GUEST - How does free will equate to fascism? How do love and nonviolence equate to fascism? Where I agree with that other fellow is in his identification of certain possible political/social problems, but not necessarily in his method of responding to them. That's up to him. I don't have a gun.

As for "primitivist", I suggest you try plowing through just one book by Sri Aurobindo Ghose, such as "The Life Divine". He was a scientific and intellectual giant, and also an atheist in his youth, but not later. I doubt you could handle it. Too unprimitive for you. And no, I am not a follower of his. But I respect him. He was one of the great anti-fascists of all time. You have me, just as you have God, confused with some thing you have made up in your own head. You don't know me, you just want to "win", verbally speaking.

Such a victory would be meaningless. I've seen my father, a very opinionated and insecure man, win any number of arguments with other people when he was WRONG! It's easy to do if you're aggressive, articulate, determined and unscrupulous, and it doesn't mean diddly-squat.

If you paid even a modicum of attention to my definition of God and analyzed it it little, instead of falling back on old, tired rhetoric that is better aimed at some fundamentalist church, you might learn something new. Do you actually think you are totally alone? Do you think you are nothing more than an isolated body and mind, incapable of channeling anything or being a part of anything but the workings of your own mind? Do you think life has no purpose other than surviving and experiencing pleasure? If so, then to all intents and purposes, you truly are alone. That's tough. People who are irrevocably (by their own choice) alone would usually rather be "right" than be happy or even be alive. They'd rather be right than anything.

You're not here just for you. And if you think you are, then you're an outlaw of a sort. There was no one on this land (before the white men came here with their fanatical religions and their greed) so unutterably stupid as to assert that there is no spirit within people, animals, and things and no divine purpose behind Life. No one. It takes a very spoiled people to believe something that stupid. And the American Indians were not a primitive or a spoiled people. They just had a simpler material lifestyle. It was the Europeans who were the barbarians, and whose society and religion were rife with corruption and hypocrisy.

Let me rephrase the original title of this thread: If there is a Life why is it hiding?

Answer: It's not! It is all around you, and you are part of it. Open yer friggin' eyes, paleface!

If there is Love, why is it hiding?

Same basic problem. Open your heart. I can't do it for you.

Cluin - Right. God doesn't require "worship" anyway. There is nothing God requires. It's people who require things, I find. They're empty inside, so they look to you or me to fill their emptiness for them.

"Though the rules of the road have been lodged, it's only people's games you've got to dodge"   - Bob Dylan

- LH