The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #87904   Message #1645923
Posted By: Amos
10-Jan-06 - 08:15 PM
Thread Name: BS: Religion=good folk doing bad things?
Subject: RE: BS: Religion=good folk doing bad things?
It is pretty obvious that asserting and dramatizing a cultist belief leads one into bizarre contortions of irrationality, and that resisting the same concepts, pictures or words with equal vehemence does exactly the same thing. The reason you don't hear about Buddhist suicide bombers is that Buddha taught to clear the mind of desire and of resistance both, in all dimensions, in order to achieve clarity and centering of the soul. Good advice.

The dramatic dance of desiring and resisting cultist beliefs changes form and hue depending on whether the cult involved is the Boy Scouts, the Jungbunde, the Sri Lankan Revenge Society, the Tamil Tigers, the Episcopalians, the Methodists, the Dianeticists, the Hamas, The Loyal Worshippers of Werner Erhardt, or the Martyrs of Islam Ad Infinitum. Any dramatization, taken on as a substitute for calm awareness and open dialogue, leads to contortion, distortion, aberration, and mellerdrammer. We like to tell our kids to stop "acting out", but often that is just because they aren't acting out the things we think they should. We don't really need to dramatize, but it helps pass the time.

We are TERRIBLY fond of having incidents in our lives, almost to the point of addiction. This is one factor in the endless panoply of Punch and Judy rock-a-billy that goes on across the planet, including here in our own threads.

A