[GJM] Fw: Is God Dead? Response by Peter Challen and futher comment by Mary Rose

[Dr.Muhammad Mukhtar Alam]

Dear Mary,
 
Happy birthday...May we all have grace of Almighty, the creator of men and women and all that we see and that we do not see..You wonderfully record the wars..let us also record the peace time bounties that would be ecologically sustainble for children of 40th century...
 
Dr.Muhammad Muhktar Alam

--- On Thu, 5/6/08, mary rose <maryrose333 at att.net> wrote:

From: mary rose <maryrose333 at att.net>
Subject: [GJM] Fw: Is God Dead? Response by Peter Challen and futher comment by Mary Rose
To: FixGov at yahoogroups.com, "Discussion Forum for Global Justice" <discussion at globaljusticemovement.net>
Date: Thursday, 5 June, 2008, 4:08 AM





 
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Peter Challen 
To: mary rose 
Sent: Wednesday, June 04, 2008 12:20 PM
Subject: Re: Is God Dead?


Dear Mary,
 
Congratulations Mary on reaching 76. 
 
I can vouch that the year ahead is a good one for the thinkers and the searchers! Can't be sure yet of the year after that;, but wiser and older friends sow seeds of a tentative conviction!

In relation to the piece below, despite your immense wisdom, methinks you do protest a tad too much!
 
Religion derives from both ligament and law and given the fact that all our language is metaphor, it is a recognition of a search for whatever meaning we can muster to help us hold all things together and order them in ways that work for everyone and protect the earth.  Take the thought of an 'ineffable God' and the sexism, denominationalism, sectarianism and a few other isms appear to cause the dangerous slippage and its gross effects, while humility in the search continues in even some people as erudite as you.
 
It is a happy thing that this quotation arrived in the same hour:

"Where Science and Spirit Become One

In this excerpt from WIE's interview with John F. Haught, Georgetown University's acclaimed evolutionary theologian, Haught zeros in on the key point at which science and spirituality converge:
     Something religious is going on even in scientific work, not in the scientific information itself but in the commitment to the idea that the universe is intelligible and truth is worth seeking. Those are religious convictions. You can't prove scientifically that truth is worth seeking, but it's the conviction that it is worth seeking that underlies all good science. Religion lifts this up and makes it more explicit. It symbolically names that depth, that truth, that meaning, and refers to it in Western theology as God or Allah, or in Eastern thought as Brahman or Tao."

 
I go back now too to feed my curious mind, to serve my servant ministry, on your profound reflections. Thank you.
 
So we flow on in emergent evolution, in the riches of scientific enquiry and by the grace of 'God' - ineffable - yet imaginatively described in a rich profusion!
 
 
Love
 
Peter 
 
Dear Peter, Thank you for your words of wisdom. What I have a problem with here are the words "Religion lifts this up and makes it more explicit."  This seems to indicate that only through religion can one find meaning, or bring meaning to science.  And this really rattles my feathers as I know hundreds of what might be defined as excellent, moral and ethical people who do no harm, and have committed their lives in the service of all life in the Universe, including the Planet Earth.. Among them are scientists included who do not adhere to any religious faith, but carry their spirituality within them, recognizing that we are ALL part of the Oness, but that there is no "one god"  as depicted by most religious organizations. Monotheism emerged out of the dominator paradigm.  And the dominator paradigm arose from the need of the so-called Patriachial Group, mainly composed of
 Levites, to end the worship of The Great Mother.  But then, "herstory" and the truth of what went on prior to the emergence of the One God has been suppressed for centuries.  This suppression of the feminine has resulted in "male-dominant" religions which have held sway over society from the 1600's (Neolothic Age) until the present time. And, while The Great Mother societies were known as peaceful societies, the hell released on earth by the One God belief system has brought about more pain and suffering than any other cause.  
 
In their book: "The Laughing Jesus,".Freke and Gandy write: "It is easy to blame the current crisis on mad Muslims and ato forget the horrors the West has perpetrated throughout history in the name of Christianity.  Let us not forget th unspeakable suffering inflicted on Muslims and Jews during the Crusades. When Jersulem fell to the crusaders they butchered more than seventy thousand Muslims in the Al-Aqsa mosque alone.  They also burnt thousands of Jews alive in the synagogues.  A Christian chronicler recors our troops boiled adults in cooking pots and impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled.  
 
Let us recall the thousands of men, women and children condemned for heresy and burned alive by the Inquisition.  (Somewhere between six and eleven million people, mainly women. other records indicate).  Let us hold in our hearts those placed in the Torture Chair, with its wrought-iron mechanism for clamping the head still to enable the inquisitor to remove the heretic's tongue or teeth with ease, and its cunningly designed set that allowed th insertion of torture instruments into the vagina or anus of the viReligion lifts this up and makes it more explicit.ersecctim.  
ion of the
Let us not forget that the Catholic Church created the Inquisition in order to ethnically cleanse Spain of hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Jews, which it did with unimaginable brutality. The Inquisition then planned to put to death the three million inhabitants of the Netherlands simply because they had become Protestants, but fortunately it failed.  One writer of the time declared the Inquisition  to be a "wild monster of such terrible mien that all of Europe trembled at the mere mention of its name.  But it was not just Europe that trembled before the tortures of the Holy Inquisition.  When Columbus set out in his little boatd, the he had red crusader crosses stitched to his sails.  Columbus may have discovered the New World, but this was just a happy accident.  He was actually looking for a way to sail around the world and attach the Muslim empire in the rear.  When he discovered the Americas
 instead, Columbus wrote that he had found enough gold to recapture Jerusalem.  In the New World the Spanish Inquisition repeated on an even grander scale the genocide they carried out so effectively in Europe.  Hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of innocent indigenous Americans perished in unimaginable pain and suffering.  They were burnt alive or tortured to death as a glorious testimony to the triumph of Christianity throughout the world. 
 
Let us remember the relentlesss persecution of the Jews by Literalist Christians. Among the relentless persecution of the Jews by Literalist Christians. Throughout Christian hisotyr Jews have been routinely burned alive by zealous mobs with the full blessing of priests and popes.  It was the Catholic Church in the thirteenth century who first forced the Jews to live in ghettos and wer a yellow badge, a policy which the Vatican was still enforcing in the nineteenth century.  In Eastern Europe the Inquisition used ovens to burn heretics, who were rubbed with grease and roasted alive.  All that changed in the twentieth century was that the process was industrialized.  
 
When the Facists and Nazis started persecuting the Jews by humiliating them, depriving them of all rights, herding them into ghettos, killing nd burning them, they were only doing what teh Church had done for centuries. When they introduced their racial purity laws they argued that they were merely following the lead of the Catholic's most respected religious order, the Jesuits.  As a member of the Fascist Grand Council in Italy announced:  
 
    It comforts our souls to know that if, as Catholics, we became anti-Semites, we owe it to the teachings that Church has promulgated over the past twenty centuries. 
 
Let us not forget that the Nazi SS who exterminated the Jews had emblazoned on their belt buckles:  "God is with us."  
 
To those of us who are not afflicted with the insanity of religious Literalism, it seems impossible to understand how human beings could inflict such horrors on other human beings. But to those unfortunate enough to be in the grip of religious madness, these terrible crimes against humanity are seen in an entirely different way. They are righteous acts required by God and justified by sacred scripture." 
 
One of the problems being that too many popes and priests see themselves as politicians and use the pulpit in that sense. But whatever, it is time to end the reign of terror that accompanies religious beliefs. Recall that George W. Bush was heard to say that we must "fight in the name of God" for our country.  That churches today condone war in the name of God has been revealed by We Hold These Truths and Straight Gate Ministries, as they picketed churches of all denominations nationwide here in the U.S., including a presentation by evangelist Billy Graham as well, asking attending parishioners about the stance of the church pastor on war,  and urging them to stop attendance is the minister or priest was not against killing through war.    For more on this group see here.  www.whtt.org/ as C. E. Carlson was on a list to which I once posted. I am not a member of this church group,
 nor do I adhere to any of their policies and beliefs; however, I found it interesting that there was a church with enough guts to begin calling other religious orders on their position on war -- particularly the sending of young sons and daughters to the warfront to defend "the American lifestyle," which we are finding out today, served to pad the pockets of the rich and deprive the poor, many of them black and indigenous people, but with poor whites included. 
 
And, if the Global Justice Movement is truly a justice movement, then I call upon them to address this issue. NOW!
 
As revealed by R. Buckminster Fuller, in his book: "Critical Path," in which he reveals his foresight of what would happen today, and why, he writes as to how the people believing in "pagan" religions (pagan religions referring to those who worshipped the Goddess, The Great Mother) were able to access God in a natural way, e,g. meditation or communion with the Earth.  However, as the aristocrats of that time saw so much money flowing into the pagan churches, and wanted control of it, they joined together with the priests to create what we now know as Christianity. And, they did so by decreeing that people could no longer access God directly, but must do so only through a priest accredited by the Church. Pagans had formerly donated gold to the Temples whcih was used as decoration. And this was what the aristocrats of that time and the priests coveted control over, as there was immense wealth
 flowing into the Temples. After formalizing the Church, they also decreed that relationships be made legal through marriage, and that births were recorded along with baptismal events, which brought in even more money to the Church. Thus, men took control of inheritance procedures, legally ensuring themselves of  patrilineal "birthrights".  And, they enacted other laws ensuring that women's rights were taken away from them. However for several centuries after this, women and others known as "Israelites" continued to worship in the Temples and accept the pagan rites of the Temple as their belief system.  So, by carefully studying "herstory" we learn that Christianity did not come easily to the masses, but was enforced by The Holy Roman Catholic Church, through the Inquisition and in other ways. And, that the intent was solely to gain control over both the people and the money they
 held.  Both the invention of God, the Father, and his Son, Jesus Christ, were inventions of those who demanded control.  
 
That Jesus ever lived is doubtful -- it appears that He was more a work of fiction created by those who sought control at that time. A study of ancient history reveals that the story of Jesus closely resembles fables of numerous other dieties going back centuries before the founding of the Church.  It was not until sometime between 45 and 75 years after his supposed cruxifiction that Jesus appears in the Bible. And numerous other incidents of omission lend credence to the idea that He was not a real historical figure.  
 
As noted above, many priests and popes saw themselves in the role of politicans rather than as religious fathers taking care of a flock.  It is my feeling that we should note, as responsible adults today, the caution written on the cover of the book:  "The Laughing Jesus," asked through the question by Freke and Gandy:  "What if the Old Testament is a work of fiction?  Jesus never existed and Muhammad was a monster. 
For too long, I fear the so-called "good book" has been accepted without question as "the word of God".  We never hear the "other side of the story. We only mainly get the Church version -- and, of course, who could doubt God?  But through investigation of "herstory" we learn an entirely different tale.  Its obvious, that men (and perhaps women too) were as influenced by money as they are today. And, that the power brokers weilded much power over the masses. From studying history as well, we learn that there is evidence that drug use was very prevalent in that time.  So, one has to ask: how many of the episodes in the Bible were tinged by intoxication?  In a recent book by brain researcher, Andrew Newberg, M.D., it is revealed that religious visions and epilectic seizures produce the same brain states (of a hallucinatory nature), and there is a wondering as to how many of the episodes reported in the
 Bible fall into this category? and how many fall into the category of being under the influence of psychotropic drugs of which peyote is one. And evidence shows that peyote was used prolifically in the regions noted in the Bible.  In fact, one researcher, questions as to whether the visions reported by Muhammad might have been the result of a grand mal seizure or drug use.  
 
To wind this up, let me ask the question: "Before we begin taking these writings in the Bible literally, wouldn't it be wise upon our part to investigate more fully both history and herstory, and set the record straight before we go around creating any more massive murders "in the name of God?"  Isn't it about time rather than acting in the name of religious we started using a little common sense? 
 
mary rose 
 
2008/6/4 mary rose <maryrose333 at att.net>:




The original article asking this question was published by 
TIME magazine in the April 8, 1966 issue, and has ever 
since been incorporated into an on-going international 
dialogue.  
 
This first link reveals the cover of TIME for this issue with
the question "IS GOD DEAD?" emblazoned on the front. 
 
http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19660408,00.html
 
msg truncated. _______________________________________________
Discussion mailing list
Discussion at globaljusticemovement.net
http://globaljusticemovement.net/mailman/listinfo/discussion_globaljusticemovement.net


      Unlimited freedom, unlimited storage. Get it now, on http://help.yahoo.com/l/in/yahoo/mail/yahoomail/tools/tools-08.html/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://globaljusticemovement.net/pipermail/discussion_globaljusticemovement.net/attachments/20080605/bd4ecb20/attachment-0001.html