Tealeaf said:
oh-kay? said:
Religion, to me is much more of a denial of a preconceived notion of reality. It's a straw man argument where the world is designated an evil place, full of wickedness and cruelty. Heaven is set up as a place of tranquility and the only way anyone can get to this respite is to follow others into religion and give over control of your lives to those who supposedly speak for God.
In a nutswhell you give everything to the Church and after you die and can't return to verify anything, you are given a reward for denying all the pleasures of the world. Sounds like a loose loose scenario that has played out literally 1000's of times. Those on the religious right speak badly about wealth distribution, but the church has been distributing it's parishioners wealth to itself for the last 2000 years.
I'm glad you're here to help. Here I thought I was reading about things like how to use meditation, focused exercises, and critical thinking to improve one's self-control and awareness, that restrictions can be destructive to spiritual understanding and to people, and that the point of it all has nothing to do with a heaven or a hell. Thank you for opening my eyes.
I don't know anyone who has ever been lonely who has never wanted to be someone else. Has this spiritual hoping and wishing ever helped anyone out other than to remove their conscientiousness away from reality, as drugs and strong drink dull the senses?
The idea of meditation is bring inner peace to yourself be blocking out all external forces. It does nothing to prepare a person to be who they need to be in an unforgiving world full of those who prey on less influential people, to make themselves look bigger.
There are literally thousands of nerds, which I am one, who are well versed in critical thinking that is only important to other critical thinkers. Is this not the very reason these web sites have come in being? Those who search these places out are getting killed out in the real world by those who are dumber than a box of rocks, but have what it takes to be popular.
You want focus, let me give you my philosophy in life and lets talk about something that works for me. Not that it made me more popular, but it does allow me the clarity to see those who are popular for what they truly are, instead of what others see them as.
I read a very good book a while back called
"The four agreements" It started out explaining just how domesticated human beings were and how this domestication has given us a false truth that stipulated just how the social roles of men, women and everything else was to work, so that the those people who fit into that mold could have comfort in the knowledge that they were normal and the rest of us were strange, weird and socially unacceptable. This reality put a target on all of our backs because our existence didn't support the image society so many others are familiar with.
This is why were are all here. Not because we are different, because all people are different and many find this reality very comfortable. It's just that these people who fit in are all different in the same ways. It's like people who get earrings and piercings so they can call themselves individuals, but the get the same ones, so they all look alike and yet assume that they are, somehow rebels.
Is this not the same thing that religious people do. Do they not create an image of normality and think if that adhere to certain standards that they will get a reward and is this not the same thing that popular society does and aren't we the secular equivalent to being gay in the religious community? Are we not ostracized, ridiculed and excluded for something that we had no choice in being?
If this tweaks your interest, I will continue with this, but far more deeply.
