you use it here, is a part of believing. If you read carefully you’ll see that I merely object to Stavros lumping of you, Martin and others with just those zealots. Just in case you prefer to be lumped with them, I left your name out of it and spoke for myself only.

Criticize what you don't even understand HEATHENS!!!!!!

Mostly I criticize what I do understand, study what I don’t understand and ask people who claim to know things like “Conversation and thought are way too slow for God” exactly what they mean and how they know.

Who's got it better?
The transsexual call-girl who make 5 grand a night?
Or the Fat-Cat Republican who can afford to pay?

I wouldn’t know.

[buttslinger]

"...the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way". _Judge Holden, Cormac McCarthy's, BLOOD MERIDIAN.

This is GOD-101
That's why I thought you were.......Pro-God.

[fred41]

It's like, the long answer with the pretty picture and the humorous pseudo-moral, have absolutely nothing to do with the quote in red that supposedly inspired the response.
Maybe I'm not reading it right.
I know I'm on drugs buttslinger...I only hope for your sake you are too...lol

[buttslinger]

The Humor that I am the one speaking for god here has not escaped me.

[martin48]

My humo(u)r is independent of an imaginary being.

[Stavros]

In Matthew 25:31,32,33 we read “When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be assembled before him, and he will separate the people one from another like a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.”

Are we to take this literally or is the second coming a metaphor? In either case, people are being likened to sheep and goats. What distinguishes the sheep from the goats?

Matthew 25:34-46 tells us that essentially the sheep are those who treated people with charity even though they were strangers and the goats are those who were uncharitable. The goats will say, “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not give you whatever you needed?” And the Son of Man will answer, “...just as you did not do it for one of the least of these, you did not do it for me.”

One metaphor is made explicit here: every person, even the stranger, is Jesus and Matthew here is telling us that we must treat others as charitably as we would treat Jesus. But why?

Matthew has Jesus tell the sheep, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” To the goats he says, “...depart into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

If this is a metaphor, an implicit analogy, then what is homologue of eternal life? Well-being? Satisfaction? Contentment? Justice? Knowledge that you’ll be fondly remembered? What is eternal punishment? Frustration? Being disliked? Empty? Knowledge that you’ll be forgotten or hated by future generations?

From my perspective, these interpretations work fairly well as providing reasons (albeit selfish ones) for being charitable.

Now suppose eternal life and eternal punishment are not metaphors. Surely the harm done by any being of finite power is finite. Even the destruction of the planet and on life upon is a finite amount damage (especially if every soul on it lives forever anyway either in Heaven or Hell). Why would a charitable God choose to punish anyone eternally for something they did as a finite material being during a tiny, finite window of time spent on this little ball of dirt? Eternal life, eternal punishment, Heaven and Hell on one side of the scale and human beings, ignorant except of whatever conflicting things they’re told by human authorities purporting to speak for the Gods on the other side. Do the scales balance? I think not, not if eternal life and eternal punishment are interpreted literally.

So I’m perfectly willing to accept that the parables, the stories and the advice given in the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita etc. work as metaphors. But does any Christian, Muslim, Hindu etc. take all of these stories metaphorically? Are there any Christians who think the soul is finite? That life after death is a fiction? That the second coming is just a metaphor? Just a way of presenting a story? Or do Christians continue primarily to think in the primitive modes our prehistoric forebears explored? Do they not still walk in those same baby steps, afraid to set out on their own because otherwise the cosmos seems too big, too bewildering? Here in the U.S. Christians refuse to acknowledge that humans give purpose to life and as a result they live empty lives waiting for a non-existent God or one of his earthly authorities to tell them how to live.

I have no interest walking arm in arm with religious zealots who would force others to believe as they do. Conversation and thought are tools enough. As far as I’m concerned people can believe and will believe what they wish. That doesn’t mean I respect all religious belief, or will not criticize some religious beliefs or belittle some religious beliefs.

Humans have created the narrative which presents a moral life to people in the context of punishment and reward based on the way that people live. At some point in the last 7,000 years or more, humans realised the difference between a 'state of nature' and a 'state of government' -as Hobbes puts it- and developed politics to order society so that people could find a way to live through co-operation and common endeavour, rather than through selfishness and perpetual violence, and justified it using the existing cosmology and adapting it to contemporary issues.

It seems to me you are looking at this issue backwards by ignoring the cosmology that was at the foundation of human thought -accepting that some human societies, but not many, appear(ed) to have no religion (eg, the Pygymy of Central Africa)- a cosmology that as I suggested has no practical concept of time as a finite thing but sees the here and now joined to an eternal past and future in which without knowing how, humans believe they live on, as humans or spirits, or are re-incarnated so that death never really means death. I am afraid you have to accept that the idea that there is nothing after death terrifies a substantial number of people, even if it is true. One of the reasons people turn to religion for spiritual nourishment is the absence of it which they find in modern life, just as for some the benefit in the here and now is the practical experience of being part of a community that believes the same things and worships together, much as fans of a baseball or football team will congregate in a stadium once a week.

The metaphors and literary styles one finds in so many religious texts have become the axis on which much of contemporary interpretations rest, because the fundamental problem is precisely how we in the 21st century understand texts that were written in the Bronze Age or after, up to and including the Quran, and in the case of the Old Testament we know that many of the ideas contained in it were imported into Judaism from beliefs and practices that were common in Babylon, just as Ancient Egypt had a greater impact on 'classical' Greece than used to be thought by some scholars. This raises the question why so many ideas if not all practices endure across thousands of years -a scientist might say, because we are all humans and inherit the same characteristics- which is why I find it at least odd that some atheists would so easily dismiss thousands of years of human history in just the same way that Abdul Wahab dismissed everything that had happened in Islam since ibn Taymiah in the 13th century if not before that. I suspect that modernization is a key breakwater here and that different reactions to it enable some to dismiss everything that has happened before as 'out of date' and 'archaic' just as others believe modernization is destroying the human past and should be opposed, be they Salafists of Islam or the Unabomber in the USA.

Punishment and reward are fundamental to the ways in which human societies are organized, and much of secular law in many parts of the world incorporates into its statutes the principles that can be found in all religions. If precise punishments for crimes have changed -stoning adulterers to death, for example- that is more a reflection of contemporary life than the religion, and it shows how religions endure by adapting to their times, though I don't think that they would survive if people did not believe in the religion, and that is where I think the main divide exists today between believers and non-believers. What is interesting here is how major traumas can lead society onto different paths.

Thus, in the years that followed the collapse of Biafra's attempt to break away from Nigeria, resulting in a terrible civil war and famine, local people -many as a result of evangelical work by outsiders- became evangelical Christians in a way that had not been noticed before. The same process, albeit one that was encouraged by American Missionaries, happened in Uganda after the collapse of Idi Amin Dada's dictatorship and has been part of the hysterical anti-homosexual abuse in life and in the law that is also prominent in numerous, mostly Christian African countries, just as the revival of the Russian Orthodox church since 1991 has been accompanied by a 'conservative' attitude to social issues, as well as reviving the 'nationalism' that was an indelible part of the Tsarist autocracy before 1917. On the other hand, many people who see the horrible crimes that are committed in the name of religion go in the opposite direction and reject religion altogether. Whether or not the convulsions in the Middle East will mark the beginning of the decline of Islam I cannot say as the alleged resurgence of it is so bound up with the search for a practical politics that enables people to live a quiet life that is is too early to say. It is in the revival of what to many are the out-dated practices of religion -the 'abomination' of same-sex relations for example- that encourages the dispute, even though the easy way round it, and it is not a cop-out is to simply dismiss this aspect of religion much as other practices have been. If this sounds like a 'perfect menu' has gone from all-or-nothing to pick-and-choose this is also a fact about religion, because most believers most of the time find the moral strictures too strict, and constantly seek exemptions, and these disputes and practices explain why all of the Abrahamic faiths have fractured into sects which modify the religion even as each one eyes each other with suspicion, even loathing. The irony here being that if these warring parties were indeed to 'return' to the basic tenets of their faith these disputes would ebb away, whereas in the context of a fiercely contested political realm as one finds in the Middle East in the current disputes between Muslims, and between Orthodox and Secular Jews in Israel and the West Bank the way in which a religion is lived seems to take over from the beliefs that inform it, where modernization is the key driver begging the questions for which religion may only have an unsatisfactory answer.

What is clear is that there are people who want to be part of something bigger than themselves, that they want to be part of a collective -the use of sheep in Christian metaphor implies innocence rather than servility-, rather than in Nietzsche's sense develop themselves on the basis of their own personal vision. But one can never really separate the individual from the collective, because without language we cannot exist as societies, although it may be possible to do so individually if one becomes a hermit. And it is that language that binds, which both asks and answers questions if not always in a conclusive way.
But I do think that just as the secular world must acknowledge the debt it owes to religion, those who believe and practice religion must make that bold, even reckless step to admit that their scriptures do not contain the first and last word on everything and that the men who propagated it were not perfect or divine even if that is what people want to believe. This seems to me the rational way of maintaining the essence of what religion is without taking on the baggage of those features of ancient life which we now consider to be useless, offensive, or counter-productive, but as there is such a degree of intolerance on both sides, I don't expect universal peace and harmony to shape our lives in the near future, if ever. But one lives in hope....

[trish]

There is little, if anything, I would take issue with in your latest post.

I might imagine the transition to politically organized societies may have been less abrupt then Hobbes describes, but I agree our moral narrative is of human origin. I can understand how the fear of death inspires the kind of denial of its existence that most religions perpetuate in the guise of everlasting souls, or perpetual reincarnation. I also understand how organized worship and its ritual provides a sense of community and provides ritualized experiences around which communities can bond.

I do not think religious practice is the only thing around which such bonds can be formed, but perhaps because of their age, the roots of these practices sweep broadly through the foundations of most societies. One cannot birth, marry, suffer illness, celebrate good fortune or sit down to a family meal without someone invoking the blessing of one god, goddess or another through the ritual of prayer or sacrifice.

We may differ on the weight one should grant to age when evaluating the truth or falsity of a proposition, but I do realize (I think) that you are less concerned with the truth of a justification given for an enduring practice than with the value of the practice itself. There are many arenas.

I was brought up within a Christian tradition to which my parents and siblings still subscribe. Even though I am openly atheistic, I still bow my head at family meals, weddings, baptisms and funerals because the world isn’t about me or my beliefs. People deal and grow however they are able. In this sense I respect these practices; and in this sense they are forced upon me.

[hippifried]

Reward and punishment is how we train our pets. I owe no debt to religion at all. Like the vast majority of people on this planet, I follow the universal moral code that tells me to treat everyone as if they were me. Like people since prehistory (regardless of religious bent), I do this without a single thought about what some self proclaimed mage, sage, seer, king, bureaucrat, "leader", preacher, writer, editor, compiler, philosopher, or any other hack has to say about it. Personally, I think the code is innate, but that's a different argument. Religion & all other forms of autocratic rule just slow the pace of human social progress by forcing their own rules to the top of the priority list, while confounding or ignoring the basic moral code.

KIS,S