religion is the problem

European countries are secular states.Except Vatican city state:
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0108136.html 

Originally posted by medenaywe European countries are secular states.Except Vatican city state: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0108136.html

Some European countries today, are more secular than the US.   I think that is a good thing, and hope the US moves in this direction a little faster.  


Edited by Athena - 26-Apr-2011 at 12:48

I have come across more accounts of native Americans caring for environment since we have become more concerned about accurate explanations of the past.  I am in a hurry or I would google for links to validate this is a newer discovery.  Many native people around the world live with a mythology that a deity told them they are to care for the earth. 

The most impressive explanation of native Americans believing the earth is one living organism, and how resistant we were to this idea, came from a science paper.  I sure wish I could link to that one and put an end to your doubt, which is curious to me.  


Are you suggesting we haven't been darn careless, deforesting the east and pushing the timber industry further and further west, turning areas of rivers, lakes and the ocean into dead zones with our pollution?   Eugene Oregon industry used the Willamette River as a sewage dump, and nothing nice was build along the river.  A good thing is in more recent years we were able to create beautiful parks and there are some nice privately owned areas along what used to be avoid land.   We have a governor who is restoring as much natural habitate as we possible, and we are having an amazing return of birds. 

Perhaps you mean, native Americans who lived closely with the land and nature, didn't become aware of the effect they had in it?   Or is it just the earth as one living organism concept that you don't believe?   I thought someone would argue the bible tells us to be good stewerts of the land.
The idea that we need to care for the earth is not totally foreign to religion.  Muslims may stress it more than Christians? 

Thank you for giving me reason to think on this.   You have really made my day.   Because you pushed the point, I realized at the base of my thinking is a knowing (body, feeling and mind) that animism is what feels right to me, and that the God of Abraham religions do not.

I don't know when human consciousness got cut off from the spirit world, as Judaism and Christianity do, but Rome was materialistic, so I suspect the major change in consciousness happened there.  The God of Abraham is separate from us, and we became separated from the whole of nature.  But since I was a child I responded to the soul of trees, and this was well before New Age thinking.  I am not saying this is a scientifically better understanding of reality, but my feeling about life and death is a lot better when I hold a concept of spirituality that Christianity has opposed.  I perhaps should not have said this consciousness is native American, but so far all my information is about how before Christianity, aboriginal people had a different consciousness.  

Animism is a sense that everything is spiritual in nature.  Quantum physics returns to this thinking of what it is that manifest reality as we experience it.   I am in favor of New Age thinking, because thinking quantum physically is such a different consciousness, bringing the east and west together, and and it comes with the sciences that bring the past into the present.   If we think about this wholistically, our consciousness is completely changed isn't it?   Not that long ago, hurting for sport was considered as natural as rain in Oregon.  Men enjoyed trophies of animal horns and heads on their walls, and women enjoyed their furs.  Older movies glamorized this, and offend today's sensitivities.  At the same time many Christians are demanding more spiritualism in church services.   There is a problem with separating spirit from nature.  There is a problem with separating man from both nature and God!   

 


Edited by Athena - 28-Apr-2011 at 15:00

My gosh, conversation is so enjoyable when people share some agreements and disagree on some points. 

Interestingly more cultures than Judo/Christian/Muslim ones have stories of humans being made from mud.  Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell speak of shared symbolism, because we share being humans in common.  This symbolism will come up in the mythology of quite diverse people, such as humans being made of mud and serpents as spiritual beings.

Now the big difference is do we believe the wolf and the bison are our brothers, or do we believe, humans are not part of the animal world?  What is our nature?   What is the nature of spirit?  Is spirit something internal to all things, or something that is external?   Are we humans who can have a spiritual experience, or spirits having a human experience?  Could we have a wolf or bison experience? 

Do only humans have souls or do all things have souls/spirits?  J/C/M religions tell us we fell and are separated from God, and are born into sin, and need to be born again in Jesus Christ if we are to have eternal life.  Often times Christianity has treated nature as an evil.  Christians have claimed only through Jesus can we know God and morals, and can our souls be saved.  Why?  The need of a deified human to save my soul, is not appealing to me on any level.  What kind of magic is this?   Who has the authority to externalize God from my very being or to deny the spirit of all living things?   When I die, will I be with my loved ones and loving God, or will I be isolated in a dark place of suffering, or will I just return to the Tao, or will I just cease to exist?  Hum, I think my ego "I" will cease to exist when it becomes one with the Tao.    

I really want to get into what you said about technology, but the baby woke up. 


Edited by Athena - 28-Apr-2011 at 15:32

Cryptic, I am so impressed by your answer! That was a spark of genius, and I hope I never forget your explanation for externalized divine authority.   Your suggestions for further research are excellent.   Perhaps I should stop talking and start reading.   I am not sure if I have the information now needed for this discussion, in my library, but I will look for it, and contemplate what you said  tonight when I retire.   Off the top of my head, I can say for sure the Egyptians had many gods, but did not externalize divine authority.     Wow you handed me a thinking puzzle that is really going to take some work! 

However, for the Hebrews, Abraham comes from Ur and Ur was a city of Sumer.   At least five biblical stories appear to be translations of Sumerian stories.  These were stories of many gods, that were adjusted to be stories of one God, and this may have occurred after Amenhotep attempted to force monotheism on Egypt, possibly leading to the followers of the new religion fleeing Egypt and traveling to what was once Sumer, and searching the archives of Sumer as they may have searched the archives of Egypt for knowledge of the true God?  Writing!  that is the missing piece of the puzzle you have gave me!   The written word, became the authority of truth, as opposed to the personal experience. 

Thinking that instead of there being many gods there is only God, is not so special.  Native Americans commonly held a concept of a Creator.  When people worshiped the Mother Goddess, there was one God, but in Sumer life had become so complex these people created bureaucracy to manage the complexity of the culture. This is recognizing the need to break things down into different task and delegate responsibility.  Obvious, from this consciousness, one God or Goddess could not do everything alone, so there must be many of them.   The problem with many gods is you have to add one everytime you realize a new concept, and eventually the complexity of gods and goddesses becomes unmanageable. 

But back to Amenhotep.  It was his grandfather who started the search of archives for the true God.  This reduced the number of gods to one, Ra the sun god.  Which may not be so different from the sun god of south America.   As Jung would explain, we share the human experience, so we come up with the same ideas.   Zoroastrianism also tilted towards the worship of one God, and Hebrews were worshiping several gods until they too settled on one God, after God punished them for worshiping several gods, according to their own mythology.   Perhaps this worship of one God, is the result of their contact with Persia, and Cyrus, and Zoroastrianism?  I don't know, the stories are so confusing!  People move around and their names change, and counting the date backwards from 1 BC confuses the heck out of me, so my brain can not figure out what happened when. 

However all these historical events played together, there is that moment when we externalized the spirit, and thanks to you Cryptic, I want to know about that moment.   I am going to search my library now.   Hopefully I stay awake long enough to get some reading done. 

About technology- today it is the low tech people who are doing some of the worst damage to the environment.   This is a critical problem today, as growing populations of low tech people are stressing eco-systems.   If they depend on wood for fuel, they deforest their region.  Then they use animal dung for fuel and this prevents the animal dung from fertilizing the land, adding to the environmental disaster of deforesting the land.  Just think Easter Island, where a growing low tech population devastated the environment so badly, the people were reduced to cannibalism and lost the culture they had developed.   Easter Island is the poster child for what can happen to all of us.   Technology is not our enemy.  Human stupidity is the enemy. 


Edited by Athena - 01-May-2011 at 00:15

Originally posted by Cryptic