I’d argue it’s not religion
It’s lust for certainty where problems begin.
Faith is belief in something unknown. Something you choose to believe. Denying you don’t really know, and surrounding yourself only with like-minded people, doesn’t make something known. Why should it? How can it? That self-deception may be cosy for a while. But it easily leads to demonising of anyone does not embrace the party line. …
Continue readingGiven the context that an individual has already freely chosen to embark on the spiritual quest to understand self and God, it may be in the initial stages that their motivation for perseverance comes mainly from fear of failure. And therefore enlightened teachers may speak that language for the sake of helping such neophyte practitioners stay with the plan. And that such preaching may justify the use of white lies because it serves the neophyte in relation to their chosen objective. …
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Just saying …
So we are faced with three different truths about the shape of an object seen by three separate people. The object is a either round, square or a strange shape … surely they cannot all be correct?
You say it’s round I say no, it’s a square, another says it’s a strange shape. But imagine our seeing ability is restricted to just one eye … i.e. …
Continue readingAnyone who embarks on an adventure with eastern thinking cannot help but come across the notion of the ‘Four Defects of the Conditioned Soul’.
… and the argument that these defects prevent determination of dependable truth, especially in the matter of the meaning and/or purpose of human life.
But the widely recommended solution – submission to infallible authority of guru-sastra-sadhu* – to my mind does not automatically remove one’s personal limitations from their truth-equation. …
Continue readingWe find it relatively easy to dismiss as false or deluded the truths of others … especially when they don’t tally with our own. We might consider them ridiculous, unbelievable, inconceivable, implausible, or even insane. No more thought required.
But what if the same processes apply to us that make such ‘wrong’ truths acceptable, or even absolute, to others? In other words, our finding something believable – real – true, no matter how implausible to another, is arrived at in fundamentally the same way as theirs is. …
Continue readingIf everything is simply the imaginings and role-plays of God, then surely everything is contrived: God is pretending – contriving – not to be god for the sake of achieving some specific experience and enjoyment?
What we generally mean by contrived is something we consider to be concocted for a less worthy objective. But is not worthiness of objective a subjective (contrived) judgement? …
Continue readingInvented, I suggest, because we find it impossible to accommodate the dark, the evil, the ghastly of this world within our idea of who God is and what God is like. It’s easy to accommodate things like love, kindness, mercy, peace within the traditional concept of God, but in excluding the other stuff I propose that we end up with an extremely limited idea of God, and, perhaps more importantly, a very confused idea about what we are doing here. …
Continue readingImagine no religion … or a religion where there is no presumption of a single ultimate goal.
There would be:
I propose that death, and for that matter birth, old age and disease as well (sometimes dubbed the fourfold miseries of material existence) are there to serve us. They are there in support of our purpose. Indeed they are necessary to our purpose.
But how? And do they really need to be so extreme and harsh? I propose they are actually no more or less graphic than necessary, in fact just dramatic enough to make entirely believable the notion that we are mortal/temporary, limited … and so on. …
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