I think were worshipping the wrong thing.

If those words stick in your craw, spit them out. Our innate devotion is sufficient for any cause, the instinct for self preservation at one end to gratitude at the other.

 

If God the creator is our father, than the earth is his bride, and when he returns he will be very angry that we have abused her so that gave us our flesh, and nourished our needs that the greedy might rise above and control all the destinies. To poison and desicrate the earth is to poison ourselves. What we do is only to ourselves. Their is sickness and insanity rampant in humanity and the peaceful sit back and wait to be rescued. speak out now. teach the children the truth that our collective reality become heaven and not hell. The bible teaches all, shows us how to live if you but read it yourself with an open heart and prayers for wisdom and clarity. It will scare the shit out of you when you think of whyat we have become. Change your hearts, tell the truth, the time is now the reasons are many, what we have to lose is everything. What we have to gain is everything.

 

perhaps this is my problem

i have very little instinct for self-preservation

and most of my gratitude is directed at things like trees, birds, cats and such

possibly i should be worshipping nature spirits? is there a shinto sub-forum?

 

No problem then. I could hold your head under water and I imagine you would find more instinct than you had imagined, and that you have gratitude completes the spectrum, somewhere between 98 degrees and the speed of light.

 

that may be true -- i was referring to mundane examples of self preservation, like getting a job, eating properly, being careful

[if you saw me on a bicycle you'd understand]

but, what does that have to do with worship?

an animal will fight as hard or harder, and worships nothing

 

To worship may be to love something deeply, our lives seem to inspire that kind of devotion.

 

huh?

our lives inspire devotion?

meaningless

the difference between loving deeply and worshipping is one of pathology

 

No, but there's a pagan sub-forum, with a thread on animism; Shinto would probably fit, too.

 

Has anybody heard of Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis that the Earth functions as an organism? (not to be confused with Lovehandle's Gay hypothesis that earth can provide a good orgasm.) See his 1979 book Gaia: A new look at life on Earth and The Quest for Gaia. This theory has the support of microbiologist Lynn Margulis, although atheist evolutionists like the late Stephen Jay Gould and Ricahard Dawkins reject it as neo-pagan hippie claptrap.

 

Perhaps if your head were held under water you would find some inspiration.

 

I have heard of it. We might say that space travel is the wisdom of Gaia.

 

I guess I have problems with the logic here. Putting aside the problem that Buddhists don't worship any supernatural entity, I have no problem worshiping an "intangible and immeasurable" being/power, and if I did, I don't think I'd look around for something tangible and measurable to worship. Many of the things I value most are intangible and immeasurable: justice, liberty, democracy, beauty, etc. They're ideals; abstractions. Most of us can understand cynics who question their existence, because tangible, measurable indicators in the real world fall laughably short of the idea. But people have given their lives for these ideals, and to me they're what makes life meaningful and worth living. John Dewey defined God as the summation of human idealism. The Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich, defined God as the Ground of Being--the ultimate value that gives meaning to our existence. I define the God that I worship as a felt presence of Something Big Out There, or an immanent and transcendent Higher Power, if you will.

If it were tangible and measurable, I wouldn't worship it, because it would be a mere finite object. I love my dog; he's affectionate, loyal, always there for me, and really cute and playful. But I wouldn't worship him, because he's just a dog. My girl friend is far more wonderful than my dog, and is the closest I've seen to a goddess on this planet, and I really love her. But I don't worship her, because she's just a wonderful human being. I have heroes--Socrates, Jefferson, Lincoln, Martin Luther King--but although I admire, respect, and value them, they're just heroes and role models, not deities. Much as I value the planet we live on, and appreciate the metaphor of Mother Earth, it's just a physical system, not a living supernatural organism.

 

ah, so that's how you get people to believe in yahweh . . .

we call it torture, i s'pose you call it inquisition

 

But the problem for a ritual was: Is it your fault irrespective of the social norm?

Knowing if it is or not, is half the battle. Ritual shares ignorance too. You know.

 

Nah, I just think you are as devoted to your own existence as we all are to our own.
Everything seeks to be what it is, from the hardness of a stone to the sense of gratitude.

 

Could you love Jesus when he walked among us? Is the tangible face of God too intimate for you?

The Gaia hypothesis is not too far-fetched. Colonial organisms do the same thing on a nearly micro scale. We get in trouble when we take a logical leap that the super organism, perhaps a mega colonial entity we call the biosphere or Gaia becomes an object of veneration.
It would even be a stretch to claim consciousness for Gaia, but the sum total of all members of the biosphere seem to be acting instinctively for the good of the planet, subconsciously?

 

You raised a good few points there lucid it all makes sence to me.

 

Please! The preferred eupemism is "enhanced instructional methods" (See Bush-Cheney memos as to why waterboarding isn't torture). The plus side is it doesn't do permanent damage, unless you hold out too long, which nobody does. The downside of the way we Christians do it is that if you do hold out long and survive, we'll assume you're a witch and burn you at the stake.

 

If I had the opportunity to know Jesus, I'm sure I'd have loved Him. I think I'd also hav worshiped him. I consider myself a Christian because I accept the example and teachings of Jesus as my role model. Assuming that I'm right that the principles that he exemplified are divine, and that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the historical Jesus and the one I worship, I would consider him to be God Incarnate. So that would be the one exception to my statement that I don't worship humans.

The way my Christian mind works, if such a super-organism existed I'd fall to my knees in awe and veneration of the immanent and transcendent God who created it.

 

I'd like to relay an aspect of an ecstatic mystical experience.
I would describe it in symbolic terms as standing at the doorway of heaven and looking in. The experience was one of profound gratitude, the awe I experienced was not for proportions, but for the intense feeling of love that was meant for the "individual". In other words, it was not impersonal. A huge surprise to me. The feeling of awe is an unavoidable consequence being in the throws of this vision. It was not a question of me falling to my knees in admiring regard, it had nothing to do with my judgment, I was overwhelmed.