Bailey? Creme?
I'll drink to that!
Cheers!
Posted on 03/12/2011 2:58:25 PM PST by betty boop
Interesting is an understatement.
Bailey? Creme?
I'll drink to that!
Cheers!
"Indeed, He is Truth. A thing is true because He says it."
Indeed... Hebrews 6:18,19 - "That by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie, we might have a strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before us: Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul..."
The new age movement is trying to create it's own anchor for the soul.One made of straw.The wind will blow,that house will fall and mighty and terrible will be it's fall.
Thankyou again dear Alamo-Girl!
"That human "progress" is always to be found, not in the past, but only in the future"
Chronological snobbery.
"No wonder science could never arise in a Buddhist/Hindu spiritual context...."
Who cares? Science can just butt out of the spiritual quest,except of course when it's percieved it to be usefull in getting rid of the baby along with the bathwater.
So many New agers seem too busy flitting about like spiritual moths cherry picking what suites them from whatever spiritual tradition crosses their path to worry about cold hard reality.With a head full of "goodwill" and a heart that they do not know they march steadily toward the flame dreaming of Utopia.While at the same time millions are murdered in the womb and homosexuality verges on the compulsary....etc etc etc ad nauseum.
I think,if it were possible,the enemy of men's souls would be absolutely busting a gut laughing at the so-called "new age".'New' age my @$$.
"...there is no new thing under the sun.Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us There is no remembrance of former things..."
I suppose that's where cronological snobbery works it's wonders..."no remembrance of former things"
"I really have more to say on these questions."
Here's hoping.
"Thanks to anyone who has read so far — for your wonderful patience"
It aint no thing,seriously,I don't need any while reading and I don't possess any while waiting.8-)
Thank you so very much for contrasting Islam and Eastern Religion worldviews to Judeo/Christianity - and thank you for the background on Ouspensky, Gurdjieff and Creme!
I do not see where LDS (circa 1830) or Scientology (circa 1952) either clarified or improved Spiritual insight. And certainly Heaven's Gate (circa 1970's) was literally a dead end.
Indeed, if it does not come from God Himself, there is no Spiritual insight to be had.
Indeed, God cannot lie because when He says a thing, it is. It is because He said it!
As you say, the New Age belief has no foundation.
Thank you for your insights and encouragements!
BTTT!!!
"Man is the image and likeness of the Creator, so he therefore has an uncreated intellect that may know Truth, and know it with certainty. He may distinguish between the Real and the unreal (or less real), between appearance and reality, between the transient and the eternal, between causes and effects, between the objective and subjective, and between principles and their manifestation. No mere animal can do any of these things, nor can any materialist philosophy or tenured ape account for them in a manner that is not logically self-refuting. ...."
"..man is man because he may know the True, the Good and the Beautiful, and act upon that knowledge with a will that is free. Any man who does not achieve these ends is a sick man, and any culture that does not produce such men is a sick society.
Judged by these criteria, academia is by and large a very sick place, at least as it pertains to the humanities ....On what elite campus do the professors speak of timeless truth, or objective morality, or of transcendentally real beauty? .."
Our enemies in the Muslim world are our enemies precisely because they are sick men from sick societies who wish to spread their disease to the rest of the world. But in our own part of the world, approximately half of the population suffers from a soul pathology that prevents them from making judgments on, or even perceiving, the soul pathology of our external enemies. ...."
HERE: The Cause and Cure of Mankind
<>
"....one of our first principles, "as above, so below," i.e., "man is made in the image and likeness of the Creator." But there is image and there is likeness, and human time is the distance between the two, which is none other than the spiritual path.
Only human beings may know that "it is possible to act in error." Conversely, "if fate ruled everything, error would not only be impossible, but the very idea of it would have no meaning" (Bolton). Likewise, to entertain a single regret is to acknowledge that things might have been different if only you hadn't been such a jackass and made such stupid choices.
To say "better choices" is to say truer ones -- or decisions aligned with truth and therefore rooted in reality. ..."
I certainly agree, dearest sister in Christ!
People who flock to men purporting to have spiritual insight according to their own wisdom are being set up for a most grievous fall....
That is a spiritual dead end. But charismatic charmers have novel ways of enticing the spiritually rootless to reject the Logos of God which underwrites (so to speak) the entire world of creation. Gurdjieff's "schtick" was "dance therapy." For Ben Creme, the "schtick" is "group meditation." Which to me is a real howler, an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, a logical impossibility: Reason tells me that "groups" do not meditate; only individual souls/minds do.
But people fall for this baseless "stuff." They feed their spiritual hunger with "junk." Life is terrifying, and they seek easy answers that relieve them of their existential anxieties, and that make them "feel good" about themselves — so they flock to self-described gurus who are happy to supply them....
Or so it seems to me. FWIW.
Thank you ever so much for writing, dearest sister in Christ, and for your very kind words of support!
"... man is man because he may know the True, the Good and the Beautiful, and act upon that knowledge with a will that is free. Any man who does not achieve these ends is a sick man, and any culture that does not produce such men is a sick society.
Oh so very true, dear Matchett-PI! Just take a look around, and behold a very "sick society."
Thank you ever so much for drawing our attention to these marvelous insights from "Gagdad Bob".... and the outstanding links to his articles! I class his work as "highly recommended reading."
Thank you so much for sharing these insights and links, dear Matchett-PI!
Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us. — Ecclesiates 1: 9–10
Thought it worth repeating....
Dear mitch5501, you wrote:
With a head full of "goodwill" and a heart that they do not know [New Agers] march steadily toward the flame dreaming of Utopia. While at the same time millions are murdered in the womb and homosexuality verges on the compulsary....etc etc etc ad nauseum.I so agree! There is nothing "new" about what "the enemy of men's souls" is now doing; for it is what he has ever done.... He knows his "future"; he just wants to take down as many of God's creatures with him as possible, out of sheer spite....
I think, if it were possible, the enemy of men's souls would be absolutely busting a gut laughing at the so-called "new age". 'New' age my @$$.
He may be laughing; but he already well knows that God gets "the last laugh"....
Thank you ever so much for sharing your marvelous insights, dear mitch5501!
These fabricated exercises to achieve spiritual insight bring to mind many drug induced methods to achieve "spiritual" insights, e.g. Peyote of the Native American Church and Marijuana in the Rastafari Movement.
For people who think a drug high equates to spiritual insight, anesthesiologists must be like high priests. LOLOL!
Outstanding insights, dearest sister in Christ, thank you!
You’re welcome. Thank you both!
DeniseMilani: the Qu’ran for instance, which states that all the spiritual teachings clarify the older ones
Spirited: Then the Qu-ran lies, for rather than clarifying supernatural Christian theism, Mohammed’s heresy muddied and subverted Christianity. According to the great Augustinian Oratorian John Henry Newman:
“Muhammad is the 3rd historical shadow of the Antichrist,” said Newman. “This shadow began his imposture about 600 years after Christ and his armies tore at the soul and body of Christ in the fierce religious wars they waged against the Church.” (A Confederacy of Evil, pp. xxi-xxii )
Newman argues that the Antichrist will be an individual person whose types and forerunners are famous historical persons. The 3rd was Muhammed. One, Two and four are:
1. King Antiochus whom we read about in the book of Maccabees
2. Emperor Julian the Apostate (331-363 A.D.)
4. the godless leaders of the French Revolution. These prophets of godless ‘isms’ (i.e.,communism, socialism, secularism, liberalism, evolutionism, materialism, progressive atheism) held that man is god. They attacked the Church, secularized France, and spread rebellion against God and His Church throughout Europe, the world and now here in America.
Newman describes the conditions that pave the way for the Antichrist. The first is apostasy. Everywhere in the world we are witnessing a “supreme effort to govern men and dominate the world without religion,” particularly Christian theism. It’s a widely accepted and spreading dogma that men should have nothing to do with religion, that religion and morality are private matters best kept to oneself.
Next is the widely accepted idea that transcendent Truth and authority are divisive, intolerant, bigotted and hateful. Each man it is said, is the supreme inventer of his own truth.
Third, the feverish endeavor to remove every vestige of orthodox Christianity from schools, mass media, political affairs, entertainment, and social affairs. Emergent Christianity, Liberal Christianity, Eastern mysticism, neo-paganism, Wicca and even Satanism are socially acceptable but orthodox faith is not.
Fourth, the nonstop redefining of the Bible. Today the Bible has so many meanings over and against its’ obvious meaning that it “has been reduced to having no meaning at all, to being at best a pleasant myth, at worst, a dead letter.” (pp. xxiii-xxiv)
The true faith said Newman, has been “cast into the dark world of variable, evanescent, volatile feelings…(it) is discredited in the minds of many when, it is not already destroyed.” (pp. xxiii-xxiv )
“Surely,” concludes Newman, “there is at this day a confederacy of evil, marshalling its hosts from all parts of the world, organizing itself, taking its measures, enclosing the Church of Christ as in a net, and preparing the way for general apostasy from it…This Apostasy and all its tokens and instruments are of the evil one and savior of death.” (p. xxiv)
(Excerpted from: The Death of True Christian Theism Ushers in the Day of Antichrist, http://patriotsandliberty.com/?p=16284 )
I never said the relativism of Good and Evil was an idea originating with Gurdjieff. The idea has a very long history, indeed. (Socrates/Plato battled this idea back in he fourth century B.C., and he was not the first to do so.) You seem, however, to concede that Gurdjieff positively endorses this relativism. And I'd have to agree with you there.
Of course, if Good and Evil are merely relative, and not substantive, then what possible basis can be found for morality? If follows that morality itself is also relative; or to put it another way, morality is simply a matter of opinion (doxa), and one man's opinion is just as good as any other man's.
But deep down, people do not believe this. There is something about human nature itself that is primed for justice, for truth. All men want to believe that they live in a system that is "moral." A theory of moral relativism thus is a falsification of human nature — which arguably is a "given," and not something that "progressively evolves" to a presumably higher/better state over time.
That is to say, human nature doesn't change much, if at all, over time. Any objective student of human history can tell you that.
This insight was drilled in for me in the course of reading Boccaccio's Decameron — a fourteenth century collection of short stories. In that experience, I was repeatedly drawn to the recognition that Boccaccio's characters were "just exactly like people I know" today. Their "human nature" is just like the "human nature" to be found today. But you can go all the way back to ancient Egypt and find writings that deal with the same existential problems and concerns that people still have today. For instance, the anonymous work, "Dispute of a Man, Who Contemplates Suicide, With His Soul," which dates back to the First Intermediate Period, c. 2,000 B.C.
In short, man is not "clay" for a Gurdjieff or a Creme to refashion at will.
We need to remember the prophetic words of another fictional character, Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov, who declared that in a world beyond Good and Evil, "all things are permissible." I gather that is the entire point of the "God is dead" movement....
For without God, there is no Logos to serve as the criterion that enables us to make free judgments regarding matters of Good and Evil, thus no foundation for moral behavior.
You wrote: "A lot of Christian groups are NOT based on balanced thinking but are purely emotional." Again, what on earth is "balanced thinking" when there is no criterion by which rational thinking can proceed in the first place? Plus, what is wrong with "emotion," with human feeling? Are you suggesting that emotion and reason are somehow necessarily mutually exclusive? How can that be, since every man possesses both those faculties?
Perhaps you have been persuaded that faith and reason are mutually-exclusive. That has become a very fashionable canard these days. But if you believe this, then all I can say is that you do not understand Christianity, and its great historical tradition as a fides quaerens intellectum, in which the Christian (at least some of them) see themselves as engaged in a quest, a search that begins in faith — seeking the reason of one's faith, or faithful understanding of the Creation God made.
This is a highly rational activity, for sure. Consider the heartfelt, emotional statement of Anselm of Cantebury, which is also a model of rational thinking, based on direct experience:
O Lord, you are not only that than which a greater cannot be conceived, but you are greater than what can be conceived. — Proslogion XV.DeniseMilani, have you ever read the Holy Scriptures? If not, I hope you will. I also hope that you will see that it is a monumental work of divine self-revelation, that comprehensively deals with God's Great Hierarchy of Being, constituted by four partners: God–Man–World [Creation]–Society.
[Descarte expressed a similar idea when he noted that the idea of God is necessary to the formulation of any other idea the human mind can conceive.]
The God–Man relation is absolutely primary; the other two partners derive from that relation....
Nothing ever written by man could be more "comprehensive" about the human existential position/condition than what the Lord has revealed to us in Holy Scripture....
Plus not one jot of Holy Scripture has been "falsified" by science....
Just some thoughts, FWTW.
In closing,
God's Name is: I AM.
Absent objective truth, there is no basis for a rational observation.
Thank you so much for your splendid essay-posts!
Simply outstanding observations, dear sister in Christ! (I particularly resonated to the above italics — no human society can cohere in truth and justice, let alone liberty, under such a supposition.)
Thank you, oh so very much, for your wonderful essay/post!
Simply hilarious, dearest sister in Christ!
Left to his own devices, sinful man will choose the "god" who lets him do what he already wants to do.
Indeed, this is the whole point of Dostoevsky's chilling "Parable of the Grand Inquisitor."
The Grand Inquisitor is glad to let the people sin, even encourages them to do it (supposedly taking their sins upon himself) because he knows this is the fastest route to thoroughly enslaving them ... which is the total inversion of the Sacrifice and Atonement of Christ, Whose divine purpose is to liberate human souls....
Just my two-cent's worth, FWIW.
Thank you ever so much for writing, dearest sister in Christ!
Exactly so, dearest sister in Christ!
Not to mention that the word "logic" is rooted in the idea of Logos....
Which is "in" the world, Alpha to Omega, from first to last, from beginning to end.
Which is why the world is as it is, and not some other way.
Thank you so very much for writing, dearest sister in Christ, and for your kind words of support!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.