and to burn the crowd that has a name Options

[Badman]

Actually I'm not a religious person in the usual sense of the word, so I wasn't at all offended.
And since I don't wanna go all off topic,we'll leave it at that.

[This thread jumps off this longer discussion in the Ed section]

Believe me, you aren't alone Opine. Most people on this website are pretty non-religious. I do have a theory for this:

In the absence of church leaders telling us what to do, many of us learned to think for ourselves. We sought out music that "made us think" such as TC and MJ which caused us to fall in love with the band. I mean, these songs are all open for interpretation and offer real advice for how to live our lives. We are the world, good pain, and the idea that water is both the giver and the taker of life. This is some deep stuff.

Because many of us feel this way towards religious and shallow music, we have experienced a complete rejection of Ed's new direction. This is a generalization of the fans from my point of view but I'd like to know if this resonates with anyone here. Has this music at some point in your life replaced/stood in for religious feelings?

[Wambangalang]

yes it's all really rather perverted isn't it?

[FishOutaWater]

I think that Catholic doctrine is a vestige of pre-Enlightenment thinking, clinging to the control, misogyny and politics that the church was once able to exploit to keep itself powerful. Sadly, after John Paul II, the church has decided to tack hard even further to the right, and double down on its archaic thinking and ways, claiming to be happy to be a smaller, more orthodox faith. This new Vatican has chosen to abandon all of the progressive steps that the church took since Vatican II and become more exclusive and isolated. It is only a chruch for the narrow minded and ignorant - or the hypocrites, which is more often the case. I can't tell you how many Catholics I know who cling to (and judge others based on) certain beliefs (mainly out of fear) and then sytematically violate the beliefs (like birth control, premarital sex and divorce) that they don't agree with.

By the way - about religion - I don't think that ANY of them are "right". As Lao Tzu said in the very first verse of the Tao Te Ching: "the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao". In other words, as soon as you name and describe the eternal "creator" or "Tao" or "God" or whatever you want to call it, you have immediately limted and contracted it. We cannot, as human beings, limited by our intellect and our limited ability to think and perceive get it "right" because as soon as you try to teach God or tell someone about God, you have by definition moved away from God and you have gotten it wrong. Religions are not only based on human's apprehension of the divine, but they are further tainted by passage of traditions over centuries, the cultural, societal, gender, political, economic, agenda, etc. biases of human-kind. Each religion is only that religious tradition's expression of the divine, as shaped by the culture within which the tradition developed, and as further muddled over the passage of centuries. Once people get their hands on religion, it becomes quite un-Godly. I am generally more favorable to religions that advocate direct spiritual experience and have a non-exclusive, "open-architecture" approach to understanding God.

This post has been edited by FishOutaWater: Jun 25 2012, 9:53 am