Religion, Secularism and Homosexuality

[Eric the Green]

(06-16-2016, 11:33 PM)taramarie Wrote:

(06-16-2016, 01:54 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(06-16-2016, 01:15 PM)taramarie Wrote:

(06-16-2016, 11:18 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(06-16-2016, 12:05 AM)radind Wrote: What I have seen from barn.org is 3 polls conducted over a period of ~ 20 years with the result that the percentage in the USA with a Biblical worldview is ~ 10%.

How would you explain the differing percentages in the results of their various polls? Where is the poll that says 10% have a Biblical view? I don't think it exists. You claim to have seen such a poll; I don't see it.

Quote:No poll from anyone provides proof. One can accept the information in the polls or not. You clearly do not accept the barna results. 

I'm sure they interviewed real folks, but polls results can differ depending on how the questions are framed, and what conclusions are drawn.

Quote:I do not agree with your claims that such views foster hatred.

But you offer no refutation of my view. Views that say we are right and others are wrong foster hatred and division; not among all who believe them, but among some like that pastor Jimenez and Mateen.

Quote:Since our worldviews are in conflict, it appears that we have exhausted this topic.

The topic can never be exhausted. And "dialogue" can only happen when each person responds to the questions and challenges of the other, with genuine interest. But I will be ready to refute you whenever you claim that the "secularist majority" are about to oppress the "Christian minority." It just ain't so.

It is your right to hold your worldview, and I respect that. I may have held it nominally, as a child; but I mostly grew up as a devotee and fan of science and materialism, but with a love of Nature and Music. As an older teenager I threw over this view and moved into Oriental philosophy and mysticism, and then gradually embraced various Western hermetic and esoteric, holistic views, fully switching into this mode in my late 20s.

Myself, I prefer the worldview that says that some are enlightened, in various degrees, and some others are enlightened and don't clearly know it yet. I would put you in the second category. The truth is self-evident to all. It requires no Bible, no preacher, no guru to experience it, however much they might help, or hinder, that experience. It is always there, in everyone. The truth is found in all religions, to one degree or another. Jesus did not come as the only-begotten Son of God to sacrifice his life for our salvation, and to demand that we believe he is the Only Son or else continue to be damned sinners. He came to demonstrate eternal life as the essential truth of our being; that we are all God. He came, in his words, that we may have life, and have that life more abundantly.

Bingo. Just as i thought. He hates materialism because it is a rebellion against his parents generation. I suppose with certain things I say reminds him of his GI parents and their generation and probably the Lost generation too. Kinser must make him shiver even more as kinser is even more of a materialist than I am.

You just love to read things into what I say that aren't there.

It is a type of rebellion though. It was the world view before the consciousness revolution. It was what you first experienced till you struck out on your own and developed your own view of the world around you and abandoned some ideas that you first experienced. Ok, if you do not think that is true then why are you so against materialism? You mention it all the time as if you despise it. Which is what led me to wonder if it is to do with your early years before the boomer rebellion against the materialistic worldview of the GI's. A rebellion is thinking and acting differently than the parental generation after all. It is disagreement.

It was during the consciousness revolution, though on my own, that I "experienced" something and had an awakening that affected my worldview. Before that it was not what I experienced, but what I absorbed and assumed from what was available to my mind. It was always my own ideas. I didn't "strike out" on my own; it was a clearer experience of reality that changed my worldview.

I tend to be against materialism, but recognize it as part of human experience and my experience. I now look on it as part of the philosophers wheel. It is a tendency within our being; the lower chakras or the roots of the tree of life. In moderation it has its place.

Materialism is the dominant philosophy or default worldview of educated people today. As such it is the source of problems and limitations today which we need to see beyond in order to progress. We need now to see the world as alive, not as solid billliard balls knocking each other around. Materialism taken to its logical extreme is a philosophy of death. It reduces life to mechanics and sees the world as composed of solid, separate things. It reduces ourselves and life to objects for our use, and denies free will, mystery and miracles.

This is NOT talking as if I "despise materialism." It is just simply and plainly, the facts of the matter, so to speak. Materialism is what it is; you can't soft-pedal it or cover up for it. You do have a tendency to talk in an insulting way, and draw false conclusions that justify your own anger.