By Virgil Smith, February 13: “Faith is believing what you know aint so”

So believe in The Ring..........

...at least, I keep saying the same thing:

Religion is from the top down;
Spirituality is from the inside out…

“It is always the denial of the Spiritual in the world which produces the worst kind of malpractice in thought..”
-R.Steiner

Warm Toast And Courage For All,
.....We Strive On.......

GrammaConcept

#By Maani, February 9: “Re: Religion DOES matter… Does this mean you (i) did not vote in the primary in your state, if one was held, and (ii) will not vote in the general election, since ALL of the current candidates in both parties are Christian and believe in God...”

Oh boy, Maani, it sound like a lot of people would rather leave GWB and the Neocons in power than be bothered to trouble themselves to vote, uhh!!! Any excuse for keeping their heads in the sand.......

#By Tony Wicher, February 8: “Religion is ideology - Ideology means a belief system. It does not matter whether it involves believing in God or believing in no God.... Is it possible to get beyond belief and ideology, to have a perception of human events that is unconditioned by ideology...”

Ideology is a belief system but it is not necessarily religion. It can be science or creationism or music or art or militarism or materialism or aetheism or a million other things. It is a subset of ideas about how we think and act towards some end.......

But being “unconditioned by ideology” is only possible in two ways. One is more or less total and utter ignorance of everything - and that is not so unusual. The problem with that is that we are still “conditioned” by our wants, desires and fears, etc etc, whether learned or unlearned. That is the quandary facing most people as they grapple with the inner demons of their own R-Complex and subconscious mind.

The other is pure original thought - or what we think is “original”. In fact, nothing is really new or original as it was all created some how in the beginning. That is, it is not possible for a human being to design anything new, let alone a human body. In some way we don’t quite understand, it was all “thought” into being aeons ago when life as we know it first began on Earth.

Thus the nearest thing to an “unconditioned… ideology” is to consciously become in contact with the Universal Mind and to learn how It created everything in the Universe. That is possible - but, as you say, it can only be done by freeing oneself from limiting man-made concepts such as religion and even science and to accept the ultimate Reality as It really Is - and that we are a part of It - and just how precious this Nature is.

In doing that, we find out how deprived we have been for millenia in following man-made sets of rules about anything. Instead, we should have been following our Intuition and avoiding the pitfalls and aiming towards discovering the real reason why the human race was created in the first place. That is something that is still unknown despite all the prophets and all the masters of yoga and all the raving idotic priests of mankind’s slavery to his/her inner fears and emptiness.

Larry King is about as dead in his response to Michael Moore’s criticism of US media giants regarding “political retribution” as the BBC’s David Frost was to Benazir Bhutto last December when she said that Osama bin Laden had been killed, possibly back in 2001. Then again, maybe that was eventually edited too???

But this business of being “morally prohibited from voting for Hillary.... because of her war votes” simply because Moore is “an Irish Catholic” is utter garbage. People tend to use that excuse for avoiding ever facing up to their own lack of perception in voting for GWB and so forth. Essentially though, Moore is just another sexist when the chips are down.

Moore doesn’t seem to realize the hypocrisy in his words when it was Bush and the Neocons who led the USA into war, not Hillary Clinton. What is more, there were 100’s of other congress persons and senators who also voted the same way from both major parties so he has no reason to pillory Hillary Clinton for what others are guilty of. Easy to do to a woman, uhh.

Its also precious that religion should be “off limits” in a country which is being so usurped and led up the garden path by the Zionist fiends from AIPAC. In fact the Catholic religion is as guilty as any in that regard never mind the historical atrocities it has been guilty of over the past 1,000 years. But the Christian churches’ upholding the “old testament” garbage about the bloodthirsty Jews as being in any way “holy” or “the chosen ones” is the ultimate hypocrisy.

Micheal Moore has sadly shown himself to be the utter fool that he really is.............

Re WriterOnTheStorm, February 8 at 10:29 am #

“Re: Religion is private
Imagine a young candidate running for president of Pakistan. He holds the exact same religious beliefs as Bin Laden. However, he has no “record of actions” to go by. Is his religion irrelevant to his campaign as well? What if that same belief system were held by an American candidate? Still private?”
-----------------------------------------------------
Sure, why not? From my standpoint and presumably yours, bin Laden’s brand of Islam could not be any more ridiculous than Mormonism. If he took the same approach as Romney did in his speech, which I rather liked, and said that his religion is his own business, and people should be concerned only with what he does in the public square as a politician, I would say that’s fine. If Osama wants to have a beard and bow to Mecca 5 times a day, bully for him. Tolerance is one of my basic principles, and I’m not going to persecute or ridicule his religion. But if he tries to impose those practices on others as a matter of legislation, that violates basic democratic principles. 

How about putting it this way: there is, after all, one common relgion that we all have have to believe in - it’s called democracy. That’s my relgion, as it was that of our founding fathers.

But I do also have a private religion. I am very rational and scientific, but at the same time I believe that reason is limited, thinking itself is limited, and that reason is only possible because there is some kind of source, or ground, call it the Tao if you like, which cannot be comprehended. I have religious icons (I prefer the ancient Egyptian) on my desk, and they give me a good feeling.  Sometimes before going to sleep I pray to God, and give thanks for every minute of my life, because after all, I did not create myself. It’s good to have such a religion, I think.

Moore failed to answer the most important part of the question… something like: “What do you think of the idea that the intent of the Constitution was to keep government out of religion… not to keep religion out of government?”

Since Moore did not answer, I guess I’ll have to answer for him… that idea is insane. It is a lie that is perpetuated by religious puppet-masters whose agenda is to keep their historically and scientifically ignorant constituency (i.e., the ‘religious’) in a perpetual state of bamboozlement so that they can be relied upon to support the sub-rosa transition the USA into a christian theocracy.

Regarding Moore’s contention that a candidate’s religion/religious beliefs do not matter… absolute rubbish and nonsense. One’s religious beliefs are the only accurate barometer of just how gullibile, irrational, willfully ignorant, self-deluded, intellectually dishonest, lying, hypocritical and droolingly stupid a candidate is. The only flaw there is that it requires the presumption that the politician is ‘honest’ in his/her declaration of faith… or lack thereof.

Statistically, one is obliged to presume that at least 10 members of the Senate and 44.7 members of the House… roughly 55 congressmen… are atheists. Considering that there is a statistically significant INVERSE correlation between religiosity and intelligence, one would probably be justified in presuming that there are a lot more atheists in congress that what the plain-vanilla demographic statistic tells us. But guess what? There is only ONE member of Congress who admits that he is an atheist. So… what does that tell us?… it tells us that in all likelihood, ALL members of Congress… save one… are EITHER gullibile, irrational, willfully ignorant, self-deluded, intellectually dishonest, lying, hypocritical and droolingly stupid (i.e., religious)… OR… that somewhat over 10% of them are just lying. The ones that are ‘just lying’ (the atheists) MIGHT be excused if we recognize that there is an unwritten ‘law’ that says that a candidate must proclaim religious ‘belief’ in order to be electable… an unwritten law that AUTOMATICALLY DISQUALIFIES the best ... the brightest… the most educated… the most intelligent… the most capable… the most qualified critical-thinkers… from eligibility to be elected to high public office.

We get what we deserve.

Ideology means a belief system. It does not matter whether it involves believing in God or believing in no God.

Is it possible to get beyond belief and ideology, to have a perception of human events that is unconditioned by ideology?