Icelander said:

I should?

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Icelander said:

Present his arguments. You've read them.  Let's rumble.

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Icelander said:

Interesting. This author would  benefit imo from reading Becker's work on death anxiety as a prime motivator for humanity. 

Myself, I tend to lean toward the no god/no afterlife or meaning line of belief. Yet non violence is my preferred mode of operation. Nor am I inclined to control the actions of others who are not interfering with me. 

This is Zizek's exact point on why Christianity proper is nonviolent. Christianity recognizes that there is a gap in reality and that there is no oneness to strive toward.

Now anything can be used for military purposes. Take the Christian Crusades as an example, or the war against homosexuals on the home front.

Those people are simply trying to create a oneness and seperate any gaps in reality and bring everyone into a universal harmony. Once again, true Christianity recognizes that reality is not a oneness and that there are unbalances within reality.

Everything you wrote here imo directly relates to death anxiety and so the author is missing the point and the cure.

Zizek, a psychologist, is probably well aware of this.

Can you present his case for a Christian mode of living being the cure for war and violence? 

Turn the other cheek.

Look if Christian morals were a cure for violence then America would be a very different place than it is.

Oh come on, how many christians have you met that actually think about their religion anywhere near an academic or philosophical level?

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SlashOZ said:

Icelander said:

Present his arguments. You've read them.  Let's rumble.

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Alright, I'll try to present them as faithfully as possible. Keep in mind I just find this book interesting so my ability to argue on the authors behalf might be limited.

Anywho....

In reference to Zen Buddhism used for military purposes by the Imperial Japanese Army in WWII.

"This reasoning is based on the opposition between the reflexive attitude of our ordinary daily lives (in which we cling to life and fear death, strive for egotistic pleasure and profit, hesitate and think, instead of directly acting) and the enlightened stance in which the difference between life and death no longer matters, in which we regain the original selfless unity, and are directly our act."

A pretty damning argument against Buddhist or oneness thought. To reword this argument, in a sense, Buddhist ideas of selflessness allow us to be complacent actors in which we merely watch our actions happen in a state of suspension where we are carrying out acts that we are not truly responsible for.

He goes on to write

"Insofar as subjectivity as such is hysterical, insofar as it emerges through the questioning of the interpolating call of the Other, we have here the perfect descriptions of a perverse desubjectivization: the subject avoids its constitutive splitting by positing itself directly as the instrument of the Other's Will. And what is crucial in this radical version is that is explicitly rejects all the religious rubble usually associated with popular Buddhism, and advocates a return to the original down-to-earth atheist version fo the Buddha himself: as Furakawa Tiago emphasizes, there is no salvation after death, no afterlife, no spirits or divinities to assist us, no reincarnation, just this life which is directly identical to death. Within this attitude, the warrior no longer acts as a person, he is thoroughly desubjectivized--or, as D.T. Suzuki himself put it: "it is really not he but the sword itself that does the killing."

He ends the argument by pointing to communist revolutionary Che Guevara.

"There is only one logical answer; it is not that, in contrast to Japanese military aggression, revolutionary violence "really" aims to establishing a nonviolent harmony, on the contrary, authentic revolutionary liberation is much more directly identified with violence--it is violence as such (the violent gesture of discarding, of establishing a difference, of drawing a line of separation) which liberates. Freedom is not a blissfully neutral state of harmony and balance, but the very violent act which disturbs this balance."

Sorry for the long quotes but it was much easier to posit his argument in this fashion. They were of course pieces of text in between these quotes that I did not feel the need to type up as the ones I chose seemed to cover his argument fairly well from my perspective. Let me know if you need any clarification, etc.

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SlashOZ said:

Icelander said:

Interesting. This author would  benefit imo from reading Becker's work on death anxiety as a prime motivator for humanity. 

Myself, I tend to lean toward the no god/no afterlife or meaning line of belief. Yet non violence is my preferred mode of operation. Nor am I inclined to control the actions of others who are not interfering with me. 

This is Zizek's exact point on why Christianity proper is nonviolent. Christianity recognizes that there is a gap in reality and that there is no oneness to strive toward.

Now anything can be used for military purposes. Take the Christian Crusades as an example, or the war against homosexuals on the home front.

Those people are simply trying to create a oneness and seperate any gaps in reality and bring everyone into a universal harmony. Once again, true Christianity recognizes that reality is not a oneness and that there are unbalances within reality.

Everything you wrote here imo directly relates to death anxiety and so the author is missing the point and the cure.

Zizek, a psychologist, is probably well aware of this.

Can you present his case for a Christian mode of living being the cure for war and violence? 

Turn the other cheek.

Look if Christian morals were a cure for violence then America would be a very different place than it is.

Oh come on, how many christians have you met that actually think about their religion anywhere near an academic or philosophical level?

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I would suggest reading the book or some of his works.

Here is an overview of his philosophy http://www.lacan.com/zizekchro1.htm

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Samurai Drifter said:

A lot of the things he says are largely to shock people into examining their own beliefs. I wouldn't take it quite so literally.

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Icelander said:

SlashOZ said:

Icelander said:

Interesting. This author would  benefit imo from reading Becker's work on death anxiety as a prime motivator for humanity. 

Myself, I tend to lean toward the no god/no afterlife or meaning line of belief. Yet non violence is my preferred mode of operation. Nor am I inclined to control the actions of others who are not interfering with me. 

This is Zizek's exact point on why Christianity proper is nonviolent. Christianity recognizes that there is a gap in reality and that there is no oneness to strive toward.

Now anything can be used for military purposes. Take the Christian Crusades as an example, or the war against homosexuals on the home front.

Those people are simply trying to create a oneness and seperate any gaps in reality and bring everyone into a universal harmony. Once again, true Christianity recognizes that reality is not a oneness and that there are unbalances within reality.

Everything you wrote here imo directly relates to death anxiety and so the author is missing the point and the cure.

Zizek, a psychologist, is probably well aware of this.

Can you present his case for a Christian mode of living being the cure for war and violence? 

Turn the other cheek.

Look if Christian morals were a cure for violence then America would be a very different place than it is.

Oh come on, how many christians have you met that actually think about their religion anywhere near an academic or philosophical level?

---

I would suggest reading the book or some of his works.

Here is an overview of his philosophy http://www.lacan.com/zizekchro1.htm

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Why the need for Christianity? The superstitious belief in a god and the need to believe all the shit in the bible will not achieve these mentioned ends.



You are talking about philosophy, and not religion. Why the need for a type of religious belief?    And I imagine most Zen Buddhists are fairly non violent from the looks of it.

I also think that very few psychologists really understand the basic implications of death anxiety.  Freud didn't.


Christianity recognizes that there is a gap in reality and that there is no oneness to strive toward.

I'm not so sure about this. 
The Christian God is the singularity that all strive toward.

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