Should Governments regulate fraudulent religions?

Human beings are social animals and no man or woman is an island. A majority of human beings are sheople, dumb, and ignorant which is why hierarchy exists to begin with as the smartest leads them. Einstein was an intellectual thief/plagiarist and was responsible for the Manhattan project in the application of nuclear weapons. Somebody should take a time machine in the past and erase his entire existence snubbing him out. As for the gay code breaker in a more ideal world the Third Reich would of been victorious in World War II. I want a society where there is no public influence of poofters. All the problems the west faces in civilization now is a direct result of world war II, we are still living in the consequences of its aftermath.

Compare the number of death by nuclear bombs to the number of people saved by nuclear medicine and tell us if we have a net gain or a net lose.

You might also wonder why the world has been enjoying the best stats for death by violence, including war, than it has ever had, in part, thanks to M.A.D.

Regards
DL

Nuclear medicine? Please clarify.

Yeah, we’re just a button or detonation away from complete total global destruction and annihilation where we’re better off because of it. :laughing:

Your fears are clouding your judgements.

As you requested. If you want more, do your own research.

world-nuclear.org/informatio … today.aspx

Regards
DL

Most nuclear medicine exists for cancer which has skyrocketed because of our artificial environment we’ve created where there are cancer causing effects everywhere in our modern society but whatever. :wink:

Your fears are clouding your judgements.

As you requested. If you want more, do your own research.

world-nuclear.org/informatio … today.aspx

Regards
DL
[/quote]
Most nuclear medicine exists for cancer which has skyrocketed because of our artificial environment we’ve created where there are cancer causing effects everywhere in our modern society but whatever. :wink:
[/quote]
And you did not even have to find the numbers that refuted your original claim, but whatever. :wink:

Regards
DL

You seem to be agreeing with me here, but I was pointing out in part that the law is logic and reason based, and not simply fact based (whatever that would mean) which is not what you said previously.

Yawns

Care to defend your other positions?

But then you must be against contraception since it is for sexual relations not for reproduction. You should be against celibacy, porn should be a problem for you, masturbation, couples who stop having children and activities that limit reproduction - that is anything that reduces the number of children people have - everything from time consuming hobbies to too much focus on career and more. And since you found homosexual sex disgusting than disgust as guide could lead to all sorts of other shoulds. What other shoulds do you have that are based on disgust?

Yes, there was homosexuality, in high numbers, even when it was illegal and when the social punishments were unbelievably high. It was constantly denigrated in all media and nearly all social circles and condemned by the church. Nevertheless there was a significant part of the population that engaged in it, many of whom felt attraction for the same sex as far back as they could remember.

What else counts as radical individualism?

You seem to be agreeing with me here, but I was pointing out in part that the law is logic and reason based, and not simply fact based (whatever that would mean) which is not what you said previously.
[/quote]
If only logic and reasoned ruled us, there would not be fraudulent religions.

If the word fact is giving you a problem, I recommend the dictionary. I am not re-defining well defined terms.

Regards
DL

Care to tell me what you object to?

Do it with an argument against and we can proceed.

Regards
DL

I believe I’ve already responded to a few points several posts back and waiting for a response from you.

I am not a mind reader.

If you have issues, put them up as I do not know which ones you are referring to.

Regards
DL

I am not going to hold your hand in finding my prior posts in this thread. Please utilize your computer properly, thanks in advance. :wink:

Thank you as well for not knowing what you priorities are.

Regards
DL

It’s clear you don’t know how to use an internet forum properly.

Ditto.

Regards
DL

  1. you said that law was fact based and CONTRASTED the law, because of this, with processes bases on logic and reason. But the law also uses logic and reason. You presented something in a binary way, I disagreed. Do you agree that the law/courts use logic and reason and are not only fact based or do you disagree? I find with your posts that because you often do not integrate what I write in response, your responses only seem to respond to mine. 2) The word fact is certainly complicated, but that is not the main problem I am trying to understand what it would mean if a process (the law or courts in this case) was only fact based. I cannot see that working. YOu have to have logic and reason to connect the facts if you want to draw any conclusions. You have to have logic and reason to draw conclusions about probabilities, relevance and application of those facts in the context of determining responsibility, guilt, innocence, etc. A court without logic and reaon: The judge and lawyers state facts. No arguments, no connecting facts. No mounting arguments, no trying to demonstrate that the other lawyer’s argument is weak or does not make sense. No logical or reasoning in the way witnesses are interviewed and their suggestions are critiques for their logic and reason. No logical advice to the jury about how to work with testimony, physical evidence. No interviewing professional witnesses about how they drew conclusions. No preparations for court using logic and reason. The jury does not use reason and logic or even try to. They sit at the table and state facts to each other. Etc.

So, again, I don’t see your sense that law is fact based RATHER THAN logic and reason based as making sense. Now I realize to never stated that courts were like this, however you did present a dichotomy. Courts being fact based, rather than reason and logic based. I think that makes no sense.

It seems you have muddled what I put. That or I presented the issues poorly.

Logic and reason work with facts. Faith does not. Judges use facts as evidence and ignore faith without facts.

I trust the courts more than any religion for that reason.

Only a pride-less nation allows flagrant and open fraud of it’s dimwitted and gullible citizens.

Regards
DL

The knowledge of God through faith.

Faith is non-conceptual knowledge, agnosia. An agnostic was originally someone who had non-conceptual, apophatic knowledge of God (dark knowledge).

(I just wanted to put this Alan Watts transcription somewhere, so this is as good as any other.)

[i]The Christian Church therefore emphasized “mystis” or “faith” as against “gnosis” or “knowledge” because they said you can never know God; God could never become an object of knowledge, and in this funny roundabout way, the Christian theologians were saying exactly the same thing as the Hindus, only the Hindus who do call this knowledge of God through faith, they call it “jnana” which is the same as the Greek word “gnosis”, but just to give you a little sidelight on how words get mixed up in their meanings: we now have a class of person called an agnostic and an agnostic generally means a person who doesn’t commit himself to any beliefs about the ultimate nature of things; he just says he doesn’t know.

But the original word “agnosia” in greek meant a special kind of knowledge, it was called “the dark knowledge of God”; the knowledge of God in the “Cloud of Unknowing” to use the title of a mystical treatise written by an anonymous 14th century English monk. This monk derived his ideas from a very mysterious figure who wrote under the name of Dionysus the Areopagite. Dionysus was a fifth or sixth century Syrian monk who had learned his mysticism from Porphyry (sp?) who got it from Plutinos who was a neo-platonist and who probably got a great deal of stimulation from the intellectual world of Alexandria, and Alexandria in the early years of the Christian era was a tremendous exchange place between east and west.

Buddhist monks visited Alexandria because it was one of the great centers of trade between Rome and India and as you may know, all Rome’s gold eventually went to India for the purchase of pepper, and as a result of this the Roman economy collapsed; they bought too much luxury from India and India in exchange got Roman architecture; you’ll see a lot of Roman architecture in Indian temples. But Alexandria was the great center for the gnostics and for Christian theology and some of the greatest theologians: Clement, Origen, Athanasius, Saint Cyril, all worked out of Alexandria.

And now going back to this strange monk Dionysus, it was he who first put around the idea in Christian circles that there was such a thing of the knowledge as the knowledge of God by faith, by agnosia, really by unknowing, and he, in a book which he wrote called “The Theologian Mystica”, he wrote a treatise on the higher knowledge of God which might be quoted directly from the Upanishads, in certain parts of it, the last section of it reads like the Mandukya Upanishad because it’s a series of negations. It says what God is not and he goes very far because he says that God is not “one” because our idea of unity falls far short of what God is; so does our idea of Trinity; so does our idea of spirit; our idea of mind; of justice; of love; all these things are not really God and he says in another place “that if anybody, having seen God, understood what he had seen, what he would have seen would not have been God, but some creature of God less than God; some sort of angel or something like that.”

It’s perfectly amazing to consider the influence that this man had for writing under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite. He became identified you see with St Paul’s first convert in Athens and legend has it that he was the first bishop of Athens and was martyred in Gaul now where he’s known as St Denis, but St Thomas Aquinas looked upon the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite as having the highest authority, and you could, if all the text of Dionysus his work had been lost, you could restore most of it from quotations of St Thomas.

He wrote really two very important books: one was the one I said “The Theologian Mystica” the other was called “The Divine Names” and these two books presented the two phases of his theology. The book called “The Divine Names” was a discussion on the nature of God in terms of what God is like, by analogy, and this kind of knowledge of God he called “cataphatic” from the Greek “phanai”, “to speak” and “kata” meaning “to say according to that” which is to say “to speak by analogy” where he used, though entirely negative language about God, this sort of discourse was called “apopahtic” and the word “apo” meaning “away from” to “talk away from” just as a sculptor, when he makes an image, reveals the image by removing stone, and so Dionysus explained that one attains the knowledge of God by discarding concepts, which is exactly what the Hindus mean when they say of God: one can only say “neti neti”: not this, not this, not any conception. Thus in Hindu philosophy, the highest state of consciousness in Samadhi is called Nirvikalpa Samadhi which means literally “non-conceptual”. “Vikalpa” means “a concept”, “Nir” is a negation, so the “non-conceptual knowledge”.

Now, people have greatly misunderstood this; they have imagined that “unknowing”, the state of the highest contemplation, was the acquisition of a blank mind from which you first discarded thought, then you went on to discard perception, then he went on to discard any kind of sensory content in awareness until you were, so far as anyone could say, aware of nothing and they supposed that this kind of
catatonic state was mystical consciousness. This is often believed in India. If you go to the Vedanta Society and ask “what do you mean by Nirvikalpa Samadhi?” they will tell you that the one in that state has no consciousness whatsoever of the sensory world; that he is completely absorbed as you sometimes see Hindu holy men sitting in a state where they are blind and deaf to everything going on around them.

The founder of Chinese Zen known as Hui-neng, described people like that as no better than pieces of rock and lumps of wood and said is a very serious mistake indeed to confuse Sunyata, the sanskrit word for “the great void”, which is both the ultimate reality and the consciousness thereof, it is a great mistake to confuse it with nothingness. It is rather to be thought of as space, or like space, because space is not empty, it contains the whole universe and so in the same way the state of mind of a person who is truly enlightened is not empty; it contains everything, but like space it is not stained by what it contains and it’s often said in Zen imagery: you can’t hammer a nail into space; you can’t spit on the sky and soil it; if you try, the spit will just return and hit your own face.

So they go on to say the consciousness in all of us, your basic mind, is like space. It is completely pure, but of course by purity they don’t mean unsexual, which is of course what purity generally means in the Western world: blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. A person who’s pure in heart is generally understood as one who never has any naughty thoughts. You know what “naughty” means? It means “vain”, “negative”, “empty”. A naughty person therefore is one who doesn’t amount to anything; he’s just nothing; that’s the real meaning, but this misunderstanding of the nature of contemplation existed not only in India, from which it was transmitted to China, but also in the West.

You read many treatises on Western mysticism and there’s still the feeling that getting into a deep deep trance, sometimes called “rapture”, again the word “rapture” has undergone some transformations: we talk about rapture as people being beside themselves with pleasure, but to be rapt means “to be taken away from the body”. So also “ecstasy” we now interpret as meaning in a state of high pleasure, but it means “to be outside yourself, to stand outside yourself, your soul has left you it is with God.” As Arabs say of all crazy: people be kind to them, they’re not here; their soul is with God, but actually if it can be true, as Buddhists say, that Nirvana and Samsara are one, and if it can be true, as Christians say, that the spirit can be made flesh, the word can be made flesh, then obviously the highest form of man is not sitting in a trance like a lump on a log with a perfectly blank mind because, if that were the highest state of consciousness, it would be an exclusive state of mind; a state of mind that shuts out life and, in that sense, it could not qualify for being what the Hindus call non-dualistic.

They always speak of the highest reality as being not “one” because “one” excludes “many”; not “nothing” because “nothing” excludes “something”; not “being” because “being” excludes “non-being” and vice-versa, so they use this word “non-dual” to mean that which doesn’t exclude anything, which as it were has no outside: as we say space has no outside. You can only have outsides inside space; you can’t have any outsides outside space; there is no outside space even though space may be curved and finite.[/i]

yousubtitles.com/Alan-Watts- … id-1623818