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OfflineMarkostheGnostic
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Re: Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer [Re: Zahid]
    #840303 - 08/24/02 10:04 AM (21 years, 7 months ago)

"The Christian community believed that God, who had created heaven and earth, had become incarnate in a particular man and that furthermore he still dwelt with the community and guided it. This, we may say, was the narrative or mythological expression of their faith, and like us, they looked for an alternative interpretive language that would express the same faith in a different way. They came up with the trinitarian formula."

"[T]he Christian community could not get along with the single word 'God' as his key word. A richer and fuller experience of deity demanded a more complex symbol for its expression. The Christian could not go along with a stark monotheism in which God is utterly transcendent and sovereign, and still less witha pantheism in which God is entirely and universally immanent; he could not embrace a monism in which all differences are swallowed up in the eternal unity of God, but still less a pluralism like that of the world of polytheism with its 'many gods and many lords.'"

"Thus we may say that the doctrine of the Trinity tries to elucidate the picture of God as he appears in the Biblical narrative and in the history of the Christian community. He is a God who embraces diversity in unity; who is both transcendent and immanent; who is dynamic and yet has stability...The unity of God is expressed in his one 'substance' or 'essence.' No person of the Trinity is any less God than the others; in particular, the Son and the Holy Spirit are not demigods or intermediaries, subordinate to the Father. They are all one in respect to the Godhead...If the unity of God is expressed in terms of 'substance, his trinity or diversity is conveyed by the talk of 'persons.' Everyone knows that the word 'person' at that time when these formulations were being made in the early Church did not bear the same meaning that it has nowadays, of a conscious center of experience. It had in fact a much more shadowy meaning, and perhaps the wiser course is to leave the meaning shadowy."

"But while these remarks may to some extent defend the traditional doctrine of the Trinity, it will be said of the formula of one substance and three persons constitutes an interpretation that has ceased to communicate, for it talks the language and moves in the universe of discourse of an obsolete philosophy. This does not mean, however, that the formula is to be rejected. Especially if it does indeed conceal within itself essential Christian insights, what is required is a new act of interpretation that will interpret in a contemporary language this ancient and hallowed formula of the Church, just as it in tuen had interpreted the mythological and historical material that lies behind it."

The above passages are from 'Principles of Christian Theology' by John MacQuarrie. He elucidates the 3 Persons in terms of Primordial Being (Father), Expressive Being (Son) and Unitive Being (Holy Spirit), as eternal 'modes' of the Godhead. This however is rather advance Christian theology, and suitable for discussion only after the basics are familiarized. I hope the above is instructive.

Tertullian wrote at the end of the second century.



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γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself

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OfflineCalen
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Re: Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer [Re: Zahid]
    #840435 - 08/24/02 11:21 AM (21 years, 7 months ago)


Alright, let's waste some more of my brain power.

Jeffrey Dahmer ultimately became a Christian after his arrest. Not five years into his sentence or 20 years into his sentence, but directly after the madness when he was sent to prison. He read the Bible on a daily basis until one day, a schizophrenic man killed him in Prison around two years after his conversion. After his death, Jeffrey Dahmer's father also became a Christian, as did Jeff's older brother. Jeffrey Dahmer, unlike most serial killers, had a conscience, that's why he turned to the LORD in search of forgiveness.


No news to me that people can find redemption. I have read cases of prisoners turning to Buddha. I felt it was a great irony that these people find eventual and final solace in one of the most dreary and freedom-restricted environment. That's it. I don't go around praising the power of Buddha. I've done it one instance only and realized it's a pitiful mistake to indulgently revere Buddha.

Speaking of which, your zealous reverence is becoming quite insulting by comparing Ghandi to Dahmer.

I can describe in words, but it's like this... when you seek refuge with the Creator, you experience true peace in your heart. The more you remember God, the more peaceful you are. You also see through every deception that leads one to disbelieve when you surrender your will to God.

You speak from *only* your beliefs ~ blindly assuming that anyone embracing your beliefs -> Islam -> Allah, will find what you have found. The tone of your wording gives the impression: you've already believed strongly in your own mind that your divine 'experience' is already real in any of us. Do you understand what I mean?

When you let your animal self control your free will, you are letting evil decieve you. When you surrender your will to God, you do deeds with your free will according to the guidance He has given you.

Oh yeah, the whole complexity of a person's individuation riddled down to that 'insight'. Wow, who in blazes need science of psychology to discover the reasons and truths behind the nature of being human?!


Plain ignorance? Heh. My religion clearly states anyone who dies in disbelief of God's messengers to man will be one of Hell's inmates. The disbelievers forgot about God in the world, and so God will forget about them in the next life. Ghandi was a Hindu. He was clearly aware of Islam, and other faiths. He rejected God.

YOur ignorance is infuriating because you're quietly self-righteous. YOu show no respect. One quality of every word you've uttered that I have seen is an amplitude of implicit, indirect, or direct disrespect to other great prophets, teachers, students who are not 100% Abrahmic religious. Your belief system renounces all forms of mysticism and its practitioners that are not of Allah because the Koran says so.

Here is an example of your blatant discourtesy:

First, Buddha lived long before Allah established the final messengers, so it is safe to assume that he has a plea of ignorance on the Day of Judgement, and Paradise is where he dwells. As far as we (as humans) know, Buddha could have been a prophet of Allah.

The belief of Buddhism is not a reality. It's just another deception. The buddhists reject Allah, and His Messengers. There is nothing beautiful about a shirk belief, that only decieves people from their Lord.


You got some nerve.. Telling us Siddartha is in Paradise, while his students will rot in Hell or are... That Buddhists are bunch of illusionists. And then MAKING a 'half-hearted' presumption on Siddartha being one of Allah's messenger. Tell me where in the Pali Canon does it even remotely reveal it. Tell me where the Koran even says it.

Just picture yourself speaking like the above to me personally, not knowing I may be such a 'student' or my family is devoted to Buddha. You understand what I mean by that and disrespect? It means watch your mouth.

Lets stop beating around the bush, If God showed Himself to you right now and told you disbelievers burn for eternity, would you still turn your head away from Him and say "I won't believe in a God who damns people forever"?

No, I will question him and the book that says so. If he says that's all true by your words... then I say he's lying to me because in my eyes he's not the compassionate one. Just as I would question Buddha about emptiness if he came to me at this moment.

All your spiritual experiences and intellectual understanding of your own religion revolves around your ethocentric beliefs. You associate and rationalize through only your beliefs. Can you not see how one-dimensional that is?

Currently, yOu have no wholistic understanding of the phenomenological process of ""insert other favourite mysticisms"" that leads to ""insert your favourite word for spiritual awakening"". You will encourage us to explore that process through Islam but scoff off other philosiphically different traditions.

Your intentions are good, your euphemism is, at best, undesirable.

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Offlinemirror_saw
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Re: Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer [Re: MarkostheGnostic]
    #841897 - 08/25/02 08:00 AM (21 years, 7 months ago)

"The Christian could not go along with a stark monotheism in which God is utterly transcendent and sovereign, and still less with a pantheism in which God is entirely and universally immanent; he could not embrace a monism in which all differences are swallowed up in the eternal unity of God, but still less a pluralism like that of the world of polytheism with its 'many gods and many lords.'"

The question of what is more pleasing or more understandable to the human mind is of interest, but can this really fully account for the doctrine?

Does Christianity have something fundamentally different to say about the nature of reality as compared to say Buddhism or the more world denying Gnostic sects?

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OfflineMarkostheGnostic
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Re: Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer [Re: mirror_saw]
    #842423 - 08/25/02 03:00 PM (21 years, 7 months ago)

Unlike the Indian and Greek ideas that God is impassible, transcendent and without involvement in form, Christianity posits that a unique rending in space-time has occurred, and that the Infinite and Eternal God has become united with finite and temporal human nature in the person of Jesus Christ. How this occurred has been defined by the numerous schools of Christianity that spring up: Sabellianism, Montanism, Arianism, Nestorianism, etc., etc., through the centuries of -isms. The union remains a Mystery - the central Mystery of Christianity, which thereby has ennobled human life, nature, and creation in general.

Christ or Logos may be imperishable, but through the agency of the man Jesus, the Eternal God was able to experience death - the limit of human existence; and also through the man Jesus, was a human able to experience the Magnitude of the Infinite Godhead. His Presence, and the Holy Spirit that emerged from that 'rend' or 'portal' in space-time that His manifestation provided humanity, is a Way to Eternal Life in God - while yet here and now. This interpenetration of Infinite and Eternal Spirit, and finite and temporal nature, constitutes the uniqueness of the Christian kerygma. Certainly, parallels to various aspects of the God-Man Jesus Christ can be found among the Avatars and Buddhas of Hinduism and Buddhism, but in addition to their existence on mythological levels of existence; as archetypes of the collective unconscious of humanity, Jesus was manifest in the historical level as well - not as a human who attained Enlightenment, but one who Incarnated the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This is the claim - the acceptance of this claim is a matter of faith.


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γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself

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Offlinemirror_saw
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Re: Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer [Re: MarkostheGnostic]
    #846323 - 08/27/02 07:50 AM (21 years, 7 months ago)

But you have left the discussion of reality and deferred to doctrine!

"Christianity posits that a unique rending in space-time has occurred, and that the Infinite and Eternal God has become united with finite and temporal human nature in the person of Jesus Christ."

Such differences could be written off as being different tradition's ways of expressing the same truth. Some people believe that all religions are roads to the same destination, that the differences between them amount to no more than a diversity of language for describing the same reality. My interest is not in unity, but in division.

I'm not sure you really believe in that division. Some people with a certain outlook (and I wouldn't know if that is you) will preach "tolerance" for all faiths, but only where the faith in question accepts all religions as being relative, that none is any more true than any other. They have an avid intolerance for anyone who disagrees!

Their position is just as much based on faith as the person who claims that their's is the only way to salvation. (and yet they think they are above such people...) What they are blind to is that their belief is intrinsic to their philosophy, that anyone who believes reality is an emanation from God to which all our "souls" will return can hardly believe that any religion is any more true than any other religion because it's all just the mind of God at play. To them, all scripture is just a pointer to this truth. It could be an entrenched, weird kind of fundamentalism. It is based on a psychological experience that for all we know could be a self supporting lie.

What is that outlook based on?

an experience. (believed to be spiritual)


That yours is the only truly divine religion, what is this based on?

an experience. (believed to be spiritual)

What we are left with is subjective psychological experience's - that can convince people of opposing views that they are both right!

It could be argued that the "spiritual" experiences come from the same source, but that the "broader" outlook is based on a fuller understanding, or at least that they have "gone beyond" a literal interpretation of scripture and the claims of a particular faith to be unique.

This would seem to be a false argument which doesn't recognize the philosophical divergence between the two positions.

Those with the "broader" outlook are so convinced of their "truth" that they can't see any divergence from their beliefs as being anything other than an illusion belonging to people with less understanding than themselves!

it would seem perhaps to be a delusion where any criticism can be dismissed as coming from someone "less spiritually developed" !

It is pleasing to the sensibilities of some people to think that all religions lead to God. If truth was always pleasing there would be no such thing as untruth.


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OfflineMarkostheGnostic
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Re: Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer [Re: mirror_saw]
    #847083 - 08/27/02 01:32 PM (21 years, 7 months ago)

Religions are comprised of doctrines that constellate around the founder's religious experience. Christianity developed more around the experience of Paul, than of the experience of Jesus; Buddhism developed around the experience of Gautama; Islam developed around the experience of Muhammed. As I read today in Hoeller's new book on Gnosticism, most people's faith is based on someone else's faith.

It may be that 'all roads lead to the same place,' as in Frithjof Schuon's book 'The Transcendent Unity of Religions,' wherein he describes a many faced mountain, with each face representing a world religion. At the base where the mountain is widest, so are the differences between religions the widest. This is exoteric religion. About half way up the mountain, the faces narrow, as do the differences in each religion. This is esoteric religion. At the peak, the religions merge into a single apex - the Transcendent Unity. The PCE, or Pure Consciousness Experience school of mysticism believes that the PCE transcends the colorings of individuality in each faith. This means that at some 'point,' Buddhist Nirvana and Christian Heaven transcend their different formulations in mind as well as their ontological differences in the experiencer.

It is rare to experience, for example, a completely convincing Nirvanic experience, as well as, say, a completely convincing Theistic experience. I can say that with the aid of psychedelics, mind set and setting, I have had different types of mystical experiences. In one, on a Rosh Hashana, I had an 'I-Thou' experience that seemed as if 'I' was being addressed by the 'sky' (symbolically taken). I felt 'addressed' by an omnipresent, omniscient 'Subject,' for a moment. A couple of years later, indoors, sitting beneath a common ceramic Buddha on a bureau, after a day of staying high on microdot acid, and reading 'Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism,' my 'I' vanished, and an infinite and omniscient space of Compassion was All there was. 'I' was gone. When this infinite expanse of Compassion retracted, it seemed to shrink into a locus in space-time that had re-appeared - precisely into the 'place of my Heart.' The Universe had become a Compassionate Jewel in the Lotus of my Heart.

Now, both were powerful and different experiences which I can see as a synthesis of set and setting. The first was like the Buber descriptions I was reading - Theistic and Jewish. The second experience was Vajrayana-like, but could have been regarded as Christian (I was also reading Underhill's 'Mysticism' at the time). These experiences occurred in the early 1970's, and this week I bought a Kabbalistic book by Scholem as well as a Gnostic text. So, what am I saying? Well, like yourself, Scholem is interested in historical differences, not in identities like Jung or Campbell or Kerenyi. The Gnostics concede gnosis through other traditions besides their own. Both points of view may be completely insoluable in any amout of rational thought. I've pondered this for decades.

Nirvana is not equivalent to Heaven, these are not mere formulation differences based on temperament, constitution, tradition. They describe ontological differences. One can find, like the Gnostics, a "God beyond God" that Paul Tillich speaks of; or Saguna and Nirguna Brahman - Personal and Impersonal aspects of God, so that perhaps Nirvana means Nirguna Brahman; or Ishwara equals Judeao-Christian God and Purusha equals the J-C Godhead. The long held medieval belief was that one came closer to the 'Throne' of God, the more one was suffused with love and joy in this life. The Bhagavad Gita says that the Impersonalist (Yogi)who meditates on OM, is indirectly Krishna Conscious.

The Utterly Transcendent God, is One God, but the vectors by which the human consciousness attains union with the Divine may well be ontologically different. We may go to one of the "many mansions" mentioned by Jesus. Humans do not become the Essence of God, but perhaps merging with God's Radiance, or Uncreated Energy, as the Greek Orthodox say it, is tantamount to union with God. We can never 'Know' another like the other 'Knows' himself - God included.

What to do? Is there a Way of life upon the Earth that is acceptable on the horizontal plane - interpersonally? I think so, and I believe that it is to be Compassionate. What else must one do to be a good Buddhist that differs from that which one must do to being a good Christian? Probably maintain outer rituals and inner beliefs to be authentic in the body-mind as well as the spirit.

I do not think that all religions are equal. There are high and low religions. Stewart Ferrar in 'What Witches Do,' said that Wicca was a low religion. The cyclical forces of nature, howsoever symbolized as God-Goddess, do not express the Transcendence of other religions of the world. Santeria and Voodoo are other examples. I aspire to the God Who is Love. I see this in a (granted, Gnostic) Christian worldview, for lack of a better tab (different from mainstream vicarious-sacrifice Christian theologies), and not as a Bhakti Krishna Devotee who might make the same statement. What else can I say?


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γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself

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Offlinegnrm23
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Re: Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer [Re: MarkostheGnostic]
    #848303 - 08/28/02 01:57 AM (21 years, 7 months ago)

"what else can i say?"
~
"Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me!"
(martin luther, early 16th century)
~

~
is karuna = caritas ?


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OfflineMarkostheGnostic
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Re: Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer [Re: gnrm23]
    #848984 - 08/28/02 10:08 AM (21 years, 7 months ago)

"is karuna = caritas?" Hmm. This might be like comparing bananas to plantains
Karuna is generally rendered 'compassion' I think. Caritas [charity] is theologically the 'caritas synthesis,' wherein the Catholics created a hybrid - at least in word - of agape [the selfless Godly love from 'on high'] and eros [the yearning for the 'other']. Agape is sort of a fulfilled form of love which 'gives of itself, freely'; and eros is the yearning or desire for union with the other, in the higher Platonic Eros sense, for God, as well as in the (now appropriated meaning) sense of 'the erotic.' Eros was the god of love for Plato, but theologians have relegated eros to the strictly human and creaturely domain, while agape is spiritual, imparted by the Holy Spirit. I think karuna = agape. Kama (as in the sutra, is probably) = cupidity or eros (Latin/Greek) in today's meanings. Anders Nygren wrote a huge tome on these forms, called 'Agape and Eros,' which I suffered through, on my own without it being assigned, during my seminary days. I might have learned more about love if I'd gotten laid more during that sad period.


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γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself

Edited by MarkostheGnostic (08/28/02 10:09 AM)

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Offlinegnrm23
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Re: Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer [Re: MarkostheGnostic]
    #850345 - 08/29/02 02:01 AM (21 years, 7 months ago)

"faith, hope, and charity... and the greatest of these is charity..."
~
jeffery's prison conversion... well, i do think that he was raised in a lutheran household, and thus at least, nominally "christian"...
back to the old sanctification & justification deal... is a "conversion experience" needed for one to "truly be" a christian??? must one display "gifts of the holy spirit" (i.e. "tongues", etc...)??? one baptism for the remission of sins???
just who is a christian anyways???

(hmmm, maybe a new post required? topic of repeated yammeryammer at hipplanet.com


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InvisibleSwami
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Re: Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer [Re: gnrm23]
    #850450 - 08/29/02 04:24 AM (21 years, 7 months ago)

I don't believe in jailhouse conversion. Notice that no one (rarely) ever repents until AFTER they get caught? The last minute conversion is either fake or totally fear-based (poor me - what will happen to me now?) which is contrapuntal to love and compassion.


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The proof is in the pudding.

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OfflineMarkostheGnostic
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Re: Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer [Re: gnrm23]
    #851593 - 08/29/02 04:10 PM (21 years, 6 months ago)

Good questions. The Catholics began to baptize infants, based, I suppose, on related Biblical notions such as the faith of one's spouse saving the other. The Amish people, for one, were persecuted and killed for their disbelief in infant baptism. They, like other Protestant denominations, believe that an adult must decide that they want to be baptized. The baptism is an outward symbol of an inward change [metanoia], it is not a 'magical' procedure as some people tend to think of it, imparting the Holy Spirit by a combination of words, substance (water) and intention. BTW, baptisms are recognized, even from lay people in dire emergencies if only 2 of the 3 above elements are included. Thus, baptisms with urine on the desert, or sea water, from people who did not know any liturgy, but who knew the intention of what they were to perform for a dying and truly contrite individual are valid.

In the heyday of my yogic-psychedelic-long-haired search, just prior to leaving college - I was reading the New Testament. I had already known about the BE HERE NOW message that 'All Your Acts Will Be Consecrated,' but I began to pray befor eating. A beautiful, shapely, long-haired Black girl named Pauline asked me, "Are You a Christian?," and for the first time in my Jewish life, I answered "Yes." We became friendly, and I sorely wanted her, but her 'born-again' friends warned her about me. I don't know what they knew, except 1) I was White, 2) there may have been some possessive jealousy from her Black, male friends, and 3) I was filled with desire for her, even while making a confession of faith, thus prooving the iffyness of my faith to her. In fact, an inner change had occurred, and I sought baptism in a Catholic Church about 6 months later.

Despite all I had learned from India and from Greece, when life itself humbled me, and I broke down while working as a janitor and living again with my parents after 4 years of college, it was God to Whom I pleaded for strength in Jesus' Name. I have never regretted the inner change since my sense of morality was always strong even before this occurred. This change made me uptight about sex for a while, but that passed. The Real change was the working Reality of prayer, and having prayers granted; about synchronicities which can be read 'miracles,' and about growth in deep peace (despite surface neuroses), faith and abiding certitude in Eternal Life.

As you know, I usually do not 'witness' in this manner, but this is how I can answer your question best. I do not possess glossolalia, neither do I believe in many of the psychoneurotic manifestations of hysteria ('conversion' hysteria!) that manifests by utterings, swoonings or slayings, general prophesying (of course I recognize psi functions) and other aberrant behaviors commonly taken a signs of spiritual rebirth. Perhaps the 'gift' that I possess is in teaching - certainly not preaching - which I don't even care for. Bottom line is that I believe in my Heart-of-Hearts that Whomever Christ was historically, and is Eternally, He is THE Reality that fuels the Life in my Sacred Heart. I attribute Compassion, Faith, Truthfulness, Joy, Courage and Patience - to name the most prominent facets of a single Reality that indwells my Center. These I attribute to Christ, which in my opinion makes me a Christian. I suppose I could speak in parallel terms of the various Dhyani Buddha-Wisdoms as facets of the singular Diamond Body (Jewel in the Lotus of the Heart), but this would be just that - a parallel to THAT which I MOST thoroughly believe in - with All my Heart, All my Soul and All my Might. This is a Blood Mysticism - from the Heart, rather than a Head mysticism; and I am a warm-blooded Western man in a Jewish-Christian milieu. It just seems Right.


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γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself

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Offlinemirrorsaww
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Re: Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer [Re: MarkostheGnostic]
    #854867 - 08/31/02 10:57 AM (21 years, 6 months ago)

I do not think that all religions are equal. There are high and low religions. Stewart Ferrar in 'What Witches Do,' said that Wicca was a low religion. The cyclical forces of nature, howsoever symbolized as God-Goddess, do not express the Transcendence of other religions of the world.

I'm surprised that there are no pagans around here to bash you for that comment!

My own opinion of paganism is that it is 98% a recent invention. Some people believe that the inquisition was an attempt to repress a pre-Christian "nature religion". Pure fantasy and bullshit.

You don't seem to admit the possibility that some of the major world religions could be "low religions" as you put it.

It's strange that you would seek to identify yourself with some long dead heretical sects. Where is your problem with the normal Christian mystics? Is there some Gnostic philosophy that you passionately believe to be superior to the orthodox?

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Offlinemirrorsaww
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Re: Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer [Re: gnrm23]
    #854890 - 08/31/02 11:17 AM (21 years, 6 months ago)

is a "conversion experience" needed for one to "truly be" a Christian???

Or do conversion experiences only happen to people without self-awareness of the gradual change in themselves? i.e. that it suddenly bursts up from the subconscious appearing to them to be instantaneous?

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OfflineMarkostheGnostic
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Re: Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer [Re: mirrorsaww]
    #854996 - 08/31/02 12:16 PM (21 years, 6 months ago)

LOL! You're beautiful, man. Why should Pagans bash me, I'm not bashing them. If you do not aspire to disembodied/corpus incorruptibilis existence, but desire rebirth on this beautiful planet, then what is that to me? 'An Harm Ye None,' is ethics enough for life in this world with Pagans. Some people finish high school; others get Associate degrees, or Bachelors, or Masters, or even Doctorates. Different degrees in this world; different degrees of 'closeness to the Throne' in the next. I know I'm being Medieval, but I'm just reiterating the spiritual Great Chain of Being.


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γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself

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Offlinemirrorsaww
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Re: Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer [Re: MarkostheGnostic]
    #858152 - 09/01/02 11:48 PM (21 years, 6 months ago)

I'm not bashing them.

Oh right, you just mentioned Stewart Ferrar's opinion that their's was a "low religion"... and you seemed to agree with it  :grin:

I'm still bemused as to why you want to identify yourself with lond dead sects...

Edited by mirrorsaww (09/02/02 12:23 AM)

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InvisibleSclorch
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Re: Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer [Re: mirrorsaww]
    #858283 - 09/02/02 04:33 AM (21 years, 6 months ago)

Why is this thread still here?

MAKE IT STOP! mmmake iiiiitt ssstooooooop....

Seriously, this thread is sooooo far off the original topic...
Start a new thread, this one's dead.


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Note: In desperate need of a cure...

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OfflineMarkostheGnostic
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Re: Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer [Re: mirrorsaww]
    #858356 - 09/02/02 05:47 AM (21 years, 6 months ago)

Why don't you check out this site: www.webcom/%7Egnosis/welcome.html just to listen to a contemporary scholar on Gnosticism. His new book explains Gnostic scriptures in a contemporary light. I am not looking for other myths by which to grasp our origins, but the Gnostics were psychologists in their own right, and they understood that transformation of the world was an inner transformation, a psychospiritual transformation, not a political-social transformation. Their body of sacraments and rituals were intended to transform consciousness. Influences from Gnosticism can be found in literature and in modern theological constructs about our tripartite nature as body-mind-spirit.

I have always been drawn to the Gospel of John - the least historically accurate, but perhaps the most spiritually accurate of the canonical gospels, as well as the most Gnostic in the inner-directed sense. The Gospel of Thomas was my next discovery, and anyone with even a little Hindu or Buddhist exposure will find a theology of Self-Realization; and a Fully-Realized Esvhatology, which differs radically from the partially-realized eschatology of the Gospels, wherein the victory over evil is here potentially, but the 'fullness' exists in the 'future.' The Kingdom of God/Heaven is expressed as a condition 'in the future,' not as a present reality, except in certain passages (e.g., 'the Kingdom of Heaven is within you,' which Gnostics point out has 2 Greek translations into -eso and -ento forms, such that the first indicates an inner psychospiritual reality, and the latter ['in the midst of you] speaks to a social notion of community).

Once my soul had been psychedelicized, I could not help but become even more inner-directed, Self-Realized, and interior than I had been before. Mainstream churches, like society in general, are mostly extroverted. Less than 25% of Americans tested are introverts, and my typology according to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, is INTP, like Carl Jung himself. This type is in the single digit percentages. It is a great gift that my Lady is also an Introverted Intuitive Thinking Perceiving type. This typology resonates with the kind of thinking that the Gnostics are known for. The original Gnostics were no exception, and they were deemed heretical by the extraverted, power hungry, movers and shakers that constituted the developers of the early Christian Church. I for one, and my Lady have predominantly Meso-Ectomorphic bodies, with the corresponding Cerebrotonic temperaments. We are thinkers and contemplatives, not warriors. Our Scheldonian types want to soar on-high, not pick fights, crusade against our neighbors or establish rule over anyone. Neither did the Gnostics, and the Mesomorphic bully-boys of antiquity, who, through their action-oriented, aggressive Scheldonian temperaments processed their religious beliefs through their typical constitutions, picked on the egg-head Gnostics as well. Might does not make right, not then and not now, but politics are run by bullies, tyrants, sadists, and the like, as evidenced by 'Christian' persecutions, inquisitions, torturings, immolations, and crusades. In conclusion: it is natural to people of my typology (as variously defined) to be attracted to groups who have processed certain Profoundly Spiritual Experiences in like manner. I hope this helps to answer your questions.


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γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself

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OfflineMarkostheGnostic
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Re: Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer [Re: mirrorsaww]
    #860478 - 09/03/02 12:21 AM (21 years, 6 months ago)

Oh yeah, neglected this question. Yes, a conversion experience is necessary to becoming a Christian. The word in Greek for such a change of perspective is called 'metanoia.' Enlightenment can be like someone sleeping in a darkened room til noon, who suddenly has the window shade spring open suddenly, flooding the room with light; or it can be like someone who leaves the shade up, and the light of day gradually brightens the room til one is awakened by it.

The inner projects the outer. This is the only legitimate 'order of operations.' Growing up in a 'Christian' family might impart values and thoughts about life, but this is a social learning situation, taught from without and merely assumed. The core personality remains untouched howsoever well one is cloaked with religion. One may go through life acting in a socially wonderful way, which is great for society, but the 'act' is not transforming of the personality itself. One's ego does not become 'transfigured' into a 'transcendental ego.' Stated another way, there is no 'death and resurrection' of the ego - dead to self and raised in Christ. These are Christian psychospiritual formulations, but conversion, or completion clearly involves both psyche (mind, soul) and pneuma (spirit) in a change that is evidenced by increased selflessness, increased humility and compassion, and faith in Ultimate Reality (God, by any Name) that transcends one's comprehension).


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γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself

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