Any man or woman who professes to speak on God's behalf -- is a fraud. It is an act of rhetorical manipulation -- somebody trying to get you to do do something, or not do something, based on 'Divine Heresay'. God doesn't make ethics. Men and women make ethics -- and then sometimes, oftentimes, attach God's name to the result -- fraudulantly -- in order to give the ethics more 'rhetorical power'. The power of 'Divine Authority'. The power of fraudulant Divine Authority.
A religion needs to be judged by its system of ethics; not the reverse. Not by the professed Authority of God. That is an act of righteous fraud. If you want to judge a religion as being 'healthy' and/or 'pathological', then you have to judge it by ist system of ethics. This system of ethics is made by men in positions of religious power; not by the power and the word of God.
God is a myth -- sometimes a good myth, sometimes a bad myth, depending on whether people are helping each other, caring for each other, in God's name -- or killing each other.
God's name has been used just as often to promote violence as it has been to stop it. God's name has been used endlessly to support and give rhetorical power and manipulation to man's narcissitic and righteous -- ethical or unethical -- intentions. That is why a religion needs to be judged by its system of ethics -- just as a political party does, just as a business does, and just as the men and women operating behind the scenes -- making and breaking the 'professed' ethics -- do. That is why 'idealism' in the philosophy of Marx becomes turned on its head and called 'ideology' which in Marx's system is not a good thing. Ideology in Marx's system of philosophy essentially means 'fake idealism and realism'. Ideology to Marx means 'a smoke and mirrors' cover up for man's real behavior -- his 'narcissistic materialism'. That rule of thumb generally applies for 21st century politics: idealism equals fake ideology equals hypocrisy. The same equation has been just as rampant in religion over man's history as it has in politics. rigtheous idealistic and ideological intentions disguise and cover up man's real intentions: narcissism and materialism. Schopenhauer and Marx are smiling at me in their respective graves.
Religion -- without humanistic-existential ethics and values, meaning a balance of compassion and accountability, self-assertiveness and social sensitivity - generally degenerates into righteous intolerance based on 'either/or' ethics. Good and bad, heaven and hell, God and the Devil...Excommunicate those who are bad, associated with Hell and the Devil...Curse them...This is the religion of promoting hatred and violence. It is not the religion of tolerance, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion.
They -- meaning the Amsterdam Jews, those who had understandably fled the righteous intolerance, the hate, the persecution and the torture of the Spanish and Portugese Inquisition -- turned around and betrayed the finest and most ethical among them -- Baroch Spinoza. The man who dared to integrate Science and Religion -- God and Nature in Spinoza's eyes were One. Not God ruling over Nature. But God in Nature. God and Nature being synonymous. God being the Spirit of Nature. This is a myth too -- just like God the Creator and Ruler over Man and Nature -- without the negative side effects. Without the righteous intolerance based on 'Either/Or' Ethics. God and Nature as being one and the same -- is a good myth. Because now when I look at Nature, I look at Nature with new meaning and substance. I look at Nature and feel a part of Nature -- with a sense of awe and splendor. Enjoying the most of it because it may not last. (Or I may not last.) Not something to be tossed away like a rag doll. Polluted until you are afraid of the dangers of its toxicity. I saw Daytona Beech in the 1960s. I would probably cry if I saw it now. I once jumped into Lake Ontario at Ontario Place when I was drunk (in the 1980s). I had to throw out my clothes when I got home. I smelled like a sewer rat. You were once able to swim at Woodbine Beech in Toronto. I wouldn't want to swime there now. People have to go further and furhter north to find safe swimming. 'You pay paradise and you put up a parking lot.' -- Joni Mitchell.
When I use the word 'God', I do not use it righteously unless it is to protect Nature and Reglious Tolerance in the name of Spinoza, and after him, in the name of Albert Einstein. I don't say that my ethics comes from God. It comes from pre-Enlightenment philosophers like Spinoza, Enlightenment philosophers like Locke and Adam Smith and Diderot and Voltaire and Paine and Jefferson. It comes from Romantic philosophers like Rousseau and Schelling. It comes from Dialectic philosophers like Hegel and early humanistic Marx. It comes from Humanistic-Existentialists like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre. It comes from political humanists like Erich Fromm. And it comes from General Semantics empiricists like Alfred Korzybski and S.I. Hayakawa. To repeat, it doesn't come from God. It comes from me. I will take full responsibility and accountability for my philosophical ethics. And I will use God's name symbolically, metaphorically and mythologically -- not epistemolotically.
Epistemologically (or ontologically), if you ask me if God exists, I will say, 'I don't know. I think that makes me an 'Epistemological Agnostic'. Spiritually, I will call myself a pantheist -- or some derrivative of a Spinozian-Einsteinian Pantheist.
That is where I stand today.
dgb, Aug. 30th, 2007.
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