What the next First Turning won't be like

[Eric the Green]

(10-06-2021, 01:05 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote:

(10-06-2021, 12:45 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(10-06-2021, 04:05 AM)AspieMillennial Wrote:

(10-05-2021, 04:00 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(10-03-2021, 08:52 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote: I can't wait to see the looks of horror on their faces when their children are into Christianity. It will be the absolute nightmare of the secularists in my generation and it will finally be justice to the religious Millennials who have been persecuted.

How can you believe in a religion of child predators, Aspie? Catholic priests molest millions of children all over the world. Just today a report came out in France about 350,000 young teens abused by priests over 7 decades, and their leaders even steered children toward abusers.

The Catholic church creates its own problems. Ironically, it is their own suppression of sex that causes the sexual abuse. They never even consider revising their long-outdated rules. What kind of man is attracted to a profession which requires celebacy? And to a profession which no woman can practice? Sex is part of who we are; it can't be suppressed. The Taliban can't do it, and neither can the Catholics. Go around in Rome to some dens of sin and you'll find priests there. The Catholic Church is a relic; its doctrines and rules are obscenely outdated and superstitious. In the long run its fortunes can only decline, since it is unable to reform itself, or to return to the long-abandoned actual teachings of Jesus and other mystics.

Because it's one of the only institutions that is a stable rock in society that's constantly changing and one of the only institutions not saying things like "God and heaven are metaphors" and all kinds of nonsense you see. I think today's society is too sex obsessed. They are willing to throw out concepts like God, meaning, eternal salvation, and heaven just because of issues with sex and sexuality.

Our society WAS too sex-obsessed. Now it is sex-repression-obsessed. Or both at once, depending on which part of culture you meet. I don't see people throwing "out concepts like God, meaning, eternal salvation, and heaven just because of issues with sex and sexuality." I don't see any connection between these issues.

Our approach considers God and heaven etc. as aspects of reality to experience and learn more about, rather than stories in a book to believe in, and a basis for knocking others who don't believe in them.

I think with how much pornography is promoted, polyamory, or LGBT is promoted (it's in kids shows now) is very sex obsessed. There is also lots of sexual things in the music videos. Do you see these things as sex obsessed?

Yes about the music videos; especially from 10-20 years ago, but as I said, our society is both sex-obsessed and sex-repression-obsessed at once. Society is huge and diverse with many conflicting trends. I don't see porno promoted very much, and people do defend the rights of LGBTQ people, but that is not sex obsession; it is defending peoples rights to be who they are, of which gender and sexual preference is a part. People who assert their right to be different from straight are just as likely to be monogamous and respectful rather than predatory as those who are straight. Maybe more so.

[pbrower2a]

(10-06-2021, 12:45 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: [quote pid='79094' dateline='1633511106']

Because it's one of the only institutions that is a stable rock in society that's constantly changing and one of the only institutions not saying things like "God and heaven are metaphors" and all kinds of nonsense you see. I think today's society is too sex obsessed. They are willing to throw out concepts like God, meaning, eternal salvation, and heaven just because of issues with sex and sexuality.

Our society WAS too sex-obsessed. Now it is sex-repression-obsessed. Or both at once, depending on which part of culture you meet. I don't see people throwing "out concepts like God, meaning, eternal salvation, and heaven just because of issues with sex and sexuality." I don't see any connection between these issues.
[/quote]

That's how things often go: from excessive repression to excessive lassitude. In some circumstances tradition might dampen the tendency. But that takes a long time to assess. Sometimes we see paradoxical reality, as with same-sex marriage and adoption being accepted during a harsh (if justified) crackdown on domestic violence and sexual abuse of children. So LGBT people threw the "chickenhawk" gay men who preyed on vulnerable boys? That is one way to show that LGBT rights are possible with the qualification that they are for adults only.

Quote:Our approach considers God and heaven etc. as aspects of reality to experience and learn more about, rather than stories in a book to believe in, and a basis for knocking others who don't believe in them.

The prospect of Heaven used to be a reward for compliant suffering for non-elites who accept their subjection and poverty and adhere to the local orthodoxy, with Hell as a threat for anyone who rejected the demands of rapacious, ruthless, self-indulgent elites or challenges the local orthodoxy. I'm tempted to believe that if there is a Hell then the horror is the company that one keeps (stumbling around among fellow drunks and addicts is something to avoid, but the real horror is to go where the Nazis and Stalinists are.

Maybe if I were to write a modern Inferno, I would have the Bad Places ranging from a nasty slum to various shades of prison (including a plantation in which brutal slave-masters and human traffickers are the slaves and robots are the masters. As Abraham Lincoln put it, "as I would not be a slave I would not be a master"... to at the worst a Gulag or KZ-Lager. Unending battlefield? Somewhere in there. For obvious reasons, Dante could not write about the Atlantic slave trade, Nazis, Stalinists, Ba'athists, ISIS, or the like.

Quote:Catholic Church doctrine used to teach that God created the world in 6 days, and all creation is the same as it was 6025 years ago. But it is established knowledge that life has evolved and changed over millennia, and therefore life progresses and develops rather than being like a stable rock. You don't even have to consider evolution; just consider how a plant or animal develops in its lifetime. It grows from a seed and continues to grow and change. That is the way of life. Your Church simply refuses to be alive.

At the least the Catholic Church, if not for the most honorable reasons, has elected to ensure that scientific learning and achievement or a desire for social equity are not to be stumbling blocks to faith. Some religious bodies have dug themselves into an even deeper hole by rejecting science and acquiescence to extreme suffering on behalf of plutocracy. Maybe Aspie Millennial will be delighted to see many of these becoming   Catholics.

Quote:Of course, today even the Church is more willing to accept science. And those like me who accept evolution don't have to reduce it to natural selection or some other mechanical cause, but also see it as divine spirit or God unfolding and expressing.

 The best reason for believing in one God is that the universe makes sense. Does something supernatural underpin mathematics and physics?

[AspieMillennial]

Science is not the same as scientism. Scientism is believing science is the only truth and that only the naturalistic universe exists. Scientism is accepting things just because scientists say so such as accepting Thalidomide. Now scientism is the trend.

[pbrower2a]

(10-06-2021, 04:16 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote: Science is not the same as scientism. Scientism is believing science is the only truth and that only the naturalistic universe exists. Scientism is accepting things just because scientists say so such as accepting Thalidomide. Now scientism is the trend.

And that is why most people insist that children learn morals before they learn how to use fire or chemicals.

[Eric the Green]

(10-06-2021, 04:16 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote: Science is not the same as scientism. Scientism is believing science is the only truth and that only the naturalistic universe exists. Scientism is accepting things just because scientists say so such as accepting Thalidomide. Now scientism is the trend.

But just a few years ago, the opposite was the trend. Religionism, is that a word? Fundamentalist or other doctrinaire religion is accepting things just because religious authorities say so.

I don't agree with either trend myself.

[Eric the Green]

(10-06-2021, 03:31 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:  The best reason for believing in one God is that the universe makes sense. Does something supernatural underpin mathematics and physics?

They are at least Platonic. Numbers don't exist in the sensible universe. They are in the realm of pure form or reason. To that extent they are supernatural. And yet we can use them to measure the universe, and to demonstrate that theories of physics work. The originators of modern western science had the purpose of proving that God created an ordered universe. They understood that numbers are part of a higher intelligence of harmony and rhythm. If the universe demonstrates this harmony, they thought, it is proof of the faith.

I have noticed harmonies that indicate to me an intelligent design, although I don't believe in that theory per se. The design is not imposed by an external God force. It is inherent in the full nature of reality, which is more than what we often think it is. I notice that our two great lights (Sun and Moon) have the same color as the two most luminous metals (gold and silver). The ancients decided the value of these metals according to the length of the two orbits. These two bodies are arranged proportionately just right so that total eclipses can occur, according to the number 108. The orbits of Earth and Venus are aligned so that the pattern between them forms a 5-pointed star or pentagram. The pattern looks like 5 petals, in 4 sizes, within the 0 circle. The number 540 (The BWV number of Bach's Toccata in F) is 5 times 108, and is the total number of degrees in a face of a dodecahedron, one of the 5 platonic solids that represents the universe, the zodiac, ether, or spirit, depending on how you call the fifth element. The angles within a pentagram are each 108 degrees, and the lines in a pentagram (which can be drawn inside a dodecahedron face) shows the divine proportion, which creates the fibonacci series. The relationship between these two orbits are in fibonacci numbers, 5, 8, 13.