shame

[tinkerjack]

A visceral poem, I always get a little spooked when I hear those preachers go on about the precious bloood. Just my mesiah complex I suppose.

I was a fortunate child, one of the chosen few.
Nobody never promised me nothing, it was all here and now, no body threatened me with hell or promised me heaven, and dead was dead.
I never had a saviour until i did lsd

sorry I can't relate to all this, except as Jesus as a metaphor.

[mnaz]

Neither can I.

Though I've been told I might pay dearly for it.

Perhaps my old church was oblivious to the work of the Lord.

[tinkerjack]

The Faith of A Heretic, Walter Kaufmann

I know what is at stake.

"Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt." Vonnegut

Homeboy used to work the ER room in a Catholic hospital if some one was in pain and started cursing Jesus he said the nuns would send them to another hospital.

Marx was right religion is opium, and opium is good stuff when you are in pain. I try not to lean on Jesus unless I hurt like a son of a bitch.

I don't know what the score is, plenty of churches do good work, they did better work during katrina then FEMA did.

Ah hell
sorry

[mnaz]

But that's just it.

What claim does religion have to Jesus? It always seemed to me that it ain't the same thing.

[tinkerjack]

Yeah I don't know mnaz
I was lucky that at the same time I was down on my knees and praying to Jesus just to let me fall asleep I had already read nietzsche. THere was only one christian and he died on the cross, his words acid etched on my brain. What claim does religion have to the Buddha. I like the Dalai Lama's bit about religion being like medicine, no pain no need religion

. The Dalai Lama And The Genius Of The West

The Dalai Lama said at another juncture, as if talking to himself, that religion was not for every day; religion was for times of pain. As I recall, his exact words were, "Religion something like medicine, when no pain no need medicine; same thing religion."

I got asome post appoctolyptic vision that the meek have allready inheirited the earth. No body meeker than our president of good and evil, that probably makes no sense to you and I don't know if I can explain it.

"Religion is all about belonging, men to the right women to the left" j from a long time ago

[mnaz]

The shame angle triggered it, I guess. Or guilt. Or shame of guilt. Where's the shame of guilt in being born imperfect and incapable of absolutely no sin? What claim does eternal life have on absolute perfection or lack thereof?

[e_dog]

d ya hear the one 'bout the mARXIST and tha HIPPIE?


MARXIST: Religion is the opiate of the masses.

HIPPIE: Yeah, man! Hell's yeah. Let's do some opium. Dude!

[e_dog]

no. jesus died in the holocaust. gas chamber. crematorium. mass graves. firing squads. march of death.

israel is resurrection.

the letters easter and israel are the same except for the t and l and i and extra e. that spells tile. or lite.

Christ is lite. tile is the work of the devil.

yu said jesus is metaphor. Man is a metaphor for jesus Christ.

[mnaz]

Yes Jack. At the the time it seemed unnerving, though not 'traumatic'. (That has come in soft waves since). After all, Jesus loved me! But oh my those gentle admonishments about eternal punishment. Seeped into my six-year-old brain, no doubt. Shit, how did this become a confessional? Not sure why I wrote it down here. Just wanted to know why we are supposed to feel condemned as imperfect by our creator for simply being born as imperfect, for simply being. Yeah, that's it.

[mnaz]

I was a fortunate child, one of the chosen few.
Nobody never promised me nothing, it was all here and now, no body threatened me with hell or promised me heaven, and dead was dead.
I never had a saviour until i did lsd

Yes. Dead is dead. Here and now. Savior does not contol the mind. Savior lets you make up your own, at least in theory.

[tinkerjack]

But oh my those gentle admonishments about eternal punishment. Seeped into my six-year-old brain, no doubt. Shit, how did this become a confessional? Not sure why I wrote it down here. Just wanted to know why we are supposed to feel condemned as imperfect by our creator for simply being born as imperfect, for simply being.

unmediated existence
they say it is not possible
How do you overcome enculturation
We are born into an extro biological womb of culture
A lot of seepage

I used to like that game Sim City, been years since I played it. There was a a sequel called Creation or something like that. It was a lot of fun playing god.

Speaking of the Holocaust which I still don't know has to do with this thread. I do sort of feel guilty about Christianity. Sometimes I wonder if it was a Jewish plot to enslave the over man.

So karmically speaking the jews were chosen to suffer. Pity St Paul took that road that day. Would the world have been better off it it had remained a Jewish cult.

I can't get this song out of my mind
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Dead is dead
but only my dying will tell.
I could be wrong about that, I was just was not enticed to be good because of some promised after life.
But Maybe the dead do know something.

I don't know much about theology or what people are supposed to feel. I liked Kaufmann's book it was helpful to me.
It gave me courage to persist in the faith of a heretic. I think it would be useful to you. But that is just a sugestion.

This is a review of it from Amazon for what it is worth.

Writing about religion has always been a risky endeavor. There are few subjects which so often provoke banal,intellectually dishonest discussions that rarely get to the heart of the real issues. But Walter Kaufmann, one of the greatest scholars of the last century, succeeds in Faith of a Heretic where so many others have failed. Instead of defining concepts like "faith" and "religion" without examining their historical and cultural uses, Kaufmann traces religious ideas through their development in the Hebrew Bible, New Testament and subsequent philosophical discourse. This analysis results in a study of religion that avoids the reductionist condemnations of faith so common among today's "free thinkers," and the simplistic diagnoses offered by writers in the "science and religion" movement. If you want to start thinking seriously about religion, this is the place to start.

If you get to heaven and you look down on me burning and thirsting in hell maybe they will let you throw me a a couple of ice cubes or an Eskimo Pie would be good.

sorry for the ramble e-dog
I liked your poem a lot
but I have no idea what the holocaust has to do with it. Do you feel guilty about that?

[mnaz]

Jack.... I'm a bit of an odd creature about religion. I tend to categorize it broadly (and often get a lot of shit for that from both theologians and historians or whooom-ever). E.g.... I tend to think of militarism as religion (insular, self-perpetuating and self-justifying as it increases within a culture, or between cultures)... and it seems "Izzm" in general may be elevated to religious stature in the mind, even the collective mind ('tho it takes only an astoundingly few with power to get the ball rolling, at times), and it seems to me the 20th Century is paved with the ruins of tunnel-visioned quasi-religious Izzzzzzzm in general... But that's just me.

Anyway, that's one reason I liked what that namby-pamby-ass New Age freak J. Campbell had to say. He read the central tenets of Christianity more in the form of truth-bearing metaphor, and put the burden of "salvation" on us, where it belongs. Not on Jesus. Not on Buddha. Not on Mohammed. On us. Ultimately we make our own heaven and hell. The ascension of Jesus is an inner-space affair, not outer.

As for my old Sunday school days.... again, not quite sure why I brought them up, other than to illustrate indoctrination, and its often compelling (compulsory?) circumstance(s).

As for e_dog's write, yes, the shame-=-=-guilt thing is important to think about when considering religion, which often uses either/both as a major part of its sales pitch to join.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

[tinkerjack]

Not to get off topic mnaz but I was pretty stoned when I was posting that stuff last night. Trouble is when I am stoned I think i am so got dam smart. Who am I kidding? I was born to follow.

I like what Joe C had to say about Christ as metaphor, it made a lot of sense to me.



You were raised on bible stories I was raised on Freud, it was my father's trinity, the ego, id, and super ego.


Freud's last book Moses and Monotheism, been a life time since I read it. I can't remember anything about it hardly. I been thinking about re-reading it.

The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days(Hardcover)
by Edmundson, Mark
"Focusing on Freud's .... ideas about death, and also about the human proclivity to embrace fascism in politics and fundamentalism in religion. Edmundson suggests new and important ways to view Freud's legacy, at a time when these forces are once again shaping world events. '

Our human proclivity to embrace fascism and fundamentalism. Ain't it a bitch.

[mnaz]

Our human proclivity to embrace fascism and fundamentalism. Ain't it a bitch.

Very true.

I like what Joe C had to say about Christ as metaphor, it made a lot of sense to me.

Some of his best thinking/writing, IMO.

there's no payin' the debt, once the bookies start bookin' accounts

And what is God accountable to? Creation? Does God owe a debt to human consciousness?

Anyway....

Of course this is all fairly rudimentary stuff. I can already hear Toten's objections of intellectual slackness... e.g.... if militarism is a deleterious sort of 'religion', then why isn't pacifism as well, at times? Was it morally bankrupt to participate in the mass slaughter of WW2, to oppose fascism? Jeeezz, another Izzzzzm Skizzzzzzm. We've been inundated wizzzzm... No E-Z answer, it seems.

[Totenkopf]

We agree that the Khrustian metaphor still resonates. That metaphor really can be read in secular terms as well: and in those terms, it's not so overwhelming. It's the proverbial "I fought the law" meme, or sort of like perennial Billy Jack . JC, aka Kid Nazareth, carpenter and street preacher, hung out with street peeps--thieves, ho's, chandala of various sorts.

Kid Nazareth doesn't care for what's goin' down--corrupt officials, roman cops, judges, bureaucrats all tryin' to take away his Phreedom. Pagans like Pontius Pilate in their fancy villas, and people starving, etc. So he decides to FIGHT THE Power, like. And they bust him, even tho' he's representin' and doin' the right thang! Mutha-f-ers. So the Statist pigs decide to hang the rabble rouser with some petty perps. The cops throw dice, a few hos' teary eyed, someone selling helados, as a good guy hangs.