Speaking about the Natural Law party, there's a good satire about it on the Freethought Mecca:

http://www.geocities.com/freethoughtmecca/ashram.html

In the name of Allah the Beneficent the Merciful

If all the peoples of the world where Buddhists or alike then what chance will their be of the mankind reaching beyhond a limit of no more than a year.

Who will carry out the trades?

And for this New Age Cults....
Why not ask the parents of the followers of such Cults as to what misery has been placed upon them due to the New Age Sadists.

If all the world were Buddhists instead of Muslims, ya habeebi Zengi, the world would be a much more peaceful place. Buddhists don't kill people for having different beliefs.

What New Age sadism are you talking about? Is there any greater sadism than jahannam (Islamic hell)? Is there any greater sadism than raiding and looting and murdering the kuffaar (infidels)?

Has Allah ordered killing all the mushrikeen (polytheists) and the mulhideen (atheists)? If so, then Allah is cruel and sadistic, and undeserving of worship. A mushrik who feeds and clothes poor people is far, far better than a Muslim who loots and plunders innocent people.

http://www.geocities.com/stmetanat/morality.html
http://www.geocities.com/stmetanat/damnable.html
http://www.geocities.com/stmetanat/idolworship.html

Zengi wrote: Why not ask the parents of the followers of such Cults as to what misery has been placed upon them due to the New Age Sadists.

Are we talking about the same group of people? What misery are you talking about?

I believe the "mundane distinctions" are the only reality, and a total, indistinctive unity of all beings is in fact the illusion

I guess you can stick to that and i will just leave it at the point that i view the whole difference between eastern thought and pantheism as nothing but a verbal mutation of the original thought

Mysterious is Universe, so little comprehended. That is the beauty of naturalism, that instead of saying (like the theists) that you've got all the answers, you admit you don't know.

That particular humility should be part & parcel of any sensible individual. But by admitting that nature is a closed system and all explanations have to be natural, is like defining the boundary and setting out to find the truth. Does not always work and sometimes even if you find the truth, you might discard it coz it falls outside the boundary.

Really, I think evolution is more akin to Tao (Way, Flow) than karma. Karma is a system of reaping and sowing works of past lives (karman in Sanskrit means "deed"), whereas evolution is just blind selective flow, a river (out of eden?), as it were.


Karma is the deed on which the individual soul is judged and is awarded its next physical form. And the reason I had given karma as analogical substitute was due to you mentioning your variator (sic!)i.e, evolution. Tao is similar to nirvana or satori, the reality beyond comprehension.

Theism = lunacy, insanity
Atheism = removing lunacy and insanity
Pantheism = substituting sane spirituality

That is, IMHO, the three-staged view of my coming to Pantheism. I can't live on atheism alone; one removes the poison, but one cannot live on anti-poison, so one must attain real water. My thoughts.

Congrats on finding your raison d'etre and best of luck. I only wish that everyone find their paths with ease and simplicity .. sigh..


[This message has been edited by phaedrus (edited May 07, 2001).]

Yes, I've often pondered on the subject of subscribing to a worldview. I sometimes ask myself, "if I have subscribed to the worldview that nature is all there is, am I a freethinker or not?". Well, everyone's got to subscribe to something, or we can't lead a sensible life, and it's no shame to subscribe to a worldview if you don't do harm in its name. As for metaphysical naturalism, it is greatly founded on the lack of evidence for anything supernatural. As I say, miracles and revelations have a mysterious tendency to appear in contexts where they would be useful, such as books of propaganda (ie the Bible etc).



I don't believe in any non-human judgement. Nature makes no judgement, only adaptations to changes. Also there is no evidence for a soul, a consciousness separate from the human body. I have toyed with the idea of the existence of a matter-based consciousness which gets recombined into a different body when one dies, but there's no scientific proof for such a thing.



Variator: simply, that which causes variations. A straightforward definition of evolutionary flow. I think this word exists, though not in formal, scientific use.



As far as I know, nirvana is from Sanskrit nis-vana, "extinguishing". This is one of the things which disturbs me about Buddhism. They say you are liberated from suffering by extinguishing all your desires, but that strikes me as no different from the Abrahamic doctrine of cancelling your self for God. I believe our desires are, so to speak, quite desirable, a veritable stamp of our selves. The person who extinguishes all desires is, IMO, mentally dead. I keep my desires and cherish them as long as I live.

Well, everyone's got to subscribe to something, or we can't lead a sensible life, and it's no shame to subscribe to a worldview if you don't do harm in its name. As for metaphysical naturalism, it is greatly founded on the lack of evidence for anything supernatural. As I say, miracles and revelations have a mysterious tendency to appear in contexts where they would be useful, such as books of propaganda (ie the Bible etc).

One does not need to subscribe to a worldview. An individual can have his/her own personal view and until unless that view clashes with the laws of the societies at large, there should be no problem. Your explanation about naturalsim amounts to – “it is a philosophy to which i subscribed coz it does not recognise supernatural” . Just curious, ever asked certain questions so as to ascertain the foundations of naturalism?

I don't believe in any non-human judgement. Nature makes no judgement, only adaptations to changes. Also there is no evidence for a soul, a consciousness separate from the human body. I have toyed with the idea of the existence of a matter-based consciousness which gets recombined into a different body when one dies, but there's no scientific proof for such a thing.

Let me clarify something, I have not offered karma or soul or anything as an option. I started this discussion to point out that the distinctions you see between the teachings of Upanishads and the so-called new age movements are nothing but semantics.
Yup there is nothing like scientific evidence for that and most probably an individual rooted in Indian philosophy will reject any scientific evidence you have for “evolution” as just maya (illusion) . Having said that, i invoked the label karma as an analogy for ur variator. When you label nature/evolution as a variator it is giving a third person status to something, which is natural. Hence, me saying that karma is similar to evolution, i.e., it plays the role of ur variator in indian philosophy .

As far as I know, nirvana is from Sanskrit nis-vana, "extinguishing". This is one of the things, which disturbs me about Buddhism. They say you are liberated from suffering by extinguishing all your desires, but that strikes me as no different from the Abrahamic doctrine of cancelling your self for God.

Yes that is what it means, Sanskrit or the old Indian language “pali”(nibbana). By comparing the tao, satori and nirvana, I was referring to all those words indicating a reality which is continuous and beyond comprehension, a state which is to be achieved to be at total peace with one’s self. Nirvana is part of Hinduism and Jainism as well. The difference will be apparent if you take into consideration the dualism (as opposed to the monistic perception) prevalent in the abrahamic doctrine (which one were you referring to?). There is no god in the Upanishads (referring to the philosophy not the religious paraphernalia) just the Brahman who is but a spiritual being, by rising above the mundane (samsara) you attain moksha or nirvana


I believe our desires are, so to speak, quite desirable, a veritable stamp of our selves. The person who extinguishes all desires is, IMO, mentally dead. I keep my desires and cherish them as long as I live.

I thought our actions/thoughts are true reflections; hence there is not question of one's grey cells croaking . From my perspective, whoever lets desires dominate their actions/thoughts have taken a path of hedonism and I would question their saneness (not their choices).

edited to change "religion" to "language" in the pali context


[This message has been edited by phaedrus (edited May 08, 2001).]

From my perspective, whoever lets desires dominate their actions/thoughts have taken a path of hedonism and I would question their saneness (not their choices).

Why would you question the sanity of a hedonist?

I agree for the most part. It is frightening to hear well, if you don't allow yourself to care about it anymore, you will cease suffering over the death of your child. I mean, it sounds like that is what the Buddha was teaching...

But from what little I have learned, I think that what is meant is not to allow your desires to control you, but to control them. To try to balance between excesses of any kind. And to realize in times of stress and suffering that it all will pass, because it always has and it always will.

I also get the feeling that cultures which accept reincarnation look upon life as an addicition or as a toy--- slowly, we grow out of it as we (our souls) 'mature'. Similar to the way that we look nostagically back on our childhood activities but rarely spend a day playing the same way.


Personally, I have found most NA's (not wiccans or pagans etc: just new agers) I have met to be more Christian but don't like some of the religion. They seem to be a bit flakey and wishy washy, so I wouldn't expect much from them in terms of activism. But then, I don't use activism as a yardstick to judge people by. But I have seen many involved in activism, on varying levels. And they all recycle...

my 2¢

Dev:
They say you are liberated from suffering by extinguishing all your desires, but that strikes me as no different from the Abrahamic doctrine of cancelling your self for God. I believe our desires are, so to speak, quite desirable, a veritable stamp of our selves. The person who extinguishes all desires is, IMO, mentally dead.

Ps418:
What about the person whose desire for money and material objects motivates their every waking moment, to the exclusion of other pursuits? The person who is dragged through life by their own unexamined desires is hardly more alive than the person who has learned to experience contentment in the absence of such objects of desire. That's my view anyway.

Patrick