Galileo? Seriously?


In reply to this comment by Irishman:
"The Catholic church gets bashed on a lot and I'm never sure why."


The vatican staying silent about the holocaust during WWII,

Still teaching even today that HIV can pass through condoms in AIDS stricken Africa,

Covering up child abuse allegations, for example that of Father John Geoghan, accused of sexually molesting over 100 boys in the Archdiocese of Boston,

The persecution of Galileo, the inventor of the telescope,

The infamous brutal and violating interrogations directed at the suppresion of heresy,

In fact hundreds of years of years of persection, deceit, lies and social control; much of which can be levelled at any religion in the world. Take your pick.

The vatican's position on evolution does not explicity say that evolution is the most likely creation theory, only that "faith and scientific findings regarding the evolution of man's material body are not in conflict, though man is regarded as a 'special creation', and that the existence of God is required to explain the spiritual component of man's origins."

This is always worth saying: Science is a METHOD, not a position.

bamdrew: "What I'm saying basically is this; its to the detriment of your own knowledge of the complexity of the human and inter-human experience to 'throw the baby out with the bathwater' by falsely defining religion as being no greater than the sum of its mystical tales, and staunchly ignoring not only the real human value of shared religions but also the ridiculousness of logically dissecting something that is very infrequently valued for its logic. If you must I again direct you to thinking about the evolutionary origins of religion for some insight."

There is certainly value in religion, but not in faith. Organized religion has "blessed" us with beautiful works of art and the study of religion as a means of social control is very interesting. I believe that faith is detrimental to our society because it is flat out stupid and deluded.

quantummushroom: "do you think you're "better" than that man of faith?"
"Better" encompasses a bit to much. I do not know what skills this person has, but I can say this, on the particular point of religion I am not deluded and he is. I suppose you could call that "better" if you wanted. If all other things are equal, then YES: faith is strictly worse than no faith

In a way that's one reason religion developed, to answer unanswerable questions. It flourished by accruing mass amounts of money and control through means of taxing the people (through guilt). It gained more power as it was backed by leaders as a source population/social control. Now it is passed along like a bad schoolyard joke from parent to child and is taught as truth. It's a folk tradition nightmare.

Quantummushroom is confusing religion with the belief in God, which are not the same thing.

There has always been a belief in 'the other', 'the cosmic attractor', 'the goddess', and even the worship of the mushroom, the moon and mother earth/Gaia. This is religion in the ancient shamanic sense and is more than 12,000 years old. It is almost certain that it has its roots in the psychedelic experience and is **boundary dissolving**.

Religion as we experience it today has only existed for 2,500 years and is a social control mechanism employed by governments everywhere in the world. With the decline of religion in most of the western world, governments have now invented 'terrorism' as the fear factor. Religion in this sense is **boundary building**.

Existentialism as proclaimed by Nietzsche is a third 'way' that denies both the very real religious/psychedelic experience AND the existence of a god, goddess, or higher cosmic attractor. Atheism does not necessarily equal existentialism, again Quantummushroom is confusing these things.

The third confusion here is 'kill the religion and you kill the civilization'. Almost right - kill the religion and you kill the culture would be more accurate.

Killing religion as Neitzsche says would lead to the death of culture and a descent into chaos. We know something today that Nietzsche didn't know, a little mathematical theory called Chaos Theory which is likely the most important discovery since the wheel. From the natural chaos a new order would arise, one free of culture and boundaries. Chaos is the source of imagination and all creation.

Religion is not based on faith - it is based upon the religious experience. The very real power of this experience has been seized upon and hijacked, and turned into something which takes a lot of faith to swallow, whilst retaining all of its original social power.

Finally, the US education system being crap has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with socialism. I agree with QM that socialism is facism in slow motion. I live in a country where people have fought and died for socialism and we have one of the best education systems in Europe. The reason the US education system is crap is because it is entirely culture bound.

"The Catholic church gets bashed on a lot and I'm never sure why."


The vatican staying silent about the holocaust during WWII,

Still teaching even today that HIV can pass through condoms in AIDS stricken Africa,

Covering up child abuse allegations, for example that of Father John Geoghan, accused of sexually molesting over 100 boys in the Archdiocese of Boston,

The persecution of Galileo, the inventor of the telescope,

The infamous brutal and violating interrogations directed at the suppresion of heresy,

In fact hundreds of years of years of persection, deceit, lies and social control; much of which can be levelled at any religion in the world. Take your pick.

The vatican's position on evolution does not explicity say that evolution is the most likely creation theory, only that "faith and scientific findings regarding the evolution of man's material body are not in conflict, though man is regarded as a 'special creation', and that the existence of God is required to explain the spiritual component of man's origins."

This is always worth saying: Science is a METHOD, not a position.

TO CATHOLICPRIEST
Excellent post.

Julian Jaynes proposed in his controversial 1977 book 'The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind' that in pre-Homeric times (before the historian Homer) people did not have the highly developed minds that we take for granted today.

What we call the 'ego' today was for these ancient people what they called a 'god'.

When danger threatened suddenly the god's voice was heard in the individual's mind. This function of the mind has since evolved and become integrated into what Jung called the 'ego'.

Science has nothing to say about the origin of consciousness, aside from Daniel Dennett's reductionist ideas which I don't accept. Religion on the other hand SHOULD have something to say about origin of spirit/consciousness but it has become so sidetracked over the millenia with social control that it has completely lost its way.

Religion in the ancient, shamanic, spiritual, natural sense would be very welcome in the world right now, and would be welcomed by every individual on this planet.

Religion gets a bad rap because it has tended over the last 3-4000 years toward social control, no matter which of the religions you choose to look at. This is why the seperation of church and state is VITAL.

If any one of us were to go back in time and go into Jesus's church, we would be going in there to LEARN, to learn about ourselves, our minds, our consciousness, our spiritual centre. When we 'graduated' we would not need to go back, and we would be informed and learned enough to teach others.

Science teaches. Religion controls.

Artist Brian Springer spent a year scouring the airwaves with a satellite dish grabbing back channel news feeds not intended for public consumption. The result of his research is SPIN, one of the most insightful films ever made about the mechanics of how television is used as a tool of social control to distort and limit the American public's perception of reality.

Take the time to watch it from beginning to end and you'll never look at TV reporting the same again. Tell your friends about it. This extraordinary film released in the early 1990s is almost completely unknown. Hopefully, the Internet will change that.