Look who’s talking. I am sending a link of this post to Mia ( but only after you are done with helping with the furniture move next week 
)
Stop ! 
Try an Alpha course, lots of answers there. Religion has nothing to do with man made rules for man . . . Religion is from God for everybody. Mankind has created “culture” to implement greed and control.
You are willing to allow women who are forced to wear the burka/niqab as a symbol of oppression to continue being oppressed to protect the freedoms of women who choose to wear the burka/niqab.
Fine, that is your choice. End of discussion really.
Says who? Prophets? So they are not men or do you have the absolute scientific proof that they talk for god?
Please, Mr bubble and squick, you may enlighten me…
I don’t allow anything to happen in Afghanistan, or not happen for that matter. Nothing to do with me, it’s their country, their culture.
If you think the Afgan women are going to see any benefit from the French banning anything, then you have been smoking too much pot.
Please, let this be the end of your drivel . . . please ;)
I can’t enlighten you, woudn’t even try Find out for yourself if you’re interested enough.
Cripes Steve! Your sounding dangerously like a socialist*! ;)
(could it be something to do with socialism incorporating the best bits of Judaeo/Christianity like looking after your brother/sister to the best of your ability and resources while leaving out the smiting/misogynistic bits).
I have a capitalist approach to socialism 
:w00t:
Why did this thread derail? 
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Well as far as I last checked, it wasn’t created by an intellectual high brow society of tabby cats…
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That’s too much of a leap in logic: you’re trying to explain your premise (that religion was created for men by men), by referring a specific example of its practice. Abstaining from pork; or the practice of circumcision offers nothing as a form of logic nor specific example to help explain your premise.
Try looking at it … the mystery of religion …in another way: in its broader and meaningful context: what drives people to identify with a religion? It’s not the clothes (e.g. burka) nor the food they eat (halal meat): not the concrete and physical phenomenal world, but the spiritual and the metaphysical.
If you are looking for an explanation of religion by examining phenomena, all you can assume, is that your method is that of a materialist. If you wish to do away with believing in a material-only world, then it requires looking at what is inherently ‘spiritual’ as a principle: not its pragmatic practice.
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It’s almost ridiculous hearing this explanation, so I hope you didn’t try too hard to come up with it
It just seems that your logic is trapped in a pre-medieval logic of refutation. Dare I say… ‘old testament’ mentality lol :D**
Thing is Scooterassassin, without the “rules” of religion, it is merely philosophy.
Why isn’t “I think therefore I am” a religion? It answers the same question as “God made us”. “Why are we here” being that question.
It is the rules, the rules you must follow to please God, that makes religion. The spiritual, metaphysical etc etc is just philosophy, you don’t need religion for that.
That’s not corret either Kaos; the accreted practices of a religious philosophy, when the practices are unmasked, does not reveal mere philosophy. What is unmasked, is that essentially nebulous domain of ‘spirituality’.
Philosophy and religion took a dividing course in the Enlightenment; whereas the renaissance philosopher could understand the world and explore it philosophically, by examining philosophy in the light of religion, that’s to say, the spiritual principles informed the renaissance philosopher…this was also his limit. There was no exploration of the principiae scientia, in the absence of God. This is equally true of the medieval mind.
You ask why a singular premise: “I think, therefore I am”, is not a religious premise. Firstly, because it is misconstructed as a premise from the outset. It is a philosophical premise, when systematised into the Latin form: Ac proinde hæc cognitio, ego cogito, ergo sum, est omnium prima & certissima, quæ cuilibet ordine philosophanti occurrat. , you can see how even more ridiculous the Cartesian statement is (if you can read Latin). The simplification “Cogito ergo sum”, is characteristic of Descartes’ schizoid and detached personality: from a man, constantly in flight from his own inherent psychological demons…one who constructs a demon to challenge in a cognitive way, to explain away anxiety through the principles of ‘self-doubt’. If Descartes ‘knew’ himself, in the fullest import of the verb to know , not as a reduction into the form of a mere ‘ego, cogito’, he would then be back in the position of Socrates: ** “Know thyself”** . Whereas Socrates understands the function of knowing, in terms of informing the existential nature of man, Descartes makes a logical fallacy, and presumes that knowing in its form of not-knowing or doubting, constitutes knowledge.
This is not to say Descartes’ principles are useless. Far from it - they are useful. This form of pragmatism, has come to shape the western mindset: pragmatism overrides, knowing (in the Socratic sense). Descartes’ philosophical position, is also why the statement ‘I know, therefore I am’ it is not religion; the Cartesian method, is a method of ‘knowing’ through uncertainty. Religion offers no such thing: religion ascribes certainty, either a set of reified principles, accreted through historical culture and tradition (e.g. the Hindu tradition, or the Confucian tradition, the latter of which, believes in no deity, and therefore fits with atheism very well), or in what is intrinsically, Christian revelation .
In that sense, religion operates diametrically opposite, to your statement, “I think therefore I am”. All such a statement imports, is the unconscious belief, that “I am my own god - therefore I can be as I please…I can think as I please…I can do as I please.”
To answer your question: Christian revelation, is of a different order than religious practice. It is refractory to examination by the scientific method, being neither invalidated by the scientific method, nor accessible to it. This is the nature of faith; not in opposition to science as some crackpots would foolishly assume (like Dawkins), not dependent on science (like some philosophers e.g. Teilhard de Chardin would have us believe).
The rules of organisation for a society, particularly a western society, do indeed derive from early church practices. Your body follows the rules of physiology; and the physiology is a branch of science which can explain your bodily functions, however that is not to say, that your body pleases science, or that your bodily practice makes science. Such a kind of discourse is sheer nonsense:
spirituality and philosophy have always operated with uncertain boundaries. Thus, the Greek Skeptics, who refuted all of the forms of knowing which you or I hold, such as epistemic themes - had no qualms in rejecting philosophy, however had their own body of spiritual beliefs about the origin of the world.
More relevant to you: you have a belief set, even if you are unaware of this (in this instance, Socrates, would state that this is the ‘unexamined life…which is not worth living’). Some profess a spiritual belief (a declaration of faith, based on an existential choice on logical/illogical beliefs).
That some do not recognise their own belief set, does not make them void of bias: the worse examples in contemporary society are the ardent atheists, who worship every Sunday at Sainsburys, collecting Nectar points at the cashiers’ desk, unaware of their rituals and rites with the shopping trolley, heart loaded with pure material fantasies of ‘3 for 2’ and other similar discounts. These rituals…are phenomenologically…no different than the Sunday churchgoer, who lines up in his pew…recites in antiphon, verse for verse, rather than parading aisle after aisle…and does his checkout at the communion table. The difference is not the ritual; not the practice: this kind of thinking can only aim to ridicule religion. What is different is the mindset and its intention.
PS: “Why are we here” is a question which needs to be framed accurately. Id est -
You can only answer such a question for yourself - not on behalf of others. This is a universal question, one on which you can take a biologically deterministic approach (“I’m here because dad liked mom”; or a genetic approach “X + Y chromosomes had a happy time together”; or a materialist approach “I’m here, because there is no human teleportation machine, so I can’t be anywhere else”; or a philosophical approach (dependent on epistemological and metaphysical principles); or a cultural approach (“I’m here because the Anglo-Saxons beat the Jutes and the Normans invaded”) or a religious approach.
Take any approach you like 
Religion doesn’t state that only those that believe in the religion were created by God, it states that everything and everyone was created by God, in essence it is attempting to answer the question for everyone.
To flip back to the start. Spirituality, absolutely meaningless word conjured around the notion of religion. Much the same as the term ‘sacred’ which also has no real meaning beyond that created for it by religion. These words are used by religion and psuedo-religion as a means to convey their philosophy as being something more, more then simply an idea but instead an understanding of our soul or our core being. When in reality it is no more and no less then any other philosophy, it is an idea about how we came to be.
Your rather odd tangent on Descartes makes little sense to the current debate. It is of no relevence what Descrates actually thought. That is not the point. It appears that you have run off on this wild tanget rather then deal with the point that I raised by relating to it. Religion is simply a philosophy with rules. That is the point I raised…what does Descartes’ schizoid and detached personality have to do with that point? I could have chosen ANY philosophy by ANY philosopher, I choose that one because it is short and well known. So the peculiarities of Descartes himself are irrelevent.
Christian revelation without religious practice is not Christian at all, it is merely the acceptance of an omnipotent being. Without the religious practices of Christianity how would you know the God was the Christian god? It is ONLY the practices that set apart Christianity from any other of the many monotheist religions. There are plenty of religions that believe in a single omnipotent being that will punish you if you don’t do as he says.
You can’t claim that society is the same as a “being” with desires and wants. Society doesn’t WANT anything from you, it is an inanimate thing. God is claimed to be a being that WANTS things. He wants you to pray, he wants you to be good, he doesn’t want to you kill and he doesn’t want to you eat pork on a Saturday…if you pick that particular God. Therefore the rules are to please him. You can’t compare inanimate ideas that have rules and claim an invalidation, now that really is nonsense.
I understand the point you make that people live by ritual, but that has nothing to do with belief and it has nothing to do with religion. To claim that the repetition in people’s lives amount to a belief system is just a step too far. People do live by ritual, we become accustomed to our surroundings and to a routine and an order in our lives. This has nothing to do with religion or a belief set.
Christians believe there is only one God. The only thing a Christian MUST do is believe in Jesus Christ as the Saviour and the Son of God . . . hence where the name Christian comes from. As far as God is concerned . . . if you meet that criteria you are a Christian . . . no rules to follow, nothing else. Forget what Catholic, CofE, Baptists might add to that . . . that one rule is sufficient.
If you read the Bible there are some suggestions in the New testament as God saw people had trouble living together . . . so he suggested some simple rules. They are all optional, a murderer or a rapist can still be a Christian . . .
The most important rule . . . with is also the hardest to do . . . is to love your neighbour as yourself. (Neighbour used to mean everybody else in thew World)
If you’re interested in what religion means then have a chat with your local Vicar or Minister . . . they are usually well educated in these matters and willing to debate if there’s even the remotest chance of a conversion
Kaos -
your view of religion is still too narrow. Take for example:
This is factually incorrect. Hindi, Buddhists, Confucians - none believe what you have written. These three major religions espouse evolution; creatio ex nihilo (some say this is the root structure of ‘evolution’): the phenomenal world, as a product of an order, which is not directed by a deity, as in ‘creation’. Only the Hindi of these three major religions, believe in anythign approximating to a f creator-God proposition that you suggest. Even then, they have a million different gods to choose from, from the belly-side upwards of a giant turtle on whose legs form the pillars of the world…believing somehow, mathematically, that these million gods are mere manifestations of the same (underlying principle of) God.
It’s meaningless…if you don’t understand it. That is not to say, it is meaningless for those who do.
In essence, all you’re offering … is your opinion. In that sense, you aren’t really interested in an exchange of views, or trying to understand the relationship between a ‘philosophical premise’'; an underlying ‘spiritual belief’, nor a manifestation of a ‘religious ritual’.
It is true that the medieval mindset, had a greater reverence for ‘the sacred’ in life, than perhaps contemporary society, which seeks to try to explain holiness and the ‘sacred’, as a form of relativism with no right or wrongs.
Again, I will insist that your ignorance of Latin, leads you to assume that the word ‘sacred’ means nothing.
The root of the English word ‘sacred’, derives from the Latin root ‘sacrum’.
‘Sacrum facere’ - “to make holy” is that very term, where the English language derives the word ‘sacrifice’. To sacrifice … is an act of interiority: it is an act of the heart, to make one’s life holy, in mind and practice (the latter, in the form of ritual, such as practicising sacramental life).
You say that the word ‘holy’ or ‘sacred’ is used by religion or pseudo-religion to convey a philosophical idea, when you in fact, seem to be trying to say, that religion inflates philosophy, through fluffy concepts as ‘holiness’, or ‘sacredness’.
This view is loaded with a world-view contemptuous and dismissive of spiritual life: for the religious, holiness and sacredness is not some kind of mentalistic ‘idea’. It is a way of life: it constitutes, the pre-Christian Socratic principle of ‘living life to its fullest’. Living out holiness, or sacredness in life, is no mere idea: it embodies and envelopes the one who lives this way: in this respect, it is an existential choice. Not some mere intellectualisation.
Cogito ergo sum? Who quoted that Descartes first Kaos lol.
Your argument, is a classic example of a tautological thought
I can see why you think this (within the confines of the logical rules which you’ve shown in the way you think). The Cartesian position of detachment, is essential to your argument: you wish to assert that ‘religion is simply a philosophy with rules’: you need to re-read to understand that I’ve refused to let you apply such a reductionistic way of thinking, insisting that religion and philosophy, are both motivated by inner life and spirituality - not detached in the simplistic binary fashion of ‘either/or’ which you would like to assert.
By all means - please do choose another philosopher. The example you gave of Descartes is fine with me. I can try and follow any example you have to offer (I confess, I did my Batchelor’s degree in Philosophy though ;)), however perhaps I won’t be lazy enough to let you run away with making such lazy premises which aren’t perhaps, as rigorous as you are capable of making them - if your heart is genuine in its exploration, then the path you choose in unmasking knowledge is more respectable: if it is not, then there will be a bridge for others to cross…and you know what they say…under every bridge lives a troll
(j/k)
No offence meant honestly!
As Steve points out … you’ve missed the point. It is not about show and tell. It is about, the basic condition of your ‘heart’, face to face, in relationship with the creator God in your example.
Perhaps what you are asking (tacitly) is…if all these religions claim to be the truth, how I can tell out of the 10,000 christian cults, or 1 million world religions, who the true God is?
No dispute there. But are we considering ‘society’ in this tangent, or … that fundamental difference, between religion and philosophy? Society may be inanimate however it still has expectations, which you grow up with, consciously or subconsciously. For instance - your language, follows the rules of grammar. Your code of conduct, accepts that killing is wrong, or speeding, is punishable as an offence. Society does expect conformity with its rules.
Im’ not sure any version of religion would claim that ‘God is … a being that WANTS things’. This describes a baby or an infant better. If this is a view you apply to religion, then it can only be a distortion.
Oh I see where you’re coming from now. An inanimate idea lol…is that different from an ‘animate’ idea?
Try and think about it from inanimate society’s perspective: society doesn’t want you to kill either! Society doesn’t want you to have food poisoning (unless you live with private healthcare on a charge-per-session basis).
Somehow your post suggests … that you do not understand religion at all. no wonder it seems so abominable in your eyes ;(
Well I’m not sure there’s any point in going on…but if you let me
Scientology, nothing to do with science everything to do with a mad individual who espoused that if you cannot make a million dollars found a religion.
So he did.
Absolutely Kevsta.
Does that example …of the spiritual yearning of those who are sucked into Dianetics and mother Hubbard’s bizarre world…describe how the politics of power, extends to religion too?
There are those who use religion as a form of power. This is Foucault’s premise. Power requires a channel to exercise dominion over others. Without this channel, power is impotent.
If western materialism wasn’t so spiritually vacuous, is it possible that the market freedom for the propagation of such cults, trading on religion and the spiritually bereft, would cease? If so, what else would it be filled by? Dialectical materialism? Socialism? Politics … in any other name *but **** * religion?
We were talking about monotheist religions, namely Islam (being the current theme of the thread we are in, and Christianity as a contrast) to now take my statements and apply them to non-monotheist religions outside of those two is rather silly. It is like taking some bodies comments about engine maintenance on this site and pulling them up when they don’t apply to a lorry…yes but it is a motorbike site and taken in context… Yes I didn’t constantly repeat that we were talking about these religions, but I thought it was a given that this was the context of the thread.
No it is simply meaningless, it doesn’t gain meaning by understanding, as I pointed out it is a concoction of religion to give greater meaning. All you are doing here is proclaiming the emporers new clothes. Well sorry I am not interested in pretending that there is some deeper understanding within the word, just to give strength to religion.
There is no spiritual belief, it is a pretence that religion perpetrates that it is more then a philosophical idea, that is the idea that I am trying to get across to you.
You seem to have misunderstood the point of saying that ‘sacred’ has no meaning. It wasn’t a literal lack of meaning, it was a lack of meaning in the sense that without religion it means nothing. Your knowledge of Latin is impressive, but pointless since you rely on yet another religious term that has no real meaning to anyone outside of religion, exactly the same as sacred. It is a religious concoction designed to give the ideas expressed by that religion more import.
Absolutely true that my world view is contemptuous and dismissive of the spiritual.
I didn’t quote Descartes as anything more then an example of a philosophy, not as some great meaningful example of something we should follow. There was little reason for you to then go into a massive discourse on Descartes, though I see why you did now, I tend to be the same on legal matters, it is easy to get caught up within your own thoughts imagining that others are as interested.
I do not believe that philosophy is a part of the “spiritual life” as you claim it to be. This is mainly because I don’t believe in the “spirit”, in the context of religion…see what you got me doing now? having to put everything into context, I do hope we can take spirit to mean the soul, the inner being, the part of us that is more then our bodies, rather then the spirit of the boxer, the will to continue under difficult odds and that I can stop putting it into context everytime I mention it?
You make statements about the spiritual life as if they were a given fact. A proved point that need only be referrenced now. I don’t think you can do that. I offer the opposite view that we are not a spirit but merely the systematic firing of neurons in a large gray blob in our heads.
I will add more as you lengthed your post after I posed…
The very point I raised…that religion is rules is corroborated by Steve… the only thing you need to do to be Christian is to believe in Jesus Christ. Well surely that is a rule of the religion. You have to believe in a character said to have lived 2,000 odd years ago who sacrificed himself for our sins. That is a rule you need to obey to be christian.
Not sure how I have failed to elucidate that this is the point of religions.
Well I have always found the religious representation of God to be rather childish and infantile, which is probably why my language portrays God in that way.
Yes an inanimate idea is different from an animate idea. God is an animate idea, a being that exists and therefore has thoughts and ideas. Society is an inanimate idea to explain the interactions between people in a larger community. Society doesn’t have any ideas, it doesn’t have any thoughts.
You can’t claim that society doesn’t want you to kill and that society doesn’t want you to have food poisoning. Society doesn’t exist in that way, you seem rather confused on that. Society isn’t some being with a desire, the rules that exist within a society are created by men and women. These men and women are the creator of the rules and they are animate.
By your line of reasoning my building doesn’t want me to set it on fire…because rules exist about setting my building on fire.
That is a really crazy way of thinking.
Hi Kaos,
You’ve missed Steve’s point (Steve can correct me if I’m mistaken).
Steve’s point is that the rules pale into insignificance; if a believer’s heart follows the cardinal rule of the Jewish Torah: “Love your God with all your heart, with all your strength and all of your mind”, coupled with the Christian dialectic: “Love your neighbour as you do yourself” - all the rules are insignificant.
Your post still confuses ‘rule’ with ‘belief’: are all ‘beliefs’ therefore, ‘rules’? If I believe that I will get killed if I go through a stop sign, is that because I am driven by rules, and my belief is a rule?
You can follow the rule (“STOP!”) whilst holding no belief. This is the predicament, of the spiritually vacuous, who attend Sunday church, believing somehow that their rules constitute their belief.
Quite to the contrary of your take on Steve’s post - I’m going to insist, that you confuse ‘rule’ with ‘existential choice’. The christian example you’ve cited, demonstrates that ‘to love your God and your neighbour, as you do yourself’ - is a free choice. This is not a rule: it is a free choice, which I believe is at the core of what Steve is trying to describe to you when he talks in terms of ‘acceptance’.
The above example is why you have failed to elucidate any clarity: a ‘belief’ is different from a ‘premise’; a ‘percept’ is different from a ‘precept’ which is different from an ‘injunction’, all of which come to play in making an existential choice. Reducing religion to a ‘rule set’, never gets to the point of ‘religion’, in the same way, that describing the physiological rules which your body follows, ever describes what humanity is. It does not; it describes the pure physiological and mechanical principles thereof.
Yes…this is undeniable when we look at a cross-section of a population. Returning to the Cartesian premise: “I think, therefore I am” - many who criticise the religious, see them as blind sheep, following some mullah or pastor, prefer to see themselves as ‘enlightened’ or ‘free-thinkers’ who choose their own morals; their own beliefs. There are always trite examples of the best of things; the worse of things. Whether we seek to justify our own beliefs, by looking at the worse examples, is a personal matter tho’.
Thinking about specifically christian literature, there is a profound distinction between being ‘child-like’ versus being ‘childish’. We have examples of many childish men (e.g. Pontius Pilate, who thinks that by pursuing rituals when his heart is unclean - such as the act of washing his hands in public, when his very actions have condemned Christ to the hooligan mob), or the foolish rich young man, who owns several penthouses, the state of the art Italian v-twin powered race chariot with 16 horsepower etc - who thinks he can follow all the Judaic rules …yet lacks love in his heart … all these examples are of spiritual childishness.
In contrast, being ‘child-like’, in the form of accepting ‘grace’, pursuing obedience and holiness as a way of life …as a way of the heart, and not some kind of prescriptive legislation. … this is elevated as a spiritual quality: quite a shock to the judgemental and critical Jewish sect of the Sadducees, or the know-it all legalists like the Pharisees, who couldn’t argue their way out of a paper bag, but insisted that kettle was pot and pot was a crack in the black…kettle pot…crack…pot.
Again, this view is incorrect: Spinoza, amongst the pantheistic philosophers, and even Newton, as a post-Enlightenment ‘deist’, and even Einstein to some extent, viewed God as a universal force, a bit like gravity.
Christianity has no interest in such views. It does not seek out a scientific explanatory power to justify itself. Neither is it interested in some impersonal force like gravity.
Ideas … any idea… can come to live (‘animated’), when it is lived out to its fullest. It is not an either/or. Religious ideas, can be sterile and dead; secular humanism (thinking of Erasmus), can offer some of the best goals we have ever seen in western Europe and vice versa. Society, is a collective of living individuals and minds; not some abstract and inanimate thing as you refer to in overly concrete terms.
No confusion here: but quit the projections I did not introduce the word ‘want’: this was your own doing. The confusion is in your mind, because I refused to accept, that society is an inanimate force: correct me if I’m wrong, but it was your words - ‘society does not want’ anything from you. I had merely reframed your use of the ‘want’ into ‘society expects of you … x, y, z’. There is a duty (deontological) towards society, if you live in it (which is how this thread started). Equally, there are principles, which decide how we respond to societal expectations (e.g. sticking to the speed limit). You are fine to abandon the example, which is in all honesty, somewhat childish when stated ‘society does not want … from you’. Society and citizenship, has a dialectical relationship: this is why I use the word ‘expectation’ which far from being pedantic, is necessary, to show that we do not live in a little vacuum bubble.
Yes it is totally crazy. Yet it isn’t my way of thinking either. Quit the projections Kaos
1). You assume that your building is alive, and can feel, desire, or want.
2). Your building in an inanimate non-sentient thing.
3). When your views bear on society, we are referring to a mass of sentient human beings - a living community of people who abide by rules (or not as the case can be), in the form of ‘citizenship’. They do indeed have expectations of others. That is - the mass of people, who constitute society … who constitute the community within society…do have expectations. They do not expect you to set fire to them. I, on the other hand, can expect to get flamed!
4). This expectation of society is no mere ‘rule’: it can be reduced to a rule which is punishable as an offence, if its rule is violated. However beyond this legalistic rule, this ‘expectation’ is the very deontological duty, as a member of society, that in all fairness, I have been brought up to expect to treat others, like I would like them to treat me. This is a moral imperative, which transcends the boring legalistic stuff. That’s to say, that we steal from our post-Christian legacy, and try to buttress secular society with principles derive from the Christian principles of loving one’s neighbour as oneself, even in its most diluted form.
I do take a dim view of legalists, in that I am not impressed by those who argue for the sake of wanting to appear bigger, or better, or right. This kind of attitude, however is rife on forums, however remember, that arrogance and critical contempt for religion or spirituality of the form you’ve offered, has no philosophical basis: in that respect, there is no logic nor reasoning to support your irrational hatred of what constitutes the very spiritual/religious core of religions. Hatred for the rituals/rules/conflict in the name of religion - yes. I share those with you.