Debates
For some unfathomable reason I waded back into a debate community http://www.livejournal.com/community/right_left08/104548.html and got wrapped up in a rant that I can't post there so will post "do you forget that no one is perfect? or in your elitist liberal mind do you think that there does exist perfect people. (only hollywood and martha's vineyard right?)"
Getting a little defensive here aren't we?
Is there something wrong with being a liberal? You've referenced that in another response as well and clearly it is something inherently bad for you. What exactly is a liberal to you and why is that something that you loath so much? I really need to know this as the few times I have debated somebody from a religious conservative viewpoint I've never gotten a straight answer to this. FYI, I actually consider myself to be a moderate but am often seen as a liberal because the framing of modern issues has become so very conservative. As a whole, my views in another time would not seem so far off center as they do today.
I repeat myself here: If you are genuinely sorry for something you have done then you should stop doing it in the future. You would make amends for harm you have caused and you would find a way to modify your behavior and stop doing it. If you haven't stopped doing it then you haven't truly repented your ways. If you think you can find something in your faith that allows you to bypass this most basic precept then I would have to question the validity of your understanding of your faith. You simply can't have it your way all the time because you ARE [Catholic, Baptist, Mormon, Shiite, Sufi, ...) and believe you can be forgiven your sins whenever you feel like you want forgiveness. It has to show in a genuine alteration of your behavior in this life or else you haven't genuinely repented of your ways. Think about that please.
"THOSE ARE THE ONLY ONES WHO, IN GOD'S EYES, ARE FORGIVEN." I don't even know how to respond to this.
How do you know who is forgiven in God's eyes? I think you just repeat what you've been told and haven't bothered to stop and think if what you have been told makes any sense. You are not God, neither is the one who told you this. You do not speak for God either, no matter how convinced you are that you somehow sit closer to God than anybody else. Goodness gracious, how brazenly you violate the seventh commandment here - “thou shalt not use the name of the lord, thy god, in vain.” Please think about that.
What is the true nature of God? What is your relationship to God? Does God exist? In what way does God exist that you can relate to him / her? These are not light questions that have easy breezy answers but are central to any human with a desire to understand their life in context with a greater whole. You seem to be just repeating verbatim what somebody else long ago had said without understanding the context of the times that they said it What else was happening in those times, what other philosophical considerations were in vogue in those days when these thoughts were developed, how were those thoughts influenced by the perspectives and history of those times, what prompted these thoughts and what affects they had in those times, what perspectives have changed since that time and how has that affected our development to date, and do these same statements in today's context carry the same meaning as they did back then, are they valid in today's perspective? You seem to think you've hit upon eternal truth just because somebody told you that it was eternal truth. Don't you think the same opposition to new thinking was extant back when these new collections of "eternal truths" were revealed to the set of prophets you chose to follow? How can you just decide to be so narrow in your views and yet decide that you also have some kind of ultimate truth that should apply to all? Who the hell is the elitist here anyway?
Am I perfect, absolutely not! I could go on for many days examining my faults, my failings, my defects; I have so many to chose from in such a wide variety of areas. I am not arguing from a perspective of being perfect. BUT I believe it is very important to have an ideal to strive for, a perfection you would like to achieve, and strive with all that you have to achieve that ideal state. I simply can't stand it when those who claim to have such a simple means of instantaneously achieving righteousness in their lives simply bypass the really hard parts of getting there and then sincerely believe they have achieved the same state of righteousness as those who have gone through the shredder of life to get there. I'm sorry but that simply doesn't count the same in my book.
Then again…Perhaps we are arguing the same point from two different perspectives. I’ll consider that a possibility.
Perhaps I have a hard time with your perspective because in my younger years I was of the same frame of mind as you seem to be now. My world would have broken apart if I were to consider anything outside my fundamentalist upbringing. At a minimum I was certain to go straight to hell if I varied one little bit from the path that had been laid out for me from my birth. I lived in fear and paranoia that I could lose my privileged status as one of the chosen at any time by simple unknowing acts of “sin” and prayed for forgiveness whenever I found out that I had violated some kapu of one kind or another. [Kapu - Ancient Hawaiians had many sacred places where only royalty could approach. Commoners found in these areas would have violated a kapu and were usually executed for their crimes, usually tied to the ground and beaten to death with clubs lined with sharp stones or shark’s teeth, very horrible gruesome punishment. Similarly all manner of ‘disrespect’ for royalty were also violation of kapus, something as small as looking up at the royal procession instead of remaining prostrate at all times in their presence. These kapus seem strange to us now, an arbitrary and capricious means of exercising absolute autocratic authority to keep the people cowed and threatened at all times, but they were real enough to the people back then.] I was so swept up in the whole vortex of sin and forgiveness that I was missing the rest of life. Back then I felt quite a bit like I was intentionally blinding myself, shielding myself from all information that contradicted my underlying assumptions, labeling it as sinful or false or, as the case seems to be today, liberal. Later in life I was fortunate to find that I could remain a very spiritual person without all the fear and paranoia that the church doctrines and dogma had taught me. I guess I can't understand why anybody would be satisfied with that kind of life, I certainly found it to be a very limiting, debilitating, and narrow life.
But then again… I have relatives and good close friends who are very involved in their churches and synagogues and derive a great deal of satisfaction from the experience. For many, they initially came to their faith in a state of panic or great emotional turmoil and found solace within the confines of the church, a means of coming to terms with a life that was spinning out of control for them. Through their experiences in the church they began to put their shattered lives back together, related better to others in a more normal civil fashion, got their careers back on line, or made progress towards some higher goals. I have no issue with that, in fact I find something distinctly positive and noble in having an established institution that can ably assist people in need of stability and sanity.
BUT that doesn't mean that the religious experience that those people have will have the same meaning for me. We come from two different places in life. In nearly all these relationships I have with my religious friends we seem to have a mutual understanding that this is true and we all get along quite well, even if we don’t exactly understand each other.
I would like to think that part of the religious education that people receive would be to understand and accept differences in perspectives, differences that should be respected as one would expect to be respected for their own perspective. Unfortunately all too often I find that this prime lesson in life is refuted by the tenets of a faith that insists on absolute rights and wrongs with the inherent understanding that they have discovered "right" and therefore everybody else is consequently "wrong". There is no consideration that there could be multiple possibilities of righteousness; there either is heaven in store for you or not and that is all that we learn in our churches. That's entirely too limited to be an absolute truth yet I hear time and again this same refrain from the religious institutions.
What's even more grating is when I am labeled as a liberal, or elitist, or baby killer, or anti-family, or anti-business, or anti-gun, or any of a number of insulting simplistic hot-button labels by people who have never heard me before on these issues. They just automatically presume that if I am in favor of one issue I must therefore stand for all others even if those extraneous issues don’t relate to the issue at hand. Who ever told you that was appropriate in civil conversation? Why do you want to take a civil discourse down to a level of uncivil name calling and labeling? If you want to talk to me you will have to listen carefully to what I say and respond with courtesy and tact. Otherwise you can expect me to spit venom back in your face just the way you spit it at me.
Amen.
Don't feel compelled to read this, it's just posted as a matter of expediency for me.
Getting a little defensive here aren't we?
Is there something wrong with being a liberal? You've referenced that in another response as well and clearly it is something inherently bad for you. What exactly is a liberal to you and why is that something that you loath so much? I really need to know this as the few times I have debated somebody from a religious conservative viewpoint I've never gotten a straight answer to this. FYI, I actually consider myself to be a moderate but am often seen as a liberal because the framing of modern issues has become so very conservative. As a whole, my views in another time would not seem so far off center as they do today.
I repeat myself here: If you are genuinely sorry for something you have done then you should stop doing it in the future. You would make amends for harm you have caused and you would find a way to modify your behavior and stop doing it. If you haven't stopped doing it then you haven't truly repented your ways. If you think you can find something in your faith that allows you to bypass this most basic precept then I would have to question the validity of your understanding of your faith. You simply can't have it your way all the time because you ARE [Catholic, Baptist, Mormon, Shiite, Sufi, ...) and believe you can be forgiven your sins whenever you feel like you want forgiveness. It has to show in a genuine alteration of your behavior in this life or else you haven't genuinely repented of your ways. Think about that please.
"THOSE ARE THE ONLY ONES WHO, IN GOD'S EYES, ARE FORGIVEN." I don't even know how to respond to this.
How do you know who is forgiven in God's eyes? I think you just repeat what you've been told and haven't bothered to stop and think if what you have been told makes any sense. You are not God, neither is the one who told you this. You do not speak for God either, no matter how convinced you are that you somehow sit closer to God than anybody else. Goodness gracious, how brazenly you violate the seventh commandment here - “thou shalt not use the name of the lord, thy god, in vain.” Please think about that.
What is the true nature of God? What is your relationship to God? Does God exist? In what way does God exist that you can relate to him / her? These are not light questions that have easy breezy answers but are central to any human with a desire to understand their life in context with a greater whole. You seem to be just repeating verbatim what somebody else long ago had said without understanding the context of the times that they said it What else was happening in those times, what other philosophical considerations were in vogue in those days when these thoughts were developed, how were those thoughts influenced by the perspectives and history of those times, what prompted these thoughts and what affects they had in those times, what perspectives have changed since that time and how has that affected our development to date, and do these same statements in today's context carry the same meaning as they did back then, are they valid in today's perspective? You seem to think you've hit upon eternal truth just because somebody told you that it was eternal truth. Don't you think the same opposition to new thinking was extant back when these new collections of "eternal truths" were revealed to the set of prophets you chose to follow? How can you just decide to be so narrow in your views and yet decide that you also have some kind of ultimate truth that should apply to all? Who the hell is the elitist here anyway?
Am I perfect, absolutely not! I could go on for many days examining my faults, my failings, my defects; I have so many to chose from in such a wide variety of areas. I am not arguing from a perspective of being perfect. BUT I believe it is very important to have an ideal to strive for, a perfection you would like to achieve, and strive with all that you have to achieve that ideal state. I simply can't stand it when those who claim to have such a simple means of instantaneously achieving righteousness in their lives simply bypass the really hard parts of getting there and then sincerely believe they have achieved the same state of righteousness as those who have gone through the shredder of life to get there. I'm sorry but that simply doesn't count the same in my book.
Then again…Perhaps we are arguing the same point from two different perspectives. I’ll consider that a possibility.
Perhaps I have a hard time with your perspective because in my younger years I was of the same frame of mind as you seem to be now. My world would have broken apart if I were to consider anything outside my fundamentalist upbringing. At a minimum I was certain to go straight to hell if I varied one little bit from the path that had been laid out for me from my birth. I lived in fear and paranoia that I could lose my privileged status as one of the chosen at any time by simple unknowing acts of “sin” and prayed for forgiveness whenever I found out that I had violated some kapu of one kind or another. [Kapu - Ancient Hawaiians had many sacred places where only royalty could approach. Commoners found in these areas would have violated a kapu and were usually executed for their crimes, usually tied to the ground and beaten to death with clubs lined with sharp stones or shark’s teeth, very horrible gruesome punishment. Similarly all manner of ‘disrespect’ for royalty were also violation of kapus, something as small as looking up at the royal procession instead of remaining prostrate at all times in their presence. These kapus seem strange to us now, an arbitrary and capricious means of exercising absolute autocratic authority to keep the people cowed and threatened at all times, but they were real enough to the people back then.] I was so swept up in the whole vortex of sin and forgiveness that I was missing the rest of life. Back then I felt quite a bit like I was intentionally blinding myself, shielding myself from all information that contradicted my underlying assumptions, labeling it as sinful or false or, as the case seems to be today, liberal. Later in life I was fortunate to find that I could remain a very spiritual person without all the fear and paranoia that the church doctrines and dogma had taught me. I guess I can't understand why anybody would be satisfied with that kind of life, I certainly found it to be a very limiting, debilitating, and narrow life.
But then again… I have relatives and good close friends who are very involved in their churches and synagogues and derive a great deal of satisfaction from the experience. For many, they initially came to their faith in a state of panic or great emotional turmoil and found solace within the confines of the church, a means of coming to terms with a life that was spinning out of control for them. Through their experiences in the church they began to put their shattered lives back together, related better to others in a more normal civil fashion, got their careers back on line, or made progress towards some higher goals. I have no issue with that, in fact I find something distinctly positive and noble in having an established institution that can ably assist people in need of stability and sanity.
BUT that doesn't mean that the religious experience that those people have will have the same meaning for me. We come from two different places in life. In nearly all these relationships I have with my religious friends we seem to have a mutual understanding that this is true and we all get along quite well, even if we don’t exactly understand each other.
I would like to think that part of the religious education that people receive would be to understand and accept differences in perspectives, differences that should be respected as one would expect to be respected for their own perspective. Unfortunately all too often I find that this prime lesson in life is refuted by the tenets of a faith that insists on absolute rights and wrongs with the inherent understanding that they have discovered "right" and therefore everybody else is consequently "wrong". There is no consideration that there could be multiple possibilities of righteousness; there either is heaven in store for you or not and that is all that we learn in our churches. That's entirely too limited to be an absolute truth yet I hear time and again this same refrain from the religious institutions.
What's even more grating is when I am labeled as a liberal, or elitist, or baby killer, or anti-family, or anti-business, or anti-gun, or any of a number of insulting simplistic hot-button labels by people who have never heard me before on these issues. They just automatically presume that if I am in favor of one issue I must therefore stand for all others even if those extraneous issues don’t relate to the issue at hand. Who ever told you that was appropriate in civil conversation? Why do you want to take a civil discourse down to a level of uncivil name calling and labeling? If you want to talk to me you will have to listen carefully to what I say and respond with courtesy and tact. Otherwise you can expect me to spit venom back in your face just the way you spit it at me.
Amen.
Don't feel compelled to read this, it's just posted as a matter of expediency for me.