religion and spirituality

[Bud Weiss]

Take a good look at the history of organized religion and you see basically
building power gathered in the hands of a few to control people and justify
wars committed on the part of the powerful to gain more power using the poor
and misguided middle classes. As General Smedley Darlington Butler once put
it as the most highly decorated longest of service general in the Marines,
"War is a Racket."

The Abrahamic religions that grew out of the far older African practices
honed by the Egyptians into the 144 negative confessions as the guide to
life. I like what you wrote here Regina very much.  Interesting to note that
the 10 commandments are taken whole from the 144 negative confessions that
the Egyptian priests had to pass in order to become part of the holy of
hollies.
The Aboriginal people have their laws which they basically shared across
that incredible continent despite many different villages, tribes and
languages. Their oral history which continues to be passed down even today
tells of things accurately, verified by archaeologists and anthropologists,
that happened as much as 50,000 years ago and more. How they have been able
to sustain their integrity living more or less in piece as neighbors through
all that time until they began to be slaughtered and used by the European
invaders is still one of the most poorly understood and least adequately
told stories of all time.  Now that's spirituality at its best for me.
Bud

On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 9:59 PM, REGINA SEWELL <sewell.2 at osu.edu> wrote:

> Ivo,
>
> The issue that you bring up...  it reminds me of Marx's declaration that
> religion is the opiate of the people.  I live in Columbus, Ohio and have a
> sense that Marx is wrong...  the Opiate isn't religion, it's football....
> except when the buckeyes lose, which they just did...
>
> But seriously, you raise the issue of religion/spirituality, but I think
> that the issue is broader...  it has to do with people getting stuck in a
> cultural conserve.  And while the downside of religion as cultural conserve
> of choice are easy to point out (you did in the example of John Travolta's
> son, and on the surface, we can blame religion for much of the blood that's
> being shed all over the planet), my sense is that people flock to religion
> and stay with it because it works for them somehow.  It gives meaning to
> what may otherwise be a frightening, overwhelming, pointless existence.  It
> gives them what Joseph Campbell dubbed "Myths" to help them navigate their
> world.  And it gives them rules for living.  Though we break them all the
> time, it's easy to see how the "thou shalt nots" of the Abrahamic religions
> helped to keep societies from killing each other...
>
> Campbell also notes that perhaps the problem with religions today is that
> they myths have not caught up with the economic and social realities of the
> world in which we live.  Perhaps what we need are new myths.  Oddly enough,
> some of the new science and new religion is backing up what the Mary Baker
> Eddy prosletyzed to her masses -- the power of prayer, of "energy" and
> intention.
>
> So perhaps we should take to heart the words of Bruce Springstein on his
> album "war"  "Blind faith in anything will get you killed."
>
> According to the press:
>
> "A post-mortem examination determined last night that John Travolta's
> chronically ill son died of a seizure, as controversy erupted over the
> Scientologist actor's handling of the boy's medical condition. According to
> the family, Jett, 16, suffered a seizure and hit his head on a bathtub at
> their holiday home in the Bahamas, where he was found dead on Friday."
> ...Travolta
> and his wife, Kelly Preston, issued a statement saying they were
> "heartbroken that our time with him was so brief. We will cherish the time
> we had with him for the rest of our lives." The couple said that Jett
> suffered from Kawasaki disease, a condition that causes inflammation of
> small and medium-sized arteries. The disease affects the lymph nodes, skin
> and the mucous membranes in the mouth, nose and throat. Experts said that
> the disease was rarely fatal and seldom affected children over the age of
> 8....Critics of Scientology suggested yesterday that Jett may have been
> suffering from autism, a condition that the church does not recognise
> because it considers mental illness to be psychosomatic and argues that it
> should be treated through spiritual healing...." From The Times January 6,
> 2009
>
> Well, I will not discuss the way this church or others deal with humans. I
> think that the problem is deeper than this and deserves an urgent and
> serious consideration. My question is: What are the political consequences
> of spirituality? I will not bother you with this historical problem, but
> with the clear fragmentation between Governments and Institutions related
> to
> "faith" and "Spirituality" a big and increasing hole is there for we all to
> see if we want and have the courage to see it. The consequences can be
> disastrous if all remains the same. Governments can not pretend that the
> New
> Age Movement doesn't exist as a genuine mode of discourse or other types of
> movements that are pupping up now. With post modernism the respect for all
> kinds of truth are being mistaken for all truths are equal. And We all know
> this is simply not truth in our relative world.  Note the paradox. They say
> "All kinds of truth are equal" forming in that very moment another kind of
> truth. I will attempt to say that in our relative world there are not only
> various types of truths but various degrees of truths. I will call this
> degrees simply Evolution, defined as a truth that emerge, transcend and
> include the previous truth (but the topic is too complex to expose it here,
> I think, because it would divert from the real intention of my e-mail)
>
> Spirituality have to enter in the political discourse again, I believe,
> simply because spirituality, by whatever name is an intrinsic part of a
> human being, and the bad use of it makes the world poorer. By political
> discourse, I mean in the broadest sense of the world, including the
> explicit
> consequences of the work and the understanding of science, of arts, of
> culture, etc that have to result in a better informed political decisions.
> This, I believe, can only be met by a real transdisciplinary approach. Is
> Sociatry Era coming at last?
>
> regina sewell, Ph.D.
>
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>
>


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