traders who are deeply religious

Yes, that's my friend. He's actually a pretty good guy, a devoted husband with a wonderful wife and kids. His grammer and spelling are impeccable, and you won't find a more scrupulous or accurate defender of all things catholic, oops, that a capital "C". I have found him very helpful in motivating me to find my own truth, because I don't ever want to go back to living separated from the family of mankind, with a Taskmaster (capital "T")between me and my Creator. Not that that's changed much, ha ha!

Here is his opening statement for his blog. He has subordinated his blog to the authority of the Catholic Church.

 

Thanks for the confirmation, JohnnyK. Someone once said...

God is closer to us than we are to Him.

Its amazing to me ...Providential.... how/when our associations
with others moves us along.


.... rj

 

Obviously not as interested to discuss / learn as he pretends . More to do with proselytizing then?

 

Yes there was a pretense it turns out...and the proselytizing is foremost directed toward the young minds in the family who have access to the blog. Its for teaching the youngns to apologize for the faith, and learn how to fish on their own. I was just getting in the way of that.

Here's the latest lesson:

The hallmark of this belief structure is to divide mankind into two groups...those inside, and those outside.
This is dualistic thinking at its finest. Divide and conquer.

JohnnyK

 

The Catholic church is a political organization disguised as a religious cult. This political organization has carried out, financed and supported some of the most egregious and heinous crimes against humanity. From the inquisition, the crusades, to political intrigue and wide-spread murder of political opponents by burning at the stake in the middle ages, to the recent pervasive condoning of widespread child rape. The crimes of mass murder against humanity were carried out under the disguise of being condoned by god.

Once the historical crimes against humanity of the catholic political organization are brought into perspective, the rest of what it stands for becomes irrelevant. Its members do not wish to recognize these crimes. After all they are good cult members. As I have posted earlier, much of its christian teachings are divergent from what Christ taught and observed himself. A good God would never sanction, nor tolerate the existence of such a evil organization that supposedly exists to carry out His word.

 

.. evidently "He" does.

 

Speaking of duality, interesting historical comment on Islam from the LA Times. I wonder how much this line of thinking applies to Catholicism.

One could provocatively argue that Catholocism is weaker today for having not embraced the revelation / reason split. Johnny K's friend appears to be a fan of Averroes.

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Back in the High Middle Ages, the three great monotheistic religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — reached one of those fundamental forks in the historical road. For centuries, a series of Islamic scholars had preserved the works of Aristotle that one day would lay the foundations for the secular logic and science that have made the modern world possible. Their "rediscovery" by medieval scholars provoked a crisis. They recognized that reason was a powerful tool, but were fearful that using it would undermine faith, which was the basis for authority in all three communities.

What to do — or, more precisely, how to think?

Three intellectual giants rose to the challenge. Two of them — the philosopher and jurist Abu al-Walid Ibn Rushd, known to the West as Averroes, and the great rabbi and physician Moses Maimonides — actually were contemporaries, both born in the Spanish city of Cordova. Tradition has it they even met and befriended each other while on the run from the Almohads, Islamic fundamentalists from the Maghreb, who had captured Andalusia and destroyed its storied culture of tolerance. The third was Thomas Aquinas — of whom his admiring coreligionists one day would say, "He led reason captive into the house of faith." Recall that this was an age in which the literate West, not unlike today's Islamists, still regarded theology as "the queen of the sciences."

Averroes' exposition of Aristotle was so widely admired and influential that when Aquinas took it up a century or so later at the University of Paris he referred to Aristotle simply as "the philosopher" and to Averroes as "the commentator." But while Maimonides and, later, Aquinas — who also read and admired the philosopher rabbi — held that there exists a single truth and that faith, properly understood, never can conflict with reason, Averroes took the other fork. He held that there were two truths — that of revelation and that of the natural world. There was no need to reconcile them because they were separate and distinct.

It was a form of intellectual suicide and cut off much of the Islamic world from the centuries of scientific and political progress that followed.

As the events of the last week have demonstrated pretty forcefully, all this is more than an historical curiosity, because the globalization of markets and peoples has brought the rest of the modern world to Islam whether Muslims want it or not. One of the minor paradoxes at work here is that long before the imams' fiery sermons sent people into the streets this week, they'd been whipped into a frenzy by quintessentially modern creations — cellphone text messages and the Internet. Islamic societies are enthusiastic consumers of nearly everything the modern West produces — except such indispensable values as separation of church and state and freedom of expression.
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Religion is a poor substitute for reason

 

On the other hand, once, through the operation of grace, you make the act of faith that you “believe and profess all that the Catholic Church believes, teaches and proclaims to be revealed by God,”* while you may not understand every detail of every article of the faith.... that truth is always borne out to an amazing degree, bringing with that understanding a deep sense of peace and satisfaction (and even love) that an “outsider” cannot know.


That is the central rub. The church wants to have its cake and eat it too.

In terms of logic and reason, you are to submit your own mind to the hive mind -- take on the belief structure of the system, and readily alter that belief structure as the system commands you to. If the Pope decides in 1950 that Mary ascended into heaven in bodily form, and you, a believer since 1940, think that is nuts, well... too bad.

Such an act of total submission seems treasonous to the spirit of logic and reason (which it is, really). The church makes that treason okay, though, by promising that everything you are to swallow, er, believe is rationally sound, with the very strong hint that if you don't think something makes sense, you merely have not grasped its intrinsic soundness yet.

This format is ingenious, absolutely ingenious. The logic / faith duality (plus heaven / hell overlay) acts like a gravitational force field -- once you are in, it is nearly impossible to find the critical mass to escape.

Those who never had much taste for reason in the first place are happy to give over their cumbersome thinking duties, and even grow smug in the realization that they have the "truth" while others who struggle to make sense of the world are lost fools. Those who somewhat respect logic and reason but do not have a passion for objective truth -- most of the population -- may grate against the inconsistencies at times, but once they are "in," seeds of fear and seeds of comfort overcome the weaker seeds of doubt. (No wonder Green Flash wants so badly for his kids to be "in.")

Once deep in gravity's grip, it is only those who are fiercely committed to logic and truth, who have to pursue objectivity as the highest ideal or otherwise forsake their own integrity and sanity, that have a real chance of breaking away when the irresistible force of reason runs headlong into the immovable object of faith. And even then, to make the full break they often must alienate family, friends, community, and maybe even question their own sanity in the process. In the absence of something there is suddenly nothing. It is a very hard thing.

The logic / faith duality pattern, I think, is more an evolved coercion response to human emotional patterns than a specific feature of religion. I have an old friend from high school who has become a diehard socialist / anti-globalization activist. He is going through a similar struggle... his life is now so wrapped up in utopian-marxist bullshit that extricating himself could shatter his identity in the process. I see the reality of the gravitational field every time we talk.

Which brings me to one last point before I shut up: animosity doesn't help anyone. Heaping scorn on someone's inconsistent beliefs is like giving nourishment to the parasite that has infected them. If your words are powerful enough to crack someone's foundation in two, they have to be administered with care if the goal is to truly be of help.

 

Thanks for pointing this out. It really brings some absurdities to the light.

I'm in favor of using death as a benchmark for successfully integrating truth. Last I checked though there are an alarming number of pastors dying from, er, death.

What's more alarming is few pastors even believe in eternal life, despite promises from the Master that some hearing his words would live, and never die. So it seems few have heard the words.

To the last man, (priest and pastor alike) immortality has conveniently been assigned to the future, after a future physical death. This is a cop out that doesn't excuse christian leaders from their responsibility to teach about immortality...and how to achieve it. More than a cop out, it is the means of gaining control by dictating the kind of faith needed to...live...in the future.

But where God lives, all is NOW, and time is relative. We can't live in the future anymore than we can live in the past. If we are to be immortal, it must be NOW, or we must die trying. If we are not immortal now, we are not immortal.

The question is, can we be immortal now? All of so-called christianity has completely abandoned this quest, shirking it's responsibilities...even its purpose! What other purpose could there be? We have all been betrayed by these death cults, and should start holding pastors responsible for finding the ways and means to reach immortality now.

Pastors currently focus on death, wondering why catholics reject "the finished work of the cross"...while themselves rejecting the unfinished work of the resurrection. But pointing out how dead other people are doesn't make themselves more alive. Let the dead bury their dead, and let us follow life and the living.

JohnnyK