Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Craig Richards who wrote (23802)	7/21/1998 11:19:00 AM
From: Emile Vidrine	Respond to of 108807

"Emile, Many people believe in Buddhism all their life but do not attain the true teachings. The same can be said for Christianity. " In Christianity, all who truly believe in Jesus as their Lord and Saviour receive Eternal Life---the life of God . Christianity is not a complex system of meditation that attains through accomplishment and achievment. Through simple faith in the Crucified and Resurrected Jesus, Christians are Born Again as children of God and receive the Holy Spirit of God. Through this simple faith God writes his laws on our hearts and puts them in our minds. This is all received through a simple faith in Jesus. There is no long processs of effort and step by step elimination of desires but rather an instant recreation of the fallen and sinful human spirit. After a Christian is Born Again, there begins a struggle and a war between his newly recreated spirit and the sinful desires of the flesh. The spirit of God withing us desires the heavenly things of God but our bodily temple of clay desires the things of this world. Our recreated spirit and the Spirit of God living in us overcome the desires of the flesh. Buddhism is a religion that strives through achievment and accomplishment to attain to a state without desire. This state of no desire is perfection and called Nirvana. This state of eliminating desire or sin is unachievable through the efforts of man because man is by nature innately fallen and innately sinful. No system of meditation or achievement can restore man to a sinless nature. Only an act of God can restore man to perfection as the sons of God. This is why God sent His only Begotten Son to die for the sins or imperfection of mankind. He restores our state of spiritual perfection through an act of love.

To: Craig Richards who wrote (23802)	7/24/1998 8:21:00 PM
From: Sam Ferguson	Respond to of 108807

Craig I lost my copy you requested about the book I wrote for my children in a hard drive crash. Will have to scan to get back on computer. Meanwhile a little more wisdom: <ggg> The Law plays no favorites; the only fate one ever encounters is the one he has made for himself. It's time we snap out of our hypnotic-trance-state and do some straight thinking; but don't take my word for it--continue reading the following pages.LAURENCE P. FOLSOM, D.D., PH.D. In his fine History of Christianity Dean Milman speaks of the tyranny exercised over the human mind in the name of religion. This tyranny has taken a wide variety of forms, imposing upon the collective mind of the race a vast agglomeration of conceptions, beliefs and persuasions as to the relation between man and deity which have proved to be psychologically disastrous. Outstanding among these tyrannous impositions have been such ideas as the existence of a personal devil forever working to defeat a divine plan for mankind; an anthropomorphic creator and deity; the doctrine of the fall of man and the consequent innate sinfulness of his nature; the total helplessness of man to effectuate his own salvation, and the necessity therefore of his attaining that end by throwing himself on the tender mercies of his creator, and accepting the provision by the latter of a way of escape through the sacrificial blood of his own son, who volunteered to be the scapegoat for man's sin; the belief in the soul's eternal future existence in a heaven or hell, following a post-mortem judgment, with its enjoyment of everlasting bliss in the one region or agonizing torment in the other; and a thousand major and minor idiosyncrasies of tortured theology which wrought on the Occidental consciousness for two thousand years an unconscionable stultification of the reason that must in the total of its consequences, if ever its colossal ineptitude be recognized, be rated as the most devastating psychological plague and scourge of human sanity to sweep the race in all its history. Since at least the third Christian century this besom of theological dementia has swept on through age after age, blinding the eyes of the childhood of every generation with its fatal dust and gripping the old age of every period with a mental palsy that was thus made the unbroken heritage of every people. Its morbid obsession of demoniac influence and sin consciousness settled like a pall of evil portent over the souls of millions, driving them out of the very sunshine of life into the darksome cubicles of convent and monastery. Not even the body of man escaped the impact of gruesome conviction, for it was proclaimed the very instigator of evil impulse, the arch-enemy of the spirit, the vile tempter, the foul denier of God, full of a lecherous concupiscence that would seduce the very soul. So deadly was its subtle enticement to sin that no color of a garment sufficed to cover its raw indecency but the somberest black. From the list of fateful hallucinations enumerated above one has been withheld momentarily, to be adduced now as the theme of the brochure,--the cult of prayer. There is reason to speculate whether, in the full range and force of its universal vogue, it has not proved to deserve rating as the most pernicious of the lot. Perhaps it has not inflicted greater injury to the valiant natural spirit of the race than has the spell of sin-consciousness. It stands so close in kinship of mental affinity with the later that the power of the one is essentially the power of the other. But it has been and eternally continues to be the most active and persistent force in daily consciousness of the masses, never permitting the soul of life to escape from its darksome shadow to bask in the open sun and air of the world. Where religion has fixed its routine habitudes, with reminders of a morning, a noon and an evening bell, it refastens its droning spell upon pious devotees perpetually thrice daily. Lest flagging piety fail in its count, there are the beads to certify to deity how faithfully the loyal soul has whipped itself to devotion. A searching probe into the roots of the human prayer cult would be an investigation of the most revelatory character. It would take the mind into the profoundest recesses of the human consciousness far back in its primitive development and would reveal man to himself in the most intimate and elementary aspects of his being. Such an investigation, we are prone to believe, would furnish intelligence today with abundant reason for completely reversing the general view of prayer from its commonly accepted status of a most exalted religious virtue to something approaching the most abject and degrading human ignobility. That such a sweeping revolution in the estimate of the prayer feature of religion has not been suggested or undertaken hitherto is due to the fact that it is an element in the general cultus of religion toward which the human mind has forever oriented itself in a special and extraordinary manner. Religion can be not inaptly defined as that department of human sensibility in which the mind, to apprehend the values sought or to gain the experiences believed attainable, lifts out of its ordinary posture towards reality and strives to project itself into a quite other world wherein a completely different order of phenomena will manifest themselves. The faculties by which the human mind evaluates its normal experiences in the world are set aside and consciousness is opened to another mode of experience approached through the media of a special and quite extraordinary set of perceptive modes and psychological reactions, by which one is believed capable of receiving intelligence and becoming susceptible to influences emanating from what is deemed to be a higher world. This is commonly expressed by the statement that religious experience, to be properly such, must have a transcendental character and source; that is, it must elevate the sensibilities into a realm of consciousness of a totally different character from that of our commonplace daily posture of realism.