Religion, etc

[Masin]

Define Christian/Christianity.

1) Is it....any religion that "claims" to follow Christ?

or

2) Is it...a religion that bases its beliefs and actions on Christ's teachings and as an extension the Bible as a whole?

On the surface it may not seem like much difference. If the definition is more #1, then there are many, many Christian religions. But if it is #2, then that number is severely limited. Why? Because the teachings in the Bible and those stated by Christ are for the most part pretty self-explanitory. But most so-called Christian religions often ignore many of those teachings, and it is easy to see the 'hypocrisy' - be it involvement in war, immoral conduct, fleecing of it's members, etc. When testing many of these groups against the supposed source of their faith, most of them cannot stand.

The Mormon question is an interesting one, and I have heard that explanation as well. I often enjoy asking Mormons questions about the Book of Mormon
- If Joseph Smith supposedly translated the Book from some ancient unknown language, why did he translate it into Old English even though that form of english was no longer commonly spoken in his time?
- Why do large portions of the Book of Mormon follow exactly, word for word, portions found in the King James version of the Bible? And along with that, how is it those word-forword "quoted" statements found in the Book of Mormon were supposedly said hundreds of years before Christ stated them?
- How is it the Book of Mormon uses phrases that were not developed till many years after Christ and the apostles. Words such as "Bible" were not developed till the 4th or 5th century, yet the Book of Mormon has being used hundreds of years before Christ?

[Baddori]

"The Mormons are from Mars dad, we've had it checked on."

--Eddie Izzard speaking as Jesus

[Dhomara Glenshade]

I know this forum has been mostly Christianity vs. Evolution, but does anyone want to talk about more eastern religions and the philosophies behind them?

Examples:
Rebirth in Hinduism and Buddhism
Sikhism's view of tolerance of other religions
People starving themselves to death as a religious practice in Jainism
Escaping the world through nirvana, moksha, etc.
The role of Gods in Hinduism, and their inability to achieve enlightenment in Theravada Buddism.
Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism combined in China.

These are just a few examples. Religion can cover far more topics than just creationism vs. evolution, as can Science.

[Baddori]

I'd argue all of those for you except for the fact that I believe they're all false anyway.

[Eomer]

Few people have started talking about Eastern religions because next to none of us know anything about them! Feel free to educate us on some interesting quirks of them though

[Blackdoom]

i neither believe in god nor do i pray... but i suddenly will if i'm on a burning plane destined to crash.

physics theory i hope you'll appreciate this honesty as a joke

[BigTaurean]

I think we learned about Jainism in 10th grade World Studies class, isn't that the ultra pacifistic religion? Like they absolutly refuse to kill bugs and wear mask over their mouths and that type of thing?

[Physics Theory]

Originally posted by Blackdoom
i neither believe in god nor do i pray... but i suddenly will if i'm on a burning plane destined to crash.

physics theory i hope you'll appreciate this honesty as a joke

Blackdoom, I just reread your post here, and while you meant it as a joke, I think there is a certain amount of wisdom and truth in what you said.

I could be wrong, but I think that is actually many people's approach to religion. They don't really believe, they just WANT to believe so badly, so they go through the motions. You wait until you know you are going to die to "find religion", but it is just another level of the same behavior that some people do in their everyday life. (Boy am i reading to much into this, hehe)

To be fair, there are of course many people who really do believe.

[aychamo_aycono]

Haha.. Speaking of nearly dying.

I am an ex-skydiver. On my 73rd jump, I had a line-over malfunction, which is where one of the steering lines ends up on top of the parachute during opening, and it "bow-ties" the canopy, which in turn makes you spin, and it is not landable.

In training, they always teach "pull cutaway, pull reserve." Cutaway is on your right hand, reserve on the left. They teach you in such a fast motion, etc "cutaway, reserve." You always practice it in the plane, while they are spotting the dropzone, go through the hand motions.

Back to the story: I had been getting a bit of ground-rush, which is the feeling you get when you see the ground, or, the things on the ground, start to get big. I mean, I was opening low. I'd pull around 2000-2200 feet. The owners of the dropzones, who were good friends of mine, got on my ass about opening so low, so on my next jump (#73), I was going to kinda, as a joke, open up high.

So we had a freefly goto shit, and I end up dumping my main right at 4,000 feet, which is pretty dang high. As soon as it opened quick as shit, and I looked up and saw the ball of crap over my head. I knew it was un-landable. -- It was odd, because so many times, I'd be under a normal, perfect canopy, and I would think "Do I have the guts to cut-away from this perfectly good canopy, and trust my reserve?" I never did it of course, as there is just no point in taking that chance. -- And I didn't question the reserve for a second. So I grab my cutaway, and stroke it, and I immediatly went for the reserve next.

Well, apparently I didnt' stroke my cutaway all the way, beacuse I heard the distinct sound of my reserve's spring loaded pilot chute winding out behind me. I yanked on the cutaway again, and I realized what happened. My lineover caused such massive line twists that my cutaway was binded in the risers (any skydivers here? You know what I'm talking about), so anyway, I yank the shit hard, and then I remember falling backwards, then I remember being jerked up again, and looking up, and thinking "Oh, wow, my reserve is blue!" (I had never seen it open before.)

So anyway, I find myself under canopy, and I see my cutaway main canopy floating down somewhat beside me, and I realize I almost just totally died, and then I realized that I lost both my cutaway and reserve handles (DOH 50 bucks).

So anyway, I land, forgetting that my reserve wasn't Zero-P, and first thing I hear is "CASE OF BEER BOBBY!", Meaning that I owed a case of beer since I had my first cutaway (although I wasn't old enough to buy beer, they bought it with my money, lol).

ANYWAY -> The point being, in my near death thing, I never once just froze and thought of god, or tried to pray for help. I just reacted quickly as trained. But then again, that is in a situation where you can react.

On another note, the first time I flew in a commercial airliner after the 9/11 attacks, I was extremely nervous, which is odd for me, because I used to ride in a plane like 6 or 7 times in a weekend when I was an active skydiver. When the plane reached cruising altitude, I guess the pilot cut back the engines, or whatever, because they went from making a lot of noise, to a little bit of noise, and I was so nervous, about the plane crashing, that my hands were pouring sweat, and when the engines cut-back, I was convinced that they had shut-off, and that we were crashing, so I look around to see if anyone else is noticing what I thought that I was noticing.

I akin it to that scene in Vanilla Sky, where after Tom Cruise takes the sleeping pills, and he waves goodbye to himself in the mirror. That's how I see what happened in the plane. It was odd, and I, at that moment, accepted that I was going to die.

A few moments later, however, I realized everything is OK.

Of course, had the plane really started to crash, I'm sure that things would have been different.

But before that time, and since that time, actually, for the past year or so, I've had really intense dreams about dying. The thing about you never dying in your dreams -- bullshit, I've long since been dead, as I have died probably 25 timesin my dreams.

In one dream I realized that the terrorists new plot was to tamper with the fuel supply, so that planes would take off, and then the bad fuel would ruin the engines while they were in the air, and force the plane to die. It was on a huge plane, the kind with 10 seats accross 3 sets of rows in the plane, and I think I was in the plane with the Beatles. Regardless, we crashed down, and in the dream, I watched how all the different people reacted to the fact that they were about to die. Some people silently praying, some people being hysterical. And it got to the point where you are only a few seconds from dying, and then we crash, and I see the plane wreck. It was really quite odd.

I've, in my dreams, been through many, many plane wrecks.

Another weird dream, was for some reason I was living in a weird island thing, hiding out from society, for many, many years, because I was accused of murdering someone. So one day, in the hiding place, I had a radio on, and some fisherman heard it, and then he came back with the police, and they threw a bomb into the hiding place, and I coulnd't escape, so I just knelt down, and lowered my head, and the bomb killed me. Actually, quite oddly, in that dream, I went to heaven. I actually remember waiting in line in heaven, but there were stairs, and it was more of a building, than a bunch of clouds with pearly gates.

But really, in both facing death in real life, and in dreams, I don't seem to remember ever trying to make amends with my religious views, or lack there-of. Maybe it's because I don't feel guilty about anything that I've really done in my life. I'm not saying I'm perfect, as, well, anyone who knows me knows that I'm nuts, but I've led a good life, help out a lot with anything I can, and which ever way it turns out in the next life, I'm pretty sure that I'll be OK.

[Physics Theory]

I believe the following sums up this thread quite well:

"How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people -- first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving...

"I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves -- this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts -- possessions, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible.

"My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude...

"My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality... The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

"This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man... I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.

-- Einstein, 1931

[Gargazon]

If you want to get rid of the Mormons just tell them the Wicans told you it was ok to run around naked, barking at the moon and screwing every whacked out earth chick they brought to their bonfires...then ask them if their god can beat that offer, when they tell you about heaven tell them you want information on the benefits, cause if it doesn't have a good dental plan you are going with the whacked out earth chicks...make sure you read up on wica first though, that way you can intelligently try and convert them from mormanism. You can also toss in a prove your heaven exists. It's always fun to see how most people squirm when you tell them that. If you get a smart one they will at least try to say something like, well I can't "prove" it, it's a matter of faith...back up by this evidence here blah blah blah.


Seriously though, I don't think the mormans have it even close to right, but they do have a close knit community, cause little trouble to their neighbors or law enforcement, and are generally good moral people...which dosen't matter at all if they are wrong.

[Baddori]

"'Therefore once more I will astound these people with wonder upon wonder; the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish.' Woe to those who go to great depths to hide their plans from the Lord, who do their work in darkness and think, "Who sees us? Who will know?" You turn things upside down, as if the potter were thought to be like the clay! Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, "He did not make me"? Can the pot say of the potter, "He knows nothing"?

--Isaiah 29:14-16

[Gargazon]

I'm a bit confused by what you posted baddori, would you mind clarifying?