Stream of Ry

“The battle between faith and lack thereof is completely unnecessary. It’s not important where you think love comes from, what’s important is that we share it and give it and accept it.” Agreed!

I think you make an awesome point. I am Jewish. Born into it, raised a Jew, bat mitzvah’d, the whole nine yards. However, as I grew up, I found my religious beliefs to be as diverse as if I’d been raised in multiple religions. I’m pretty sure my incarnation of God, the universe, the spirit, whatever it is, could care less if I eat chili cheese fries (GASP! Unkosher!) or have some bacon (see: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore). I don’t think the universe really cares if I dress “modestly,” wear a sheitl after I get married or work on a Saturday. What I do think the universe gives a damn about is me, trying as hard as I can not to be an asshole to people around me. Giving love at every opportunity and understanding that love is love, and it’s generally a good thing.

In other words, I totally agree with what you’ve said. I’m proud to be a Jew, but I also recognize that everyone gets it in their own way.

I have been thinking about this as well…I was raised Lutheran, baptized, and all that jazz. But growing up in a family/environment of people that generally don’t really give you an option or inform you that there are other ways to be spiritual or not– you are too ignorant/innocent to understand that you have a “choice”. As a child, you do what you’re told…

It’s amazing how so much of my perspective on spirituality has changed as I age. The fact that “religion” has been the cause of unnecessary war, unnecessary pain & suffering, and unnecessary death is beyond mind boggling. If we all could just respect one another’s beliefs , how much of this world we call home would be at peace?

I show respect and honor that everyone has their “own way” whether it be in solitude or in a church of some kind with their hands up in the air and speaking in tongues…But I have to say, those guys in the white shirts and black pants knocking on my door to spread the “Word of God” every other day, is really beginning to wear thin on me. lol

Without religion, how do you know what’s right and wrong?

Even with religion, different religions have different takes on what is right and wrong. I think a simple concept of what is right or wrong is, “Does what I am doing/what I to do hurt anyone?” If the answer is yes, it’s wrong to do it.

exactly, revtomorrow! I don’t feel you need religion to know what’s right and wrong. Isn’t that pretty instinctual? Or at least taught. I guess I just have a negative feeling on organized religion. My family was pretty strict catholic when I was growing up. I had such bad experiences when I was growing up because I was a bit naughty and didn’t follow rules very well. So I never quite belonged, always getting yelled at on retreats & other outings with the church. As soon as I could make my own decision, I ran as far as I could away from it and haven’t been back since.

“So, here’s to breaking down barriers and opening arms and hearts. ” Yes, yes yes!!

Swiftwing – “right” and “wrong” are subjective. However, it doesn’t take religion to understand that if you harm others, there are consequences. If you’re in a tribe and you steal food or attack someone there will be a reaction. You know that if someone does such things to you how it feels.

The “do unto others” idea wasn’t invented by Jesus, he was just speaking common sense. No one needs a spiritual rulebook in order to figure out these things, they just need to be human and have spent some time around other humans. It’s basic social interaction.

After all, we made it for many thousands of years before we started writing religious texts. Unfortunately, religious texts pile senseless rules on top of common sense ones, which confuses people as to what really is right or wrong.

I wish this type of discussion took into consideration that there are the shades of religion across the continuum of experience and practice that bring wholeness (more in keeping with the intent of the word as I understand it, “to make as one, whole, etc.” and then there are of course the understandings that do the opposite and cause all the woes of the world, that cause the divisions. The insights of the founders of the religion (and their heirs too, the prophetic voices and mystics and people who get it) are of value to all. They are gifts to humanity. But the people who don’t do the inner work and aren’t initiated in that, and who are not taken to a place where their ego is put in its proper place are the ones who cause the strife. And unfortunately, the ego can lead people who are uninitiated in the true mystery of any religion into positions of authority where they can cause their havoc. Sad. If anything I think people need to be MORE religious at the level of transformation that any religion offers. But in broad terms there is good religion and bad, and I think the distinction between the poles comes in how well it transforms people into something better, and at what level of their being.

We were born as complete humans, I believe. We don’t need to add mystical beliefs in order to be fully present, conscious and kind. At least, I and a lot of atheists I know don’t. Simply because we are human, we are capable of kindness or malice. One can come up with a system to help direct people towards a more focused and less egotistical headspace, but spirituality isn’t mandatory for such a thing.

I think there’s a general idea among many spiritual people that those without spirituality are somehow lacking and incomplete. I used to think that way, and such ideas made me arrogant. I believe in human equality, which does not require any kind of spirituality. We were born as equal humans, and whatever beliefs we take on later does not make any of us any more or less so.

Oh, and if we’re focused on whether or not someone else is spiritual, we’re not focused on just loving them as they are.

I think people who talk like you have spirituality as a sense but don’t attribute it as a separate component of life, with perhaps its own vocabulary and “story”. I don’t think the believer-atheist binary set is able to dismiss the great mysteries of life, but they certainly have their differing philosophic views of them, what they mean, who embodies it best, etc. That most recent comment of yours is quite a spiritual minded thing, but where did it emerge from? If you want to say that came intuitively, then fine. But you didn’t invent it. You can’t control it being within you. Everyone has it too, but often are so conflicted that it is something even they are unaware of, and therefore unable to act upon. It needs to be given back to them. Good religion will do that. Bad religion will lock up their birthright and lose the key. No wonder people don’t want to spend more time in those settings. But I think the nature of being human endows us with all the goodness we need. It’s a cultural thing whether that is cultivated or not. I think that it is sad to throw Christianity (in particular) out with the bathwater because at its best it is a critique of that same cultural value system, and promises to help people reclaim their birthright of wholeness and kindness and all that good stuff. The problem isn’t with the kernel of truth Jesus understood and advocated. It’s with people who don’t understand it. But any of us can get there. Part of his message was that each of us has a hotline to the ultimate reality of life, but it takes the hard slog on the way there, the loss of delusions of self, shaped by culture, family, even religion. So, whether that is achieved using one mythology or another or none at all does not worry me. What worries me is that some think they can live on the outside of that reality and live as if they are not connected to life and others at a profound level.

Why would talk of love be necessarily spiritual? Things like compassion, love, seeing humanity as somehow connected, etc don’t require spirituality. That’s the whole point…it’s nice if you want to have it, but it’s not required. An atheist is exactly as capable of being altruistic, loving, centered, etc. as the most lofty guru. Both are simply human.

See, when I was spiritual, I spent so much time worrying about how spiritual I was. Whether I was on the right path. Was I hurting my karma? Should I go get a candle and a crystal and a tarot reading to help me figure things out? Now I don’t worry about it, I just treat people well and don’t worry about what they do in their heads.

I figure it this way: if it is true that we all come from one source and will return to it, then there’s nothing to worry about. If it isn’t true, then there’s nothing to worry about. Whether or not there is a god or spirit or whatever is irrelevant to how we choose to treat each other. If one looks down on or pities another because they don’t share the same belief as themselves, or think that the person is “missing something”, then they’re just judging. I found I was far more judgmental when I was spiritual, strangely. I judged others according to how spiritual I thought they were. Eventually I realized that it was pointless to even worry about it.

If one chooses to be religious or spiritual, fine. If one doesn’t, equally fine. My point is, when it comes down to how humanity deals with each other, it should not be relevant at all. If someone is in dire need of help, I’m not to assess them first to determine if they’re worthy.

I agree that any of us can get “there”. However one doesn’t even need to believe we’re all connected in order to be kind. Perhaps it helps, but even that is not a requirement for compassion. If it matters to you to believe it, then believe it. What others believe shouldn’t matter at all. After all, when I used to believe that we were all spiritually connected, that belief didn’t stop me from occasionally being a selfish asshole. Spirituality doesn’t prevent people from doing bad things.

So, it’s what we DO, not what we believe that really matters, because it’s our actions (or lack thereof) that affect others. True, our beliefs often inform our actions, but we’re capable of choosing how to act, regardless of our beliefs. Personally, I’d have a pint with anyone before even thinking about what they believe. If they turn out to be shitty, then there’s no second pint and life goes on.

Right or wrong. Why do you do what you do? Do you do things just for the sake of doing it? Religious people do things for the destination.

Depends on the situation. I don’t need a “why”. I’m here, other people are here, the rest is up to us. Personally, I just like exploring life. I figure, why not be good because it simply tends to make things work out better? There may or may not be a purpose for life. Either way, I just choose to be kind.

Richard Rohr likes to say “we are spiritual beings trying to become more human.” Compassion, love, and seeing things as connected IS the domain of spirituality. It IS what spirituality is. We’re born with a lot of innate ability to operate in that realm but society takes it apart piece by piece and our task of “becoming” more spiritual as life goes on, maybe after 25 or more years of being taken apart by social pressure and handed a basket case of ourselves, is to reclaim what was lost.

I go to a progressive Christian church. I doubt I will be able to sell any of you, but we’re rather liberal in our interpretation and a good range of people attend. There is a totally cute little 3 year old girl who has what still seems to be an unfettered spirit. She doesn’t yet feel disconnected or alienated or managed, if you take her little bouncing and dancing and giggling gestures in worship as any sign. It’s quite cute. But one day, she was all aflutter and just having a moment of some kind of 3 year old bliss while doing a children’s choir performance when I think it was her sister (probably just wanting to focus on her own part) almost unthinkingly grabbed the little one and silenced her. Grabbed her arms and pulled them down to her sides so she’d be properly contained in church. Over the little girl’s face came a flush of a frown and a glance at her sister with a look of shocked disappointment. It made me sad to see it right before my own eyes.

From where I sat, it was something I recognized as just one of countless such instances she’s going to face as her inborn spirit is tamed by social pressures to conform and think not as herself but as the prevailing world does. It will take her places she does not want to go. Some dangerous too. It will have repercussions while she lives a life so shaped by values other than her own–in family, in consumption decisions, in who to vote for. But eventually, she will have to start to reclaim that original spirit of who she is, and live from that. She’ll have to eventually shed the social skin so she can wear her own again, according to the compass she was given to live as she was created to be.

Now all the Jesus doubters might pile on against this, but that reclaiming of the innateness of being is part of what Jesus gives people. The death is a death to the false self that gets built up over time. The resurrection is the emerging as a true self that can still reference the false stuff but that isn’t governed by it. The idea of all that is to get back to who already are. It seems that the socialized human mind can’t bear that we could be anything without being socialized, “civilized” and all that. Like, we’re nothing if we aren’t “made” by our own thoughts and such. I think that’s crap. There are no self made people unless these people first invented the universe. The mysteries of interrelatedness are all around for us to tap into and live in wonder before. We’ll never outthink that. The good religious stuff helps people live in that space, not to deny it, not to think we can think our ways out of the interrelated and interdependent order of things. Not to deny others access to same. We’re born with what we need. It get stolen away a little at a time, and we have to steal it back either a little at a time, or in breakthrough periods that some call conversions. And since you don’t learn how to do that from people of power and pop culture, the old figures of Jesus, Buddha, Moses and their kind are still there to point the way to reclaiming a self that operates out of the deep well of life, and not out of the shallow well of culture. Jesus was willing to die to culture in the clearest way, not for our sins but as a grand expose that a righteous person is an enemy of the state. The person who lives a God-shaped life is dangerous to the status quo, that would just as readily put him on a cross or in the ground, or like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, on a gallows. Shedding the pressure of socialization comes at a price: the loss of who you THINK you are. But it gives you the chance to claim who you REALLY are.

Kelliann—I think it would be a finer point to say you don’t need one religious mythology to know what is right or wrong. I say that because the word religion connotes wholeness, integration, healing, and I think people have unfortunately had bad practitioners shape their consciousness of what religion means. I don’t defend the damaging practices my beloved Christianity has engaged in. But you know what? Our founder’s conviction holds that to task. The scriptures too hold that to task. In a lot of ways, the Church has indeed become what Jesus was trying to point people away from. It can still happen. There isn’t an expiration date.

His word and his method is timeless when it is seen as a demonstration of self giving love, motivated out of a gut-level experience of life, rooted in an awareness of interconnectedness, that what hurts one hurts many. That much can be taken for true because we have its opposite to evidence what life is like when we work using opposite values of self-centeredness, head games, and a culture that favors individualism. Notice that prior to “Enlightenment” era thought, we were never so close to worrying about how we had the power to destroy ourselves, our land, our livable space in the universe! We got more brains now than ever, in sheer biomass and numbers. But now we fear and dread extinction at the hands of our weapons, our science, and dare I say, our own ability to think. Jesus was a man of feeling. He felt first. He felt deeply. This is why I think atheism is stupid shit. It’s just a head game, and from my pov, seemingly stripped of feeling (or the ability to use language to indicate it anyway).

But my case is not for bad religion (church abuse, backward theology, etc) vs. atheism. That’s a worthless set of options to be locked into. Where I go to church, we have hundreds of people who are burnt by church dogma or politics (lots of LGBT folks), or by sexual abuse at the hands of Catholics, and many others. But the prevailing message of Christianity seems to unite: that after the death at the hands of society comes the life in the hands of God (or however you like to word your understanding of the deepest currents of life). There are theologies that are more inviting to life and those that are less so. Sorry the Church has been such a bad custodian of the Great Mystery. But you know what? It won’t be able to see its errors if people only ever flee from it. That will just hunker it down and make it even narrower. I feel like people need to remain and resist from the inside. The church can’t be left with all the people of shallow and narrow conscience. The whole nature of the church was to embrace the lost and poor and other disadvantaged, and it really has to be called back to task, not by any philosophical “challenge” from atheism or agnosticism, but by the people who were launched in that environment. Right now, LGBT folks are at that crossroads, and some are going to seminary anyway, and eventually their influence will be felt alongside that of women and folks of different races or other social situations that have been ignored but that are getting their day. The church from now on will be a bigger place than ever.

My head is spinning – thanks for all the great posts!

tapkae – How is a lack of belief in a god a head game? All atheism is, is a lack of belief in any god. Anything else you see in it is your projections. Saying it’s a head game is like looking through a clear window and claiming it’s stained glass.

Also, I think it’s a bit rude to say that my worldview is “stupid shit. That kind of stuff is why there’s division in humanity. I can point to a lot of wrong done due to Christians, but I overlook it and instead say, “Hey, I’m willing to accept you as you are, regardless of what you believe.” I find it odd that, with all your talk of how much good Jesus is supposed to do for you, that you can’t do the same. You’ll never be anything close to what Jesus supposedly taught as long as you insult the worldviews of others.

One thing I’ve noticed many times in the last few years. I put out my hand in open friendship and acceptance towards those who think their beliefs make them more moral, and they turn their noses up at it, if they don’t slap it away. Kind of makes it hard to take such people seriously. What’s moral about judgment?

one can make the distinction between implicate order and explicate order, the former being the realm of the quantum physicist and the eastern mystic, and the latter, which includes conventional christianity (i make the distinction from more enlightened forms of christianity, apparently which is practiced by some of the posters here, nice!) and supernaturalism/superstition, etc. ‘god’ need not be an ‘external agent’ but is implicate in the structure of life itself. and that also could be called an atheistic notion of god, since atheism posits that there is no EXTERNAL entity. more later, sleepytime…

Atheism doesn’t posit anything. It’s a lack of belief in any god, which is not the same thing as actively believing the no gods exist. While it’s true that many atheists actively believe there is no god, that is not the definition of atheism.

a = not or without
theism = belief in a deity
a+theism = without a belief in a deity

I understand the common understanding of the word, but we have to explain this pretty much as often as gay people have to explain that they’re not interested in fucking everyone of their own gender.

good distinction. ‘posit’ was not the best choice of word for what i meant

i am a former diehard atheist, now a spiritual person, not affiliated with any religion, though… arrived at this by personal experience.

extremely interesting personal experiences, that is!

i do think that most mainstream fundamentalist religion is very maddening. i would prefer to live in a secular society than a religiously-controlled society, any day!

heh, I’m basically the same in reverse! Good to meet you, either way! And, I don’t blame you for the distinction, it’s basically the general public consensus on atheists, heh! So, do you miss eating babies?

ya, i guess i was more biased towards my own version. there is a treatise somewhere on the interwebs by a frenchman called ‘the spiritual atheist’… afraid the baby crack went over my head, but it’s real late here! mind is dim!

Ah, it’s just a joke going around atheist circles these days…how when many people find out we’re atheist they act like we ate their baby.

I’m pretty casual as far as most atheists go. I went through the whole backlash phase and then mellowed out. Interestingly, I still keep a lot of the good stuff I learned from Buddhism and the like, as far as non-attachment goes. All those years having a very zen mindset kind of stayed with me, so I tend to be more accepting than a lot of my fellow atheists. I’m what some atheists would call an “appeaser” because I don’t seek to eradicate all that is not science. Whatever. I just would rather see people putting all that aside and putting their hands to work helping each other.

ya. i like science. i also like buddhism, taoism, most eastern thinking/philosophy. as an artist/musician i tend to look for unifying principles..

There are as many paths as there are people. Thanks for all the interesting posts and thoughts )

hops – That reminds me of one of my favorite things to say: There is no such things as one right way for everyone to live.

up2eleven – I agree, I have my beliefs and they are just that… mine. “There are as many paths as there are people” is something I say all the time and is part of these beliefs.

Similar to your quote, it personifies what this site is about, ‘any beat’ or many beats of different drums…