Religion is a form of psychosis

Wayfaring stranger:

What if the proposition happens to be "Let's make war on our opponents"? The senselessness that surrounds religion is inevitable, and ultimately insupportable.

Even if I hadn't said 'at all' it wouldn't have been an overgeneralization, and yes that's part of what I meant.

 

That's the down side of free thought and free speech. The postive side is that people can come up with good ideas that they can share with each other. If they say "Let's make war", we can ask "why?" and explain to them why they shouldn't. You seem only to see the negatives and nonsense in religion, and that is blindness on your part. Have you read William James' Varieties of Religious Experience? I recommend it, along with Karen Armstrong's A History of God. If you read them with an open mind, you might get a less narrow-minded view of what healthy religion is about.

 

I have not read either. Have you read Dostoyevsky? What is healthy religion?

 

I've read only The Brothers Karamazov. What does that have to do with the discussion? Maybe an example of unhealthy religion--dark, obsessive, narrow,intolerant. He seemed to have no use for any perspective but his own Russian Orthodox faith, and was a virulent anti-Semite. But a great author, nonetheless.

It's a value-loaded concept, I admit, but I was using it the way William James (in the book I mentioned) uses "healthy-minded" (as opposed to "sick-souled") religion. Healthy-minded religion is life-affirming and sees the good in the world around us, while sick-souled religion accentuates the negative (He gives Tolstoy as an example of the latter). Other writers made similar distinctions:e.g.,Walter Kania, Healthy Religion: A Psychological Guide to a Mature Faith, to whom unhealthy religion is literal, dogmatic, close minded, militant, extremist, using mind control, fear, and shame, and healthy religion does the opposite. As an example of sick-souled religion, Dr. Jacob Bronowki gives the example of the Auschwitz crematorium, which is "how men behave when they believe they have absolute knowldege." Al-Qaeda, polygamist Jeffords, Jim Jones, Focus on the Family, the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, etc., come to mind as "sick,sick,sick". Healthy religion is the opposite. According to Bishop J.S. Spong, "A true and healthy religious system" encourages questioning and is "an invitiation to a journey" rather than a faith that has all the answers. Psychaitrist Erich Fromm,likewise, distinguishes between authoritarian and humanistic religions. Authoritarian (unhealthy)religions view God as a symbol of power and fear, encourage slavish dependence on religious authorities, stress unquestioning obedience to religious authority, use guilt and shame to control followers, and foster suspicion and hostility toward people outside the group of believers. Humanistic (healthy) religions see God "as a symbol of humanity's own powers, of what we potentially are or ought to become." There's also Jesus's advice that we can tell the good prophets from the false ones by their fruits (Matthew, 7:16-17). Religious fanatics have been feeding us a lot of bitter fruit lately, sowing division and conformity,but you can still find good fruit that nourishes the human soul and encourages compassion and respect for all humans.

 

I had never heard he was religious, let alone an anti-semite and I have read most of his writing.So you read the Karamazovs, what variety of religious experience would you categorize Ivans episode with the devil under?

lol

Filthy hypocrites!
If you want the superhuman, "god" ain't the way to go suckers! To hell with you! Brothers and sisters! Ask them to describe what god is or means to them if you wish to split your sides

These people, of all things in the world, are afraid of words. The good. lol

 

Yeah, he was converted in prison to the Orthodox faith. Check out Joseph Frank, The Mantle of the Prophet. Others who have "read most of his writings" came to the conclusion that God was his central obsession. For his anti-Semitism, check out his essay "The Jewish Question".

 

No one knows everything. It is an existential delusion to believe one knows everything. Be careful with anyone who tells you they know everything.

Which is . . . what? What is their description? Which theistic thinkers are you referring to?

You are free to disagree, but it is far more interesting to hear you elaborate (positively) on what you know. Ranting against the unknown is the delusion you speak of.

There is no description of God anywhere in the Torah or in the Gospels.

The Divine Reality of God is not a "thing."

Maybe the problem is habitual thinking about the nature of . . . reality, the divine . . . all of this, whatever it is. Habitual thinking limits one's perception of all that lies outside one's "known."

There is a tendency (certainly in the Modern, Western mind, at least) to believe in some kind of supreme authority of the senses. That is, sensory information "exists" more than anything else and is, therefore, the measure of what is and is not real.

This is not to diminish the senses. I am a big fan of Nag Champa, Martin Guitars, every variety of the female form, chili dogs, all Bonny Doon wines, the Big Lebowski and the paintings of W.A. Bouguereau (just to name a few things), but the Enlightened know that God transcends everything, including any human definition of God.

If the sensual were more real than spiritual, the sound of one's words would be more real than their meaning. We may as well yodel at one another.

I love Alan Watts. His words changed my life.

 

I must confess I share that "tendency", based on what Santayana calls "animal faith". It takes a certain faith to believe that the world around us is real, that there are other people relating to us, that Dejavu, Varuna, etc., are real people who reply to us when we type these posts. But I'm willing to take the leap. Otherwise, what hope do we have of making any kind of headway? Besides sensory data, I'm also willing to believe in mathematics and logic, that 2+2+4, yesterday, today, tomorrow and always. I take comfort in the observation that there is an overwhelming consensus among other humans (if they exist) about these matters. On the other hand, there is far less consensus about God's existence, nature, gender, etc. So I think it's reasonable to expect convincing evidence of an empirical, sensory kind.

Do you claim to posess a kind of sixth sense that enables you directly to perceive God or sense God's awareness? It's certainly possible that you might have this, and it's even possible that other people do too. Those who don't, however, are entitled to demand some evidence of the sensory, empirical kind. I've bet my life on God based on admittedly limited faith (intuition+risk taking), but I admit it's more a hunch than a certainty, and is subjecst to modification if better (i.e.,emprirical) evidence becomes available.

 

I am quite sure that many people have this sense. It is a normal, human experience, available to anyone who is open to it. It is exactly like being inspired, you know, how you just KNOW you are on to something original and good.

It is similar to the way that you just "know" something is funny, or the way you "know" a musical instrument is in tune, or the way you "know" someone is in love with you, or the way you "know" when someone is telling the truth.

It is a healthy sense of wonder and awe, a sense of inexplicable, inherent meaning. It transcends perceptions like "feeling," "peaceful," "intelligent," "alive," "good" and so on, with the same veracity that you have transcended your own infancy.

And just as there is no way to accurately describe a melody to one who has never heard it, it is just as impossible to prove the presence of the divine to anyone who has not experienced it.

Peace and Love

 

It is defined by its actions, of which the torah and gospels are filled with such. Starting with the very first line of genesis, it describes an action by god and continues from there. If those same actions were ascribed to a person, they would be some sort of psychopathic artist, smoting people and creating things.

 

I think you misunderstand. I despise everyone who means anything by god! This doesn't mean I have abandoned my love!

No, not private, but not clear. The good are all who are prepared to misunderstand themselves in favour of another.

Have you read Zarathustra?

 

Yes. It's been awhile. Are you the madman? (no insult intended)

 

actualy religion is faking schitsophrenia, they all claim to hear the voice of god but every one of them is lying to get theyre disability check, just in the case of religion they expect to be denied theyre payoff till after theyre dead

 

None of the ones I know, including myself, claim to hear the voice of God. That's more of a charismatic/evangelical thing, and most of those are talking metaphorically. As Lili Tomlin said:"When you talk to God, it's prayer; when God talks to you, its schizophrenia."

 

Eagle

Agree

And hey.. you look like me .tho my beard aint that wild.[yet].hehe.
we are the hair bears...LOL

Occam

 

Stranger

So. god only speaks to schizophrenics.? All those catholic saints were schiz?
LOL..thought so.
Saint Vitas (patron saint of epilepsy and the convulsive disorder known as St Vitus Dance).
Tell me when the patron saint of cancer shows up.....

Occam

 

i believe there is a clear and unambiguous distinction between what we experience for outselves out in the woods, and what some priest or book, trys to tell us to convince ourselves and each other.

this idea of any sort of hierarchy being inheirently bennificent, that i find permiating organized beliefs of virtually all manor of flavors, is what i find inconsistent with the kind of feelings and experinces that i've felt and experienced as spiritual.

i'm not trying to say what can't be or has to be, i'm not convinced anyone can.

religeon is by and large a social thing. and there can be good there. but a social thing is one thing and a spiritual thing is another.

it comes back i think, to what is, not being limited to or by what is known. nor under any obligation to be.

whereas religeon, belief, whatever you want to call it, keeps claiming to be. to KNOW what is, when such knowing, knowing names and descriptions and all that, is not honestly knowledge at all. the feeling of some sort of reciprocal nonverbal sharing of feelings might be. but all this bussiness of detail of what lies beyond what we can see, or at least infer from what we can measure and observe even indirectly. well these are really such completely different things.

none of it HAS to be wrong, but there are just so infinitely more ways of perceiving and understanding the same spiritness, then even all beliefs togather are willing to consider.

=^^=
.../\...

 

Lili Tomlin is a comedian. It was a joke, not a diagnosis.

 

it is not that we deny that which appears to us, but only when it is attributed to something "non-evident"

 

Non-evident? As in, abstract? Like the concept of infinite space? There can be no definitive evidence (or human understanding) of infinite space, and yet it is a commonly accepted belief. I believe it.

Or is the "something non-evident" just another name for something not commonly recognized? You know, like the ideal of "The Perfect World" that everyone imagines (regardless of whether they are, or are not, conscious of it), or public satori, or Humanity's inherent unity (or . . . the inherent stupidity of "the War on Terror").

To what, exactly, are you clinging when you deny the Divine (the Tao, the Supreme Being, the Buddha Mind . . . whatever "God" is)? I am sure you believe (as the evidence obviously suggests) your "reality" is the best of all possibilities.

Maybe the important question is - What are the Enlightened actually talking about (Or, what should they talk about) when they speak of God?

Until one addresses that simple question, any statement concerning the existence/non-existence of "God" is, simply, unfounded. You may as well try to deny the existence of "the Laws of Physics," or Time, or Transcendence itself, or any other abstraction.

Peace and Love