Doubt - Spirituality

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Category:Religion & Beliefs | Tags:doubt, faith

Created:on 2007-12-11 | Updated:on 2008-05-14

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The Neural Buddhists - New York Times

the genetic and neuroscience revolutions would affect public debate. They would kick off another fundamental argument over whether God exists.

Tags: science, religion, neuroscience on 2008-05-15 -All Annotations (0) -About

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- the militant materialism of some modern scientists.
  
  To these self-confident researchers, the idea that the spirit might exist apart from the body is just ridiculous. Instead, everything arises from atoms. Genes shape temperament. Brain chemicals shape behavior. Assemblies of neurons create consciousness. Free will is an illusion. Human beings are “hard-wired” to do this or that. Religion is an accident.
  
  In this materialist view, people perceive God’s existence because their brains have evolved to confabulate belief systems.
- the genetic and neuroscience revolutions would affect public debate. They would kick off another fundamental argument over whether God exists.
- The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going to end up challenging faith in the Bible.
- This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.
- First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.
- In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation.
- the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate.
- The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits.
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Top Ten - Top 10 Arthur C. Clarke Quotes - Top 10 - 2001: A Space Odyssey Quotes

"The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion."

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Salon.com Life | You are the river: An interview with Ken Wilber

The integral philosopher explains the difference between religion, New Age fads and the ultimate reality that traditional science can't touch.

Tags: religion, science, mysticism on 2008-04-28 -All Annotations (0) -About

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BBC/OU Open2.net - Philosophy & Ethics

Philosophy and Ethics Explore those who are the guides to our understanding of the world - what leads philosophers to make leaps of faith? What is faith, and how does it shape our world? When ethical decisions are needed, who sets the standards?

Tags: Philosophy, Ethics, faith on 2008-04-09 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Books | The atheist delusion

The atheist delusion 'Opposition to religion occupies the high ground, intellectually and morally,' wrote Martin Amis recently. Over the past few years, leading writers and thinkers have published bestselling tracts against God. John Gray on why the 'secular fundamentalists' have got it all wrong

Tags: John Gray, atheist on 2008-03-30 -All Annotations (4) -About

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- The mass political movements of the 20th century were vehicles for myths inherited from religion, and it is no accident that religion is reviving now that these movements have collapsed. The current hostility to religion is a reaction against this turnabout. Secularisation is in retreat, and the result is the appearance of an evangelical type of atheism not seen since Victorian times.
- As in the past, this is a type of atheism that mirrors the faith it rejects.
- the idea of free will that informs liberal notions of personal autonomy is biblical in origin (think of the Genesis story). The belief that exercising free will is part of being human is a legacy of faith, and like most varieties of atheism today,
- Zealous atheism renews some of the worst features of Christianity and Islam. Just as much as these religions, it is a project of universal conversion. Evangelical atheists never doubt that human life can be transformed if everyone accepts their view of things, and they are certain that one way of living - their own, suitably embellished - is right for everybody. To be sure, atheism need not be a missionary creed of this kind. It is entirely reasonable to have no religious beliefs, and yet be friendly to religion. It is a funny sort of humanism that condemns an impulse that is peculiarly human. Yet that is what evangelical atheists do when they demonise religion.
  The crux of the ironical paradox!
  posted by amortal on 2008-03-30 05:26:24
- But religions do not consist of propositions struggling to become theories. The incomprehensibility of the divine is at the heart of Eastern Christianity, while in Orthodox Judaism practice tends to have priority over doctrine. Buddhism has always recognised that in spiritual matters truth is ineffable, as do Sufi traditions in Islam. Hinduism has never defined itself by anything as simplistic as a creed. It is only some western Christian traditions, under the influence of Greek philosophy, which have tried to turn religion into an explanatory theory.
  ...and in western christian mystical spirituality, the path to the devine is one of "unknowing" - in greek 'agnosia'.
  posted by amortal on 2008-03-30 05:29:25
- In an interview that appears on the website of the Edge Foundation (edge.org) under the title "The Evaporation of the Powerful Mystique of Religion", he predicts that "in about 25 years almost all religions will have evolved into very different phenomena, so much so that in most quarters religion will no longer command the awe that it does today". He is confident that this will come about, he tells us, mainly because of "the worldwide spread of information technology (not just the internet, but cell phones and portable radios and television)". The philosopher has evidently not reflected on the ubiquity of mobile phones among the Taliban, or the emergence of a virtual al-Qaida on the web.
- Both science and religion are systems of symbols that serve human needs - in the case of science, for prediction and control. Religions have served many purposes, but at bottom they answer to a need for meaning that is met by myth rather than explanation. A great deal of modern thought consists of secular myths - hollowed-out religious narratives translated into pseudo-science.
- Dawkins seems convinced that if it were not inculcated in schools and families, religion would die out. This is a view that has more in common with a certain type of fundamentalist theology than with Darwinian theory, and I cannot help being reminded of the evangelical Christian who assured me that children reared in a chaste environment would grow up without illicit sexual impulses.
- Dawkins's "memetic theory of religion" is a classic example of the nonsense that is spawned when Darwinian thinking is applied outside its proper sphere.
- Unfortunately, the theory of memes is science only in the sense that Intelligent Design is science. Strictly speaking, it is not even a theory. Talk of memes is just the latest in a succession of ill-judged Darwinian metaphors.
- Dawkins makes much of the oppression perpetrated by religion, which is real enough. He gives less attention to the fact that some of the worst atrocities of modern times were committed by regimes that claimed scientific sanction for their crimes. Nazi "scientific racism" and Soviet "dialectical materialism" reduced the unfathomable complexity of human lives to the deadly simplicity of a scientific formula. In each case, the science was bogus, but it was accepted as genuine at the time, and not only in the regimes in question. Science is as liable to be used for inhumane purposes as any other human institution. Indeed, given the enormous authority science enjoys, the risk of it being used in this way is greater.
- might there not be a connection between the attempt to eradicate religion and the loss of freedom? It is unlikely that Mao, who launched his assault on the people and culture of Tibet with the slogan "Religion is poison", would have agreed that his atheist world-view had no bearing on his policies.
- the idea of religion itself - have been shaped by monotheism. Lying behind secular fundamentalism is a conception of history that derives from religion.
- the belief that history is a directional process is as faith-based as anything in the Christian catechism.
- Secular thinkers such as Grayling reject the idea of providence, but they continue to think humankind is moving towards a universal goal - a civilisation based on science that will eventually encompass the entire species. In pre-Christian Europe, human life was understood as a series of cycles; history was seen as tragic or comic rather than redemptive. With the arrival of Christianity, it came to be believed that history had a predetermined goal, which was human salvation. Though they suppress their religious content, secular humanists continue to cling to similar beliefs.
- it is obvious that the idea of progress in history is a myth created by the need for meaning.
- The problem with the secular narrative is not that it assumes progress is inevitable (in many versions, it does not). It is the belief that the sort of advance that has been achieved in science can be reproduced in ethics and politics. In fact, while scientific knowledge increases cumulatively, nothing of the kind happens in society.
- People live longer and kill one another in larger numbers. Knowledge grows, but human beings remain much the same.
- Belief in progress is a relic of the Christian view of history as a universal narrative, and an intellectually rigorous atheism would start by questioning it.
- evangelical atheists have positioned themselves as defenders of liberal freedoms - rarely inquiring where these freedoms have come from, and never allowing that religion may have had a part in creating them.
- The key liberal theorists of toleration are John Locke, who defended religious freedom in explicitly Christian terms, and Benedict Spinoza, a Jewish rationalist who was also a mystic.
- It may be true that Jews first developed monotheism, but Judaism has never been a missionary faith. In seeking universal conversion, evangelical atheism belongs with Christianity and Islam.
- Islamists owe as much, if not more, to the far left, and it would be more accurate to describe many of them as Islamo-Leninists
- It is not necessary to believe in any narrative of progress to think liberal societies are worth resolutely defending.
- Some neocons - such as Tony Blair, who will soon be teaching religion and politics at Yale - combine their belligerent progressivism with religious belief, though of a kind Augustine and Pascal might find hard to recognise. Most are secular utopians, who justify pre-emptive war and excuse torture as leading to a radiant future in which democracy will be adopted universally. Even on the high ground of the west, messianic politics has not lost its dangerous appeal.
- Religion has not gone away. Repressing it is like repressing sex, a self-defeating enterprise.
- Not everything in religion is precious or deserving of reverence. There is an inheritance of anthropocentrism, the ugly fantasy that the Earth exists to serve humans, which most secular humanists share. There is the claim of religious authorities, also made by atheist regimes, to decide how people can express their sexuality, control their fertility and end their lives, which should be rejected categorically. Nobody should be allowed to curtail freedom in these ways, and no religion has the right to break the peace.
- The attempt to eradicate religion, however, only leads to it reappearing in grotesque and degraded forms.
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James Randi - Multimedia

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Wilber Watch

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INTEGRALWORLD.NET - EXPLORING THEORIES OF EVERYTHING

On Hermeneutics & The Wilber Inner Circle

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A Critique of Wilber and Beck's SD-Integral

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The Cult of Ken Wilber revisited

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The Cult of Ken Wilber

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Spirituality Outside The Pews -- Courant.com

Growing Numbers Seek Meaning Without The Framework Of Formal Religion

Tags: no_tag on 2008-03-23 -All Annotations (0) -About

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AlterNet: The Dangerous Atheism of Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris

adapted from the new book by Chris Hedges, I Don't Believe in Atheists (Free Press, 2008)

Tags: atheism on 2008-03-23 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Freedom of thought and of religion

Article 145 of the Constitution of Guyana provides as follows: 145. (1) Except with his own consent, no person shall be hindered in the enjoyment of his freedom of conscience, and for the purposes of this article the said freedom includes freedom of thought and of religion, freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others, and both in public and in private, to manifest and propagate his religion or belief in worship, teaching, practice and observance.

Tags: Freedom, religion, thought on 2008-03-23 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Mixing medicine with religion may limit our potential

Mixing medicine with religion may limit our potential

Tags: medicine, religion on 2008-03-23 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Proto-Indo-European religion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The existence of similarities among the deities and religious practices of the Indo-European peoples allows glimpses of a common Proto-Indo-European religion and mythology. This hypothetical religion would have been the ancestor of the majority of the religions of pre-Christian Europe, of the Indian religions, and of Zoroastrianism in Iran.

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Review - Eisenman's - James the Brother of Jesus by Robert M. Price

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New Testament Narrative as Old Testament Midrash by Robert M. Price

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Tillich on Christian Faith and the Plurality of World Religions by Robert M. Price

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Doubt - Spirituality

The Neural Buddhists - New York Times

Top Ten - Top 10 Arthur C. Clarke Quotes - Top 10 - 2001: A Space Odyssey Quotes

Salon.com Life | You are the river: An interview with Ken Wilber

BBC/OU Open2.net - Philosophy & Ethics

Books | The atheist delusion

James Randi - Multimedia

Wilber Watch

INTEGRALWORLD.NET - EXPLORING THEORIES OF EVERYTHING

A Critique of Wilber and Beck's SD-Integral

The Cult of Ken Wilber revisited

The Cult of Ken Wilber

Spirituality Outside The Pews -- Courant.com

AlterNet: The Dangerous Atheism of Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris

Freedom of thought and of religion

Mixing medicine with religion may limit our potential

Proto-Indo-European religion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Review - Eisenman's - James the Brother of Jesus by Robert M. Price

New Testament Narrative as Old Testament Midrash by Robert M. Price

Tillich on Christian Faith and the Plurality of World Religions by Robert M. Price

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