Kudlow is open and honest and this makes him inspiring. Well-worth viewing.
Tag: religion
Ron Unz lays it all out
About a decade ago, I happened to be talking with an eminent academic scholar who had become known for his sharp criticism of Israeli policies in the Middle East and America’s strong support for them. I mentioned that I myself had come to very similar conclusions some time before, and he asked when that had happened. I told him it had been in 1982, and I think he found my answer quite surprising. I got the sense that date was decades earlier than would have been given by almost anyone else he knew. (American Pravda: Oddities of the Jewish Religion)
This piece from Ron Unz is a must-read for serious thinkers. ABN
Suggested further reading:
Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years
Religious hypocrisy at the border
“Faith Based Immigration Services” is a code-speak for legalized human smuggling.
Human smuggling is big business. If you dig in to the IRS 990 forms you’ll see a lot of, well, “generous” wage/benefit perks. Golf, florists, cafe’s, mysterious leases, land purchases, third party mortgages, $$$ Spouses on the payroll, etc.
So when you’ve got each individual immigration business making multi-hundreds of millions; and politicians getting kick-backs (lobbyists); and bribes to Mexican government officials; and payments to smugglers; who do you think actually wants the business to stop? (Source)
Pope Francis: “There is no hell, there is the disappearance of sinful souls.”
Scalfari says to the Pope, “Your Holiness, in our previous meeting you told me that our species will disappear in a certain moment and that God, still out of his creative force, will create new species. You have never spoken to me about the souls who died in sin and will go to hell to suffer it for eternity. You have however spoken to me of good souls, admitted to the contemplation of God. But what about bad souls? Where are they punished?”
Pope Francis says, “They are not punished, those who repent obtain the forgiveness of God and enter the rank of souls who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and cannot therefore be forgiven disappear. There is no hell, there is the disappearance of sinful souls.” (Source)
Carl Jung speaks about Death
The value of introversion, and probably reclusion
Do reclusive and monastic religious practices foster wisdom about the human condition?
A new study indicates that they may.
Insights into social psychological phenomena have been thought of as solely attainable through empirical research. Our findings, however, indicate that some lay individuals can reliably judge established social psychological phenomena without any experience in social psychology. These results raise the striking possibility that certain individuals can predict the accuracy of unexplored social psychological phenomena better than others. (Social Psychological Skill and Its Correlates)
In an article about this study, its authors say that introverted people tend to be better at observing others because they are good at introspection and have fewer motivational biases. Here’s that article: Yale Study: Sad, Lonely Introverts Are Natural Born Social Psychologists.
Possibility Jesus was Buddhist monk, among other ideas
This video is only sort of good. I watched it all and enjoyed it. It gives a decent overview of what else might have happened to Jesus after he died. Most Buddhists probably know there is a Buddhist angle to the story—that he went to Kashmir and lived a long life as a monk. This part of the film is presented in the last ten minutes or so. Other possibilities are reviewed in the foregoing parts. Definitely worth a look if you are not familiar with this subject. ABN
Provocative analysis of cultural identity
A comment I read this morning has an insightful summary of what cultural identity is. And how it self-generates and self-perpetuates “…well beyond the control or foresight of anyone,.” (Source)
This complex of [cultural] ideas generates intense psychological pressures and allegiances and mobilizes some of the most primitive energies of the human psyche – safety, danger, clan, tribe, blood, status, power, domination – and leads to a clear pattern of behavior that is decentralized and not under anyone’s control but is still a very clear system that can be analyzed and identified. (Ibid.)
The entire string of comments is well-worth reading and can be found at the link above. [No permalink, so Ctrl F a snippet of the quote above to find the starting point.]
These comments are on Jewish culture and history but they apply just as well to any cultural “construct,” all of which are the stronger precisely because they are social constructs.
The commenter quoted above leans toward a negative appraisal of Jewish culture and history, which I largely agree with, but if it’s up to me I would say that virtually all successful cultures (“successful” being ones that perpetuate) have analogous negative features.
Incidentally, I believe a great deal of Buddhist practice and the practices of other religions are based on disentangling practitioners from cultural constructs to discover their authentic beings, souls, or the will of God.
Religions do this because in many ways cultures are toxic to the higher mind, the metacognitions of thusness and individual authenticity.
That said, cultures do teach us and raise us and we cannot develop without them. Religions are also cultures. And that said, we are capable as individuals of both learning from our cultures and growing well beyond them.
In this respect and in light of Buddhist practice, I am very leery of any and all kinds of cultural identities or individual identities fashioned as allegiance to a culture, especially an aggressive one. Sadly, it is also true that if you have no identity your culture will be lost or destroyed, so we all really do need some sort of “defensive identity.” In this respect, I can happily identify with most of the world Buddhist community and most of the traditional American Constitutional system interpreted conservatively. I also have a mild-but-strong-enough defensive white identity because that group is fast approaching eight percent of world population and I want it to survive.
Jordan Peterson analyzes a lot of stuff, not just Cathy Newman, and also inadvertently provides an excellent introduction to FIML practice
In this talk, FIML is logos. It uses word to bring order out of chaos. FIML brings meaning and clarity to primary interpersonal relations and thus also to individual psychology. You need to want to do this, to be a hero for yourself and others. You have to want to bring meaning and order out of chaos. It’s not easy to do FIML but there is nothing else as interesting or worthwhile on the interpersonal level. I hope JP will take up FIML and introduce it to a wider audience. I do not agree with his statements about bringing out the Jungian shadow. I do agree we must discover our essence or authentic being, but this can be done without myths or shadows through FIML practice. As mentioned in other posts, FIML does not tell you how to be or what will happen to you when you practice it but it will show you, eventually, your authentic being, the essence that underlies your social persona. ABN
Irish Exorcist Calls for Back-Up to Face Surge in ‘Malicious Activity’ by the Devil
The demand for exorcists “has risen exponentially” in Ireland thanks to a surge in demonic activity, according to exorcist Father Patrick Collins, who has called on the nation’s bishops to train more priests to fight the devil. (Source)
The Persistent and Exceptional Intensity of American Religion: A Response to Recent Research
Abstract: Recent research argues that the United States is secularizing, that this religious change is consistent with the secularization thesis, and that American religion is not exceptional. But we show that rather than religion fading into irrelevance as the secularization thesis would suggest, intense religion—strong affiliation, very frequent practice, literalism, and evangelicalism—is persistent and, in fact, only moderate religion is on the decline in the United States. We also show that in comparable countries, intense religion is on the decline or already at very low levels. Therefore, the intensity of American religion is actually becoming more exceptional over time. We conclude that intense religion in the United States is persistent and exceptional in ways that do not fit the secularization thesis.
link
Former CIA Kevin Shipp…Satanic Pedophilia Exposed…WARNING
Religious experience as core existential metacognition
I submit that profound religious experience can be adequately defined as “awareness or experience of core existential metacognition.”
I make this definition in order to have a way of speaking about the fundamental importance and rough sameness of deep states of prayer, meditation, grace, awareness of God or the Buddha mind, being moved by the Holy Spirit, “practicing the presence of God,” knowing God’s will, being drawn to the Tathagata, samadhi, dhyana, satori, chan, enlightenment, and many more.
These states can and do happen “randomly” with no prior conscious input from the experiencer of them, but they most often happen to people who do some or all of the religious practices mentioned above.
These states are very powerful. They are life-changing and life-enhancing every time they occur. They are different from ordinary conscious states because they involve what might be called in the words of today “core existential metacognition.”
As such, it is difficult even impossible to maintain these states at all times. Few of us have the brainpower or divine grace to do that. We achieve these states through religious practice.
If you are Buddhist you will call them by Buddhist names. If you are Christian or some other religion, you will use other names.
I for one believe you are much better off if you engage in practices that induce “core existential metacognition” than if you don’t engage in any practices like that.
The science-induced wonder of the hard atheist is not the same.
Religious practice is fundamentally the use of disciplined methods to achieve “core existential metacognition.”
The words we use to describe this state(s) and what we are able to see within it should be more beautiful and more in keeping with whatever practice gets you there than “core existential metacognition.” But it is good to have some words to describe what is common to all of these practice and that explain in simple modern terms what people get from their religions and why they do them.
Child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church: an interpretive review of the literature and public inquiry reports
13 Sep 2017
Centre for Global Research (RMIT)
CREATORS
Desmond Cahill, Peter J. WilkinsonThis research was designed to review the literature concerning child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in Australia and elsewhere, and included 26 key international and Australian inquiry reports.
Download available here.
I have not even looked at the report yet but news articles say celibacy and a culture of secrecy are major causes of the problem. ABN
‘I am not your goy’ — chaos at a liberal Zionist conference
by Philip Weis
There was chaos in messaging from start to finish of the conference, and if I can extract any lesson from it, it is that older establishment liberal Jews aren’t ready for the new discourse of Israel and they are freaked out about what young Jews are saying. Peter Beinart’s crisis of Zionism of 2013 is now four years old, and we are starting in on the chaos of American Zionism. (It couldn’t come a minute too soon, but I will try not to editorialize.) (Source)
American Buddhist Net 