immortal

Earlier you said that to be religious you have to follow the true word of some god. Now you say it's by insight.

 

Which is it?

 

I didn't said that, I said God became man so that man might become God. Just be believing in Christ you won't become a Christian you need to become Christ to be a Christian.

Icon of The Ladder of Divine Ascent (the steps toward theosis as described by St. John Climacus) showing monks ascending (and falling from) the ladder to Jesus. Saint Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai.

This is the main central tenet of not only Christianity but of all religions of the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divinization_(Christian)

That's what being religious means to become identical with God. Being religious means not to establish the Gospel all over the earth and not converting as many people into Christianity, the latter are not religious people for they don't know what being religious means.

Other have definitions that disagree with yours. Thus, your definition is not universal.

Try to make a fundamentalist agree with you, they will continue to believe what they want to believe despite all evidence contradicting their beliefs, their own religious scriptures shatter their belief systems, that's why we label them as fundamentalists. The central tenet of a religion defines itself as to what characteristics one should have to attain membership into that religion. These fundamentalists do not have the characteristics and values in them to qualify themselves as part of that religion and hence they are not religious. I gave you a precise definition as to what you need to have in you to receive membership into Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism for I know the central tenet of these religions.

If your use of "universal" means that it applies to all, then you can't follow the "true word of a god" if that god doesn't exist in the religion.

I guess you don't know what being liberal means, Christianity has its own pantheon of Gods, Buddhism has its own pantheon of Gods and so does Hinduism, Hellenistic religions and Islam. Universal doesn't mean that there is only one true word of God and it universally applies to all, no, that's not what I said, if that was the case then this definition is not any better than the definitions which fundamentalists make up for themselves.

My definition is universal means every religion in this world has its own central tenet and this central tenet is what defines that religion for all of us and that common universal central tenet is to achieve Divinization. It literally means to become more divine, more like God, and/or take upon a divine nature.

This is the reason why I insist that if you need to be a Christian you need to become Christ, if you need to be a Brahmin you need to become Brahman, if you need to be a Jew you need to become Ein Sof, if you need to be a Buddhist you need to become Adi Buddha, if you need to be a Muslim you need to become Allah.

This is the central tenet of all these religions whether it is east or west and north or south, this central tenet is universal and is what defines religion for all of us. This has nothing to do with faith just by believing in Christ, YHWH and Allah you won't become a Christian, Jew and a Muslim, these people are not religious.

So how does an illiterate person become religious, in your view?

Just by having a Phd you cannot escape from the cave, you're still a prisoner of the cave, the person who is an illiterate and the one who holds a Phd is even when it comes to religion. When I mean knowledge I'm not talking of knowledge acquired via sense organs, I'm speaking of experiential knowledge, knowledge acquired via immediate insight.

Meditation

 

It was obvious that I would not answer such questions through mere argument and reason. As both Eastern philosophy and mystical writings make very clear, knowledge of subtler levels of consciousness comes not from reading, or from studying the experiences of others, but from one’s own direct experience. So I began to look into meditation and other spiritual practices.

 

It happened that several Buddhist teachers and Tibetan lamas, including Trongpe Rinpoche who had recently escaped from the Chinese invasion, were teaching in Cambridge. At that stage in my exploration, Buddhism appealed to me because it was the most non-religious of the Eastern philosophies. It was as much a psychology and a philosophy as a religion. It made a point of not discussing God; its focus was removing the causes of suffering in oneself. So I started attending classes in Buddhist meditation, listening to various teachers, and reading some of the great Buddhist texts.

 

Several months later, the direction of my inner exploration suddenly changed. Hunting through the esoteric section of my local library for works on consciousness, I noticed a book titled The Science of Being and Art of Living by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi–the Indian teacher who had recently made the headlines when The Beatles renounced their use of drugs in favor of his technique of Transcendental Meditation. I added the book to my pile and took it back to my study, where it sat, unopened, on my desk for two weeks. Finally, little knowing how much my life was about to change, I took a look. Within minutes I was riveted. Maharishi was saying the exact opposite of nearly everything I’d heard or read about meditation, yet he seemed to make perfect sense.

 

Most of the books I had read on meditation talked about how much effort it took to still the restless mind and achieve a state of deep inner peace and fulfillment. Maharishi looked at the whole matter in a different way. Any concentration, the least bit of trying, even a wanting the mind to settle down, would, he observed, be counter-productive. Any effort would promote mental activity rather than lessening it.

 

He suggested that the mind was restless because it was seeking something–namely, greater satisfaction and fulfillment. But it was looking for it in the wrong direction, in the world of thinking and sensory experience. All that was needed, he said, was to turn the attention 180 degrees inward and then, applying his technique, encourage the mind to settle down just a little. Being in a slightly quieter state, the mind would taste a little more of the fulfillment it had been seeking. By repeating the practice, it would be spontaneously drawn on to yet quieter and more fulfilling levels of its own accord.

 

 

Maharishi’s ideas appealed to my scientific mind. They were simple and elegant–almost like a mathematical derivation. But the skeptic in me was not going to take anything on faith. The only way to know how well his technique worked was to try it. The nearest teacher I could find was in London, so I traveled down from Cambridge each day for a week to take some instruction. It was a little while before I got the practice right, but once I did, I realized Maharishi was correct. The less I tried, the quieter my mind became.

 

Journey to India

 

The following summer, I traveled to Lago di Braies, a lake high up in the Italian Alps, for a meditation retreat with Maharishi. I was instantly charmed. With his deep, warm, brown eyes, long flowing black hair and beard, dressed only in a single sheet of white cotton artfully wrapped around his small body and a simple pair of sandals, he looked the classic Indian guru. Bubbling over with joy, he never tired of talking to us novices about finer levels of being and higher states of consciousness. This was not book knowledge, but wisdom that was coming from someone who clearly had direct personal experience of these states. I knew then that I wanted to study further with him.

 

As soon as I completed my undergraduate degree, I earned some money driving a truck, then set off overland for India. My destination was Rishikesh, an Indian holy town, about 150 miles north of Delhi, at the foot of the Himalayas.

 

The plains of Northern India do not gradually rise up into mountains, as do the Alps; the landscape looks more like the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. One moment it is flat, the next there is mountain. Rishikesh nestled right where plain became mountain, at the very point where the Ganges tumbled out of its deep Himalayan gorge.

 

On one side of the river was Rishikesh the bustling market town, its crowded streets a jumble of market stalls, honking cars, bicycle rickshaws, and bony cows. On the other side was Rishikesh the holy town. The atmosphere here was very different. There were no cars for a start. The one bridge across the river–strung high over the mouth of the gorge–was deliberately built too narrow for cars. Along this side of the river, and sprinkled up the jungle hillsides, were all manner of ashrams. Some were austere walled quadrangles lined with simple meditation cells; others gloried in lush gardens, fountains and brightly colored statues of Indian deities. Some were centers for hatha yoga, some for meditation; others were devoted to a particular spiritual teacher or philosophy.

 

About two miles down river from the bridge was Maharishi’s ashram, the last habitation before the winding track disappeared into the jungle. Perched on a cliff top, a hundred feet above the swirling Ganges, were half-a-dozen bungalows, a meeting hall, dining room, showers, and other facilities providing some basic Western comforts.

 

Here just over a hundred of us, of all ages, from many countries, had gathered for a teacher training course. Many were like myself, recent graduates looking for deeper intellectual understanding of Maharishi’s teachings as much as for deeper experience of meditation. There were Ph.D.’s in philosophy, medical doctors, and long-term students of theology.

 

Over the coming weeks we listened to Maharishi expound his philosophy. We asked question after question, virtually interrogating him at times. We wanted to tease out everything, from the finer distinctions of higher states of consciousness and subtle influences of meditation, to the exact meaning of various esoteric concepts. Maharishi’s willingness to share his knowledge never tired. Often, when the day’s program was complete, a few of us would gather in his small sitting room, where we stayed late into the night soaking up yet more of his wisdom.

 

Pure Consciousness

 

As well as furthering our understanding of meditation, Maharishi wanted us to have clear experiences of the states of consciousness he was describing. That could only come from prolonged periods of deep meditation. At first we were meditating for three or four hours a day, but as the course progressed, our practice times increased. Six weeks into our three month stay, we were spending most of the day in meditation–and much of the night as well.

 

During these long meditations, my habitual mental chatter began to fade away. Thoughts about what was going on outside, what time it was, how the meditation was progressing, or what I wanted to say or do later, occupied less and less of my attention. Random memories of the past no longer flitted through my mind. My feelings settled down, and my breath grew so gentle as to virtually disappear. Mental activity became fainter and fainter, until finally my thinking mind fell completely silent. In Maharishi’s terminology, I had transcended (literally "gone beyond") thinking.

 

Indian teachings call this state samadhi, meaning "still mind." They identify it as a fundamentally different state of consciousness from the three major states we normally experience–waking, dreaming and deep sleep. In waking consciousness we are aware of the world perceived by the senses. In dreaming we are aware of worlds conjured by the imagination. In deep sleep there is no awareness, neither of outer world nor inner world. In samadhi there is awareness, one is wide awake, but now there is no object of awareness. It is pure consciousness–consciousness before it takes on the various forms and qualities of a particular experience.

- Peter Russel, From Science to God.

Religion is not about believing, its about doing. According to religion people who hold Phd's are as illiterate as people who doesn't know to read and write because both the former as well as latter people are still prisoners of the cave. Your definitions of religion sucks which is devoid of any wisdom and an ignorance of how religion works. I told you if you need to be a Christian you need to become Christ, if you need to be a Brahmin you need to become Brahman, if you need to be a Jew you need to become Ein Sof, if you need to be a Buddhist you need to become Adi Buddha.

 

Even more evidence that immortal's definition is not "universal"

Can you please clarify based on what part of my posts or based on what you arrived at that conclusion? My definition includes both eastern religions as well as western religions, so can you make it clear for me?

So Timothy is still in then.

I guess you didn't understand what I meant, Logos, the word of God is not something which exists in a Holy Book like the bible, Koran or the bhagavad gita, just as numbers and mathematical truths exists in a platonic realm even the word of God exists out there in the numinous, its imperishable and incorruptible unlike the word of God which exists in our holy books which are corrupted and even forged. So Timothy is definitely out.

Paul's letters. He described how people treated him.....exactly how people treated epileptics. He also described the incident.....exactly like a delusion from certain types of epilepsy. Guess what disease people with "Paul's Disease" have. I'll give you a hint: it starts with "E" and rhymes with "Depilepsy".

 

Also, Epilepsy Museum for the "Paul's Disease" thing, and pubmed for the matching of symptoms.

So if a person experiences a motor impairment or a seizure just once in his entire life time you conclude that he is a symptomatic epileptic patient? Wonderful, that shows your own confirmation bias and one of the strong reasons why I criticize those people who hold on to an atheistic position that they have not researched religion completely, anyone who has performed a specific ritual to make an ascent to heaven knows that the ecstatic experiences are sometimes blissful and at other times horrible and painful and in scientific terminologies the latter can be classified into different types of seizures, there will be a severe blow to the head, loss of consciousness and severe motor impairment, tonic and atonic seizures etc.

I had researched extensively about ecstatic experiences of making an ascent to heaven, these people are quite healthy and actually seizure attacks usually happen only at the time of performing the ritual and not at other times and as I said in an another thread meditators can not only self induce a high amplitude gamma synchrony which is a very blissful experience sometimes they can self induce the opposite that is desynchrony and motor impairment, the subjects in these cases are healthy and show no sign of any pathology and any record of past symptomatic seizure attacks.

Comparative studies which I did a year back while researching about Mithras Liturgy show something else is going on and that the world is a mystery.

http://wordtrade.com/religion/bible/corinthians.htm

There are also other hypotheses that Paul was not influenced by Roman mithraism but actually by Persian Mithraism and that would make his ascent to heaven a very likely event and not something which can be easily dismissed as a TLE or a hallucination or as delusion.

http://jdstone.org/cr/files/paulandthepaganreligionofmithraism.html

Comparative studies push the evidence favouring the theist's side.

How about you provide some actual evidence for gods other than your own beliefs and faith.

Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice.

http://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16369.full

The traditions of Tibetan Buddhists, Smarta tradition of Vedic Aryans, Neoplatonism and Valentinian tradition are real and they are empirical, they can not only self induce high amplitude gamma synchrony they can also self induce de-synchrony and cause motor impairment to the body and this is a fact and we all know what these Tibetan Buddhists who belong to Nyingmapa and Kagyupa traditions, the meditators chosen for this study believe in, yes they believe in the 100 peaceful and wrathful deities and these deities are inherent in their mental practices and you cannot separate them.

http://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Hundred_peaceful_and_wrathful_deities

Gods are real and they are everywhere.

Then why bother opening a new thread? Nothing in your reply negates my point that you've called others ignorant before they even had a chance to put forth their views in this discussion. That's hardly a reasonable and mature approach to intelligent and respectful dialog, and it's a problem you seem to have in nearly every thread where you participate.

Why bother? It is the kind of double standard positions that people hold on to is what bothers me, if you believe in Platonism you need to accept his Gods which is what people like Roger Penrose don't do, that's double standards, if you believe in non-dualism you need to accept the existence of Gods which is exactly what majority of them don't do, either stay away from these things or accept things as they are, any compromise position is untenable. I state things as they are, that's why its annoying for everyone.

Again, who are you to chose which way of life is religious? More specifically, can a banker be religious?

There are 613 commandments in the Torah which forms the Jewish Law, there are as many commandments in the Islamic law and there are even greater number of laws in the Vedas. These laws should be followed in their respective countries even if the laws in different countries, places and times are opposite to one another. It is the divine Logos as called by the Greeks or Rta as called by the Vedic people which is the ordering principle behind the universe which gave these laws to our ancients, even the Gods are subjected to these laws and it governs the righteous conduct of life.

Through out history these laws were in the hands of Rabbis for the Jews and Brahmin priests for the Aryans, there were not only a confusion on how to interpret these laws which still persists today, there is a great confusion on how to interpret the Islamic law but more importantly the elders or experienced priests could even change these laws and even add new laws after it was discussed and agreed upon by a elite group of noble priests and considering the amount of inequality and discrimination that exists in these laws its quite clear that these laws have been corrupted through time and we don't know what exactly was the divine law given to us by the divine Logos.

These laws were not meant to control people or something which should be enforced all over the world, these laws were meant to produce a righteous society which were based on the underlying working principle of the cosmos and it was a guiding means to seek the divinity with in us, that's why it was said that the Gospel of Thomas should be read after reading all the synoptic Gospels because you have been prepared to receive these higher form of teachings as it says seek you shall find and as the Brahma Sutras says “Now one should enquire into the Brahman.” This means that now that you have attained a human body, you should use your intelligence to discover what is really spiritual and what is the Absolute Truth. Then the second verse begins to explain what is this Absolute Truth: “He from whom everything originates is the Absolute.” Thus, as it refers to “He”, the source of all that exists, the ultimate point of creation, is a person.

This is the central tenet of Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism and Islam which are quite explicitly expressed in Kabbalah, Christian mysticism, Upanishads and in Sufism, the central tenet of religion is not to be obsessed with these laws and to discriminate women and show inequality and double standards in society, this was the message of Jesus, Shankara, Buddha and Muhammad i.e. to give equality to everyone whether one is a whore or a bishop. As long as you're in duality there is scope for discrimination and inequality but when you come to non-duality and realize that everyone and everything is of the same essence then where is the scope for discrimination and inequality to persist. The laws are important for social, theological and political constructs but what is more important is to realize whither we come from and whither we are going.

In today's Modern world which lacks wisdom these laws are given more importance rather than to the central tenets of these religions which has mainly led to all forms of violence for each of these religions want to establish their cultural laws to the far continents and colonize the earth and want to convert as many people as they can falsely believing that their acts are backed up by God which will inevitably leads to the destruction of the world as Nelson-Pallmeyer writes that "Judaism, Christianity and Islam will continue to contribute to the destruction of the world until and unless each challenges violence in "sacred texts" and until each affirms nonviolent power of God". This is the truth about religion and not just my opinion, can a banker be religious? Even a whore can be religious not by blind belief but by realizing the existence of divinity in oneself, only then you can see others in equal terms for God is not divided and he has made everyone including men and women in his own image.

Wow, did you misread all of that. The context was whether these were people following a religion, not whether the acts were right or justifiable. You claim that they aren't following the word of some god and therefore we should not be blaming religion, and others are rebutting that claim.

 

You people keep insist that they are following the word of God which means you are implicitly defending them.

 

It would be the part about belief that lets them claim it as religious. It doesn't require your stamp of approval for their interpretation; you can disavow their inclusion into your particular flavor of whatever religion to which you belong, but not from religion in general. Basically your claim is equivalent to saying e.g. that of all the sects of Christianity, only one of them (at most) is a actually a religion.

No, your examples should not be included even in the general definition of religion, the Talibanization movement is a movement just like the Nazi movement and they have their own specific required characteristics and beliefs to register someone into their group or to give membership. Your examples should be classified into the correct category and not into religion.

Talibanization (or Talibanisation) is a term coined following the rise of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan referring to the process where other religious groups or movements come to follow or imitate the strict practices of the Taliban.^[1][2]

In its original usage, Talibanization referred to groups who followed Taliban practices such as:

• usually strict regulation of women, including forbidding of most employment or schooling for women;
• the banning of long lists of activities generally tolerated by other Muslims—movies, television, videos, music, dancing, hanging pictures in homes, clapping during sports events;
• the banning of activities (especially hairstyles and clothing) generally tolerated by other Muslims on the grounds that the activities are Western;
• oppression of Shia, including takfir threats that they convert to Sunni Islam or be prepared to be killed;
• aggressive enforcement of its regulations, particularly the use of armed "religious police";
• the destruction of non-Muslim artifacts, especially carvings and statues such as Buddhas of Bamyan, generally tolerated by other Muslims, on the grounds that the artifacts are idolatrous orShirk (polytheism)
• harboring of Al Qaeda or other Islamic terrorists;
• a discriminatory attitude towards non-Muslims such as sumptuary laws against Afghan Hindus the Taliban regime enacted, requiring them to wear yellow badges, a practice reminiscent of Nazi Germany's anti-Semitic policies.^[3][4][5]

Your opinion. Not a fact.

There is no accepted etymology of religion and my definition is universal not because majority of them agree with it but because it includes all the religions of the world in it and hence it is a fact.

NONE of the Gospels are written by the people attributed.

 

So, let's throw out all extra-Biblical Gospels as well as the four canonical ones. And let's throw out the Petrine epistles and all of the other forgery in the NT. Congratulations, the NT is now only like 5 texts long.

 

Also, why should we assume that Paul was divinely inspired? Should we just take his word for it (especially when it seems that he disagreed on quite large parts of doctrine with the people who actually heard Jesus speak)?

 

It looks like we need to dump Paul's genuine letters too. So, now the "real" NT is precisely 0 texts.

No, it can't. At least not non-fallaciously. People have delusional episodes ALL THE TIME that cause dramatic changes in people's lives. And, in Paul's case, we've got plenty of reason to think that this was a delusion during an epileptic episode.

Do you have any evidence for Paul's pathological record? All these silly excuses to sideline the numerous documented accounts of genuine experiences by healthy religious persons as saying its hallucinations, delusions or were on LSD should stop because there experiences are as real as what happens when a Crow sits touching parallel electric wires with a high voltage of potential difference.

Religion is the pursuit of Truth.

“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”

(Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta, the founder of Buddhism, 563-483 B.C.)


However Tom O'Golo declares that religious fundamentalists that use violence to further their cause contravene the root truth of all faiths:

A genuine fundamentalist is also a radical, someone who tries to get the root of the matter. A major weakness with many or perhaps most radicals is not that they don't dig, but that they don't dig deep enough. Consequently many fundamentalists end up defending or acting upon beliefs which are not really at the heart of their doctrine. For example any religious fundamentalist who harms others in the pursuit of his or her radicalism is strictly out of order as no true religion ever encounters anything but love, tolerance and understanding. 'Thou shalt not kill' is at the heart of all genuine faiths, certainly the three based upon Abraham and God. That trio comprehensively condemns intentional harm to others (and to the self as well) for what ever reason. Dying to protect one's faith is acceptable; killing to promote it isn't. Arguably, it is blasphemous to say that God needs an earthly army to fight Its battles, or perform Its revenge. God is quite capable of fighting Its own battles.

That's not the argument that has been made, though. You said fundamentalists aren't religious. The response was that these fundamentalists are often informed directly by their religious texts. The position presented is that your conclusion is deeply flawed and broken. Can you see how that's not the same as "defending fundamentalists" or condoning their actions? Please say yes.

My position is that these fundamentalists are often misinformed and deliberately misuse their religious texts. Can you not see that you guys are blind towards the truth and implicitly defending the fundamentalists due to your ignorance and claiming that they are religious?

Of course. First, you completely fail to accurately comprehend the position of others. Second, you claim to hold the sole accurate interpretation of religious texts and assert that all others are wrong. You're a rather interesting fellow.

I very well know what you guys are arguing. Its evidence my friend, its evidence which says their interpretations are wrong and are often taken out of context completely than what their religious scriptures are actually saying, even Gandhi took his principle of non-violence from Bhagvad Gita, his entire life was based on Bhagavad Gita, one who has extensively studied the Bhagavad Gita knows that Gandhi was right and Heinrich Himmler was wrong, one doesn't need any special eyes to see who is wrong and who is right, its simple common sense and reasoning is all what it requires, if you argue otherwise it only shows your lack of knowledge about these religious scriptures and not that the teachings in these texts are inherently ambiguous, the teachings in these texts are perfectly fine and explicitly slams the acts and beliefs of fundamentalists something which you fail to recognize.

Those fundamentalists investigate the same texts as you, yet they arrive at a different conclusion. Just because they don't share the exact same interpretation as you does not mean they are not religious.

They don't investigate, they cherry pick those verses which could be effectively taken out of context to justify their gruesome acts and they continue to dogmatically believe in them despite all evidence contradicting such an interpretation, not even their own religious scriptures allows them to arrive at such a conclusion.

All of it.

Surely, your definition of religion sucks, I have not excluded any of the world religions in my definition of religion and none of them discriminate or show inequality towards women, in fact they strive for the opposite i.e. for the equality of men and women.

Oh, hello again, No True Scotsman. Didn't see you standing over there. Fancy a cup of tea?

Just because a majority of the population of the world emotionally hold on to false notions of religion and false notions of God and claim themselves to be the sole saviours of faith, morality and a religious society doesn't make them religious for one doesn't acquire the qualities of divine through faith but through knowledge and his way of life.

See a genuine example:

In the Ramayana, the term Arya can also apply to Raksasas or to Ravana. In several instances, the Vanaras and Raksasas called themselves Arya. The vanara's king Sugriva is called an Arya (Ram: 505102712) and he also speaks of his brother Vali as an Arya (Ram: 402402434). In another instance in the Ramayana, Ravana regards himself and his ministers as Aryas (Ram: A logical explanation is that, Ravana and his ministers belonged to the highest varna (Ravana being a Brahmin), and Brahmins were generally considered 'noble' of deed and hence called Arya (noble). Thus, while Ravana was considered Arya (and regarded himself as such), he was not really an Arya because he was not noble of deeds. So, he is widely considered by Hindus as Anarya (non-Arya).

The Ramayana describes Rama as: arya sarva samascaiva sadaiva priyadarsanah, meaning "Arya, who worked for the equality of all and was dear to everyone."

These evil people call themselves holy, sacred, religious, noble etc and do the exact opposite deeds and hence they should be qualified as according to what they deserve i.e. non-religious, hostile, envious, not liberal.

You won't become pure just by believing or just by breeding only with 6 foot tall, blonde haired, strongly built women and men, you become pure through self-transformation, following a path of perfection and by illumination and by imbibing the qualities of Jesus, Muhammad and Moses in you. After seeing your definition of religion you guys aren't any better than the Nazis, just clouded in the name of atheists, that's the only difference between you and them.

So Thomas is legitimate while Timothy isn't, why, exactly?

There is nothing special about Thomas, there are many other Gospels, Gospel of Philip, Mary, Judas, John, Gospel of Truth, Secret Book of John and the synoptic Gospels they all are legitimate.

There are two main reasons why Timothy might not be divinely inspired.

1. It was not written by Paul and it was forged. I know there are many other Gospels which were not written by the authors as indicated in the name of the Gospels but there is no evidence of a deliberate forgery to deliberately suppress the views of the apostles and portray just the opposite view of the one held by the apostles in those texts where as in Timothy that's exactly what happened. If there is evidence for such deliberate forgery then the divinity of such texts too can be questioned.

2. It was a social and political move rather than a theological one to include this in the canon of New Testament. Elaine Pagels explains it quite briefly.

 

Some gnostics adopted this idea, teaching that Genesis 1:26-27 narrates an androgynous creation. Marcus (whose prayer to the Mother is given above) not only concludes from this account that God is dyadic ("Let us make humanity") but also that "humanity, which was formed according to the image and likeness of God (Father and Mother) was masculo-feminine."43 His contemporary, the gnostic Theodotus (c. 160), explains that the saying "according to the image of God he made them, male and female he made them," means that "the male and female elements together constitute the finest production of the Mother, Wisdom."44 Gnostic sources which describe God as a dyad whose nature includes both masculine and feminine elements often give a similar description of human nature.

 

Yet all the sources cited so far—secret gospels, revelations, mystical teachings—are among those not included in the select list that constitutes the New Testament collection. Every one of the secret texts which gnostic groups revered was omitted from the canonical collection, and branded as heretical by those who called themselves orthodox Christians. By the time the process of sorting the various writings ended—probably as late as the year 200—virtually all the feminine imagery for God had disappeared from orthodox Christian tradition.

 

What is the reason for this total rejection? The gnostics themselves asked this question of their orthodox opponents and pondered it among themselves. Some concluded that the God of Israel himself initiated the polemics which his followers carried out in his name. For, they argued, this creator was a derivative, merely instrumental power whom the Mother had created to administer the universe, but his own self-conception was far more grandiose. They say that he believed that he had made everything by himself, but that, in reality, he had created the world because Wisdom, his Mother, "infused him with energy" and implanted into him her own ideas. But he was foolish, and acted unconsciously, unaware that the ideas he used came from her; "he was even ignorant of his own Mother."45 Followers of Valentinus suggested that the Mother Herself had encouraged the God of Israel to think that he was acting autonomously, but, as they explain, "It was because he was foolish and ignorant of his Mother that he said, 'I am God; there is none beside me.' "46 According to another account, the creator caused his Mother to grieve by creating inferior beings, so she left him alone and withdrew into the upper regions of the heavens. "Since she had departed, he imagined that he was the only being in existence; and therefore he declared, 'I am a jealous God, and besides me there is no one.' "47 Others agree in attributing to him this more sinister motive—jealousy. According to the Secret Book of John:

 

. . . he said . . . , "I am a jealous God, and there is no other God beside me." But by announcing this he indicated

to the angels . . . that another God does exist; for if there were no other one, of whom would he be jealous? . . .

Then the mother began to be distressed.48

 

Others declared that his Mother refused to tolerate such presumption:

 

[The creator], becoming arrogant in spirit, boasted himself over all those things that were below him, and

exclaimed, "I am father, and God, and above me there is no one." But his mother, hearing him speak thus, cried

out against him, "Do not lie, Ialdabaoth . . ."49

 

Often, in these gnostic texts, the creator is castigated for his arrogance—nearly always by a superior feminine power. According to the Hypostasis of the Archons, discovered at Nag Hammadi, both the mother and her daughter objected when

 

he became arrogant, saying, "It is I who am God, and there is no other apart from me." . . .

And a voice came

forth from above the realm of absolute power, saying, "You are wrong, Samael" [which means, "god of the blind"]. And he said, "If any other thing exists before me, let it appear to me!" And immediately, Sophia

("Wisdom") stretched forth her finger, and introduced light into matter, and she followed it down into the region

of Chaos. . .And he again said to his offspring, "It is I who am the God of All." And Life, the daughter of

Wisdom, cried out; she said to him, "You are wrong, Saklas!"50

 

 

The gnostic teacher Justinus describes the Lord's shock, terror, and anxiety "when he discovered that he was not the God of the universe." Gradually his shock gave way to wonder, and finally he came to welcome what Wisdom had taught him. The teacher concludes: "This is the meaning of the saying, 'The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom.' "51

 

Yet all of these are mythical explanations. Can we find any actual, historical reasons why these gnostic writings were suppressed? This raises a much larger question: By what means, and for what reasons, did certain ideas come to be classified as heretical, and others as orthodox, by the beginning of the third century? We may find one clue to the answer if we ask whether gnostic Christians derive any practical, social consequences from their conception of God—and of humanity—in terms that included the feminine element. Here, clearly, the answer is yes.

 

Bishop Irenaeus notes with dismay that women especially are attracted to heretical groups. "Even in our own district of the Rhone valley," he admits, the gnostic teacher Marcus had attracted "many foolish women" from his own congregation, including the wife of one of Irenaeus' own deacons.52 Professing himself to be at a loss to account for the attraction that Marcus' group held, he offers only one explanation: that Marcus himself was a diabolically clever seducer, a magician who compounded special aphrodisiacs to "deceive, victimize, and defile" his prey. Whether his accusations have any factual basis no one knows. But when he describes Marcus' techniques of seduction, Irenaeus indicates that he is speaking metaphorically. For, he says, Marcus "addresses them in such seductive words" as his prayers to Grace, "She who is before all things,"53 and to Wisdom and Silence, the feminine element of the divine being. Second, he says, Marcus seduced women "by telling them to prophesy"54— which they were strictly forbidden to do in the orthodox church. When he initiated a woman, Marcus concluded the initiation prayer with the words "Behold, Grace has come upon you; open your mouth, and prophesy."55 Then, as the bishop indignantly describes it, Marcus' "deluded victim . . . impudently utters some nonsense," and "henceforth considers herself to be a prophet!" Worst of all, from Irenaeus' viewpoint, Marcus invited women to act as priests in celebrating the eucharist with him: he "hands the cups to women"58 to offer up the eucharistic prayer, and to pronounce the words of consecration.

 

Tertullian expresses similar outrage at such acts of gnostic Christians:

 

These heretical women—how audacious they are! They have no modesty; they are bold enough to teach, to

engage in argument, to enact exorcisms, to undertake cures, and, it may be, even to baptize!57

 

Tertullian directed another attack against "that viper"58—a woman teacher who led a congregation in North Africa. He himself agreed with what he called the "precepts of ecclesiastical discipline concerning women," which specified:

 

It is not permitted for a woman to speak in the church, nor is it permitted for her to teach, nor to baptize, nor

to offer [the eucharist], nor to claim for herself a share in any masculine function—not to mention any priestly

office.59

 

One of Tertullian's prime targets, the heretic Marcion, had, in fact, scandalized his orthodox contemporaries by appointing women on an equal basis with men as priests and bishops. The gnostic teacher Marcellina traveled to Rome to represent the Carpocratian group,60 which claimed to have received secret teaching from Mary, Salome, and Martha. The Montanists, a radical prophetic circle, honored two women, Prisca and Maximilla, as founders of the movement.

 

Our evidence, then, clearly indicates a correlation between religious theory and social practice.61 Among such gnostic groups as the Valentinians, women were considered equal to men; some were revered as prophets; others acted as teachers, traveling evangelists, healers, priests, perhaps even bishops. This general observation is not, however, universally applicable. At least three heretical circles that retained a masculine image of God included women who took positions of leadership—the Marcionites, the Montanists, and the Carpocratians. But from the year 200, we have no evidence for women taking prophetic, priestly, and episcopal roles among orthodox churches.

 

This is an extraordinary development, considering that in its earliest years the Christian movement showed a remarkable openness toward women. Jesus himself violated Jewish convention by talking openly with women, and he included them among his companions. Even the gospel of Luke in the New Testament tells his reply when Martha, his hostess, complains to him that she is doing housework alone while her sister Mary sits listening to him: "Do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her, then, to help me." But instead of supporting her, Jesus chides Martha for taking upon herself so many anxieties, declaring that "one thing is needful: Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her."62 Some ten to twenty years after Jesus' death, certain women held positions of leadership in local Christian groups; women acted as prophets, teachers, and evangelists. Professor Wayne Meeks suggests that, at Christian initiation, the person presiding ritually announced that "in Christ... there is neither male nor female."63 Paul quotes this saying, and endorses the work of women he recognizes as deacons and fellow workers; he even greets one, apparently, as an outstanding apostle, senior to himself in the movement.64

 

Yet Paul also expresses ambivalence concerning the practical implications of human equality. Discussing the public activity of women in the churches, he argues from his own—traditionally Jewish—conception of a monistic, masculine God for a divinely ordained hierarchy of social subordination: as God has authority over Christ, he declares, citing Genesis 2-3, so man has authority over woman:

 

. . . a man . . . is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. (For man was not made from

woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.)65

 

While Paul acknowledged women as his equals "in Christ," and allowed for them a wider range of activity than did traditional Jewish congregations, he could not bring himself to advocate their equality in social and political terms. Such ambivalence opened the way for the statements found in I Corinthians 14, 34 f., whether written by Paul or inserted by someone else: ". . . the women should keep silence in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but they should be subordinate . . . it is shameful for a woman to speak in church."

 

Such contradictory attitudes toward women reflect a time of social transition, as well as the diversity of cultural influences on churches scattered throughout the known world.66 In Greece and Asia Minor, women participated with men in religious cults, especially the cults of the Great Mother and of the Egyptian goddess Isis.67 While the leading roles were reserved for men, women took part in the services and professions. Some women took up education, the arts, and professions such as medicine. In Egypt, women had attained, by the first century A.D., a relatively advanced state of emancipation, socially, politically, and legally. In Rome, forms of education had changed, around 200 B.C, to offer to some children from the aristocracy the same curriculum for girls as for boys. Two hundred years later, at the beginning of the Christian era, the archaic, patriarchal forms of Roman marriage were increasingly giving way to a new legal form in which the man and woman bound themselves to each other with voluntary and mutual vows. The French scholar Jerome Carcopino, in a discussion entitled "Feminism and Demoralization," explains that by the second century A.D., upper-class women often insisted upon "living their own life."68 Male satirists complained of their aggressiveness in discussions of literature, mathematics, and philosophy, and ridiculed their enthusiasm for writing poems, plays, and music.69 Under the Empire,

 

women were everywhere involved in business, social life, such as theaters, sports events, concerts, parties,

travelling— with or without their husbands. They took part in a whole range of athletics, even bore arms and

went to battle . . .70

 

and made major inroads into professional life. Women of the Jewish communities, on the other hand, were excluded from actively participating in public worship, in education, and in social and political life outside the family.71

 

Yet despite all of this, and despite the previous public activity of Christian women, the majority of Christian churches in the second century went with the majority of the middle class in opposing the move toward equality, which found its support primarily in rich or what we would call bohemian circles. By the year 200, the majority of Christian communities endorsed as canonical the pseudo-Pauline letter of Timothy, which stresses (and exaggerates) the antifeminist element in Paul's views: "Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent."72 Orthodox Christians also accepted as Pauline the letters to the Colossians and to the Ephesians, which order that women "be subject in everything to their husbands."73

 

Clement, Bishop of Rome, writes in his letter to the unruly church in Corinth that women are to "remain in the rule of subjection"74 to their husbands. While in earlier times Christian men and women sat together for worship, in the middle of the second century—precisely at the time of struggle with gnostic Christians—orthodox communities began to adopt the synagogue custom, segregating women from men.75 By the end of the second century, women's participation in worship was explicitly condemned: groups in which women continued on to leadership were branded as heretical.

 

What was the reason for these changes? The scholar Johannes Leipoldt suggests that the influx of many Hellenized Jews into the movement may have influenced the church in the direction of Jewish traditions, but, as he admits, "this is only an attempt to explain the situation: the reality itself is the only certain thing." 76 Professor Morton Smith suggests that the change may have resulted from Christianity's move up in social scale from lower to middle class. He observes that in the lower class, where all labor was needed, women had been allowed to perform any services they could (so today, in the Near East, only middle-class women are veiled).

 

- Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels.

The anti-feminism elements was purely a social and a political move not something which was inspired by the divine.

I saw Jesus in my toast this morning. Does that mean I'm "inspired by the divine"?

I didn't heard that you were persecuting the Christians and suddenly changed your mind and started preaching your Gospel about Jesus being the first born of all creatures.

"These experiences often have very significant effects on people's lives, frequently inducing in them acts of extreme self-sacrifice well beyond what could be expected from evolutionary arguments."

- Argument from religious experiences.

A strong case can be made that Paul was divinely inspired seeing the impact that it had upon his life after that experience. The behaviours of these people who have had religious experiences defy evolutionary psychological mechanisms, it cannot account for such behaviours and in such a case it is reasonable to believe that he or she was divinely inspired from a supernatural causation.

Where? Which posts? How is saying that they are religious a defense of their acts as being "all right" and "justifiable"?

Immortal... do you actually read these "religious" texts or do you just assume they can't say the things you don't believe in. God, in all of the Judeo/Christian/Islamic mythos religious texts, often the demands the death of various people is not a misinterpretation, such acts are demanded by god quite often...

It's not a matter of letting fundamentalists decide what religion is for us, it's a matter of letting them (and everyone) decide what it is for them.

But they believe they are, therefore they are religious. It has nothing to do with whether the religious actions are based on the truth, it only matters if they are using religious texts and believe their actions are divinely sanctioned. If they do something that contradicts their own religious text it is alright as long as the contradiction is in the text as well, and most of the time the contradictions are in the text.

I advice you to read the thread once before blindly accusing me of making a strawman. You guys defended fundamentalists by saying its all right and justifiable for them to do those acts because their religious scriptures often demands such acts, that's what you guys said. All it shows is that is your ignorance about religion, you guys have studied the wrong side of religion, further investigation reveals the truth as to what Jesus, Muhammad and Moses taught and their teachings are in sharp contrast with the belief systems of the fundamentalists, all these men taught the very opposite of what fundamentalists do and you expect me to call them as being religious? What part of in the definition of religion allows them claim themselves as religious? They just doesn't deserve it and even you guys are blindly dancing with their tone which is very much disappointing to see.

Religion is not just about faith, just by believing in something you won't become religious, religion is about knowledge and its a way of life to many of them and its the way they live is what determines whether they are religious or not and not what they blindly believe in.

 

I call bs on a strawman that characterizes anyone's arguments here as defending the acts of fundamentalists. I didn't see the point of reading further than this. Bearing false witness is sin, or so I'm told.

Many of them[members] defended them[fudamentalists] by saying that their religious scriptures demands them to make such acts which is very much in tone with what they exactly want, i.e confusion, I'm not in for such a disguise and I'll always expose their concealed false beliefs and they shouldn't be tolerated in this modern world.

I honestly don't know where to begin to respond to this.

 

I think it's great that you base your acceptance on the merit of the evidence that 1 Timothy was based on forged letters. If you feel forgery is the best available explanation, it would be prudent to trust that explanation over what others accept on lesser (or non-existent) evidence.

I have argued in the past that some of the Pauline Epistles were forged in order to make it in tone with Jewish Christianity but Gentiles can easily identify that.

The Ogdoad origin myth is a valid creation myth expressed in majority of the religions of the world. I still don't understand why the Pauline epistles are considered as part of the orthodox Bible, its very clear that the Christ of the gentiles is in no way comparable to the Christ of the orthodox Christians.

Most Christians I've dealt with claim that the Council of Nicea, using bishops of the early Christian church, was able to decide which of the gospels and other writings being considered for inclusion in the New Testament were of truly divine origin. The Council, like you, seemed to know what the Truth was better than anyone else, so they rejected books like the Gospel of Thomas and didn't allow them to be part of the Bible.

The Council of Nicea were not after the truth, Constantine wanted a single unified religion after his distaste for pagan religions and they gave it to him in the form of orthodox Christianity. Athanasius did ordered to destroy all the secret books and burn them. In Gospel of Thomas Jesus is not portrayed as a messiah rather he speaks as a sage, scholars think that one should read the Gospel of Thomas after reading the synoptic Gospels because the teachings in the Gospel of Thomas is considered to be for the more matured Christians who are ready to receive the higher teachings.

So my point is, if the Council got it wrong with 1 Timothy, it's entirely possible they also included other documents that weren't divinely inspired, and also possible that some of the work they rejected didn't deserve it. The whole concept of a divinely inspired religious writing, one that proponents claim is therefore the True Word of God, gets thrown out the window if even one mistake is made by including forgeries as gospel. It casts suspicions on that whole line of argument, which is what many people base their beliefs on.

I don't think there is a single holy canon which can be considered as the true word of God, some can be classified as holding the view that the son is of the same essence of the Father and some saying he is not of the same essence of the Father, these things appear to us as minor differences but in those days anyone who claimed that the son was of a different essence of the Father was persecuted, others can be classified as Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians, there is no such thing as strict orthodoxy so that anyone who disagree with them should be persecuted thinking that they hold the divine word of God, I hope not.

But I also find it hilarious (in a very sad and head-shaking way) that you claim to know the "truth" about Christianity and see nothing wrong with making assumptions and conclusions about that which can't be nailed down, not by you and not by the followers of any of the over 9000 recognized sects of Christianity. It's the height of conceit imo, and explains why you also can't see why your argument is EXACTLY like the No True Scotsman fallacy. You've completely lost your objectivity.

As said earlier there is considerable evidence to suggest that Timothy was not from the original Paul and that raises doubts about its divine origin, remember Paul was inspired by the divine on his road to Damascus so if he didn't wrote Timothy then that seriously raises doubts about its divine origin.

But they believe they are, therefore they are religious. It has nothing to do with whether the religious actions are based on the truth, it only matters if they are using religious texts and believe their actions are divinely sanctioned. If they do something that contradicts their own religious text it is alright as long as the contradiction is in the text as well, and most of the time the contradictions are in the text.

I call bs on you guys for defending acts of fundamentalists as being all right and justifiable, we are no longer in the age of ignorance where what constitutes as religion is blurred and the truth is hidden from the public, most of the beliefs of fundamentalists are often beliefs which have been taken out of context completely which when investigated gives a completely different meaning and they are either being misinformed or manipulated or have deliberately misused those texts due to their influence from other social and political factors, I will never let such ignorance to creep up in and around me.

Will you let a fraud in the scientific community to publish bad articles and who claims that it is justified by science just to influence a hidden agenda and say its all right and justifiable? Further investigation and introspection reveals what science actually says and what was wrongly projected in the name of science. In the same way fundamentalists are frauds who project wrong belief systems and claim it is justified by religious texts but further introspection reveals the truth.

Many in Afghanistan have cried and have realized that it is wrong to kill people and have thrown out their ammunitions, just because people are falsely brainwashed into believing that after their death and killing innocent infidels they will be welcomed by 72 virgins in heaven doesn't mean you can say such notions are supported by Islam, they are often misinterpretations and a misuse of religious texts just as Heinrich Himmler misused Bhagvad Gita to justify his holocaust on innocent Jews when the actual truth was that killing is only justifiable in the battle field which is the duty of a soldier to protect oneself and his country and it is not his duty to unleash poisonous gas on innocent women and children just because they were from a different race which cannot be justifiable and was completely taken out of context.

Sadly my JStor account makes me have to buy those papers to read them, but from your later responses it seems they argue that they were written and added to the bible after the rest of the New Testament. Is that correct? If not could you give a summary of what they say.

 

If that is what they are saying that argument could be made about the entirety of the NT, none of it was written down until decades after the events were supposed to happen. In fact the oldest manuscript is from the late second century

 

Yet radical as they were, the intense conviction they carried earned them wide prestige--so much so that those who disagreed with Paul and wanted to reaffirm traditional Jewish values of family and procreation did this by writing letters they attributed to Paul that taught opposite values-and put them into the New Testament under Paul's name! Here is what I mean: like many other New Testament scholars, I share the view that Paul only wrote seven of the 13 so-called "letters of Paul" that are in the New Testament (only these share his distinctive and eloquent style). The six "deutero- Pauline" (this means "secondarily Pauline," but perhaps could be called more bluntly "pseudo-Pauline") letters take Paul's inclinations to subordinate women and slaves to a new level. The letters to Timothy are good examples. They insist that bishops should be married men, whose capacity to control their wives and slaves demonstrated their capacity to "rule over the church"; in these letters, the fiery and charismatic Paul becomes the very model of an ecclesiastical bureaucrat.

Yet because some of the pseudo-Pauline letters--I Timothy, for example-pictures Paul as a champion of orthodoxy (even though that orthodoxy had not been invented in Paul's day), certain church fathers were able to reclaim the disputed territory of Paul's letters for the churches they called "orthodox."

- Elaine Pagels

http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Christianity/2004/04/Scholarly-Smackdowndid-Paul-Distort-Christianity.aspx?p=1

It is a well established fact based on scholarly evidence that I Timothy is a forged letter in the name of Paul, that doesn't mean all of Pauline letters are forged, some letters go well with his style and his core beliefs. Which proves beyond any doubt that women have been often victimized by strong social and political factors rather than religion, who ever done that doesn't deserve to be called as religious because for God doesn't discriminate women.

 

Here's the thing, you say I am misinformed while you completely disregard what I said. I didn't say he anything about how he treated them, I said he said very little about them, and didn't make any specific rules about them. I was mistaken that he technically allowed women to divorce (and he stated men could also commit adultery) but his treatment of women does not let you stretch and say that it nullified previous issues stated by Moses and others. You could make the argument of Galatians 3:28, but that was Paul's (IIRC), is the best argument of gender equality in the NT, but then you have to decide which part of the NT is to be followed. You choose Galatians while others choose 1 Timothy, both are still religious books and the people who follow them are still religious.

1 Timothy is forged which was introduced by people who were highly motivated to achieve a hidden social and political agenda rather than basing their reason based on some divine principles and there is enough evidence to suggest that and if you want to lead a life based on it thinking that it is the true word of God then all the best to you for religion doesn't allow such ignorance in its practice.

Jesus explicitly broke various Jewish laws and went out of his way to remove the double standard laws against women, there are many examples, his actions with women speak a thousand words about his views on women compared to your claim that he is silent when it comes to specific laws for women.

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.(2 Timothy 3:16-17)

Again you quote from Timothy.

If you accept Moses' scriptures as the divine word, do you accept that his works (in which women were not equal) are divinely inspired?

Well, firing such tough questions at me makes me emotionally very difficult to answer it, but I was never a big fan of holding a literal interpretation of the Bible, wisdom literatures are wisdom literatures and one must see them in such a light, the wisdom in them are more important than the stories that teach the wisdom, for example, Kabbalahists don't see YHWH as a God sitting on a golden chair and having a golden crown, they say one who views God as such is a fool, they more see God as a transcended God with Ein-Sof as the ineffable unity and God as a manifested personal form of Ein-Sof which is a more matured view.

Archeology of the Hebrew Bible

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/archeology-hebrew-bible.html

The Rise of Judaism

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/rise-judaism.html

Writers of Bible

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/writers-bible.html

 

THE FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES

 

The first five books of the Bible, which Jews know as the Torah, are also called The Five Books of Moses. Where did the idea that Moses wrote these books come from?

 

In the Hebrew Bible, Moses is the single most important human character, and more space is devoted to the account of Moses' life and speeches by Moses than to anyone else in the Bible. Moses is also considered closer to God than anyone else in the Bible. And certainly by the 5th century B.C., the idea developed that Moses had written down words that God himself had spoken on Mt. Sinai. Eventually—and this didn't happen until several centuries later—it came to be understood that Moses wrote all of the first five books of the Bible.

 

What were some clues that led biblical scholars to question this belief?

 

The view that Moses had personally written down the first five books of the Bible was virtually unchallenged until the 17th century. There were a few questions raised before that. For example, the very end of the last book of the Torah, the Book of Deuteronomy, describes the death and burial of Moses. So some rabbis said Moses couldn't have written those words himself because he was dead—perhaps Joshua, his divinely designated successor, wrote those words. But other rabbis said, no, Moses was a prophet, and God revealed to him exactly what would happen at the end of his life.

 

"Underlying the Bible are several different ancient documents or sources, which biblical writers and editors combined at various stages into the Torah."

 

It wasn't until the 17th century, with the rise of critical thinking in many disciplines—in science, in philosophy, and others—that people began to look at the Bible not just as a sacred text but as they would look at any other book. And they began to notice in the pages of the first five books of the Bible a lot of issues that didn't seem consistent with the idea that Moses was their author. For example, Moses never speaks in the first person; Moses doesn't say, "I went up on Mt. Sinai." There are also a lot of repetitions—the same stories told from different perspectives. And there are also many, many inconsistencies; as the same stories are retold, many of the details change.

 

So scholars began to think not just that Moses was not the author, but that ordinary men and women (mostly men) had written these pages.

I hope you have got my answer.

Is that why God says:

thy desire is to be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee (Genesis 3:16)

"If [the city] accepts your terms of peace and surrenders to you, then all the people in it shall serve you at forced labor. If it does not submit to you peacefully, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the LORD your God gives it into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword. You may, however, take as your booty the women, the children, livestock, and everything else in the town, all its spoil. You may enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the LORD your God has given you."

(Deut. 20:11-14)

 

"Speak to the people of Israel, saying: If a woman conceives and bears a male child, she shall be ceremonially unclean seven days; as at the time of her menstruation, she shall be unclean. Her time of blood purification shall be thirty-three days; she shall not touch any holy thing, or come into the sanctuary, until the days of her purification are completed. If she bears a female child, she shall be unclean two weeks, as in her menstruation; her time of blood purification shall be sixty-six days."(Lev. 12:2-5)

If a man sells his daughter as a servant, she is not to go free as male servants do. If she does not please the master who has selected her for himself,[a] he must let her be redeemed. He has no right to sell her to foreigners, because he has broken faith with her. If he selects her for his son, he must grant her the rights of a daughter. If he marries another woman, he must not deprive the first one of her food, clothing and marital rights. If he does not provide her with these three things, she is to go free, without any payment of money."(Exodus 21:7-11)

a man takes a wife and, after sleeping with her, dislikes her and slanders her and gives her a bad name, saying, I married this woman, but when I approached her, I did not find proof of her virginity, then the young womans father and mother shall bring to the town elders at the gate proof that she was a virgin. Her father will say to the elders, I gave my daughter in marriage to this man, but he dislikes her. Now he has slandered her and said, I did not find your daughter to be a virgin. But here is the proof of my daughters virginity. Then her parents shall display the cloth before the elders of the town, and the elders shall take the man and punish him. They shall fine him a hundred shekels[a] of silver and give them to the young womans father, because this man has given an Israelite virgin a bad name. She shall continue to be his wife; he must not divorce her as long as he lives.

 

If, however, the charge is true and no proof of the young womans virginity can be found, she shall be brought to the door of her fathers house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death. She has done an outrageous thing in Israel by being promiscuous while still in her fathers house. You must purge the evil from among you.(Deut 22:13-21)

 

I could go on, but you get the idea.

 

 

I hope you also get the idea where I'm coming from. My definition of Judaism is the correct definition of what constitutes the traditional core values and beliefs of Judaism. Just by believing in Abraham, Moses or YHWH doesn't mean you have become Jewish, you need to become YHWH to be Jewish --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabbalah. Ask these Jews about their position on women I'm sure it will be radically different and very much liberal.

From Google

Christian:

Adjective

Of, relating to, or professing Christianity or its teachings.

Noun

A person who has received Christian baptism or is a believer in Jesus Christ and his teachings.

 

So the definition doesn't agree with you.

Those who receive the name of the father, the son, and holy spirit...[are] no longer a Christian, but [are] Christ. - Gospel of Philip

You need to become Christ through knowledge in order to qualify yourself into the religion of Christianity, your Google doesn't know what Christianity is.

Even in Hinduism there is an identical ritual known as Upanayana (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upanayana) just as Baptism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baptism). Just by wearing a sacred thread you won't become a Brahmin, you need to know Brahman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman) to become a Brahmin.

"But not baptism alone sets us free, but knowledge (gnosis): who we were, what we have become, where we were, whither we have sunk, whither we hasten, whence we are redeemed, what is birth and what rebirth."

- Excerpta ex Theodoto, 78, 2

No you made your own definition of what is required to qualify as someone being religious, that's why it's a fallacy.

I know what being religious is, just because you guys as it often happens seem to have ended up reading the wrong side of religion doesn't mean my definition of religion is broken, its rock solid, universal and objective.

Some definitions of God (which not all sects agree on) are androgynous, but that does not mean that if people do not believe God is androgynous they are not religious.

People within a religion often quarrel with each other due to their ignorance but the wise know the truth and they don't see any differences in various sects and they know the disagreement are mainly due to ignorance rather than contradictions in the scriptures.

That people saw different disciples of Christ as representing different teachings was addressed by Paul himself, in the 1st letter to the Corinthians: (1 Cor 1:10–18)

I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another so that there may be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought. My brothers, some from Chloe's household have informed me that there are quarrels among you. What I mean is this: One of you says, "I follow Paul"; another, "I follow Apollos"; another, "I follow Cephas(Peter)"; still another, "I follow Christ."

Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized into the name of Paul? I am thankful that I did not baptize any of you except Crispus and Gaius, so no one can say that you were baptized into my name. (Yes, I also baptized the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I don't remember if I baptized anyone else.) For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel — not with words of human wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.

- Saint Paul, The Apostle

These different sects keep hearing the secrets of the Kingdom of God but they don't see or understand it and hence they quarrel but for one who has become one with Christ knows how to reconcile all these different views in an unified harmony based an a theological move.

How is it that you feel this not the No True Scotsman fallacy?

As I said earlier just because you don't know what constitutes or what defines Christianity and Islam and desperately want to put everyone on the same boat doesn't mean I have committed a fallacy.

From your own link -

Broadly speaking, the fallacy does not apply if there is a clear and well-understood definition of what membership in a group requires and it is that definition which is broken (e.g., "no honest man would lie like that!", "no Christian would worship Satan!" and so on).

I gave a precise definition of what is required to be a Christian and a Muslim and there is no ambiguity in it.

If you claim 1 Timothy is a forgery, doesn't that bring the entire New Testament into question since the Council of Nicea decreed these chapters to all be written under divine influence? I thought it was damned arrogant of the Council to set themselves up to reject certain gospels and other books they didn't want to be part of the new Bible, and now here you go and trump them by passing similar shady judgement 1600 years later.

You are saying as though I have rejected it based on my personal whim, I am not saying that, its scholarly evidence which says they were forged letters, if you don't know the truth about Christianity then its not my problem.

None of those things mean that people who espouse those things as a direct result of their interpretation of their religious texts are not themselves religious.

Ah, that shows you don't know what being religious means.

I was commenting on your quickly vanishing credibility, and comments like this one here don't help to turn that trend around.

Sorry I am not in for such ego trip.

1. Asserting people who believe in God are broken

2. Making false analogies and equating God with tooth fairies.

3. Believing our ancients invented gods rather than discovering them.

4. Religion equals poverty.

Just to name a few, go and preach that to someone else not to me.

You are, quite simply, wrong and merely repeating yourself over and over will not suddenly make you correct. You are arguing based on a fallacy, and you are losing credibility here with nearly each post you make.

I very well established my credibility by showing that there is nothing in the core religious beliefs of the major religions of the world where it says women should be exempted from higher education and actually religion strives for the opposite by providing equal opportunity and even higher authority to women and stops the discrimination of women which are mainly caused by social and other political factors. Your personal bias against religion and gullible conclusions is well known to everyone.

 

It's not a matter of letting fundamentalists decide what religion is for us, it's a matter of letting them (and everyone) decide what it is for them.

No, if they want to have their own belief systems and rebel against the word of God tell them to find an another name rather than calling themselves holy or religious without knowing the true meanings of such sacred words.

You've set yourself up as the arbiter of what counts as religion, and using a very narrow definition. So narrow that I doubt anything qualifies. I think that perhaps you don't qualify, since deciding who is belonging to a religion is a judgement, and I thought that was a no-no.

 

Its not an arbitrary judgement, to decide whether I belong to a particular religion or not first you should know what my religion is and then you need to know what constitutes as the core beliefs of that religion and that can be known from the scripture and the tradition which upholds the core values of that particular religion, one doesn't decide what constitutes as religion based on a majority, this is not a numbers game, this definition forms the very soul of that religion and hence it is very much important to have that values in you in order to qualify yourself as belonging to that religion.

Most everyone else defines religion as a belief involving a higher power of some sort. It doesn't matter if you agree with it, or think they are or aren't following their religious text properly.

It does matter what beliefs they are following, if their belief is that beheading innocent people is the core value of Islam then tell them to go to hell because no definition of Islam allows such beliefs.

As long as they believe it, it's a religion. People who worshipped the sun and the planets had a religion.

Every religion has its own definition of religion, the people who worshipped the sun and the planets do qualify as a religion because according to them the sun and the planets are not just physical elliptic spheres revolving around their orbits but instead they are also anthropomorphic Gods who control our fate based on the position of the planets and hence it is of a divine origin. The word god and religion has been used so loosely in some of the threads that it has become a habit to associate god with anything they like. Every religion has its own pantheon or deity and each of it is precisely defined. On the whole only those things which are from a divine origin or which having a likelihood of a divine origin can be considered religious.

People who selectively interpret their sacred book still have a religion. Argue as much as you want whether they are right or not, and what the one "true" religion is, and I probably won't care, but it's still a religion.

Its quite easy to find out which beliefs are from a divine origin and which aren't by doing comparative religious studies and scholarship, its same like how do you run a case in a court, if the witnesses claim matches with the evidence of their exact location, the timing of the event and in the absence of contrary evidence it can at least be qualified as a religion with a likelihood of having a divine origin, if you just make up something on your own then it doesn't qualify as religion.

That will come as a surprise to many Christians and Muslims, who probably don't give a rat's ass what you think.

If that's the case then they are slayers of Christianity and slayers of Islam.

Why do they not qualify as being religious?

 

Simply because their acts are not influenced by a divine origin or of a supernatural origin from God but more influenced by social and political forces for their own religion and God doesn't allow such acts, so if we assume Quran is of a divine origin then any acts which goes against the laws of the divine cannot be called as Holy and hence fundamentalists cannot be qualified as being religious, remember we are trying to find the root causes of these things and its very important to figure out the truth as to which causes have a divine origin and which aren't, only causes which is of a divine origin can be qualified as religious.

1 Timothy 2 is in both the King James Version and New International Version (the two I have) of the Bible so why are those texts not legitimate? What Bible do you use for worship?

They are not legitimate because they were forged letters in the name of Paul and the true opinion of the true Paul on women is something very different and very liberal.

Paul and the Eschatological women by Robin Scroggs

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1461319?uid=3738256&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21101541228911

Paul and Women: Elaine Pagels

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1461971?uid=3738256&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21101541228911

IIRC Christ specifically makes very little mention of women, and no rules that I know of, but at the same time does not discredit previous rules set forth about them. Using religious texts as a reference to further an agenda of subjugating women is exactly what you were asking for.

No, Jesus was the first one to change the double standard laws which where biased against women, he often broke various Jewish laws and went out of his way to help women and even talked to them and preached to them, Mary was the first female student who received his teachings.

Jesus's interaction with women

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus'_interactions_with_women

That link shows how misinformed you are and by the way only those which is from a divine origin can be termed as holy or religious and a human man made agenda can never be qualified as religious because it was never the word of God.

They are exact quotes though. A women's hand being cut off if they interfere with a man's altercation, selling a women to her rapist, killing all males and raping the females of entire villages, killing your neighbor for worshiping incorrectly, killing children that curse at their fathers, etc. Those are not misinterpretations, they are in the major books of religious texts that people use as guidelines for life. I could make your same argument towards the equality of women, that women are lower in God's eyes, but political and societal views shape us into believing that they are equal.

 

 

Again, why can you see which of these are true teachings and which are not?

There is nothing special about me, that's what the Jewish prophet and Moses himself say and many of the Muslims say and that's the first impression one gets when you read the Torah.

"'How can you say, "We are wise because we have the word of the LORD," when your teachers have twisted it by writing lies? - Jeremiah 8:8

http://bible.cc/jeremiah/8-8.htm

Many of the positions you've espoused have been a bit ludicrous, but the quoted portion above is especially so. This is about the most straight forward example I've ever seen of the no true scotsman fallacy.

 

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/No_True_Scotsman

One doesn't become a Christian by believing in Christ, one doesn't become a Muslim by accepting Muhammad as his prophet. One becomes a Christian by practically leading a life based on the principles of Christ and becomes a Muslim by following and implementing the principles of Muhammad in his life. If your entire characteristics and the your way of life is entirely against the teachings of Christ and Muhammad then you don't deserve to be called as a Christian or a Muslim, you are calling yourself Islamic only for namesake and doing everything against the laws of Islam and the teachings of Muhammad.

Just because you don't know what characteristics are required to qualify someone as being religious doesn't mean I have committed a fallacy.

Who died and left you in charge to decide who is religious and who is not?

 

For now I'm a member of sfn and I'm participating in this thread as a member, I'm not in charge of anything.I speak for myself.

Can you show any support for that statement?

 

Valentinians believed that God is androgynous and frequently depicted him as a male-female dyad. This is related to the notion that God provides the universe with both form and substance. The feminine aspect of the deity is called Silence, Grace and Thought. Silence is God's primordial state of tranquillity and self-awareness She is also the active creative Thought that makes all subsequent states of being (or "Aeons") substantial. The masculine aspect of God is Depth, also called Ineffable and First Father. Depth is the profoundly incomprehensible, all-encompassing aspect of the deity. He is essentially passive, yet when moved to action by his feminine Thought, he gives the universe form.

-The Gnostic society Library

God is androgynous, he has both male and female aspect in him.

Again who are you to make that judgement? Who gave you special knowledge? Can you prove any of it?

Read above.

And yet you did it right there in the OP before a single person had even had a chance to offer response. Fancy that.

I have already given them a fair chance to respond to my posts in numerous threads and have politely explained to them that they have been misinformed. Our ancients didn't give the names of Gods to the outside natural forces or to the external things or they didn't made up Gods to convey their message. Tell your fellow men not to make strawman arguments like such and waste our time. For our ancients Gods are individuals, they are beings existing in the intelligible realm and they appear to humans in anthropomorphic form to the Nous(Mind) which we call as Visions and it is through ritual one attains the oneness with the cosmos in all its manifested forms.

And why is this? Could it be because a connection with reality is not a prerequisite?

 

You do realize that I am not stating things as my opinion, I am stating things as facts, neoplatonism will remain because it is in accordance with the reality out there and anyone can test it, these are the basic facts of the world.

Roger Penrose contends that the foundations of mathematics can't be understood absent the Platonic view that "mathematical truth is absolute, external and eternal, and not based on man-made criteria ... mathematical objects have a timeless existence of their own..."

Intellect exists in a Platonic realm and even science confirms it and one cannot separate the Gods from neoplatonism so all evidence is showing that Gods are real and they are everywhere.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFbrnFzUc0U

Add to that the rituals of pagan religions indeed works and show efficacy and empirical results when they are tested in nature showing that the universe is far strange than it seems.

It would also be nice if you stopped calling people who disagree with you stupid!

I am not here to be nice with anyone, I am here to expose the kind of double standards that people show and the stupid mistakes that people do when evidence is shown against their preconceived notions and beliefs, the scholarly evidence doesn't allow them to disagree with my claims and its time to shut them up, if they persist continuing to ignore the evidence then that's what they should be called.

 

You need to back up this outrageous assertion immortal, if this was true all religions would be seen as false immediately...

 

Nope, a few will remain and neoplatonism will be one of them.

Please refer me to where I ever said that religion is defined by fundamentalists.

I said that in general because few members gave examples of fundamentalists who doesn't qualify as being religious, that's why I referred as you guys and didn't specifically targeted at you, thanks for clarifying your position.

You never asked to show an example of your interpretation of biblical texts necessitates women being lesser in stature than men, you asked for any example and one was given. Just because you don't agree with it doesn't invalidate it as evidence. To say that the very parts of biblical texts that are very obviously and literally anti-equality aren't misinterpretations or are being misused seems to be more dishonest than any of the other posts I've seen on here. Not to mention to say that you, personally, know which parts of religious teachings are really God's words and which aren't seems to be extremely arrogant.

 

The one example you gave was from a pseudo-Pauline letters which were forged letters in the name of Paul, the truth of Christianity is that God is androgynous and Christ is neither male nor female and in early Christian times women maintained equal authority with men, they taught, they preached and they used to run ministries and these anti-feminism elements were added later into the canon by the orthodox community in the name of forged Pauline letters which shows that these are not the true words of god but was mainly influenced by social and political factors rather than based on the true divine principles of God, perhaps Truth goes hand in hand with arrogance, yes my words look extremely arrogant because I speak the truth. Your example does nothing other than to prove my point that inequality between gender is mainly due to social and political factors rather than due to religion.

I didn't said the views of orthodox community are misinterpretations or are misusing it, I said that to fundamentalists, one cannot call the explicit verses in the Torah showing discrimination to women where the men is exempted and forgiven for breaking a law while the women is stoned to death as mere misinterpretations, I said they were ignorant and not that they have misinterpreted it, they have been misled into believing that which directly contradicts the true divine principle showing that the authors were influenced by social and political factors rather than basing their reasons for such discrimination of gender on a divine principle.

And to address the parts I snipped, do you think I can't find counter-quotes in most, if not all, of the very same books? All it really does is show that the teachings are contradictory, which is to be expected when books of rules are written in different time periods and then put together. But that does less to show that any god wrote the books and does more to show that the books were written by people who were making guidelines that fit into contemporary views.

The teachings of certain traditions may be contradictory to teachings of certain sects with in a religion who oppose the true divine principle due to their ignorance but there are teachings across religions which are amazingly identical and all based on a single common divine principle and therefore the conclusion shouldn't be that the all of religion was made up by humans, there is divinity out there.

The ad hominem is both unnecessary and incorrect. I have been interested in religion since I was a child, just because someone isn't religious doesn't mean they don't know what it entails.

 

It was very much necessary and was an well intended criticism for you guys don't know the true message of religion and blindly think that religion as defined by fundamentalists and ignorant people from orthodox belief systems is the true word of God. Most of the atheists are liars when they say, the very fact that they have studied all of religion is what made them to hold that atheistic position, which is a lie because if they had studied the whole of religion of the world and the history of humanity it doesn't allow them to hold such a dishonest atheistic position. You guys showed your ignorance of religion when you people believed the misinterpreted and misused versions of a religious scripture as actually the true word of God without knowing the truth about religion.

And no true Scottsman . . . Just because you personally ignore certain teachings of he Bible doesn't mean they are not in there and are not used by other religious people in their belief system. Who are you to say which of the gospels are the true word of God and which are not? Your whole argument does nothing to dispute the fact that there are teachings in religious texts that put the role of women beneath that of men and specifically deny them rights men have.

Every religion has teachings which is mainly for outside masses which are basically social constructs and hidden teachings known only to an initiated few.

In the Gospel of Matthew (13:10-17) Jesus provides an answer when asked about his use of parables:

The disciples came to him and asked, "Why do you speak to the people in parables?"

He replied "The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. This is why I speak to them in parables:Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand."

The outside masses though hearing it daily do not understand it and are often misled into believing that this interpretation is the true message of the scripture without knowing the mystical interpretation of the scripture which contains the core essence of a religion.

Neither religion nor God is responsible for the maniac acts of fundamentalists and the ignorant false belief systems of majority of people who claim themselves to be Christians, Hindus and Muslims without knowing what's there in their own religion, they don't deserve to be called as being religious because when each of their religion is taken as a whole in a full context much of the modern belief systems of these people turns out to be false and is with variance with the true message of their ancient ancestors who started their religion.

See these examples as to how modern people from past centuries have continuously lost the core essential beliefs of their religion which show strong contrasts when compared to the belief systems of the ancients who started these religions.

The age of the Upanishads:

"The method of yoga described in the Yoga Yajnavalkya is both comprehensive and universally applicable—open to both women and men. Yajnnavalkya explains the principles and practice of yoga, the path to freedom, to Gargi, his wife. The Yoga Yajnavalkya demonstrates that Vedic culture provided women with equal opportunities and encouragement for their spiritual pursuits to attain freedom.

I find it funny how atheists join hands with fundamentalists and say that the discrimination of women and killing of innocent people carried out by fundamentalists is quite justified because their religious scriptures demands such acts when the fact of the matter is these fundamentalists are neither religious and nor are their acts in any sense of the word be justifiable with in their own religious scriptures. The root causes that lead to worse societies is not due to religion but instead it is due to ignorance of religion, mainly social and political factors and a lack of high education standards to women which religion never prohibits in any way.

In fact, a godless materialistic society such as the League of Militant atheists holding such anti-religious motivations cannot give a happy liberal society for it is as much a fundamentalist view to say no gods as it is to say only my god is the true God without knowing the power of myth and its ability to psychologically cure us.

Christine Downing recounts the Greek view of the gods as energies that affect everyone. In so being they are referred to "as theos, that is, as immortal, permanent, ineluctable aspects of the world". Disputes among the Greek pantheon were frequent, yet, Downing emphasizes, no god of the Classical era ever denied the existence of another god. And she cautions us as humans that to deny even one of the pantheon diminishes the richness of individuals and of the world.

If you don't like Swansont's example of keeping women down how about a specific one from the Christian Bible

"Let the women learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression." (I Timothy 2:11-14)

 

So women cannot attempt to take authority over a man, therefore if a women does something a man disagrees with she is doing wrong in the eyes of god (which usually ends in death).

That shows how ignorant you guys are when it comes to religion, how about this one.

"114. Simon Peter said to them, "Make Mary leave us, for females don't deserve life."

Jesus said, "Look, I will guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of Heaven."

- Gospel of Thomas

Again where does religion stop women from taking up higher education or having a higher authority over men? Just because a majority of people blindly agree on and follow false beliefs thinking that as the true word of God doesn't mean they deserve to be called as being religious when it was never the true word of God. As I said I will never let these ignorant new atheists and those who hold false belief systems like orthodox Christianity, Hinduism etc to define what religion is for us for they know nothing about their own religion and not about what the empirical and scriptural evidence is saying.

He'll probably respond that Christianity is not a religion.

Christianity is indeed a religion for Christ has each one with in him whether an angel, a mystery or a human.

If you do it in the name of some god, or because some god-related text tells you to do it, then yes I think it's religion. How do you classify it?

The misuse of religion and misinterpretation of religious texts to justify one's unjustifiable acts is not something new to us or something which is only specific to Islamic fundamentalists even the Nazis did it. We shouldn't let these fundamentalists define what religion is for us because their interpretations are neither based on scriptural evidence nor by empirical evidence. In fact these fundamentalist groups doesn't even classify as institutional religion whether its the Taliban or any other group for that matter, even if it is the Catholic Church any religious body which supports such notions against the word of God is not a religion, its the corruption of religion. If such groups are classified as part of religion then genuine religious people might have to exclude such groups or make themselves exclude from religion and find a all new word to preserve the word of God.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/9098525/Nazi-leader-Heinrich-Himmler-a-fan-of-yoga.html

 

Although the Nazi leader was not known to practice the physical exercises associated with yoga, he was fascinated with the Bhagavad Gita, the 700-verse Hindu scripture that outlines the principles of yoga and karma, and had a German translation of the Sanskrit original always at his side.

 

But far from embracing the hippy-style attitudes of peace and love so often associated with the scripture, Himmler, who helped orchestrate the Holocaust, connected it with his desire for racial purity and the justification of killing to achieve this.

 

"He identified himself and the SS with the old Indian Kshatriya caste and its publicised attitude of unscrupulous killing for one's 'higher purpose'," writes Mathias Tietke, in his new book "Yoga in National Socialism", which is published this week.

 

Himmler was not alone amongst the Nazis in possessing a fondness for yoga, and believing it could help fortify Germans for the trials of waging war.

 

SS Captain Jakob Wilhelm Hauer apparently managed to convince the SS commander that "yoga can internally arm us and prepare us for the battles ahead".

But that's sort of the point. If someone breaks the law, then you must "war against them" in order to enforce it and get them to comply.

Like this, I guess.

http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/pages/in-the-name-of-allah.htm

Hi everybody,

 

Anybody got any ideas on how we can prevent wars from happening in the future?

Let us redefine the word WAR as Wisdom and Revelation.

 

That's moot. The poster asked where this was happening, and I gave two examples. There are more. That it is a minority view doesn't matter to the question that was asked, and the effect is not a minority one when that minority is actually in a position to exert a large amount of influence.

Honestly, beheading infidels shouting the name "Allah O Akbar" and releasing videos of that over the internet to threaten all the pagans and infidels falls under the definition of religion according to you? I asked where does religion stop women from taking up higher university education and not what some people do in the name of religion, the latter doesn't fall with in the definition of religion.