Verbs Under My Gel wrote:
snip
Can we stop with the religious trolls, already? If that's not an
option, can we at least have some Judaic (?), Islamic, Hindu, Jainist
(?), etc. tracts thrown in for variety?

Yours in Ras Tafari (almighty God is a living man),
Zippy

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One of the things that attracted me to Zen Buddhism was the story of
several monks sitting around discussing religion. One of the rules of
the conversation was no one could mention God. If anyone slipped up and
did, they all laughed so hard they fell over.

That's an appropriate attitude.

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I don't know of anyone today actually practicing Christianity. What
most people consider Christianity is actually Paulism, created by a man
who never met Jesus except in a vision, a fanatic anti-christian who
after his "conversion" became a fanatic pro-christian, diluting whatever
message Jesus had by encrusting the faith with his fanatical ideas,
wrapped in the practices and beliefs of the culture he lived in.

The church he created went to war with a group called the Gnostics, who
basically said "The Truth" (whatever that was) had to be passed from
person to person, and that each individual was responsible for his or
her relationship with God. The Paulist church believed that contact
with God was only possible through the authority figures of the church.

The Gnostics were mostly killed, their books were mostly burned, and
subsequently the Paulist church shaped the world's view of
"christianity." The victor decides how the history will be written.

Some of the foundations of modern "christianity" came about because of
political considerations. The divinity of Jesus was decided at the
Council of Nice in 325 CE, not by the bishops, who could not settle the
matter between them, but by a declaration from Emperor Constantine, who
allegedly felt a divine Christ would be better for building a Christian
empire.

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I heard an interesting viewpoint recently on Judaism. While Judaism is
considered a monotheistic religion, this person says that early Jews
actually worshipped multiple gods, that all the different names for God
that you find in the Old Testament are actually different gods
worshipped by the early Jews, and that after the concept of One God was
developed, this was "spun" into One God, Multiple Names.

************************

I figure religions are so important to so many people, that the need for
religion must spring from some basic need common to all people. My
theory is that there is a force in the universe, that I can only
describe as "The Tendency Toward Organization", that is a counter to
Entropy (the tendency toward dissolution or chaos).

Matter organizes itself into atoms, molecules, etc. Hydrogen gas clumps
together and organizes itself into stars. Dying stars spew out heavier
elements that end up organizing themselves into planets. Amino acids
organize themselves into self-replicating strands of DNA.

This goes on until we end up with animals and plants trying to organize
things outside themselves, culminating (to this point) in humans who try
to reorganize the surrounding world to suit them.

Part of the need to organize is the need to explain where all this
organization came from. That's the basis of religion, trying to explain
the events of the world we observe, trying to get some control over
those events.

The idea of this "tendency toward organization" as a counter to entropy
occured to me when considering one thought experiment used to demostrate
the one way nature of entropy.

Take a coffee cup. Throw it on the floor. It shatters into pieces. No
matter how many times you pick up the pieces and throw them on the
floor, they will never reassmble themselves into a coffee cup. Nothing
"in nature" will do that. Thus the inevitable entropic dissolution of
the universe is demonstrated.

Except -- how was the coffee cup formed in the first place? The problem
with the thought experiment is that it assumes that something "man-made"
is not "natural," that we humans are something "other" than nature.
This is a viewpoint that is basic to the Abrahamic religions: people are
above or apart from the rest of nature.

Obviously this is not true. Obviously the cup was formed from
components by some process. This process is different from the process
used to destroy the cup, but that does not make it something apart from
nature. Obviously, at least within the scope of the thought experiment,
humans counter entropy.

Nothing's ever that simple, but it seems to me that this property of the
universe, this 'tendency toward organization', might be the underlying
basis for the beliefs in "a higher power."

************************

How's that, Zippy?

grin

--
David Hill, Backsliding Buddhist
david at hillREMOVETHISfamily.org
Sautee-Nacoochee, GA, USA

filters, they're not just for coffee anymore