The Journey Toward Love

[Quaker Dude]

A very Dudely Christian friend of mine from another forum posted this, so I figured I would spread it around!  :-)


From the writings of St. Symeon the New Theologian:

We should look upon all the faithful as one person and consider that Christ is in each one of them. We should have such love for them that we are ready to sacrifice our very lives for them. For it is incumbent upon us neither to say, nor think of any person as evil, but we must look upon everyone as good. If you see a brother afflicted with a passion, do not hate him. Hate the passion that makes war upon him. And if you see him being terrorized by the habits and desires of previous sins, have compassion on him. Maybe you too will be afflicted by temptation, since you are also made from matter that easily turns from good to evil. Love towards your brother prepares you to love God even more. The secret, therefore, of love towards God is love towards your brother. For if you don?t love your brother whom you see, how is it possible to love God whom you do not see?

"For he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God Whom he has not seen? (1 John 4:20).

[meekon5]

Sorry couldn't help myself.

[Abideist]

There are ideas in the bible that have a lot of good intentions (new testament), and even to a non religious spirtualist like myself, but ultimately I think religion supported by the bible is really screwing shit up. I say burn all the bibles and start a new book called "great ideas of historical theologians".

[meekon5]

There are ideas in the bible that have a lot of good intentions (new testament), and even to a non religious spirtualist like myself, but ultimately I think religion supported by the bible is really screwing shit up. I say burn all the bibles and start a new book called "great ideas of historical theologians".

1) The Old Testament was not written with good intention?

2) How do you stand on the exclusions from the new Testament (gospels according to Thomas, Mary Magdelene)?

3) Or the theory that the new Testament is particularly manipulated to repress the fact that Mary Magdelene was actually the one who inherited the true teaching of Jesus?

4) Though good intentions "a new book called "great ideas of historical theologians"" wouldn't just suffer from the same problems, misinterpretation, misrepresentation, and intentional manipulation?

5) I have to disagree with your use of the term "non religious spirtualist" I think here you mean non-christian spiritualists. or non-abrahamic spiritualists. Unfortunatly there is a very common miss use of the term religious, all my life libraries and bookshops have sorted christianity as religious books anything else of a spiritual nature otherwise. Xianity is not the only religion. Religious is not just a term for xianity.

[Rev. Ed C]

There are ideas in the bible that have a lot of good intentions (new testament), and even to a non religious spirtualist like myself, but ultimately I think religion supported by the bible is really screwing shit up. I say burn all the bibles and start a new book called "great ideas of historical theologians".

Although I understand your sentiment there, I think that's a little... well, aggressive towards the intended parties.  That's fairly extremist way of putting it, I feel.  It's a bit unfair to blame the books, the great religious texts of the many thousands of years of well-meaning philosophy, from all over the world.

I've actually covered all of this recently in the further discussions of my DP article on Science v Religions, and that was following up on something the AD had put forward.

The upshot, without getting too in-depth about it, is that people take what they want from these messages, and some people fuzz the sentiment and sharpen the words, where what they should be doing is fuzzing the words and sharpening the sentiment.  There is very often, no literal meaning.

To that end, a future DP article I've written, that should be out in a few months, called Mything the Point, will explain this even better, the problems of getting caught up in the words and entirely missing the message.

It takes a real reactionary to take something bad out of something, and it takes a real enlightened humanitarian to take something good away.  Again, to that end, at some point I really need to get around to that article on religious extremism and how we might even find it in Dudeism.

*philosophy gland overheaing*  Excuse me, I need to go and lie down for a bit, before it all comes pouring out


In case you missed the article, or the ensuing discussion, and were interested in what we all had to say on some of the above matters: http://dudespaper.com/science-versus-religions-whats-the-beef.html/

[Abideist]

ah, it's whatever.

[Quaker Dude]

Ahem....Dudes, this thread isn't about "religion" or even Christianity; it's about love.  Were you all listening to the dude's story, or were you like a child that wanders into the middle of a movie and wants to know...aw hell...lost my train of thought again.

[cckeiser]

We should look upon all (snip) as one person and consider that (all the Universe) is in each one of them. We should have such love for them that we are ready to sacrifice our very lives for them. For it is incumbent upon us neither to say, nor think of any person as evil, but we must look upon everyone as good. If you see a (person) afflicted with a passion, do not hate him, (but love him as you would love your brother). (Forgive) the passion that makes war upon him. And if you see him being terrorized by the habits and desires of previous sins, have compassion on him. Maybe you too will be afflicted by temptation, since you are also (snip) easily turned from good to evil. (snip) The secret, therefore, of love towards (all mankind is love towards your brother and love towards yourself). (For you to are part of the Universe; as the Universe is within you).(snip)

Teaching from the Buddha?

The problem with your essay is it is attempting to be Christian. Take out all mention of god or Christ and it is not a bad message.
What you must understand is any mention of Christ or God or Christian is an immediate turn off. Most of the educated world is wise to the mind manipulations of The Church that has been going on for the past 1600 years. All of History has been corrupted by Christians that just about anything written after 400 CC must be considered suspect and of little use to anyone seeking truth.

And yes, we can all see why "Hate" was not considered one of The Deadly Sins.

[Quaker Dude]

The problem with your essay is it is attempting to be Christian. Take out all mention of god or Christ and it is not a bad message.
What you must understand is any mention of Christ or God or Christian is an immediate turn off. Most of the educated world is wise to the mind manipulations of The Church that has been going on for the past 1600 years. All of History has been corrupted by Christians that just about anything written after 400 CC must be considered suspect and of little use to anyone seeking truth.

And yes, we can all see why "Hate" was not considered one of The Deadly Sins.

I'm not sure I see where you're coming from here, dude.  Does a piece of teaching become hollow or tainted just because it's associated with a particular faith or figure?  You mentioned the Buddha, who was a great avatar.  Writings of the Buddhist faith have illuminated and uplifted many (including myself).  Should his name be expunged from every piece of writing his teachings inspired?

A lot of folks aren't cool with Christianity because it has a long history of some pretty undude behavior (the Crusades, Salem Witch Trials, Westboro Baptist Church, etc.) and I totally get that.  Like I said in another thread, I've ceased self-applying the label myself for this very reason.  But I don't see how it's fair to write off 2,000 years of beautiful tradition, from Jesus to - uhhh.....Joe-Bob Briggs - just because of a few (okay, a LOT of) reactionaries and carpet-pissers.

There's MUCH beauty to be found in the Tao, the I Ching, the Bhagavad Gītā, and yes, the Qur'an too.  Should we disregard everything their teachers, prophets, and avatars had to say because of all the uncool people who committed atrocities in their names?

Out of respect for those who don't like to read any Jesus stuff, I *did* at least post this in the appropriate subforum, right?  'Cuz I *definitely* didn't mean to step on any toes here.

[cckeiser]

Does a piece of teaching become hollow or tainted just because it's associated with a particular faith or figure?

Yeah, sorry Quaker Dude, but for me it does. For me, anything Christian is completely corrupted and without value. Actually, it's even worse, I consider Christianity evil. It teaches hate and intolerance. The Church today is no different than it was a 1000 years ago...they have just changed their methods. It is still dangerous to challenge the church.


This is from back on Dec 18, 2010:
http://dudeism.com/smf/index.php?topic=1500.msg13912#msg13912

I am a Christian.
Yep,that is what that second c stands for in c.c.keiser! 8^)
I was born and raised roman catholic. Went through 12 years of catholic schools. After graduating and escaping the brainwashing of the church I morphed into Atheism in my 20s. Took another 30 years to rid myself of the last of their mind fucking. But still find myself taking the name in vain when I'm startled. Some mind fucks just run to frickin deep.
If you really want to know about The Church you need to research how they got started in the Dark Ages. Anything written after the year 400 is suspect and of little value since just about everything after that date was written by The Church itself.
The Dark Ages are "dark" because that is what The Church wanted. They wanted to erase or rewrite all history that did not conform to their teachings.
They sparked The Great Migration by persecuting the Druids and "Heathens" that would not convert. Everyone was fleeing in terror of the army of the church, but where ever they fled the church was either there already or not far behind.
By the time of Charlemagne there was no place left to run.
If you want to know the truth about the church, start with Charlemagne and work backwards.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlemagne
Just remember that just about everything you read after the year 400 was pretty much written by The Church itself. The Jesuits were every where and have pretty much corrupted all history ever since.

[HnauHnakrapunt]

Well, it is like - can I cast runes just to get some augury or do I need to learn something about Odin too to make sense of it? Though I got my first stones before I met my first Asatru friend, I would say that rune casting with no knowledge of Norse gods and culture is mainly guessing in a fog what it is all about. Some signs and words are hard to understand without some names in the background.