"One day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald, I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I'm sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged onto a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior."

--Lord Vetinari, Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett

The thing with mocking religion is that it can easily turn into mocking any person who is religious or belong to a certain religion. I’ve seen way too many atheists (I am one) feel a sense of superiority for simply not believing in any god, while looking down on others for believing in some higher entity. It’s a cheap way of feeling intellectually better. There’s also the fact that, except if you grew up in that religion, criticising one you never belonged to means you will lack the understanding of what you’re talking about. Criticism from within for a societal phenomenon like this one feels more constructive. Finally, I sort of fail to see what there is to criticise about a belief that is so inherently personal. Religious institutions are perfectly worthy of criticism, so is the way some will practice their religion to justify bigotry, those SHOULD be criticised. But religion itself, it is very simply at its core the belief in something higher than you. If someone believes in that, what does it have to do with us? Why should their relationship to the universe be any of our business?

In that sense, if one doesn’t want to sound edgy and immature then one should be aware of certain nuances when it comes to actually criticising/mocking religion

yeah nah, I mean obviously believing that the stars can shape your destiny and crystals have healing powers and women are satanic temptresses are all personal beliefs but those beliefs also make falsifiable assertions, much like the way that Scientology and Buddhism and Christianity and Judaism all make assertions that are actually false and in many cases harmful as a result.

and sometimes funny! they can be fucking funny, and it probably wouldn't be quite as funny if people didn't take them so seriously, on the other hand people know that Hogwarts is fictional and Hogwarts is still pretty funny too, so who knows.

the inside/outside thing is just nonsense, plenty of believers know less about "what they believe" than many non-believers or believers in different religions, and it's just not a very relevant point.

now you can certainly make the argument not to be a dick to people in the sense of harassing them, bugging them with unwanted comments, setting their house on fire and exiling them from the community because they believe the wrong thing, etc. etc. and that's a perfectly reasonable concern.

but it's hard to describe any religious belief as "personal", really, like if I believe that people were created by the snake god is that personal? it applies to you too! I think you were created by the snake god and will be devoured by them when you die! I feel like that gives you the right to make fun of the snake god a little, since it relates to you.

Why do fascists hate capitalism?

Good question.  About half the reasons they hate capitalism are the same reason most leftist do, bad people are still likely to be annoyed at a bad thing that hurts them. Here are the other reasons 

1) Fascists don’t believe in social mobility.  Capitalism core tenant is “social mobility’, that somebody can work hard and become a billionaire, blah blah blah.  Now this focus on social mobility is and always has been mostly a lie, but even rhetorically capitalism values the notion of social advancement.  fascists do not, in fascist ideology, your birth determines your place in the world, and is part of a “natural order”.  The only way to improve yourself is through war, and even that is more fulfilling your existing destiny rather than creating your own.  Thus Fascists despises any form of social advancement outside military leadership, which is a major reason why they hate liberalism, socialism and communism, but its also a reason why they hate capitalism (though they usually prioritize the left wing ideologies first).  This is even more true for them when somebody they think is “inferior” advances ‘above their station.  Fascists aren’t aristocratic, but they hate capitalism for much of the same reason that the feudal aristocrats and monarchs hated it.  It brings change and challenges the caste system 

(Speaking of which) 

2) On that note, capitalism is rarely…ideologically racist.  Now capitalism is racist, it promotes and enforces existing racial hierarchies, and much of the damage of colonialism can be laid at the feet of capitalism.  However capitalist ideology rarely buys directly into blood purity or “The Volk” style race theory that fascists so love.  Capitalism in the US makes it super difficult for a black man to advance compared to his white counterpart, but if a black man does manage to become a billionaire, capitalism is basically cool with it.  If you look at a demographic breakdown of the 1%, it is mostly old white men (and almost all people who at least partially inherited their wealth) but it also includes a lot of non white people and women.  its a minority and many of them come from dictatorships (Saudi Arabia, China ect) but the ‘richest people in the world club isn’t entirely monochromatic.  To leftists, this doesn’t seem especially impressive, but to fascists it is way too much diversity.  Because capitalism is at its heart…amoral, the system will keep going even if the 1% are majority non white, gay or women, but to fascists that is terrifying.  they barely tolerate capitalism because the ruling class are mostly straight white dudes, but the thought of the ruling class not overlapping with their belief in racial science to them is terrifying 

3) Capitalism is ultimately an amoral system.  It doesn’t really believe in a larger ideology beyond “make a fuck ton of money”  and “innovate…somehow.” It does evil things because it believes that doing so will make them money, if doing the right thing will make them more money, they will.  Capitalism is just an utterly mercenary ideology, and will gladly pretend to support progressive causes if it turns a profit.  Again, leftists (rightly) aren’t big fans of this, but fascists hate it for the same reason we do honestly.  

Like you know the whole “Woke capitalism” thing that gets leftists worked up.  its doing something good but you know they don’t care and so they will abandon us the moment they feel like they can get away with it and all that.  That is how fascists feel about the racism in capitalism, they like it but because it is not ideological, they don’t trust it. 

Again this seems weird to leftists, but yes, fascists don’t like capitalism because it isn’t racist enough.  We tend to interact with capitalism more than fascism, so people often don’t realize how much worse it can get 

4) Capitalism doesn’t care about the spiritual, except as something to sell.  ironically for all the hatred capitalism and communism have for each other, the two ideologies actually share a lot in common, they are super secular, materialist, and basically assume that everything in the world is nothing more than simply products.  Communists and capitalists disagree on what should be done with these goods, but neither of them believe there is anything beyond this world.

Fascists utterly reject this world view, they hate it, they hate it with a thousand suns.  I know that there current image is a sort of ironic racism chanboard nonsense, but in terms of their actual beliefs, Fascists take everything super seriously.  The entire argument of Nazism is that they value symbols more than actual human life, and they are fiercely attached to various “spiritual” political issues even if they are officially atheists.  I mean capitalism doesn’t give a damn about “degeneracy” because it isn’t actually a material thing, its just an aesthetic preference, there is no like “measurement” of degeneracy.  same goes for honor, the family, purity, and their approach to art, fascism is in many ways about finding meaning in otherwise mundane things.  So at fascist rally to them is this transcendental almost religious experience, while a capitalist would be more It interested in trying to find a way to make money off it.   Fascism is a highly Romantic movement, which doesn’t play well with the cynical wordy perspective of capitalists, who believe in nothing.  

Fascists also dislike aristocracy, but they love the myth and romance that is necessary for aristocracy and monarchy.  They basically want aristocracy of the skin.  

5) Fascists kinda…hate the idea of money.  Like Capitalism emerged from the merchant classes and is basically came about with the argument “all of your aristocratic concerns over honor, titles, and god are stupid, what matters is who has the money and how you use it”  And Fascists just hate that worldview, one of their defining traits is their love of war and conflict, in fact fascists prioritize war over almost everything else.  It has been noted by smarter men than I (I recommend Ur Fascism) that Fascism is basically a death cult, they want effectively an endless war that they can die gloriously in destroying their enemies.  

Consistently by the way, fascists will prioritize destroying the people they see as inferior over securing their own material best interest.  Hitler probably could have run his dictatorship in Germany on his own for quite a long time and lived in luxury, but he wanted a giant war because that is what they care about.  

in fact actively seem to indulge in self destructive short term ideologies.  The Nazi economic policy was an absolute joke, with the economy serving as nothing more than something to keep the war effort going.  Stephen Miller, the most fascist like person in trump’s administration, is hyper fixated on a brutal immigration policy, even though it actually hurts the economy.  Fascists oppose freedom of movement and free trade, even though those are policies neoliberal capitalism supports.  The reason is that Fascists value the preservation of “The Volk” over profits, and would rather their people suffer than have to live alongside other races (these people are deeply stupid)

6) Fascism doesn’t enjoy having fun.   I know for most of, our experience of capitalism is misery as we work, to earn the right to work, to earn the right to give, ourselves the right to buy, ourselves the right to live, to earn the right to die.  However the way that capitalism sells itself is basically “buy lots of shit and that will make yourself happy”.    

Fascism doesn’t really…like being happy.  As i said before, they like war, they like conflict, they like having an enemy who they can destroy.  To fascists, what matters most is how you kill and how you die, rather than enjoying life.  Fascism is about fetishistic death.  Pink Floyd was right that Fascism is almost a form of intellectual suicide.  

If you look at Japanese fascism, there is big fixation on aesthetic purity focus, with the only thing mattering being conflict 

7) Capitalism tends to value the urban, the industrial, and the technology, while fascists, like the Confederates before them, are enamored with the rural and the pre-industrial.  This might seem surprising, but there are a lot of fascists who are into environmentalism, Nazis Germany was one of the first states to pass laws banning animal cruelty and limiting smoking.  Fascists are really into this sort of “Clean earth, clean people’ aesthetic which always serves as the breeding ground for cruelty.

8) Capitalism tends to be leery of state control and fascists are all about that shit 

9)Finally….we need to be frank.  A lot of the ways we talk about anti capitalism actually can fit really nicely into the antisemitic narratives that so dominated fascist thinking.  

so the Marxist says 

“Hey the entire world is controlled by a tiny elite of rich greedy parasites who are making us fight each other in order to benefit themselves”

And the Fascist says 

“Yeah….they are Jewish”

its actually really hard to depict the rich as a class without accidentally wandering into anti Jewish sentiments, because the last 2,000 years of anti Jewish racism has been about creating conspiracy theories where they secretly control the entire world.  A lot of what fascism does is taking existing issues of capitalism and being like “oh yeah…that is the fault of the Jews.  Or migrants/African Americans/Muslims/feminists ect.  Gamergate is a good example of this, they are pissed at corporations, but they blame feminists rather than you know…the inherently predatory nature of capitalism.  Many of the things we don’t like about capitalism are things they also don’t like about capitalism.  This is a major thing they do in terms of recruiting, they focus on getting people pissed at capitalism but then make it be secretly run by Jews rather than you know..Jeff Bezos.

  (nazi properganda and below are soviet Images of capitalism ) 

(and sometimes both) 

This is why btw, I am less anti capitalist than most leftists, because talking to fascists makes you appreciate things about them.  Hitler was destroyed by both a communist dictatorship and a capitalist democracy working together.  

Its worth noting that while fascists do hate capitalism, they hate socialism a lot more, and tend to ally with capitalist to kill leftists, as we see from the Weimar Republic.  Fascist are often ok with certain types of corporate authoritarianism, but in the same way the left can be ok with somebody like Obama.  

(Frank Miller’s Batman is if Libertarian and Fascism had a baby) 

The lesson I would take from this is that just because somebody hates the thing you hate, doesn’t mean they are necessarily your ally, they might in fact be even worse. Yet another reason to distrust the dirtbag left 

Hi! Do you have any books recommendations about thanatology or copping with grief from an atheist/agnostic/skeptic perspective? I am dealing with a loss but most of the sources but most of them are religious or spiritual related. :(

Hello Anon, 

I am terribly sorry to hear that you’re going through a loss. This is one of the hardest experiences in the Human condition to deal with. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any books that deals with that topic specifically, or even indirectly. However, I’ve been dealing with losses as an atheist for some time now. As some followers may remember, I lost my mother at the beginning of this year. 

I’ve been an atheist for some 7 years or more now, and have unfortunately lost many family and friends in that time. When I was a believer I used the same comfort that everyone else did. I pictured them in a better place and asked God to give me strength. After becoming an atheist I found that the loss was not felt harder now that I stopped believing in heaven. If we really collectively believed that a person went to a better place, then funerals would not be the tear driven, emotionally fraught events  that they are. We tell ourselves for comfort, but I don’t think it ever was a powerful coping strategy. I say all this, anon, to tell not to be overly concerned about loosing that avenue. 

The best ways to properly deal with death have nothing to do with religion. We are familiar with the different stages of grieving, and you’re either going to cycle through them or get stuck and be emotionally damaged. The basic cycle is denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Let’s talk about how to work through this cycle as an atheist. 

Denial- This is not always literal. You can know intellectually that a person is gone and still be in denial. In my experience, denial is a refusal to address the issue mentally and emotionally. This usually lasts a couple days. 

Anger- comes from letting the feelings hit you. I cannot stress enough that allowing yourself to process whatever you feel is vital. Loss will stir up many feelings about the person who is gone and those around them. When we talk about anger in this context, we are talking about allowing ourselves to be angry at the person for leaving us. Is that counter-intuitive, selfish, and unreasonable? Yes, it’s all of those things, but we all usually feel it at some point. 

Bargaining- This phase is highly based in spiritual belief. It expects us to be asking some higher power to not let this be true. Instead, you may feel a sense of bargaining with yourself. Something like, I’ll be okay if... If I can do X that will make me feel better etc. This little self bargains are natural, but insignificant. None of those ideas you come up with will actually make things better. Really what we are trying to do is bargain with ourselves on ways to not have to feel the feelings. Again, the most important thing is that you let yourself experience all of your feelings without bargaining them away or covering them up. You have to face them. 

Depression- We should all know that depression is natural after a loss, but if you’ve skipped the first steps, especially anger, your depression may be a fog that prevents from fully grieving. 

Having a lot of experience dealing with depression, I can tell you that fighting it is not as productive as it sounds. Depression happens for a reason and it’s telling us to slow down because we can’t handle more damage. Acknowledge your depression and give it it’s time. Most people will snap out of it in a healthy time frame. 

Acceptance- This is the state we all hope to achieve. Of course this looks different for everyone. In my experience, I’ve reached acceptance when I’m no longer carrying around anger attached to the loss, when I’m no longer stuck in depression, and when I can reasonably live life like normal. Acceptance does not mean that we never get sad, or that we never cry, or that we have it all together all the time. Acceptance simply means that we are done fighting the reality of this loss and we’ve learned how move on with the full knowledge and scope of this event. 

Atheists do not have any any unified beliefs about death. Sometimes life is far too fleeting and it doesn’t seem fair, and it’s not. I have to be realistic that there is no escaping death, but I can also focus more on life. Humans are pretty amazing. The fact that we have conscious lives, and are able to remember each other, record our history, learn from each other, and make each individual live on through record and memory is amazing. I’m in awe of my ability to ponder life and death, and understand the scope of my species stretching over millennia on this planet. We’ve doubled our life spans through modern medicine, and no other creature on Earth can even understand what we’ve accomplished. 

The fact that we do all these things as temporary life forms is spectacular. Instead of focusing on the loss of a person, I focus on how special their life was and all the ways they touched the world. Despite all the friends I have lost over the years, the death of my Mother seriously solidified the permanence of death, and the awe of our short lives. 

Karen Lucy Taber was a person that existed for 55 years, and my sister and I are here because of her. I have a wealth of memories and lasting effects from her life, and those things are real. They happened. 

Atheist may feel that they are missing something when facing loss without a spiritual belief, but that’s just not true. The truth is that death is permanent to us, loss is painful, we all hurt, and we all must live on. Spiritual beliefs do nothing to change the core reality that we face as human beings.  

Morality: God or man?

I started reading the book “What if the bible never existed” by Dr Kennedy. He explores the importance of the bible by its impact on the world. I am only a few chapters in so far just wanting to bring out my thoughts and the quotes I pulled that made me think. I am pretty much summarizing my take on the points of the first few chapters. I will be making more posts on this book with different points. I know this is a blog so I am not making this into some kind of academic essay just posting the aftermath of my reading.

God or man’s?

There are many reasons we cannot officially have a moral code without God. One main “reason you can’t have morality without religion is not that can’t draw up a common code of ethics. It is that without an external authority, most people will not follow it. Now, I will grant that the humanists have drawn up a code, and they have gotten some people to follow it” (Dr Kennedy, page 435).

Brute force

It seems one of the easiest successful ways to get people to conform to a set of moral rules is by religion. A main problem is being human we know that everyone is capable of just as much evil as us if not more with no true claim to some high ground. I have personally asked some atheists how one might go about ensuring morality with those who do not agree with them such as sociopaths who have no empathetic compass. I explained that religion has helped a sociopath namely David Wood turn from his murderous ways to live a life for God. I wait attentively for a response only to hear the atheist respond with the words “brute force”.

It is difficult to use of brute force as it often leads to tyranny and rebellions. I am taking a policing course where we overview policing history. History shows it only aggravates the people further when more force was involved such as military intervention. It went against the human desire for a decent amount of liberties and rights (which even a sociopath would desire). In the Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science, Vol. 55 by J. L Lyman from the Northwest university of Law there is a review of historical mistakes using force against one’s citizens. In the journal it mentions the way the law enforcement was so hated it was inefficient in stopping crime which in turn had crime running more rampant. The journal states that “by 1828 one person in every three hundred and eighty-three was a criminal” in London. The method of “brute force” had worsened the situation as it never got to the core of the problem.

Reasoning

I assume not everyone would have immediately jumped to “brute force”. I think some may have even thought of just reasoning with people. I mean someone has to be able to convince if not through force or empathy that one should dogmatically follow a moral code. I do not just mean sociopaths I include anyone with opposing views of morality. I have to concede everyone has their own views of morality whether right or wrong.

In recent times “the president of the Yale University in a meeting of university professor and educators. He said that we need a new renaissance of education and morality in American colleges. You would think he would have been applauded. But he was booed! They hissed. They asked ‘Whose morality, professor, are you going to impose upon them?” He couldn’t answer the question (Dr. Kennedy, page 482). His ideas might have been the most perfect ideas in the world. It did not matter because no matter how perfect his moral is the human heart is just so full of its own evil. It will not listen to reasoning because it does not care for reasoning based upon their own moral reasoning.

So what if he got a chance to speak would anyone have listened? No one cares what anyone or any group claims is moral. “Charles Darwin knew this. He said it was a horrid thought to realize that all of his speech may have no more significance or meaning than the babbling of a monkey. He said, ‘Would anyone trust the conviction of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” (Dr. Kennedy, page 506).

It is a hard pill to swallow to admit only God is righteous enough, powerful enough, efficient enough, knowledgeable enough, loving enough and so on to sustain a moral code. God even offers this moral code yet again to those who have broken it with a renewing of his mercies.

Born in sin

So if God is so great why is not everyone just following Him? The heart being born in sin wants to refuse the law for himself and have the laws imposed on others. It is where hypocrisy and double standards arise. I mean having the mental capacity to measure fairness and justice while having fleshly overruling savagery sins.

“Huxley was the most prestigious evolutionary scientist in the world at the time. The interviewer asked him, “Why do you think that evolution caught on so quickly?” Huxley began, “We all jumped at The Origin [The Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin] because . . .” Now if you ask a high school science class to finish that sentence, what do you think the students would say? They would say, “The reason we jumped at The Origin of Species was that the evidence amassed by Darwin was so intellectually compelling that scientific integrity required that we accept it as fact.” That is not what Huxley said. Rather, I heard him say, “[ I suppose the reason] we all jumped at The Origin [was] because the idea of God interfered with our sexual mores.” I almost fell out of my chair! What does that have to do with science? (Dr. Kennedy, page 692).

It seems like the same problem all over again with no one caring about absolute morality when they care too much for their own morality. This time it is different when we peak behind the veil. God makes a promise to those who seek Him diligently in Ezekiel. Ezekiel 36:26-28 A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them. And ye shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; and ye shall be my people, and I will be your God.

Change

Before we go any further we must consider historical ways people have tried to impose change in the human heart. I know not all have tried “brute” force or “reasoning”. I must admit some have tried changing the environment to help people flourish into their best selves with the hope of fostering perfect peaceful moral.

Many people have been convinced the heart can be changed apart from divine intervention with environmental remodeling. The communists thought they were going to create the “new communist man” without religion. Karl Marx the intellectual founder of communism found his ideas to be the key to solve the mankind’s predicament proclaiming this as the “true solution”. It is no wonder they prohibited ministers from preaching heaven when they had ushered it in prenatally. He thought man was pretty good inside just corrupted by his environmental structures. I have read some books on communism the dream does not pan out.

The communist plan instead of thriving the fruit of good people had made room for a greater evil as “Marxism did produce a new Communist man—a man so cruel that he could commit the most barbaric crimes against his fellow human beings without the slightest qualms of conscience. When we become aware of what took place in the ghastly labor camps, or gulags, we can understand the nature of the new Communist man, perhaps the cruelest man the world has ever seen” (Dr. Kenny, page 811).

“An example of Communist torture occurred just within the last few years. Two Christian women were being punished by the Chinese authorities for the “crime” of being a part of the unregistered house church movement. They were stripped naked, hung up by their thumbs with wires, and beaten unconscious with cattle prods. The system Marx helped create—based on a false paradigm, which was itself based on a false picture of man’s true nature—has probably caused more evil than any system known to man” (Dr. Kennedy, page 821).

In the West “we are told, the new man will be fashioned by psychology and psychiatry. Before you become too excited about that possibility, remember that of all of the professions in America, the highest level of suicide is found in psychiatrists. So if you are contemplating such an act, I don’t recommend that you go see one. He might decide to hold your hand and jump first” (Dr. Kennedy, page 854). I have run into some issues with psychologists lately as I have been told by numerous friends their psychologists think they are beyond help. I almost think that should be illegal to tell a patient because these vulnerable people will remember this every time they reach another low. I can see how a self-fulfilling prophesy could take into effect.

Testimonies

The bible has changed many lives for the better helping people turn a new leaf. It is because being born again is gives a person a new heart and spirit with new desires. God promises to give people a new heart so is there any evidence of this change?

The same power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead still has the power to change a person to this day. “No unbeliever could tell me why His words are as charged with power today as they were nineteen hundred years ago. Nor could scoffers explain how those pierced hands pulled human monsters with gnarled souls out of a hell of iniquity and overnight transformed them into steadfast, glorious heroes [of the cross]” (Dr. Kennedy, page 936).

Kwai

There is a movie called “The bridge over the River Kwai” based on the book called “Through the Valley of Kwai”. The author of the book had spoken to the chaplain man of Princeton University who had been part of British forces. He was the very man that had written “The bridge over the River of Kwai”. “He told [him], heartbrokenly, what Hollywood had done to the truth. Here is the real story of the bridge over the River Kwai. The captives had been reduced to savagery. They were starving. They were snapping for every crust of bread like animals. And then the British commander discovered in one of their backpacks a New Testament. He began to read it. As he read it, the wonder of the love of Christ began to fill his soul, and he surrendered his life to the Savior and called on Him for His grace and help. He was transformed. He began to read that New Testament to his men each day. One after another became transformed until virtually the entire camp was transformed by the gospel of Christ. These animal-like men began to save their crusts of bread to give to those who were weaker and sicker than they were” (Dr Kennedy, page 897).

Joad

It is often easy to believe mankind is mostly good when one is living safely in a first world country founded on Christian foundations (which is further elaborated in later chapters). “C. E. M. Joad was one of the great philosophers of England in this century. He was a brilliant intellect and a militant unbeliever. [...] Earlier he had thought that man was basically good and that, given the right conditions, we could create heaven on earth. But two devastating world wars and the threat of another one brought home to him the reality that man is sinful. The only solution to man’s sin, concluded this former skeptic, is the cross of Jesus Christ” (Dr. Kennedy, page 957).

David wood

Note: the pages may not be exact though they are within the range of the found text. It is harder to tell on the kindle app if it is the exact page number.

LOVE AND JOY, COMPASSION AND SERENITY:

The Way of the Christ and the Way of the Buddha

Deep within your mysterious and bottomless heartmind, there dwells a being of immense love, enormous peace, and limitless joy. this has obtained many names throughout history: the higher Self, Holy Spirit, the soul in grace, the redeemed or regenerated soul, the Love-spirit, the Christ-spirit, the higher nature, the "kingdom within." In Buddhism, this concept is called the "Buddha nature." In spiritual psychology, this perfect core of existence is called the "superconscious," and is a part of the unconscious mind. It is the deepest level of the unconscious, or "God within." In the ancient Christian texts it was called "Christ in you, the hope of glory." Thus, the "superconscious" is also the "Christ-nature."

Its nucleus is universal unconditional love. Thus, Buddhism shares with Christianity the mystical teaching of a higher nature, or "spirit" that exists within the mind. Both also agree that its major constituent is love -- agape in the Christian Greek texts, or "love," and karuna in the ancient Buddhist Sanskrit texts, or "compassion."

In many ancient cultures, the word "spirit" actually meant life itself, or the vital principle of life. This was usually seen as nurturing, and hence, appeared in a feminine form. Thus, many "goddess" traditions are the richest in love-based forms of spirituality. "Spirit" was both the giver and the sustainer of life. It was presented in two forms: an invisible force or energy, and what we today would call a "state" of Mind.

Unfortunately, many lost sight of these important ideas, and began to collect mere concepts, which they defined as "truth." In some ancient cultures, however, the word "truth' was more realistically defined simply as "reality". It was only after the evolution of complex religious, metaphysical, and intellectual systems that "truth" came to be defined as a set of concepts. Paradoxically, by embracing this diluted and deluded definition of "truth", the great truths of existence were often lost in the fray and confusion. Each sect, denomination or religion claimed an absolute and exclusive monopoly on "truth.". This not only prevented dialog, but precipitated the most horrible cruelties, evil, torture, and murder. For what one believed was the only important factor; how one behaved was irrelevant to "truth."

This was the opposite of Jesus' actual teaching, which elevated Love to a supreme place. Early Christians recognized that Jesus was, to use the words of Peter in the Christian Greek Scriptures, "a model, for you to follow his footsteps closely." Jesus was a highly developed, deeply spiritual, and enlightened man, who served as a prototype for others to imitate. He did not say, "Worship me," but, "Follow me." He was sincerely to be emulated by all who would follow his Way. Only those who sought to live as he lived could truly be known as his "followers." He identified the mark of his true disciples when he said, "This is the way that people will know that you are truly following me: You will have love among yourselves."

The difference between Jesus and others was not a difference in kind, but only in degree. He was not a "freak," a "one-of-a-kind" being; while he was a son of God, he said that all who followed him would also become sons and daughters of God. So, he was not a different order of being than are other people; he simply knew God to a greater and more personal degree than did others. He became a perfect mirror of Love, an incarnation of the Love-principle, of God.

The Buddha suffered the same fate; after his death, he was deified, and people forgot that he was a true man. Later church councils declared that Jesus was "true God and true man," in the great ineffable "mystery" of the Trinity. But the Trinity is actually no mystery if we understand that God and Jesus are not two separate persons. (The Latin persona means "mask.") Jesus became God after a mystical illumination in which he awakened to the fact that he was an incarnation of perfect Love. The Buddha, and many others in history, have had similar enlightenments.

About three centuries after Jesus' death, the church evolved into a political and economic empire. Its leaders then pronounced the teaching that Jesus was a model to be "heretical." Why? Because they wanted to cultivate an unhealthy dependence on the church's leaders, and so it became "evil" and "dangerous"for anyone to strive to know God personally--outside of the church.

By fostering the lie that "truth" consisted of church-approved dogmas, the leaders compelled people to support a church that had grown spiritually bankrupt. But unlike this later conformist religion, the early church of Christians resonated with a varied diversity of spiritual ideas, and was anything but homogeneous.

In time, however, only ideas approved by a group of often corrupt and ignorant men called the "church fathers," or "patriarchs," became acceptable. These deluded men went so far as to select some books for inclusion in the official Bible, and to reject others. One of the rejected works was the very ancient and profound Gospel of Thomas. Why? "Thomas" means "twin," and the book implied that it was the assignment of every Christian to work to become the "twin" or duplicate of Jesus Christ. This was considered by later church-approved men to be damnable falsehood.

One of the best ways to imitate Jesus is to remain as widely open-minded as possible. Thus, the wisest people on earth are not bound by something simply because it is written in some ancient book. Instead, they have made the Spirit of love in their hearts their one master, and one cannot serve two masters. Thus, the wise draw good ideas from every positive spiritual faith, including all the world's great major religions. What is not reasonable or in harmony with the highest love, they simply discard. But all that is both reasonable and resonates with love, they accept, whether it is labelled "Buddhist," "Christian," or something else. For they have given up all bigotry.

Someday, most of the planetary population will view things in this tolerant, open-hearted, loving, compassionate pattern. For if ever we are to enjoy a unified global community, it must begin with a common global spirituality; and no spiritual principle is more universal than that of love. And until our world finds the common sense to create peace among the great religiospiritual traditions, it will never know peace at all. For this to occur, all ideas that any particular religion has a "monopoly" on the truth must pass away. Historically, this narrow-minded view has bound people in relentless and merciless slavery to cruelty, violence, and stupidity.

The deep truths of existence are not found simply by accumulating mass quantities of data from old books. Instead, they are discovered in the heart by cultivating an interior stillness from which vantage one can examine the mind and the world-- deep meditation. This is what Western mystics call the "interior prayer of silence." It can lead to true spiritual metamorphosis, but this practice comes only when one realizes that inner silence is absolutely necessary.

Interior awakening aids one to see that everyone is a victim-- even those who appear to be perpetuating evil. This is, in fact, the strongest basis for "Christian "forgiveness. Since this fine quality, an aspect of love, has been so lacking in history, it can be seen that "Christianity", as a political and economic institution, has had nothing to do with spirituality. It has almost never reflected the teaching of the simple love-based Jesus. For the official "Christian" church has never been the collective body of Jesus' followers, for only those who have loved consistently can be said to have been the followers of Christ. Even those who call themselves "Buddhists," "Hindus," or even "atheists, but who demonstrate love, are closer to Christ than many self-styled "Christians."" For whenever love is expressed,the spirit of Christ lives and God comes into our world.

To love, we must be ready and eager to communicate with those of other faiths. Dialog is not a matter of giving up one's beliefs, but of learning to respect those of others. It is not accession or assimilation, but communication, based on self-love and other-centeredness. Only the secure can dialog effectively.

In Buddhism, there are two interwoven concepts that make dialoging with wisdom possible. One is stillness, the other mindfulness. Stillness is quietness or silence in the inner mind, often an act of great humility that does not seek to display itself, defend itself, or prove itself "right." Mindfulness is being fully aware of one's words, thoughts, and activities, lost neither in the past nor in the future, but fully present in every moment. This kind of centering, involving stillness and mindfulness, can be very healing.

In the ultimate analysis, nothing is more healing (wholing) than touching the interior fountain of love. Deep understanding arises from a direct knowing of love.

In loving, people must also love now. That is, we must stop planning and postponing, and begin to live right now; the old saying has it that life is what happens when we are making plans!

Mindfulness involves planning, but does not take the plans as set in concrete; instead, it is more realistic and elastic, and includes evaluation examination, and monitoring the self, without judgment. It also implies an attitude of gratitude; the word "grateful" shares a root with "graceful," and hence means "filled with grace." Grace is a state of stainless forgiveness that originates from the deepest inner Mind or spirit. It also involves the embracing of all living beings into one's own personal field of forgiveness. While Buddhism does not emphasize gratitude to some "big daddy in the sky," it does fully recommend a full cultivation of gratitude towards all living and sentient beings. Again, serving others is the only viable way to serve God. For the entire world is seen as a reflection of the deep interior Mind of God. Jesus pointed out that God, acting through nature, provides both sun and rain for both the good and evil; we must also cultivate such non-judgmental compassion towards all.

And everyone, without exception, requires much tolerance and forgiveness. This applies even to teachers of spirituality. For example, a Buddhist teacher named Tic Nat Han repeats the erroneous assumption that "Christianity is a kind of continuation of Judaism." While this assumption is all but universal, it reflects a deep misunderstanding of the mystical nature of Christianity, especially as contrasted with the legalism of early Judaism. While both religious faiths are fine, and not to be compared as to eternal value, it is a historical and true fact that Christianity does not represent any evolutionary development from Judaism. Christianity appears on the scene of the world as an entirely new phenomenon, the result of one man's direct mystical communion with the Mind of love. So, while geographically and culturally, Christianity grew up in a Jewish environment, spiritually it was a brand-new perspective-- so radical, in fact, that it terribly upset the followers and advocates of early legalism among the Jewish scholars and elders. Thus, if you had told a first-century Jew or Christian that Christianity was a natural out-growth of Judaism, she would have very strongly disagreed.

This is, in fact, the common and popular teaching that has hopelessly confused so many lives, and ruined or wasted many others. For its natural implication is that the war-god of the ancient Hebrew culture, Jehovah, was the same God of peace, love, and forgiveness taught by Jesus. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Further, the God of love is internal, while Jehovah was always completely external and transcendental. This is beautifully expressed in the Eucharist or Communion; for when one eats of the bread and drinks of the wine, these foods become inextricably, irreversibly fused with one's very biology. In the same way, the Christ-spirit of love does not simply interact with the transformed being; the Christ actually becomes that person, even as bread and wine become the body. In its highest fulfillment, the mystical words of the Greek Scriptures say it well: "It is no longer I, but Christ in me, who lives." Christ, the interior Love-nature, is "absorbed" or assimilated into one's most intimate mind-structure, fused with the very being of the individual. Thus, Communion is truly a mystical celebration of oneness.

LIVING "IN CHRIST," WITH "CHRIST WITHIN ME." To understand this Christian concept, it is necessary to distinguish between the person of the historical man Jesus and the infinite, everlasting spirit, Christ, of which he became the fullest manifestation and incarnation. There was an ancient Christian group called the Nestorians, who were careful to distinguish between Jesus the man and Christ the inner spirit of love, but they were later declared to be heretical by a corrupt church.

The distinction, however, is not only still valuable, but is crucial. The study of the historicity of Jesus might constitute an artscience called "Jesusology," but spirituality is clearly much more than that. "Christology," at its highest, is a study of the deep unconscious Love-spirit that lives within the soul of every person. An analog to "Jesusology" in Buddhism is "Buddhaology, "the study of the historical life of Gautama Siddhartha, known as "the Buddha." But he is never recognized as the only "Buddha" in the cosmos.

For Buddhism teaches that there are many "Buddhas." Everyone who is enlightened and tries to follow the interior light of compassion can be a "Buddha." For the most real Buddhist teaching is the knowing of the Buddha within--not the worship of an external Buddha. This explains the famous Zen saying, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." For the true "Buddha" can never exist outside yourself, or "on the road." Similarly, the deepest and wisest Christian comes to know the "Christ within," not just the historical Jesus, the perfect mirror of Christ.

For "Christ" was not the last name of Jesus, and "Buddha" was not the surname of Gautama. Instead, both words are titles that refer to an extremely high level of spiritual development. Both terms refer to the indwelling Holy Spirit or Love-nature. Still, Jesus did not teach that he was the only "son of God," but in fact, that everyone who followed him was a son or daughter of God.

Buddhists admit openly that they all seek to become Buddhas; why,then, do Christians think it such an awful blasphemy to say that they too want to become Christs? If imitation is indeed the sincerest form of praise, what is wrong with making Jesus a role-model instead of distancing him as a god?

Here, both the Buddha and the Christ have suffered similar fates: Both titles historically became associated with particular persons; those persons were then deified, so that others worshiped them. It is fine to worship the everlasting spirit that indwelled Jesus or the Buddha, that is, the Love-spirit of universal Mind. But worshiping the human forms is only idolatry, missing the entire point.

If one does project the divine nature onto another, then one does not have to take the responsibility, or go to all the trouble and hard work, of manifesting the Love-nature in one's own life. Then both great faiths tragically become reduced to legalisms, monopolies, cruel and vicious exclusivities.

But if these faiths are worth anything, it must be realized that both represent exciting, living, practical faiths that actually call for changes in behaviors and attitudes, for aligning oneself with the very highest principles of integrity, honesty, compassion, and love. They both call for goodness, kindness, courtesy, and friendliness; and those who do not meet these elevated standards have not fully lived out the best in faith. The very best in both great faiths is manifested not by beliefs, but by behaviors.

Seen this way, the Buddha and the Christ are both models or teachers, not merely gods. They are brothers both to each other and to all people. Jesus was both man, or fully human, and God, or fully divine. This does not represent an "ineffable mystery of the Trinity," for, if God is not seen as a separate person, the mystery disappears. For Jesus was the truest incarnation of Love, which was God.

Buddhism, although non-theological, recognizes the same great truths. It speaks of the great value, for example, of understanding (Sanskrit, prajna) and love (maitri). As we use these two qualities every day, we come to realize that we are all of the same essence and potential as Jesus or the Buddha; only they were light-years ahead of the average. This implies the great truth that neither was a "freak" or a one-of-a-kind manifestation of God or Love. Thus, to follow either is to find meaningful, practical ways to attempt to lessen the suffering in the world, to give aid and comfort to living creatures. this is to live in wellness. Ideally, one can maximize one's spirituality by an honest attempt to follow both great teachers.

In a telling and symbolic parable, a man went eagerly to visit the Buddha, but was in such a hurry and rush that he neglected a woman in direst need; when he arrived, the Buddha was invisible to his sight. If we are unkind, we are also unable to "see" God or Love in our lives. So, when we neglect or abuse our sisters and brothers, we are clearly not "seeing" or understanding the indwelling spirit of compassion; and that is the very worst of all ways to be blind.

It is precisely because this kind of compassion is the Way itself that to be "hung up" on, or to cling to, any belief to the exclusion or harm of others is to miss the joyful presence of either the Christ or the Buddha.

When Jesus uttered the words, "I am the Way, and no one comes to the father except through Me, "he was in no way contradicting the principle that Love is the Way. For these words can be seen as the Christ-spirit, which is everlasting and dwells in the heart of every person, speaking through the man Jesus. And if that same "Christ-spirit" is called in other cultures the "Buddha-nature, "that is just a matter of words-- no cause for divisions between reasonable, spiritual grown-ups.

Thus, the main agenda and objective of life is love, symbolized and personified in Buddhism by Maitreya Buddha. It expresses practically not only in the way we feel about each other, but even more in service.

COMMUNITY arises from the same root as "communion," and implies that any honorable work can serve the community as a whole and thus act as a kind of holy activity, or karma yoga. Thus, mystics are fully engaged in every form and level of good work within productive society, from teaching to medical practice. Some are house-keepers, others factory-workers. "The illuminated being wears rough and ordinary clothing," said Lao Tzu, "but within, she carries the great jewel." Deep meditative states, realizations, and profound spirituality express themselves most often through "ordinary" work. The true sage is marked by the quality of "extraordinary ordinariness," to borrow from Alan Watts.

All people have come to earth to find and to express God or perfect love. To do this, one must somehow set aside the time to become a "lay monk," or "lay nun," which means simply taking time out for meditation and good, selfless works. It is high time that we transform every home, and every community, into a holy temple of Love. In fact, anyone who lives for joy, wisdom, insight, healing, and positive transformation lives for the entire planet, and helps everyone. Thus, there is real "salvation" and "enlightenment" well outside the bounds of organized, orthodox, or traditional religion. The ultimate "Christian community, "the true "body of Christ," involves all beings committed to love everywhere, in every culture and every faith. On the other hand, the most religious person without union with the inner Love-nature, accomplishes nothing. Thus, the enlightened and compassionate being recognizes all sentient beings as his or her brothers and sisters.

The illuminated being loves not only people of other faiths, but all sentient (self-aware) creatures, and shows respect for all life. Thus, the Way is to do everything permitted by your gifts and talents, according to your personal capacities, to aid and assist other beings. To borrow from Paul, just as an eye cannot do the job of an ear, so in the "body of Christ," each acts according to her talents, gifts, and capacities-- not the same for everyone. Still, they all work together to serve the same "body" of humanity.

People who operate spiritually outside of organized or traditional religion are by no means "lost," if they are living by the Way of love; on the other hand, if a formal church lacks love, there is no true faith there, no holy spirit.

Some teachers do not recognize this crucial independence as the individual moves toward God. Again, the Buddhist teacher Tic Nat Han repeats this common error when he writes," Without a sangha (community), you will be lost." One is never lost when God has found one, when the heart is filled with love.

Thus, life's ultimate solution is not, as this might suggest, the establishment of another organized community, church, or cult; the solution is living individually in harmony with the highest love-pattern that we can come to know. Again, the same teacher writes, "The father, son, and holy spirit need the church in order to be manifested." From the liberationist perspective of free and personal mysticism, nothing could be further from the truth. God does not need the church, but needs only committed, honorable persons interested in serving and helping others. Just as individual birds and flowers manifest the beauty of God, so can individual people, without need for organization, administration, politics, economics,and the burden of a thousand other complexities.

Surprisingly, this same writer asserts," The church is the mystical body of Christ." As already noted, however, the "body" of unification with the Christ-nature is by no means limited to the Christian church, or to any other "church" as that term is commonly defined. The "body" is the totality of beings who have willingly turned over their lives to the service of Love-- whether they belong to any "church" or not.

Those who truly belong to this body of love, this communion of love, are only too happy to dialog with others; they are also the ones actively, consistently engaged in helping and serving the poor and disadvantaged of society. They insist that the suffering, depressed, and ill have equal rights, and that women's rights are equal with those of men. While they might not live in actual poverty, they do live lives of simplicity or non-greed.

They also take an unbending stand for the preservation of the ecological resources of the earth, and against any form of offensive violence. (Many accept defensive violence, but only when there is no alternative.) Being at peace with their own heartminds, they work effectively for peace among others. They often meditate, but do not abuse meditation as a kind of "drug" to make them oblivious, but as a motivator for the expression of social compassion.

They have seen the secret that, before nations can change, hearts must change; and before conflict between people can end, inner conflict must end. To love your enemies, you must first have compassion for them; so, you must try to understand them, to "walk a mile in their moccasins." Seeing them as suffering beings allows compassion to blossom in the heart. Loving your "enemy" neutralizes, cancels, and evaporates the entire concept of "enemy." While another might insist on being your enemy, you will no longer be his or hers. That is a hurtful "game" that you no longer "play."

So, mystics try to make peace everywhere. But does this mean that a mystic must always be totally neutral, that he or she never has any opinions? Of course not; mystics have very often sided historically with the poor and oppressed, crying out for justice, although Tic Nat Han, in his book, makes it clear that, for his own reasons, he will not do so. But the mystic never lives her life so as to avoid offending powerful people; instead, she lives honestly by the direction of conscience and justice, even when that disturbs the rich and powerful. She does not make excuses for them, or justify greed.

When conscience guides one towards non-violence, then, it must be realized that this is different from inactivity, passivity, indifference, or non-action.

The very deepest challenge of the mystic is one of action-- forgiving others, and creating a life of peace. But what if you simply cannot forgive? No one can forgive by an act of will; instead, try truly to understand the one who has harmed you, and that understanding can make your heart ready for the blossoming of forgiveness. See the "bad" person as suffering, and wanting only happiness. That will help to clear your heartmind.

*******

For more information, see Living Buddha, Living Christ, by Tic Nat Han (New York; Putnam, 1995)

Religion: Bound by Loving Ties. Jeffrey R. Holland. ACU Sunday Series.

Religion: Bound by Loving Ties. Jeffrey R. Holland. ACU Sunday Series.

https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/jeffrey-r-holland/religion-bound-loving-ties/

True religion, the tie that binds us to God and to each other, not only seals our family relationships in eternity but also heightens our delight in those family experiences while in mortality.

One of my BYU professors of yesteryear—actually quite a few yesteryears—was Edward L. Hart, who wrote the text of a much-loved hymn in the Church. The second verse of that hymn, Our Savior’s Love, reads this way:

  The Spirit, voice

Of goodness, whispers to our hearts

A better choice

Than evil’s anguished cries.

Loud may the sound

Of hope ring till all doubt departs,

And we are bound

To him by loving ties.1

  An omnibus word familiar to us all that summarizes these “loving ties” to our Heavenly Father is religion. Scholars debate the etymology of that word just as scholars and laymen alike debate almost everything about the subject of religion, but a widely accepted account of its origin suggests that our English word religion comes from the Latin word religare, meaning “to tie” or, more literally, “to re-tie.”2 In that root syllable of ligare you can hear the echo of a word such as ligature, which is what a doctor uses to sew us up if we have a wound.

  So, for our purpose today, religion is that which unites what was separated or holds together that which might be torn apart—an obvious need for us, individually and ­collectively, given the trials and tribulations we all experience here in mortality.

  What is equally obvious is that the great conflict between good and evil, right and wrong, the moral and the immoral—conflict that the world’s great faiths and devoted religious believers have historically tried to address—is being intensified in our time and is affecting an ever-wider segment of our culture. And let there be no doubt that the outcome of this conflict truly matters, not only in eternity but in everyday life as well. Will and Ariel Durant put the issue squarely as they reflected on what they called “the lessons of history.” “There is no significant example in history,” they said, “of [any] society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.”3

  If that is true—and surely we feel it is—then we should be genuinely concerned over the assertion that the single most distinguishing feature of modern life is the rise of secularism with its attendant dismissal of, cynicism toward, or marked disenchantment with religion.4 How wonderfully prophetic our beloved Elder Neal A. Maxwell was—clear back in 1978—when he said in a BYU devotional:

  We shall see in our time a maximum . . . effort . . . to establish irreligion as the state religion. [These secularists will use] the carefully preserved . . . freedoms of Western civilization to shrink freedom even as [they reject] the value . . . of our rich Judeo-Christian heritage.

  Continuing on, he said:

  Your discipleship may see the time come when religious convictions are heavily discounted. . . . This new irreligious imperialism [will seek] to disallow certain . . . opinions simply because those opinions grow out of religious convictions.5

  My goodness! That forecast of turbulent religious weather issued nearly forty years ago is steadily being fulfilled virtually every day somewhere in the world in the minimization of—or open hostility toward—religious practice, religious expression, and, even in some cases, the very idea of religious belief itself. Of course there is often a counterclaim that while some in the contemporary world may be less committed to religion per se, nevertheless many still consider themselves “spiritual.” But, frankly, that palliative may not offer much in terms of collective moral influence in society if “spirituality” means only gazing at the stars or meditating on a mountaintop.

  Indeed, many of our ancestors in generations past lived, breathed, walked, and talked in a world full of “spirituality,” but that clearly included concern for the state of one’s soul, an attempt to live a righteous life, some form of Church attendance, and participation in that congregation’s charitable service in the community. Yes, in more modern times individuals can certainly be “spiritual” in isolation, but we don’t live in isolation. We live as families, friends, neighbors, and nations. That calls for ties that bind us together and bind us to the good. That is what religion does for our society, leading the way for other respected civic and charitable organizations that do the same.

  This is not to say that individual faith groups in their many different forms and with their various conflicting beliefs are all true and equally valuable; obviously they cannot be. Nor does it say that institutional religions collectively—churches, if you will—have been an infallible solution to society’s challenges; they clearly have not been. But if we speak of religious faith as among the highest and most noble impulses within us, then to say that so-and-so is a “religious person” or that such and such a family “lives their religion” is intended as a compliment. Such an observation would, as a rule, imply that these people try to be an influence for good, try to live to a higher level of morality than they might otherwise have done, and have tried to help hold the socio­political fabric of their community together.

  Well, thank heaven for that, because the sociopolitical fabric of a community wears a little thin from time to time—locally, nationally, or internationally—and a glance at the evening news tells us this is one of those times. My concern is that when it comes to binding up that fabric in our day, the ligatures of religion are not being looked to in quite the way they once were. My boyhood friend and distinguished legal scholar Elder Bruce C. Hafen framed it even more seriously than that:

  Democracy’s core values of civilized religion . . . are now under siege—partly because of violent criminals who claim to have religious motives; partly because the wellsprings of stable social norms once transmitted naturally by religion and marriage-based family life are being polluted . . . ; and partly because the advocates of some causes today have marshaled enough political and financial capital to impose by intimidation, rather than by reason, their anti-­religion strategy of “might makes right.”6

  There are many colliding social and cultural forces in our day that contribute to this anti-religious condition, which I am not going to address in these remarks. But I do wish to make the very general observation that part of this shift away from respect for traditional religious beliefs—and even the right to express those religious beliefs—has come because of a conspicuous shift toward greater and greater pre­occupation with the existential circumstances of this world and less and less concern for—or even belief in—the circumstances, truths, and requirements of the next.

  Call it secularism or modernity or the technological age or existentialism on steroids—whatever you want to call such an approach to life, we do know a thing or two about it. Most important, we know that it cannot answer the yearning questions of the soul, nor is it substantial enough to sustain us in times of moral crises.

  Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, formerly Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth for twenty-two years, a man whom I admire very much, has written:

  What the secularists forgot is that Homo sapiens is the meaning-seeking animal. If there is one thing the great institutions of the modern world do not do, it is to provide meaning.7

  We are so fortunate—and grateful—that modern technology gives us unprecedented personal freedom, access to virtually unlimited knowledge, and communication capability beyond anything ever known in this world’s history, but neither technology nor its ­worthy parent science can give us much moral guidance as to how to use that freedom, where to benefit from that knowledge, or what the best purpose of our communication should be. It has been principally the world’s great faiths—religion, those ligatures to the Divine we have been speaking of—that do that, that speak to the collective good of society, that offer us a code of conduct and moral compass for living, that help us exult in profound human love, and that strengthen us against profound human loss. If we lose consideration of these deeper elements of our mortal ­existence—divine elements, if you will—we lose much, some would say most, of that which has value in life.

  The legendary German sociologist Max Weber once described such a loss of religious principle in society as being stuck in an “iron cage” of disbelief.8 And that was in 1904! Noting even in his day the shift toward a more luxurious but less value-laden society, a society that was giving away its priceless spiritual and religious roots, Weber said in 1918 that “not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness.”9

  But of course not everyone agrees that religion does or should play such an essential role in civilized society. Recently the gloves have come off in the intellectual street fighting being waged under the banner of the “New Atheists.” Figures like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and the late Christopher Hitchens are some of the stars in what is, for me, a dim firmament. These men are as free to express their beliefs—or, in their case, ­disbeliefs—as any other, but we feel about them what one Oxford don said about a colleague: “On the surface, he’s profound, but deep down, he’s [pretty] superficial.”10

  Rabbi Sacks said that surely it is mind-boggling to think that a group of bright secular thinkers in the twenty-first century really believe that if they can show, for example, “that the universe is more than 6,000 years old” or that a rainbow can be explained other “than as a sign of God’s covenant after the Flood,” that somehow such stunning assertions will bring all of “humanity’s religious beliefs . . . ­tumbling down like a house of cards and we would be left with a serene world of rational non-believers,”11—serene except perhaps when they whistle nervously past the local graveyard.

  A much harsher assessment of this movement came from theologian David Bentley Hart, who wrote:

  Atheism that consists entirely in vacuous ­arguments afloat on oceans of historical ignorance, made turbulent by storms of strident self-righteousness, is as contemptible as any other form of dreary fundamentalism.12

  We are grateful that a large segment of the human population does have some form of religious belief, and in that sense we have not yet seen a “polar night of icy darkness”13 envelop us. But no one can say we are not seeing some glaciers on the move.

  Charles Taylor, in his book with the descriptive title A Secular Age, described the cold dimming of socioreligious light. The shift of our time, he said, has been

  from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is [only] one human possibility among [many] others.14

  Charles Taylor also wrote that now, in the twenty-first century, “belief in God is no longer axiomatic.”15 Indeed, in some quarters it is not even a convenient option, it is “an embattled option.”16

  But faith has almost always been “an embattled option” and has almost always been won—and kept—at a price. Indeed, many who have walked away from faith have found the price higher than they intended to pay, such as the man who tore down the fence surrounding his new property only to learn that his next-door neighbor kept a pack of particularly vicious Rottweilers.

  David Brooks hinted at this but put it much too mildly when he wrote in his New York Times column, “Take away [the] rich social fabric [that religion has always been,] and what you are left with [are] people who are uncertain about who they really are.”17 My point about “too mildly” is that a rich social fabric, important as that is, says absolutely nothing about the moral state of one’s soul, redemption from physical death, overcoming spiritual alienation from God, the perpetuation of marriage and the family unit into eternity, and so forth—if anyone is considering such issues in a postmodern world.

  In fact, religion has been the principal ­influence—not the only one, but the principal one—that has kept Western social, ­political, and cultural life moral, to the extent that these have been moral. And I shudder at how immoral life might have been—then and now—without that influence. Granted, religion has no monopoly on moral action, but centuries of religious belief, including institutional church- or synagogue- or mosque-going, have clearly been preeminent in shaping our notions of right and wrong. Journalist William Saletan put it candidly: “Religion is the vehicle through which most folks learn and practice morality.”18

  I am stressing such points this morning because I have my eye on that future condition about which Elder Maxwell warned—a time when if we are not careful we may find religion at the margins of society rather than at the center of it, when religious beliefs and all the good works those beliefs have generated may be tolerated privately but not admitted or at least certainly not encouraged publicly. The cloud the prophet Elijah saw in the distance no larger than “a man’s hand”19 is that kind of cloud on the political horizon today. So we speak of it by way of warning, remembering the storm into which Elijah’s small cloud developed.20

  But whatever the trouble along the way, I am absolutely certain how this all turns out. I know the prophecies and the promises given to the faithful, and I know our collective religious heritage—all the Western world’s traditional religious beliefs, varied as they are—is remarkably strong and resilient. The evidence of that religious heritage is all around us, including at great universities, or at least it once was—and fortunately still is at BYU.

  Just to remind us how rich the ambiance of religion is in Western culture and because this is Campus Education Week, let me mention just a few of the great religiously influenced non-LDS pieces of literature that I met while pursuing my education on this campus fifty years ago, provincial and dated as my list is. I do so while stressing how barren our lives would be had there not been the freedom for writers, artists, and musicians to embrace and express religious values or discuss religious issues.

  I begin by noting the majestic literary—to say nothing of the theological—influence of the King James Bible, what one of the professors I knew later at Yale called “the sublime summit of literature in [the] English [language],”21 the greatest single influence on the world’s creative literature for the last 400 years. I think also of what is probably the most widely read piece of English literature other than the Bible: John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

  Five decades after I first read them, I am still moved by the magnificence of two of the greatest poems ever written by the hand of man: Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Certainly the three greatest American novels I read at BYU were Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—each in its own way a religious text and all more meaningful in my reading of them now than when I was a student on this campus so long ago. So too it is with my encounter with Russian writers, especially Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy.

  Then—to name only a handful—you add British giants like George Herbert, John Donne, William Blake, and Robert Browning; throw in Americans like Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor; then an American who became British, like T. S. Eliot, and a Briton who became American, like W. H. Auden; and for good luck throw in an Irishman like W. B. Yeats and you have biblical imagery, religious conflict, and wrenching questions of sin, society, and salvation on virtually every page you turn.

  Having mentioned a tiny bit of the religiously related literature I happened to encounter as a student, I now note an equally tiny bit of the contribution that religious sensibility has provoked in the heart of the visual artist and the soul of the exultant musician. [An audiovisual presentation was shown.]

  Brothers and sisters, my testimony this morning, as one observer recently wrote, is that “over the long haul, religious faith has proven itself the most powerful and enduring force in human history.”22 Roman Catholic scholar Robert Royal made the same point, reaffirming that for many, “religion remains deep, widespread, and persistent, to the surprise and irritation of those who claimed to have cast aside [religious] illusion”23—to those, I might add, who under­estimated the indisputable power of faith.

  The indisputable power of faith. The most powerful and enduring force in human ­history. The influence for good in the world. The link between the highest in us and our highest hopes for others. That is why religion ­matters. Voices of religious faith have elevated our vision, deepened our human conversation, and strengthened both our personal and collective aspirations since time began. How do we even begin to speak of what Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni have given us? Or of what Peter, James, John, the Apostle Paul, Joseph Smith, and Thomas S. Monson mean to us?

  It is impossible to calculate the impact that prophets and apostles have had on us, but, putting them in a special category of their own, we can still consider the world-shaping views and moral force that have come to us from a Martin Luther or a John Calvin or a John Wesley in earlier times, or from a Billy Graham or a Pope Francis or a Dalai Lama in our current age. In this audience today we are partly who we are because some 450 years ago, men like Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer, being burned at the stake in Oxford, called out to one another that they were lighting such a religious fire in England that it would never be put out in all the world. Later William Wilberforce applied just such Christian conviction to abolishing the slave trade in Great Britain. As an ordained minister, Martin Luther King Jr. continued the quest for racial and civil justice through religious eloquence at the pulpit and in the street. George Washington prayed at Valley Forge, and Abraham Lincoln’s most cherished volume in his library, which he read regularly, was his Bible—out of which he sought to right a great national wrong and from which, in victory, he called for “malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.”24

  So the core landscape of history has been sketched by the pen and brush and word of those who invoke a Divine Creator’s involvement in our lives and who count on the ligatures of religion to bind up our wounds and help us hold things together.

  Speaking both literally and figuratively of a recurring feature on that landscape, Will Durant wrote:

  These [church] steeples, everywhere pointing upward, ignoring despair and lifting hope, these lofty city spires, or simple chapels in the hills—they rise at every step from the earth to the sky; in every village of every nation on the globe they challenge doubt and invite weary hearts to consolation. Is it all a vain delusion? Is there nothing beyond life but death, and nothing beyond death but decay? We ­cannot know. But as long as men suffer these steeples will remain.25

  Of course, those of us who are believers have very specific convictions about what we can know regarding the meaning of those ubiquitous church steeples.

  In that spirit let me conclude with my heartfelt apostolic witness of truths I do know regarding the ultimate gift true religion provides us. I have been focusing on the social, political, and cultural contributions that religion has provided us for centuries, but I testify that true religion—the gospel of Jesus Christ—gives us infinitely more than that; it gives us “peace in this world, and eternal life in the world to come,”26 as the ­scripture phrases it.

  True religion brings understanding of and loyalty to our Father in Heaven and His uncompromised love for every one of His spirit ­children—past, present, and future. True religion engenders in us faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and hope in His Resurrection. It encourages love, forbearance, and forgiveness in our interactions with one another, as He so magnanimously demonstrated them in His.

  True religion, the tie that binds us to God and to each other, not only seals our family relationships in eternity but also heightens our delight in those family experiences while in mortality. Well beyond all the civic, social, and cultural gifts religion gives us is the mercy of a ­loving Father and Son who conceived and carried out the atoning mission of that Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, suturing up that which was torn, bonding together that which was ­broken, healing that which was ill or imperfect, “proclaim[ing] liberty to the captives, and . . . opening . . . the prison to them that are bound.”27

  Because my faith, my family, my beliefs, and my covenants—in short, my religion—mean everything to me, I thank my Father in Heaven for religion and pray for the continued privilege to speak of it so long as I shall live. May we think upon the religious heritage that has been handed down to us—at an incalculable price in many instances—and in so remembering not only cherish that heritage more fervently but live the religious principles we say we want to preserve. Only in the living of our religion will the preservation of it have true meaning. It is in that spirit that we seek the good of our fellow men and women and work toward the earthly kingdom of God rolling forth, so that the heavenly kingdom of God may come.

  May our religious privileges be cherished, preserved, and lived, binding us to God and to each other until that blessed millennial day comes, I earnestly pray in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

   Jeffrey R. Holland was a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when this devotional address was given on 16 August 2016 during BYU Campus Education Week.

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I’m what you’d call an agnostic. I don’t know if God exists, but the question is probably unanswerable, so I’m content to live in the uncertainty. That’s probably why I’ve always found the so-called “New Atheists” misguided in their critiques of religion.

New Atheism is a literary movement that sprung up in 2004, led by prominent authors like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. Although they were right about a lot of things, the New Atheists missed something essential about the role of religion. For them, religion was just a protoscience — our first attempt at biology and history and physics. But religion is so much more than a set of claims about the world, and you can’t fully understand if you don’t account for that.

John Gray is a British philosopher whose latest book, Seven Types of Atheism, explores the history of atheism. It’s both an affirmation and a critique of atheism, written by an atheist who is aware of all its contradictions.

Gray has been one of the most forceful critics of the New Atheists since they first emerged on the scene, and his new book continues in that vein. I called him up to talk more about his views on the movement, and about religion and science more generally.

Gray told me that the New Atheists are shaped by myths of their own, and that their failure to understand or acknowledge that is one of the biggest flaws of their movement. He also said that atheism is far more interesting when it seriously asks what it’s like to live in a “genuinely godless world.”

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

I see you as someone who enjoys exposing the hypocrisies of people who enjoy exposing the hypocrisies of others. Is that how you see yourself?

John Gray

Indeed. I’m a skeptic by nature, so I’m resistant to claims by anyone to have complete answers to intractable human problems. I’m particularly annoyed by what’s now called “New Atheism,” and I react strongly against those who debunk the beliefs of others in a way I find bullying and shallow.

The New Atheists — Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and others — attack religions in the sublime confidence that these religions are myths and that they themselves harbor no myths, but that’s not true.

In many cases, the New Atheists are animated by 19th-century myths of various kinds: myths of human advancement, myths of what science can and cannot do, and all kinds of other myths. So yeah, I’m compelled to attack anyone who is debunking others for their reliance on myths when the debunkers themselves can’t see how their own thinking is shaped by myths.

Something as ancient, as profound, as inexhaustibly rich as religion or religions can’t really be written off as an intellectual error by clever people. Most of these clever people are not that clever when compared with really clever people like Wittgenstein or Saint Augustine or Pascal — all philosophers of the past who seriously engaged the religious perspective.

These New Atheists are mostly ignorant of religion, and only really concerned with a particular kind of monotheism, which is a narrow segment of the broader religious world.

Sean Illing

My complaint with the New Atheists has always been their insistence on treating God as a purely epistemological question. I don’t think you can make sense of religion if you only see it as a system of beliefs. In the book, you make a similar point in a slightly different way, saying that the “human mind is programmed for survival, not for truth,” and I’m curious what you mean by that.

John Gray

The human mind is like every other animal mind. If Darwinism is right, and I think it’s the best approximation we have to the truth about how humans came into the world, then all aspects of the human animal are shaped by the imperatives of survival.

That includes the human mind, so there’s a deep-seated tendency in the human mind to see the world in ways which promote human survival. And the tendency to obsess over reason and rationality overlooks this fact.

Many of our most important ideas or conceptions aren’t really intellectual solutions to intellectual problems. I think that’s what you had in mind when you said earlier that the New Atheists irritated you because they treated the idea of God as a kind of theoretical or epistemological question.

There’s this silly idea that we have no need for religion anymore because we have science, but this is an incredibly foolish notion, since religion addresses different needs than science, needs that science can’t address.

“Even if everything in the world were suddenly explained by science, we would still be asking what it all means”

Sean Illing

I think that’s right, but you can unpack that a bit so it’s clear what you mean?

John Gray

For example, there are still people who treat the myths of religion, like the Genesis story, as some kind of literal truth, even though they were understood by Jewish thinkers and theologians of the time as parables.

Genesis is not a theory of the origins of the world. It’s not obsolete, primitive science. It’s not a solution to the problem of knowledge. Religion isn’t like that. Religion is a body of practices, of stories and images, whereby humans create or find meanings in their lives.

In other words, it’s not a search for explanation. Even if everything in the world were suddenly explained by science, we would still be asking what it all means.

That’s where religion steps in.

Sean Illing

Let me push back a little on behalf of the New Atheists. I think they’d respond to you by saying, “Look, specific religious ideas like the notion that life begins at the moment of conception or that homosexuality is sinful are causing real harm in the world, and so we’re morally obliged to attack those ideas.”

How do you respond to that?

John Gray

There’s no doubt that religions have contained many ideas that have caused humans harm. There’s not the slightest doubt about that. All human institutions cast a shadow which comes from the evil they carry within themselves.

To give you an example, I think the Christian idea of original sin has an important truth in it, which is that humans are divided animals. They’re different from any other animal on the planet in that they regret and sometimes even hate the impulses that guide them to act as they do. It’s a key feature of the human animal, captured by this myth of original sin.

But from the very start, the idea of original sin was caught up with a kind of obsessive interest in and hatred of human sexuality, which poisoned it to the core. At the same time, we should remember that many of the secular religions of the 20th century condemned gay people, for example.

Homosexuality was illegal for most of the time that the Soviet Union existed. Doctors who performed abortions in communist Romania could be sent to prison, and in some cases even subjected to capital punishment. Many of the worst features or the worst human harms inflicted by monotheism have been paralleled in the secular religions of modern times.

So ideas do have consequences. All we can do is try to embody these traditions as much as possible. There isn’t some form of life, not even an imaginary type of pure liberalism, that is free of these terrible consequences.

Sean Illing

I don’t think that all religions are the same, but I do believe that they’re equivalently untrue in the conventional sense of that term. But it’s obvious that religion contributes something essential to the human condition that we need, and whatever that is, we’ll still need it in a Godless world. This is the thing that atheists dismiss too easily.

John Gray

I think you’ve put it very closely to the way I put it in the book. Most forms of organized atheism are attempts to fashion God surrogates. In other words, one of the paradoxes of contemporary atheism is that it’s a flight from a genuinely godless world.

I’m most interested in the atheists who’ve seriously asked what it’s like to live in a godless world. Not to construct some alternative God, like reimagining humanity as some collective agent that manifests itself through history or science or some other redemptive force.

Too many forms of atheism have functioned like monotheisms by another method. In other words, they’ve tried to fill the gaps in their view of the world, a world in which God has been dethroned, and then they just leave the rest of it as it is.

But they’re still stuck with core assumptions that come from the monotheistic traditions. The idea, for instance, that humanity has a collective identity is fundamentally a religious notion — that’s how it came to us. We can make secular arguments in defense of this belief, but you can’t simply ignore its historical roots.

I think we should regard religions as great works of the human imagination rather than pictures of the world intended to capture what is empirically true. Any atheism that fails to do this will invariably miss what is most essential and enduring about religion, and probably make the mistake of smuggling religious assumptions into their secular alternative to religion.

“To think that you can escape the storytelling impulse that animates myths, to think you can escape that in politics is a deadly myth of its own”

Sean Illing

I often wonder if the Enlightenment skepticism that birthed atheism ultimately leads us to a moral abyss — and by that I don’t mean to imply that people can’t be moral without God, which is one of the stupidest claims I’ve ever heard. What I mean is that science cannot supply moral values, and I’m not sure this is a fact we can really own up to as a civilization, because it requires a conversation about human values that we seem incapable of having.

John Gray

I think we have to own up to it, because the danger of thinking that science can provide values has been demonstrated many times. What often happens is that science simply validates the ruling values of the time, and in the 19th and 20th centuries, those were racist values.

And we see this happening now: Many people believe science can validate our deepest values, and it just so happens that those values are conventionally prevalent in society — they’re fundamentally liberal democratic values.

If the prevailing values are good, then great. If they’re not, though — as was the case in Nazi Germany or communist Russia — then science becomes a handmaiden to the most awful crimes in human history; and almost always, those crimes are committed in defense of some grand project to improve human society.

So I think we just have to accept that science has limitations. All values come from the human animal, and that’s just the way it is. That doesn’t mean all values are equally good or bad or wise — I think that’s a mistake, too. We have natures, and there are certain constants in human life, and that’s a moral foundation we can build on.

Sean Illing

I suppose what I was getting at is that religions are stories in the same way that liberal democracy and justice and human rights are stories. These are products of the human imagination; they mean nothing and would not exist without human beings around to affirm them, and there is no ultimate foundation for any of them.

John Gray

We live by our fictions, and there is no supreme fiction. We fashion different fictions as we go along. There’s no part of our lives that is exempt from this kind of fictive world-making. As you say, even our highest ideals and creations are constructs that we’ve collectively built.

To think that you can escape the storytelling impulse that animates myths, to think you can do politics without relying on these same impulses is a deadly myth of its own, because it means you condemn all these other practitioners — except yourself, of course, because you’re the rationalist who stands above it all. But that is a terrible conceit, a fatal conceit. That’s what I’m really arguing against in my critiques of the New Atheists.

Original Source -> Why science can’t replace religion

via The Conservative Brief

The Heart of Faith

The Heart of Faith

The controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson is often asked if he believes in God.  He says that he doesn't like the question and would need quite of bit of time to answer it.  Most of his writings and biblical interpretation videos, however, are his way of answering it.  He does offer his best-shortened response to the question: I choose to act as if God exists. He also extends this answer to other so-called atheists or anti-religion writers by claiming that since they are writing and advancing positive ideas, i.e. trying to make the world a better place, they are living as if God exist; their actions speak louder than their words. What he explains that deep down in their hearts and minds, at the core of their humanity, is a sense of the ultimate good or purpose of life and that this sense is beyond anyone's conscious mind. This "implanted" sense of goodness and truth drives how they perceive the world and live their lives.  A person, therefore, who chooses to love others or sacrifice for the greater good cannot be an atheist. They have a faith that reaches beyond the material world even if they don't know it.

This view is consistent with what Pope Francis preaches and proclaims in his words and actions. This is best illustrated by a recent video where he goes into a small village in Italy to answer questions from the people. A young eight-year boy comes to the microphone and hesitates to ask his question becoming overcome with grief.  The pope summons him to whisper into his ear. After holding the boy close to him, he relays the source of the boy's reluctance.  It turns out the boy has two other brothers and that their father has recently died.  The boy wanted to know if their father was in heaven and so they could pray to him.  He asked this because his father was not a believer but that he did have him and his brothers baptized in the faith. Could a non-believer be in heaven?  This question was a no-brainer for the pope: of course the father was in heaven because the father loved his sons so much that he got them baptized even though he himself didn't believe, i.e. he rejected the mental assertions he thought of as faith.  His love for his children is what put him in heaven: love is proof of faith much more so than agreeing to a set or statements about God.  Conversely someone who agrees with all those statements but doesn't love others really doesn't have faith in the sense of what the pope considers to be true faith.  This is what Peterson means by living as if God exists, loving and sacrificing for the good of others, i.e. acting in accordance with a greater good that is at the core of our being, implanted in our souls, our hearts and minds.

This way of looking at faith is not a new way but rather harkens back to an earlier sense of faith: it was about living one's life, about how one acted and not merely about how one thought about life. It was not about intellectually agreeing to a set of mental assertions.  I am not a biblical scholar by any means but it seems from even a cursory reading of the New Testament that Jesus's life and message was about doing and not about agreeing to set of beliefs.  He wanted us to look at how he lived and imitate him and by doing so we would discover that he was the way, the truth and the light. Love cannot be an abstract mental concept; it has to be embodied by the words and actions of the people who love. Jesus loved, so by imitating him, we too can embody love in the world.  Life is ultimately a mystery that we can't mentally grasp, but we can begin to understand what is most important by our encounter with a person and stories. Jesus said follow me, heed my story, do as I do and you will live your life in the right way, in a way that is meaningful, purposeful and fulfilling for yourself and others.  He boiled everything down to two commandments-love God and love your neighbor which ends up being essentially the same thing-that we give and receive love through our encounters with others. God comes to us in a human way through our heart not our mind.

I share the Christian faith tradition not because I think it is only way to go, but it is the one I inherited and the one I feel at home with it-that resonates with who I am.

I think loving actions lead to a deeper faith. We need to have enough faith to take the first step of believing with our hearts that acts of love will ultimately lead us to the truth of life: not a mental destination, or intellectual understanding but a heart and mind- full being realization.

So if all of this "doing" is really all that matters, why bother with a faith community or the practices that come with it.  Why can't someone just be a good person and let it go at that?  Bottom line that is true: loving is what matters most.

Loving in the world however is not an easy thing as much as we might think it is.  Keeping love at the center of our lives is an immense challenge, especially as an individual in the world.  We need others, the love of others to remind us about the purpose of life. It's not about doing good to please a father figure in the sky so that we can go to heaven when we die.  It is not so much about life after death; it is about life after birth-here and now.  (Personally living and loving now my focus and challenge; I leave what happens when I die to God even though more and more I know that all will be well in end.)  

Life without love is pretty empty and all the worldly pleasures we might seek to satisfy our individual desires never can fill us up.  As we going searching for something, the farther we go off the road of loving, caring and sacrificing, the more likely we are to get lost and farther away from what life is really about.

This is where a faith tradition or religion can play the key role in our lives.  We need others who love us to direct us to what is most important, to help us make the decisions that will make our lives meaningful. We can't rely on the "world" when so many of the messages are directed towards consuming things and experiences for our own benefit.  The world today promises an easy, carefree, problem less existence. That type of life is an illusion.  Life is full of problems, struggles, confusion and we do have a tendency, very human tendency to "believe" that there is something out there somewhere that can take the pain and suffering of life away.

Religion in the form of a faith community is the way we can navigate our lives so that love stays at the center, so that we don't get lost.  The further we stray from a path of love the harder it is to realize that we are even lost or that a path even exists.  Without the greater good at resides at the core of our being rising to the surface and guiding our words and actions, we unfortunately accept a life that is filled with messages that promise something else. That is why so much of a life, without the goodness at our core being recognized and allowed to guide us, can make humans seem like lifeless, directionless zombies just seeking things to consume.

I believe that religion in the form of a faith tradition/community is the best (although not perfect way-it is always in need of revision) way to inherit the wisdom of the ages. It is impossible that individuals can figure out or invent their own way to live a meaningful life.  I think we fool ourselves if we think we can determine the best way to have that goodness at our core be the guide for how we choose to live.

Living without faith and a connection to a faith tradition, based on our rejecting a set of mental assertions, may seem to workfor many as they live out their lives.

Obviously we can observe happy people who are unattached to faith communities living productive and good lives.  I think, however, that type of life is a result of them inheriting and reaping the benefits of the faith of their ancestors. We are all connected to families whose ancestors relied on a faith passed from generation to generation. A faith tradition that was carried across the oceans to our country and remained an essential part of their lives guiding them and helping them endure all the difficult times they experienced when they got here.  

It was not easy for our ancestors to love and sacrifice and do what was right without having the wisdom of their faith traditions (prayers, stories, music, architecture, practices, community support) helping them weather the storms of life.  Our ancestors discovered joy in family and friends in spite of those storms. Their faith traditions, kept them on the path, and helped them discover joy and fulfillment in the very struggles themselves (the very things that the world tells us today that we should avoid at all cost). We all reap the benefits of their faith even though we might not embrace it-it was that powerful and lasting.  

It is hard to know however how many generations can continue to benefit from the faith of our ancestors if these faith traditions continue to be abandoned. I don't think it is a risk worth taking.

Even as a practical matter, there is no reason to go it alone in life without a faith tradition to rely on when tragic things happen that make no sense and fracture the world, as we know it.  Living without the benefit of our faith traditions that were given to us as a gift from our ancestors, is tantamount to having an oxygen tank next to us for our whole lives and then not seeing it and worse yet not using it at those moments in life when we are gasping for air. It is being a given a gift package and casting it aside without bothering to open it because we think we won't like what's inside.

So my simple advice to those good people, whose actions reveal that God (that goodness at the core of our being) exists for them and yet might still reject a set of mental assertions that they think might bind them or limit them, is to reconsider faith as act of the heart, as a way of living, doing and being in the world. The greater good at the core of our being that directs us toward love is what is most important in our lives and acknowledging it, respecting it, and nurturing it only helps it shiner brighter and giving the light we need to find and stay on the right path, the right way to live: the way, the truth and the light.  

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China, March and May made this list because china, march and may are on it and I didn't want to decide in favor of the common noun or the proper noun; all other proper nouns have been omitted (even the ten other months that met the criterium of appearing more then 6 times). #SimpleWikipedia #SimpleEnglish #wordlist #English #words #level1540 #Inli #nimi #selo1540

I was pissed about this a couple days ago, and I thought I was over it, but I’ve had a tough week so I’m just gonna let it out.

So I’m an atheist. I’m not that quiet about it, except around my family because I just don’t see a reason right now to get into this argument with them (except my brother, which I know he hates). At school, even though it’s a catholic school, all belief systems are pretty much accepted and there’s no conversion plot by the friars or anything. So I feel free enough to discuss my atheism and opinions on religion pretty regularly. I enjoy it too.

But earlier this week I mentioned how I wasn’t that happy knowing that some of my catholic friends think I’m going to hell, partly because I’m an atheist, and also because I know at least one of them thinks that transitioning is a sin. I’ve discussed my apparent sins with them several times, and I can usually view the topic with a good amount of humor, because I don’t think I’m doing anything morally wrong and their beliefs in and about sin are unfounded. However, it does bother me that my friends think that I’m doing something morally wrong and therefore on some level I’m a bad person. I think it’s pretty reasonable to be bothered by that. 

I will readily admit that I can be an asshole and a dick about a lot of stuff, but I think there’s a difference between being an asshole and being a bad person. The only thing I’m hurting by being an asshole is feelings, and when I go too far, I do apologize. I feel guilty when I go too far, and especially if I don’t realize until later that I crossed the line.

But I was pressing one of my catholic friends about my “sins” and joking about it, kind of showing the ridiculousness of those beliefs in a sort of defense of myself. When walking back home with two other friends, both christians, I half joked again that I don’t appreciate that our catholic friend thinks I’m going to hell, and one of my friends got really defensive, and told me I was being a dick.

Now, I understand I was being a dick, but he was saying it to basically tell me to shut up and that I shouldn’t say those things at all. So I defended myself and said that I think it’s reasonable for me to not like the idea that I’m seen as a bad person for doing things that aren’t morally wrong. I also said, and have said many times, that I think religious beliefs are irrational and unreasonable. So he said, “As a christian I’m offended.”

So of course I countered with “You’re offended that you think I’m going to hell and I don’t like it?” because that’s bullshit in my opinion. He wanted me to shut up and he pulled out the “I’m offended” card. I then continued by saying I should be the one who’s offended, and also brought up the fact that the beliefs he and our friends have are the same ones that lead to legislation in the world that takes away civil rights, including the rights of trans people like me. At this point I had changed from joking around to frustrated and pissed off.

He threw up his hands and walked away, saying “I don’t want to do this. I’m done.” and the friend that was walking with us followed him to go comfort him (because he’s a baby and makes everybody go comfort him and solve all his problems for him) so I just went home.

About twenty minutes later, I had thought about it and realized that I was going to have to apologize or else they’d see me as an even bigger asshole and not talk to me. I want to clarify, I don’t care what people think of me usually, but what people think about me affects how they act towards me, and when their actions towards me are negative I have a problem with that. Which is the same reasoning I have for being bothered by being considered a bad person because I “sin”- it affects their behavior and actions towards me in a negative way, even if they don’t intend it. Actually, that’s my main issue with religion as a whole- irrational and unreasonable beliefs lead to irrational and unreasonable actions that affect other people. Religion doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

So I decided to be the bigger person and apologize to them for being argumentative (even though I was just voicing my beliefs and then defending myself) and crossing a line (which I still consider necessary to cross in situations like this). Neither of them responded, and that pissed me off. It’s one thing for them to not apologize (which I think they should, I think I deserve an apology), but they didn’t even acknowledge my apology, which is just common courtesy. I even apologized to our catholic friend I was talking to about possibly making her uncomfortable, and she at least said it was okay.

A few days later, I was having what I thought was a fun, exciting, and lighthearted informal debate with my other catholic friend. I was getting passionate, as I often do when talking about these things, and after a while my friend told me I was yelling at her. I apologized, and tried to explain that I was just very passionate about the discussion. But the discussion basically ended when she told me I was insulting her by sitting there and yelling at her for 25 minutes. Obviously I had a very different perception of the conversation than she had, so I did sincerely apologize and say that my intention was not to be insulting, and I didn’t realize that I was being insulting, so I was sorry.

This situation I feel is less of an issue for me than the first, because I realized that I had started a debate without her really agreeing to it, and also I was being a dick, so she didn’t really have anything to apologize to me for. But the first situation got me angry because I do feel like my friend telling me he was offended by me simply talking about my thoughts is ridiculous, and was intended to just get me to shut up.

That’s what gets me mad most. I’m told to shut up and keep my thoughts and opinions and (non)beliefs to myself, but my friends get to talk about their religious beliefs all the time. Also how I’m always expected to apologize for talking about my opinions, but they never seem to feel the need to, even though their beliefs do real harm in the world on a much more regular basis.

I also feel like I’m pretty damn respectful to the people, just not the core beliefs. I’ve been to a few masses at school, and was incredibly respectful. But people like my friend who walked away take it personally, as if I’m criticizing them when I criticize their beliefs. I don’t want our intellectual disagreements to affect our friendship, and I think I do a pretty good job of that on my part, but they certainly don’t. It’s the nature of their beliefs that don’t allow them to really. I, on the other hand, don’t think they’re stupid or anything, just that they’ve been indoctrinated and duped into believing something that’s not true. 

I’m just sick of the double standard that surrounds the topic of theism vs atheism. Theistic beliefs are given free passes on so much, and are in a place of power over atheistic beliefs, which have to constantly fight to be recognized at all.

I’m just pissed off and frustrated about a lot of this stuff, and I hate not having many friends to talk about my atheism without judgement (even though my religious friends say only god is going to judge me)

On that point, saying that god will judge me is still saying that I have done something that needs to be judged. You think I’ve done something wrong, but the judgement you’re talking about is just if I’ll be punished for it. My friends need to stop fucking telling me that they’re not judging me and only god can judge me, because they’re fucking lying. Maybe not lying, but at least not being at all rational or logical.

I think it’s pretty reasonable for me to be vocal about my (non)beliefs because especially in this political climate, it’s harmful and false beliefs that are affecting legislation that will change my life, and others lives in pretty negative ways. The separation of religion and government is incredibly important, and I advocate for it strongly. And one of the ways I feel is effective to help separate the two is to show the unreasonableness and irrationality of the beliefs.

Another thing that pisses me off is that now it’s considered offensive to criticize religious beliefs, because like I said before, people take it personally and think I’m attacking the people. I’m not, I’m attacking the religion and the false beliefs. I’m comfortable with going after christianity because that’s more acceptable than criticizing judaism or Islam for some reason. If I criticize those religions, I’m anti-semitic or islamophobic, which I think is ridiculous to conclude. I’m not against these people, and I’m not telling them they can’t believe something, just pointing out that it’s not rational to believe what they believe. I would never force someone to not be religious, I just advocate that their religious beliefs are not imposed on me by telling me what I can and can’t do.

Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and other notable atheists are labeled as Islamophobic because they talk about how unreasonable and irrational and false islamic beliefs are, and how they are right now in this current time causing so much destruction and chaos and pain and suffering. I don’t think thats islamophobia, I think it’s reasonable criticism that can actually be very constructive.

So I think I’ve decided that if I come off as a dick or an asshole or a bigot, I don’t care after a certain point. If a person really has put their beliefs in front of actual human connections, I don’t want to interact with them.