five plus one
the challenge has been out there in the blogosphere to identify the five things you just don't get. okay, i’ve thought about it and here are five of mine (not in order of importance…)
1) why it is so difficult for people to stop doing things that they know from first-hand experience only lead to personal pain.
2) why people perceive negativity and cynicism as indicators of greater intelligence.
3) why, having been given dominion over all the earth, people still see each other as the final frontier, setting out to conquer their fellows rather than celebrating the diversity of others and reaping the benefits to be gained from valuing one another.
4) why people seem to always put faith and reason on opposite sides of a theosophical continuum. we need to be able to do battle in both arenas and know, in fact, which fights are being held where.
5) why it is so difficult for people to converse with others of differing perspective without trying to either sell them something they don’t want (or see the need for) or convince them to move... in other words, without turning the conversation into one of those battles mentioned above. there would probably be a lot more interesting conversation taking place if people knew that their perspective was going to be respected even by those who held different views. we might all actually become smarter and wiser.
(6) why i am better at writing these words than living them.
posted by jollybeggar at
3:38 PM
7 Comments:
http://agep.home.netcom.com/confession.html
Electronic Confession
........Creationism of course always works because it's a non-explanation..........
I certainly don't mean to paraphrase everything you've said into one sentence, but if I were hard pressed to come up with a definition for Fundamentalism, what you said above is about as complete a definition in one sentence that anyone can come up with.
Fundamentalism is about 'not needing an explanation.'
Oh, sure, there are those weekly explanations of a particular scripture that is pretty much explained the same way it was explained the last time the subject came up, but that's merely repetitiveness. Rote helps one not forget a lesson so as that lesson never changes regardless of the century in progress.
It all comes down to not needing an explanation. Not having to muddle about with explanations makes it all that much easier for everyone involved. Kind of like going to a Halloween party where no one wears masks.............bigbro
Bigbro said:
"Fundamentalism...
It all comes down to not needing an explanation. Not having to muddle about with explanations makes it all that much easier for everyone involved..."
well, i'm afraid that i have to beg to differ here. i don't think that fundamentalism is as much about not needing an explanation as it is about presuming that a literal interpretation of scripture is the only explanation worth considering.
close-mindedness takes on many forms, one of them being fundamentalism and another being a complete dismissal of fundamentalism.
i guess i wrestle with why we human beings are so vain as to believe that somehow we are entitled to an explanation, period. we continue to strive to be 'like God,' having become intoxicated by the empirical cocktail of data and theory, allowing ourselves all the while to become dehydrated of living water. ultimately our speculations are philosophical dry heaves, resulting in little more than a self-congratulatory headache and a broken blood-vessel or two in our eyes.
Nobody completely dismisses Fundamentalism without a butt whipping............marcythewhore
i'm not sure if i should laugh or cry here.
I think:
Evolution may be a theory but creation isn’t. It’s the Bible.
There is no faith without reason and the other way around.
The Bible says subdue the earth, not your neighbour (good point!)
I think your number 2 has something to do with number 3
I just wanted to respond to some of the things you said as I have just discovered blogs and was looking for people in my neighbourhood. God Bless.
numbers 2 and 3 are related?
hmmmm.
there's something about survival of the fittest there, i think.
are the fittest to survive the ones who see their negativity and cynicism as indicators of their place on some evolutionary ladder, or are these attitudes simply the hardest ones to break because of so much personal presumption? in other words, is it only the attitudes of negativity and cynicism that survive because they are so beligerently committed to the idea that they are beyond reproach?
we may have just stumbled onto the 'unpardonable sin.'
as long as a heart is so hard and so UNreasonable, what hope is there of that heart turning towards another point of view... in particular, a point of view that holds both the faith in an invisible, yet relational reality and the submission to the will of someone higher who has greater cosmic scope as its key distinctives?
little self-centred gods don't generally surrender without a fight.
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