• Janus
    16.5k
    Why would you put it like this? Why would you have to convince me that something is sacred.
    Let me put it this way: " How can we be alive, if life started before humans? - Are we forbid to experience something from before our existence?
    Benjamin Dovano

    This one's a kind of mind-bender that has had the power to confound philosophers for millenia. I don't think I can answer it to your satisfaction. My feeling is actually that I don't want to touch it even with a barge pole.

    but what if that past is billions of years ago, and the experience of IT is stored in a sort of Universal consciousness, where all things reside and we borrow and give back constantly without even knowing? "Benjamin Dovano

    Theosophists have claimed that everything that has ever happened is written forever in the Akashic Records, and that if you access the right degree of contemplation you can access those records. Honestly, I simply don't know what to make of such an idea.

    Did mathematics existed before humans ? Was mathematics expressed in the form of creation and galaxies and every phenomena that exists ? If so, we merely discoverd it right ? But it was there with the original creation act ?Benjamin Dovano

    Are you asking whether God is a mathematician or at least had an appreciation of mathematics?

    What makes you so sure? Maybe we invented it because of our fear of death ? We certainly invented the word for it, but what is it and why are we so affraid to face it ?Benjamin Dovano

    Invention of the sacred due to fear of death? How do you think that might work? Yes, there are probably many words in many languages that mean 'sacred'. Do you think we are really afraid to face it? Kant says the supreme sense of beauty is the sense of the sublime. The most beautiful thing of all is that before which we are most helpless. But can the most uplifting sense of beauty derive from nought but fear? Why should we think so?
  • Wayfarer
    22.8k
    Come what may, I don't think we will succeed in re-establishing the sacred. There are too many forces arrayed against such an outcome, and it isn't just the obvious secular devils of science, bureaucracy, technology, commerce, and so on. The dominant religion on earth (the Abrahamic trinity from Judaism to Christianity and Islam) are theologically complicit. — BitterCrank

    That is why I think the remedy has to be counter-cultural and why environmentalism and alternative spirituality are intrinsic to the solution. (But to be fair, there is and always has been a counter-cultural element in Christianity as a social movement.)

    My view is impossible to summarise in a forum post, but it is along the lines of an Hegelian dialectic: that at the time of the formation of the Christian Church, some of the essential attributes of spirituality were excluded by Church dogma, for complex historical reasons. The victorious party, who then edited the various teachings into what is now 'The Bible', were first and foremost intent on maintaining their monopoly on the means to salvation - 'no-one comes to the Father but by us' ('no salvation outside the Church').

    Alternative spiritualities were ruthlessly suppressed and exterminated. This continued even through the Middle Ages and the Inquisition (i.e. the suppression of the Cathars in Langue'Doc.)

    So that is one pole of the dialectic. The other pole is the rejection of religion by scientific materialism. God vs Not God, sacred vs secular, and all the other dichotomies then exist between these two poles. That is the underlying dynamic between so many of these debates. Now of course that is only one view, only one 'version of the truth'.
  • Buxtebuddha
    1.7k


    How do you know about that which you cannot think?
  • Benjamin Dovano
    76
    What is thinking ? Go with any definition you want.
  • Buxtebuddha
    1.7k


    The means with which to know.
  • Benjamin Dovano
    76
    Thinking is the means with which to know ? To know what ?

    Ok, ill come with another version, that is more clear, I see everyone tends to go insanely abstract and with no clarity, as far as I am concerned ( is just an opinion, you can totally ignore it ).

    Thinking is a response of our memory, think of it like a 'heartbeat' in the brain, that keeps pomping electrical signals that translate into ideas(thinking) , rather then blood like the heart does.
    It is no different then breathing, only harder to understand and contain because you can easily control your nose and mouth and air intake - you can hold your breath for a few seconds and the general population does it too, but there are some who can hold their breathing for minutes ( lots of them ), now try to imagine thinking again, if you try to stop it as a MEANS ( beacause I want to ), you will fail because you are trying to exercise a method of suppression on something that evolved in millions of years and we still strive to understand what it is and how it works.

    But if we go with understanding thinking and all the facts that are related to it maybe we can reach a new destination in our journey. I am not stating anything.
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