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It's a love affair... between Jesus and my Hotrod

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18:00 / 05.02.02

Ah, but by mortifying their flesh, they *were* doing them good.

18:30 / 05.02.02

Hmm... I see your point.

Still, I tend to think that more of those decisions were based more on political and personal factors than just a sadistic interpretation of the bible.

Which brings things back to the questions of 'fundamental tenets' and what we consider them to be.

[ 05-02-2002: Message edited by: Lothar Tuppan ]

09:24 / 06.02.02

quote:Originally posted by grant:
Ah, but by mortifying their flesh, they *were* doing them good.

I think there's a question of consent here. You may choose to take actions that cause your own flesh to suffer for a time, or abstain from certain things (sex, food) considered "of the flesh" in order to bring about spiritual benefits. Forcibly inflicting that on another person against their will is another matter.

Jesus was asked what the highest commandments were, and He used His answer to the question to contextualise a lot of scripture that is otherwise open to misinterpretation. His answer was that all the Law and the Prophets depended upon loving the Lord your God with all your heart, and loving your neighbour as you love yourself (I would take this to be prefering your neighbour over yourself if necessary).

It is very easy to use a brief passage of scripture to justify almost anything. Of course, people have done the same thing with A Catcher in the Rye.

09:30 / 06.02.02

(BTW, I've not actually read A Catcher in the Rye, just heard an analysis in Six Degrees of Separation. Before anyone mistakes me for a man who knows his ass from his elbows. But you get the point...)

02:22 / 11.02.02

I'm a-moving this thread to the Headshop.

20:14 / 11.02.02

On the issue of the things religion has to answer for, a snippet from Harvey Cox, in THE NATION magazine...

quote:Terrorism has a long and complex genealogy. When I watched the twin towers implode on TV, the scene that flashed into my memory was some footage I had once seen of the Bolsheviks dynamiting the main cathedral of Moscow, at that time the largest church in the Orthodox world. They went on to imprison, exile and murder millions of people in the name of one of the most powerful antireligious ideologies ever concocted. During the Spanish Civil War we saw how Catholics and atheists could massacre each other with equal relish. Religion, it seems, can indeed inspire terrorist horror. But so can nonreligious and antireligious zealotries. We have now reached a point at which mutual recriminations about who has piled up the most corpses begin to sound repetitious and indecent. We are going to have religion, for blessing or for bane, and antireligion, for better or for worse, with us for the foreseeable future. We are also going to have evil with us--for a very long time indeed--and we all know that no war is going to vanquish it. So it may be time to tone down the polemics and try to understand why--after all the faith we so touchingly placed in science or human rationality or God--we keep rehearsing the same old arguments.

The rest of the article is available here, if you're interested. I'm so glad this forum is here... I don't have much to say other than I think it's brave and interesting and important.

Well, wait: the thing about helping out with a demonic oppression/possession that you mentioned earlier (way earlier!) expressionless: whoa. That's a little odd. Could you explain. The idea of calling someone "possessed by demons" is about as scary as anything I can imagine....

alas

02:25 / 12.02.02

One of the things that makes certain religious ideas seem scary (and this may not apply in this case) is the following reasoning.

I am morally obliged to do something
=>People are morally obliged to do that thing

=>(If a person is not doing that thing, they are immoral and thus, lesser than myself, so I can either force them to act properly or punish them for not doing so)

This argument is pretty lousy, as punishing or forcing someone else to do something often violates the rule, anyway. Secular rules, at the very least, are usually designed with this in mind, since their purpose is a matter of social action. Religious rules are more likely to work for the sake of an individual soul, so they may be more dangerous when they are twisted in the manner above.

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