Look to become true to your dreams.

It has always been this sort of narcissistic preoccupation with the 'self' - with its vain dreams and wishes - that has always characterized mysticism, which is why it often reached its peak in a world crackling (as in Medieval mysticism) with the funeral pyres of witches. The Synods that celebrated the hierarchy of angels had no interest in the condition of the serf, and the great poems of Sufism rose above a universe of seraglios, castration, impalements, murder, and legalised theft that pious souls disdained to notice.

May 30, 2012 -- 12:22PM, BBarton wrote:

Good point Namchuck, yet...

Having empathy, even serving in or after tragedy should not make celebrating all that is good or having peace and joy in one's life impossible.  Sure we can't have peace or joy all the time, but nor should we be kept from them because the constant breaking of hearts and lives the few perpetuate against the many generation after generation, time after time and one place after another.

If I have to wait for the whole to wake to enjoy or appreciate what is good, I'd be dead at the rate humanity's evolving. 

How much more joy and peace could we enjoy if the rest woke!

If what follows the opening remark of your post is any indication, BBarton, you seem to have totally missed my point!

May 31, 2012 -- 6:00AM, BBarton wrote:

Or you mine, my dear Namchuck.

Oh, no, I understood your point, BBarton.

Jun 7, 2012 -- 12:13PM, BBarton wrote:

Truly Namchuck, this has pestered me too.  It makes me want to learn what Christ really taught to those persecuted unto death?

What Jesus really taught, if he existed at all, is something that is now well beyond our reach. Scholars have wrestled with it for centuries to no avail.

What was in their destroyed writings?

I don't think that represents much of a mystery. Anything that didn't meet with the accepted dogma as worked out by the official Church was simply dismissed or destroyed. One has to remember that it wasn't long into the history of Christianity that they started burning books, and Paul was one of the main instigators of this policy. 

  Certainly it was their thinking that incurred the wrath of Empires of religion and state in their quest to conquer or subjugate the world for their own benefit, -but in Christ's name.

I think what you say here is a bit hyperbolic, BBarton. What the official Church did had little to do with the teachings of people they perceived as being heretics. There is little doubt that the Church's leaders were sincere in believing that God had commissioned them to convert the world to their religion. Islam followed the same policy just a few centuries later.

 

It's like there's two Jesus: one the spirit of his words, the example of goodness, hope, and grace, a man who loved wisdom and the forlorn, respected women and children, who was fully nurturing; simeone we can even know personnaly -in our hearts.

Yes, there's the mythical Jesus, a construct of one form of Christianity, and the historical Jesus (now lost forever if he ever lived at all). The Jesus you speak of above is the mythical Jesus. The myth of the dying and rising god is one of the oldest mythical themes in the ancient Middle East.  

  He died showing us it's better to be killed than to live subjugated to man's tyranny of religion or state.

Well, that's part of the myth, too, as there is no evidence whatsoever that he lived in order to be able to die. There is compelling evidence that the whole story of Jesus was a myth that latter desperately sought historical support. 

  Then there's a 3rd-person-god who's going to judge and condemn all.  He gets recrucified every year because of our wretchedness.

He's the one with a 4th century Trinity doctrine hat excludes mankind.  This is odd when Jesus is repored to have said he went through all he did that we might be one.  One with each other, him and the Father.  He is more our brother and we are more god than most realize.

I'm not quite following you here, BBarton. Most of what you assert here about what was "reported" about Jesus came much later than you think.

   

Along with the personnification of Jesus, but into a god, comes the cufusion between religion and God.  The nature of perceiving God as 3rd person makes it that much harder to comprehend the divine, I Am within.  What we don't find or excavate from within is the harder to see without.  Hence, the lack of peoples' humanity toward one another, or the lack of godliness.

That "lack of humanity" is better explained and understood once one understands Man's true historical context (we are the first generation to know it) rather than the stories promulgated by men a couple of thousand years ago in their ignorance. 

Because I consider reform a task from within, I can see why many remain where they are to work toward the spreading of something better.  -That and the many mentors who were nobody of count within the male hierarchies of business or religion, the true standard bearers, who inspire toward the goal.

I'd entirely agree with you, BBarton, that Man's reformative work is an inner task. It's a work involving not faith, belief, and fables, but reason and properly directed thought. It involves the sound use of our understanding, the rational ordering of our minds, the implementation of a true critical will, and the general mobilization of our intelligence. In other words, the willingness to evolve while standing on our feet.

We are the world's first ethical animals, at the mercy of our biology, but capable also of rising above it. It is entirely up to us.