dpdownsouth
Member
I don't like religions, but think of this in terms of people supporting their favorite sports team. There are a lot of sports, and a lot of teams. There are also a lot of people saying stupid shit like "WE WON!" when their favorite team gets a victory. Furthermore, they are often dressed to look just like that sports team. I don't think that this makes them bad people, as life can be a pretty mundane, shit scenario without something more to hope for beyond that "WE WON!"
We can't even enter into spiritual archives without attaching some kind of backdoor reverence to these shit belief systems.
It doesn't matter what industry that I could be working in. If my techniques were not effective, and I told somebody, "Hey man, that is the way the book told me to do it, so I must be right!" - Then I would be considered a fucking idiot. However, when it comes to religion, this is considered commendable all the time! Be "Bible Based" is a dressed up excuse for not wanting to think deeply for yourself.
What techniques regarding Christianity, Islam, etc. are you talking about? And what qualifies them as shit belief systems?
Anyway, to the point at hand, when I hear 'Bible based' I think of evangelical Protestantism and their focus on literalism and common-sense interpretation. This is a relatively new development in Christianity, being not much more than a few hundred years old. Of course, all of Christianity is 'Bible based' but the norm is not literalism but rather an interpretive paradigm that goes beyond a surface reading and reaches toward higher analogical levels of meaning.
A good example of the above is Gregory of Nyssa's (c. 332-395) exposition of the Moses narrative. Here, Moses's three encounters with God (the burning bush, in a cloud atop a mountain, and seeing God's back as he [Moses] hides in a ditch) are seen as outlining a process of spiritual unfoldment. First, one begins by turning away from ignorance, seeing the absolutely objective within the relatively subjective (the light in the burning bush). One then moves beyond images, sense perception, and the ability to know, returning to ignorance (meeting God in the cloud), before finally realising the endlessness of the spiritual journey (seeing God's back).
So, traditionally, the reading of scripture enters into a dynamic relationship with practice (prayer, fasting, right action, etc.) and thus forms a path of spiritual unfoldment.
And I wouldn't want to exclude evangelical Protestants, either. If one were to read and meditate on scripture, then pray, that would certainly count as a contemplative and discursive practice.
How is this the same as supporting a sports team?
Of course you get bad religion in the same way as you get bad science. But misuse does not invalidate use, and one should try not turn examples (or even many examples) of bad practice into a universal law.
Honestly, I see most contemporary and novel Western spiritualities as deriving from either denatured Eastern non-dualism, nihilism, masonic individualism, and or the rotting corpse of Theosophy. Christianity, Judaism and Islam strike me as being no worse than any of the preceding.
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