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Post 0

Tuesday, October 26, 2004 - 12:23pmSanction this postReply
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Fake poison is preferable to real.  Fake poison talks.  Real poison kills.

Post 1

Tuesday, October 26, 2004 - 3:31pmSanction this postReply
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Adam,

Barf.


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Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - 10:14amSanction this postReply
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All religions are fake - meaning false... there is no such thing, objectively speaking, as a real religion...

Post 3

Wednesday, October 27, 2004 - 9:35pmSanction this postReply
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What is the etymology of the word "religion"?

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Thursday, October 28, 2004 - 1:04amSanction this postReply
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Joe,

It seems to be related to the latin word religare, which means "to restrain" or "to tie back"...

In other words, religion means bondage.  Those who love religion, are into the kink of psychological bondage... both binding others, and being bound themselves.

I have always been tireless in my proclamation that religion is nothing more than a covert and dishonest form of Bondage/Discipline/Sado-Masochism (BDSM for short). 

Is it any wonder, then, with this omnipresent and unmistakable undercurrent of the love of dominance and submission in religion, that nuns beat children with rulers, bishops love to lie prostrate, and priests molest choir boys?  They may not overtly know that religion is about kink, but they sure feel it... and eventually act on it.

And eventually, that philosophical bondage translates into real physical abuse.  Why kid ourselves any longer... We should no longer allow religion to lurk in the shadows as a legitimate entity; it must be identified before the entire planet Earth as the kink it really is. 

All religion should be reduced down to the proper level of just a kink lifestyle... And after that, if people freely choose to live their lives by the laws of kink, then that's their business, and they can't come crying to me.

Religion, as a kink, should only be allowed between consenting adults... If two consenting adults want to lock their bedroom doors and play the game of "master and servant", then that's their business. 

But children should be disallowed in religion; it's a form of child abuse... it's at least psychological abuse, and frequently becomes physical and even sexual.  Religion, being kink, should only be allowable, as I've already said, between consenting adults. 

Religion is not true ethics or rationality... it's not a legitimate way to raise any child.  Any parent who attempts to sneak his or her child into any religion's house of kink, should be found guilty of child abuse and penalized to the fullest extent of the law. 

(Edited by Orion Reasoner on 10/28, 1:10am)


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Thursday, October 28, 2004 - 11:02amSanction this postReply
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The reason I asked about the etymology of the word religion is to clarify the idea of religion as fake, since I suspect that term is being used loosely.

Orion writes:
"In other words, religion means bondage. Those who love religion, are into the kink of psychological bondage... both binding others, and being bound themselves."

Interesting, Orion. I've found that religion also translates as "reyoke," or "relink." The same general meaning, but I'd like to offer another assessment, if I may play "Angel's advocate."

I am influenced by the Jungian view of the mind, in his ideas of ego development, inflation, and reintegration into the psyche as part of a larger whole. If Jung is right, then the idea of religion as a concept could have a biological (or at least mental, to take Szasz into consideration) basis as a projection of the mind's reabsorption of the inflated ego. This projection not only shows in religious stories, but in the hero myths and cycles of most cultures. (Which is why those stories continue to influence us today.)

But to take it more generally, it could be anything that is being "relinked." Anytime one feels a loss, a reconnection with the lost could be considered "religious." Rand's fiction is a case in point. The quest of her protagonists is to reconnect with their egos. (i.e., the rediscovery of the word "I". Rand's use of religious imagery is an inversion, to be sure, of traditional religious values, but still religious. (Which is why she chose the word "Anthem," and used religious archetypes throughout her work.)

Orion, as to your interpretation, yes, there is a certain bondage involved, but need it be a negative bondage? There is the conception of religion as a master and slave relationship, but one could call a romantic relationship a bond also, a type of bondage. Context being key, of course, but it seems that focusing only on the negative version alone would seem that freedom entails no bond whatsoever. (I do not know if that's what you believe yourself.) It's like saying a hungry man is never free. Freedom from what, freedom for what...So if we can have a positive bond(age), can we not have a positive religion, such as Objectivism (if we go by the idea of religion as being a form of reconnection with one's lost value?)


Here is another explanation of the etymology, for those who care...

"The word religion is derived from Latin "religio" (what attaches or retains, moral bond, anxiety of self-consciousness, scruple) used by the Romans, before Jesus Christ, to indicate the worship of the demons.
The origin of "religio" is debated since antiquity. Cicero said it comes from "relegere" (to read again, to re-examine carefully, to gather) in the meaning "to carefully consider the things related to the worship of gods".
Later, Lucretius, Lactancius and Tertullianus see its origin in "religare" (to connect) to refer "the bond of piety that binds to God".
Initially used for Christianity, the use of the word religion gradually extended to all the forms of social demonstration in connection with sacred."

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Thursday, October 28, 2004 - 1:07pmSanction this postReply
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The "fake" Barbara seems to be referring to here relates to the sincerity of the religious belief of a person in who espouses religious views.  It seems very likely that Bush is sincere in his faith, and very unlikely that Kerry is. 

I prefer the "fake" version in this case, since Kerry is only using religion to manage a few extra votes out of undecided middle-America.  His policies would not by and large mirror those advocated by the religious right (abortion, stem cell issues etc)


Post 7

Thursday, October 28, 2004 - 2:09pmSanction this postReply
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"The 'fake' Barbara seems to be referring to here relates to the sincerity of the religious belief of a person who espouses religious views. It seems very likely that Bush is sincere in his faith, and very unlikely that Kerry is."

Correct, Pete. Sorry if this wasn't clear.

Barbara

Post 8

Thursday, October 28, 2004 - 9:38pmSanction this postReply
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Joe-

Wonderful etymologies; thank you from someone interested in these subjects.

I would however, contest one jarring point,

"The word religion is derived from Latin "religio" (what attaches or retains, moral bond, anxiety of self-consciousness, scruple) used by the Romans, before Jesus Christ, to indicate the worship of the demons.

"Demon" is a concept that only makes sense in a Christian or monotheistic framework.  The word in question is the Greek daimon; the term refers to hypothetical 'intermediary' entities existing, like 'gods', as subtle bodies (objects solely of ideation), but who are nonarchetypical immortal beings of limited potential.  They are presented in classical works usually as having limited place in a social ecology of religion; when we talk about 'insporation' or 'amusement', we recall language which sees concrete images and ideas which 'come to us' (which Objectivisms holds to be the subconscious integration of conceptual value, which I agree with as far as it goes) as essentially external, not internal to the intentionality or focus that is uniquely individual; hence, the personification as an exterior personage, such as the muses, graces, furies, etc., collectively called spirits or daimons.

It must be remembered that the ancients had no concept of 'reality' as apposed to 'illusion'.  Dreams, 'hallucinations' were treated not as unreal, but as different forms of reality; independent objects of consciousness, of which Pagans, Christians, and various schools of philosophers debated the nature and source.  Nietzsche said the same thing when he said (rough paraphrase) "the senses do not deceive us, it is what we make of them that does so".  And as William James, whom I generally despise, did rightly point out when talking about mystical experiences, it is a strangeness of empiricism which tells people that experiences are not 'really' happening.  Daimons were seen, rather imprecisely, as either the cause of the experience or the object of experience itself.

Socrates, for instance, treated what people would describe as a rationalist's 'moral conscience' as such a daimon.  The Romantics coined the use of the term genius, a person of special inspiration who defies normal rules of composure, manners, and morality, from the Greek spirits of the same name whose presence was experienced as a 'flash of insight'; the 'genies' or 'djinn' or fairy stories who grant gifts or wishes are simply metaphorical embodiments of the subtle-bodied gift-givers of Greek thought; the Romantic "genius" simply places the inexplicable creativity as ontologically interior to, rather than exterior to, the artist; Shelley merely altered the ontology of Plato's Ion, who took in straight from the mystery religions.  Mozart, who described his compositions as God writing through him, was talking in the same daimonic language.  See also, "I am the Walrus."

Pagans usually did discourage, sometimes violently, outright worship of daimons, but not because they were evil 'demons', but because the gods of the semi-established, 'high church' Pagans were seen as morally responsible, while the worship of daimons was mostly a low-church phenomena; daemons, being beings without cosmic position of responsibility, could not be trusted not to give antisocial advantages to the wrong people (i.e., ordain witchcraft).  Worshipping household gods which would logically fit the concept of a daimon was OK, but by a double standard where the established intermediate spirits were functionaries with a proper place, to whom decent people could request favors from, but witches who consorted with other daimons did so out of dangerous self-interest.   Basically, the first seeds of the 'demon' concept lie in the separation of the daimons of people inside and outside the tribe; it took monotheism to reify this into familiar angels and demons on the Medieval schema.

In one aspect, this is basically an expression of a state of incomplete victory of patriarchal over matriarchal cultures; just as Pagan myths are the foundations of fairy stories under Christianity, so the matriachal Pagan gods were demoted to daimons under pre-Christian patriarchy, at least in the eyes of the powers-that-be.  In this sense, the 'demon' concept does start to form in a pre-Christian setting, but ultimately only as part of the completion of the same Christianizing process by which philosophy and religion moved closer and closer to moral-heiracrhical dualism; a 'daimon' seen from an anthropological sense is just a god the speaker wishes to denigrate; though in Roman Paganism this denigration was essentially a question of civic virtue, not a dualism of good and evil as in Christianity.  But both sets of Pagans usually recognized separate concepts of gods and daimons; they just played games of what names to put in each category as part of sociopolitical power struggles (I remember reading somewhere that one of the Plinys went so far as to attempt scientifically schematized classifications!)

The same line was followed by some philosophers; actually the existence and/or nature of intermediary spirits was a big fight in the culture wars of the later Roman Empire; the Epicureans (and to a lesser degree the Aristotelians) tended to agree with modern science and call the whole concept superstition, and actually the Patristic church writers often agreed.  Many Stoics and Platonists accepted the existence of daimons; some Christians agreed, but considered this category inclusive of all Pagan divinities who were real beings but false gods; that view eventually won out, and daimon, now "demon", came to mean something evil and malevolent.  That said, there is a substantial undercurrent in Medieval thought of a synthesis of Pagan daimonism and Neoplatonist philosophy in some Pagan/Abrahamic crossfertilizations such as gnosticism and Kaballah, where the previous daimonic conception were preserved and elaborated on by semi-philosophers.  But even in mainstream religion and philosophy, the original Greek concept of the daimon in moral teleological form as Aristotelian the scala natura employed by St. Thomas Aquinas and Pico della Mirandola; here daimons are collapsed into 'angels' and treated as innately good instead of evil.  The Pagans had generally placed daimons between humans and gods; the Christians placed angels between humans and God; except for the moral framework of the latter, both meant essentially the same alleged existent.

Oh dear, I got carried away again...  sorry for the lecture of demonology.  ;o

Pyrophora of Cyprus  ))(*)((



Post 9

Thursday, October 28, 2004 - 10:07pmSanction this postReply
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Jeanine,
No worries, write away!
On the demon/daimon bit: Yes, you are correct, a fresh batch of cookies for you. Actually, I did not write that, that was something I cut and pasted from somewhere else. I did notice the use of the term, knew it would get someone's attention. Being a friend of the trickster myself, it made sense to me.

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