poliphilo | Come On Down

Well, yes, but I'm hoping we'll be post-human in a thousand years- that we'll have computerized our brains and made ourselves a whole lot more intelligent.

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I used to be an Anglican- which is a bit like Catholicism without the Pope. Yes the tunes are pretty- and the frocks....

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dakegra.livejournal.com

hopefully we'll make it that far, without having blown ourselves up or gassed the planet to death.

Little ray of sunshine, me, this morning. Bah, work.

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silent-mouse.livejournal.com

Oh! The Pope! A must in a well-established religion, I think. Of course, it would never work for us - every one would want to be the Pope. :)

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So many science fiction writers seem to be rather stingy about time--they have us exploring Titan and setting up camps in the year 2019.

Sure--like we're going to get it together down here and get to Titan in about twenty years.

With Bush in charge, these writers ought to start shoving their timeframes out about 200 years, at least. That should get us back out of the New Dark Ages.

As for aliens landing, I wish.

Why do we always assume that anything unlike us is a predator?

That's us!

Maybe aliens are benevolent teachers. Maybe they'll show us how to use warp drive and how to be kind to each other.

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thewayupward.livejournal.com

What's the difference between being Catholic and being Anglican? (I mean, besides the Pope). I always wondered. The Anglicans always seemed to me to be kind of in between the Protestants and the Catholics. Do they do Confession and Mass and everything? What are the differences in doctrine?

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Maybe they'll show us ... how to be kind to each other.

I don't think we'd recognize it if they did.

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We probably wouldn't give them time before we shot them because they looked scary.

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Anglicanism was invented by Henry VIII, when he declared himself the head of the church in England.

This was a political, not a doctrinal act. Henry remained a good catholic at heart- he just didn't want the Pope bossing him about.

The Anglican church doesn't have any distinctive teachings. It boasts of being both catholic AND protestant. Some Anglican go to confession, others are born-again Biblical fundamentalists. This is a wobbly compromise that holds just so long as no-one starts stomping around and asking awkward questions.

Currently the Church is divided over the issue of gay priests and may very well be about to tear itself apart.

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Of course they could be here already. If they were they'd surely be following the Prime Directive and keeping a very low profile.

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That's the best arrangement I think. Everyone acting as the Pope of his or her own religion.

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following the Prime Directive and keeping a very low profile.

You think?

How would they look like us? Surgical procedures via a Beverly Crusher sort of doctor?

I wish one of them would talk with Bush pretty soon.

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They are so far advanced they can transform themselves at will.

Or maybe they look like us already- and all they need to do is make minor adjusments- like Spock does in the movie, covering his pointy ears with a sweat band.

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Yeah, let's say they're from an M-class planet.

So how would they start helping us out?

I don't think they'd want to give us warp speeds just yet. Just thinking about that makes me smile. Can you imagine us nervous conflicted predators hurtling out into space to seek out other civilizations?

I wish I could imagine how they'd help us. It's beyond me. Sometimes I think only evolution itself will help us out.

We'll get our warp drive, but we'll be benign cockroaches in the year 40,000.

With opposable thumbs.

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balirus.livejournal.com

I don't think the human race will ever be beyond religious differences. Conflicts between the old religions might resolve, but the new religions will bring their own divisions.

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I think we'll learn how to speed up evolution. We'll merge with our computers and be able to carry the entire contents of the Internet around in our heads.

Something like that.

I think the aliens are merely observing us. Perhaps they give things a surrepticious nudge every once in a while. Oh- and when they get too bored with hanging about being frostily benign they fly down to New Mexico and mutilate a cow.

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I can forsee a time when we outgrow religion- at least as it's practised now. In the future we will all be Platonic philosopher-kings.

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Yup.

Sad to say.

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I have 7 sibs. We were all raised Catholic, and most of us went to Catholic school. We have among us now one nouveau Catholic, one traditional Catholic, one Quaker, one Mormon, and one Fundamentalist Christian. And we all get along, mostly by not talking about religion, or only talking about it to find commonalities.

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silent-mouse.livejournal.com

Agree - but only if I get to use the "popemobil"! :)

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Several years ago, a rare whistling swan settled in for a few weeks in a local waterway. People drove out to see it. Mostly we see swans in parks, with their pinfeathers clipped to keep them from flying far.

The newspapers came out to take pictures.

Soon afterward, a stupid hulk with a rifle shot the swan.

If he hadn't, another stupid hulk with a rifle would have.

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Some of our biggest family arguments are about religious issues.

My brother thinks we need a Christ figure to forgive us our sins.

One of my sisters thinks we shouldn't need to be forgiven for being human--she says, "Do we get mad at a dog because he barks?"

She also thinks we're more like bees in a hive, and that our religion was constructed to keep us in the hive. If we get outside the hive, she says, we get unhappy until we're back in.

I have tried and failed to understand the concept of having an intermediary for our sins. If God is a personality, as we seem to think "He" is, then why would another personality be involved?

I realize I am being simplistic...

I don't think God has a personality. I mean, God's not human. With a beard.

Or a being, either...How can we possibly understand what created us? Or what created whatever created us?

The first creator. How can we?

I wonder often, Karen, about Jesus. IF he did the things that were said about him, how could he be a human being? Was he an alien?

IF he did those things.

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I wonder often, Karen, about Jesus. IF he did the things that were said about him, how could he be a human being? Was he an alien?

IF he did those things.

I think he did some version of those things.

I don't think he was more alien to us than we are to each other.

I'm sorry your family fights about religion.

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The thing is to be secure enough in your own belief not to be threatened by others believing differently.

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We generally get along quite well.

Our WORST fights are about politics!

By fighting, I mean only that we get very incensed, pull out our best arguments, yell, get hacked.

But it's fun! And I always learn something.

I tend to agree with everyone--as soon an argument is put forward, I see the sense of it.

My mother refuses to listen to any of it.

I can't stay away. But I can only speak for myself. I don't do very well in arguments. I lose debates routinely, because I am easily convinced, a dangerous thing.

I would probably be easily brainwashed, because I want to believe.

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In the future we will all be Platonic philosopher-kings.

Ah, the elegance of it. The peacefulness of it.

The very idea of killing another person would be repulsive to us. We would naturally want to help each other grow and prosper.

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queen-in-autumn.livejournal.com

I think there will always be religious differences. I'm just hoping that one day we will get past our religious conflicts. (My apologies if my hair-splitting is on the wrong side of how you meant "differences.")

A primary tenet of my faith is that the Divine reaches out to all of us, within us, and that we respond to that Divine, name it, and create ritual to celebrate it, based on our culture and personality. That being the case, we will never have a single religion.

I would like to hope that one day we will all recognize and respect the Divine and the Holy within each other's faiths, but I'm afraid that there will always be the arrogant, the fearful, and the absolutist, who can not bear the idea that Mystery and Paradox are inevitable when the Human interacts with the Divine.

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morrison-maiden.livejournal.com

::sigh:: I know what you mean, but mostly because it sucks to be a Jew during the holiday season :(

::Puts on Rodney Dangerfield voice:: We don't get no respect!

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Yes, that must be a pain.

But so much of the Christmas stuff is purely secular/pagan. The Christians didn't invent Christmas; they took over a pre-existing feast (which was too popular to suppress) and gave it a bit of a tweak.

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I entirely agree.

God has a million different names. A million million. And all of them are fitting and true.

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morrison-maiden.livejournal.com

Yeah, that's true. I just hate how so many of them mob the stores and completely forget or ignore the actual meaning. Oh well :\

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besideserato.livejournal.com

Roman Catholicism--all right!

It's because the church has swallowed a lot of other elements of religion and through history has shown a degree of flexibility unknwon to most other major religions while still exerting a lot of control on the general population.

Plus our places of worship are prettiest.

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The thing is to be secure enough in your own belief not to be threatened by others believing differently.

I remember well a conversation I had with an older woman in our congregation whose son was dying.

I wanted to talk about Spong, that old reprobate who so stirred up the Church in the 90s with his book Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism.

(He now has a new book out, A New Christianity for a New World, in which he explains why the traditional understandings of God, Christ, the Church, and their rules and dogmas are wrong and dangerous. He spells out his contemporary vision of God, Jesus, prayer, worship, evil, the afterlife, and the Church as a community of love, equality, and truth.)

Anyway, the woman stopped me. She actually held up her hand like a policeman. She said, "I don't want to have my faith shaken right now, not with my son so ill. I don't want to think about this."

I felt terrible and apologized. But it occurred to me later that if her "faith" was so fragile, it was probably already too late.

We seem to have the idea of "faith" and "being saved" all rolled up together.

I'd forgotten all about Spong. He had a really bad name for awhile, people gasped at his blasphemies, and then he was forgotten.

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The flexibility is something I respect. I saw an exhibition in London which documented contacts between East and West 1500-1800 and the Jesuits pretty much emerged as the stars of the show.

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I had some contact- fleeting- with Don Cupitt, a Cambridge don who caused a similar stir back in the 70s and 80s with a string of books propounding "Christian atheism". He was the most ferociously intelligent person I ever met. His intellect shone like a blade.

I raised his name in conversation with the jolly old bishop of Middleton and he said, "I don't read radical theology. I'm afraid it would shake my faith."

I understand his concern. Reading Cupitt shook my faith to the extent that I had to leave the church. But is faith worth hanging onto if it such a fragile thing?

Surely what we're all trying to do- in church and out of it- is get at the Truth.

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I raised his name in conversation with the jolly old bishop of Middleton and he said, "I don't read radical theology. I'm afraid it would shake my faith."

How sad, to smother oneself in "faith" like a child's blankie, when there is so much to explore and wonder about!

I have never heard of Cupitt, but I found Spong fascinating. And there was no one to talk with about it. He was considered "evil."

The single most influential writer for me was Stephen Mitchell, a Buddhist. I happened to see his book, "The Gospel According to Jesus," in a bookstore, and I usually don't buy stuff in that section, but I kept thinking about it and kept thinking about it, and finally drove back to the store and bought it. It led me to Rumi, to Eckhart, and to thinking for myself.

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