Victor :
I thought you'd gone! Too bad... Couldn't stay away, huh?
I came back to pay off an unpaid debt to Reality.
Well, I killfiled you in private correspondence anyway; haven't you learned anything?..
You *washed your hands of me*, I believe, having failed to explain
I AM.
quote:
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Now you are violently anti-NewAge.
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No, I am very much (but not violently) anti-irrationality and anti-faith. Yes, this includes NewAge, but frankly, I think xianity to be far worse than any NewAge belief I can think of that I have personally encountered so far. On my list of "people who ◊◊◊◊ up the world", you are not very high at all.
As a personal aside, I am on the verge of putting you on the ignore list. You know what to avoid, if you wish to continue to be able to talk to me -- and you obviously do.
No, I don't. But I have a little story to tell you about Christianity.
I am very like you, Victor. My mother was also a Christian, and I was also lucky enough to be born with a very high IQ. I also had ADD which meant my behaviour was often very out of control and I had continual run-ins with authority figures of all sorts. Unsurprisingly I did not care much for Christianity. After all, who believe that ◊◊◊◊ about crucified saviours and resurection. No. I went for science. I
instinctively avoided all faith-based beliefs. I
never believed any of them. I also had an ego the size of a house.
By my mid-twenties it became clear that the world was a pretty ◊◊◊◊◊◊ up mess, and it looked to me like faith-based beliefs had a lot to do with it. Combined with humanitys innate stupidity it a recipe for disaster. And the state of the world is pretty disastrous. It's a ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ mess. But what's anyone to do about it? Hopeless.
Then a couple of years back I was searching for information to help me deconvert a young Christian friend of mine, a person with no ego at all - one of the most caring, loving, gentle people I have ever met, but very confused about her religion and fearful of going to hell, which she considered to be a very real place. That led me to the secular web,
www.infidels.org. There, I found a document about the pagan origins of Christianity, and various other documents on the history of religion. These I successfully used to deconvert my Christian friend.
I also became part of the online community at
www.infidels.org. I was the science and skepticism moderator. There I learned about philosophy and the history of religion and I put this information together with my scientific understandings, gathered over many years as a scientific materialist atheist skeptic, and I began to understand that all religions had similar themes and that mysticism seemed to lie not only at the root of Christianity but of all true religion and spirituality - it was just that most of those religions had been taken over by dogmatic control freaks who twisted the message and used it to co-erce and control people. Thus I ended up where you started - with an interest in mysticism, the Occult and the New Age. I saw them as a means of bringing people together - clearing away the detritus of the old past-it religions. ESPECIALLY Christianity, which I retained a sharp dislike for.
Now, I have a confession to make. I never really understood Christianity. I always thought it was about controlling people, making them fear hell and promising them eternal life in heaven if they were good sheep. And in its modern form that is what it is. But it wasn't always like that.
Why is the word REALLY in a mess?
Well it is quite simple really. Everybody wants more than their fair share of everything. That means
not everybody can have free will. So the history of humanity has been one of almost continual warfare and misery, as ego competes with ego and nation compete with nation. So long as we continue to act in an unrestrained self-serving and self-centred manner the world will continue to be ◊◊◊◊◊◊ up.
This is the message of CHRISTIANITY!
Christ
VOLUNTARILY submitted his will to the will of God. Even though he gained nothing but his own death on the cross, he was still
willing to do this as a symbolic act to show what could be done and what was the solution to the worlds problems.
So at the end of the day Christianity is not the source of the worlds problems. The abuse of Christianity by the roman authorities and subsequent control-freaks for centuries turned it into a bit of an abberation, but the underlying message, if it can be explained clearly instead of abused to control people, is EXACTLY what is needed to start sorting out the worlds problems.
You do not have to experience ego-death and commit yourself to a life of Service. You do not have to do that
because it has already been done, by Christ.
I am not surprised you despise Christianity, Victor. Rather than being the size of a mere house, your ego is the size an aircraft carrier. You do not seem to think this is a problem.
In this world are all sorts of people. Some have large egos, some small. Some have large IQ, some small. Now imagine a world populated entirely by people with a high IQ and an ego the size of yours. Can you imagine it?
What kind of world would it be like?
Would you like to live in a world where Christianity was eradicated but every-one else had an ego the size yours is?
Victor : Christianity is not the source of the worlds evil.
Unbridled, uncontrolled self-serving EGOTISM is the source of the worlds evil, and Christianity is a system for dealing with precisely that problem. Which pretty much makes you the anti-Christ, quite literally.
I do not want to get into an argument with you about this. I will let you have free run to say what you like (people on this board aren't stupid - they understand what has been said and why.) I am making this post not because I want to challenge you, but because I want to pay back my debt to Reality for failing to understand the central message of Christianity. I may have a high IQ, but having an EGO the size of a house blinded me to the true relevance of the religious system I was exposed to. So now I am trying to put right what I did wrong. I am not going to convert to Christianity. There is more than one path than through Jesus. I am not going to try to change the world. That can get you into
all sorts of trouble. I am going to accept my fate, enjoy my life and try not to let my ego get in the way of intellectual truths like the one about the egotistical behaviour of human beings being the true source of evil.
God isn't going to spank you, Victor. He will just love you, forgive you and empathise with the inevitable difficulties you face attempting to control your aircraft-carrier sized ego in a world of Symettrical Equality where all things ultimately come back to their originator. God is not going to intervene to punish you. By the same token, he will not intervene to save you from your self-imposed fate either. If you choose to deny the existence of your soul
then you are a slave to the laws of physics, and those physical laws are slaves to the laws of metaphysics. And we both know more about those than we are letting on, don't we Victor? If you choose to deny the existence of your soul in full knowledge of its existence then you are a braver man than I.
[Juggler puts down his balls, publicly apologises to God for having been so stupid and egotistical as to not understand the meaning of the crucifixion, and walks away into the sunset hoping that this post has gone some way to paying back his debt to Reality.]
Goodbye Victor.
...for me, only a glitch in my position will enable them to work.