History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
A Sufi myth: Fourth Ways,…and The Great Freedom Sutra
Although I no longer like the term ’sufi’ in this short essay, it raises the real issues of religion, and the way that modern secularism is a far more fruitful basis for secular culture as religious culture than anything in tradition.
I have just looked at a copy of
Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom: The True History of Shakespeare and Elizabeth [Hardcover]
Charles Beauclerk
Still another book on the Oxfordian Shakes-peare question. I have addressed this skeptically here before in several posts:
Booknotes: Contested Will…
However this book is somewhat more sophisticated than most, despite its outlandish claims.
I remain agnostic finally, [...]
After commenting on Hedges’ article on Christianity and Nietzsche, I would offer the caution: don’t underestimate Christianity. Dawkins is a programmed robot set to wreckerball for powerful forces beyond his ken. Xtianity may be undergoing collapse, but that’s none of your doing, don’t flatter yourself. It has long been prophesied that this collapse would occur [...]
I am a little puzzled by Hedges’ column this week: After Religion Fizzles, We’re Stuck With Nietzsche
An unfortunate piece of indirection, irony, or stupidity from a journalist I have followed for some time. What’s up here. Has Mr. Hedges lost his faith? Is he trying to get market share from the Dawkins groupies?
What is [...]
MBFM comment on Karmapa
MBFM raises the issue of the right ‘Buddhist dharma’ to pursue in the modern world. Original Buddhism is so elegant and simple that the steps would seem transparent, but they are not. Westerners rarely succeed at meditation, while Indians seem to know it all first hand. Deepak Chopra talks a good [...]
Hawking’s concern about aliens (I am not familiar with the details) is not inappropriate, but probably is too close to the sci-fi rocket ship invaders (as with the film Avatar, the danger in reverse!) myths to get the point. The real aliens, if real, would not use rocketships, the disinformation joke, I suspect, about ‘UFO’s’ [...]
Some free advice on ’spiritual paths’
Again, I should say that in my experience the sufi domain and/or Gurdjieff branch of that are barren labyrinths where you will be doomed to wander, or be exploited.
Be gone from those worlds forever. The Indic paths, such as they are, corrupted by Hinduism, and filled with many confusions, nonetheless [...]
Bennett: DU volume four…
I am thinking of pursuing an extended commentary of J.G. Bennett’s The Dramatic Unvierse, if only as a partial expose of some confusing and potentially exploitative ‘New Age’ material. But the ‘exploitation’ lies with all the people hovering around his work, not so much Bennett himself, who was a fool to let [...]
People expect claims of compassion to receive a red carpet along with gushing praise, and pats on the back. To me the theme of compassion is another cue to jump in a fox hole, having been betrayed twice, at least, on this theme: the bogus compassion of the Sufistic Moslems, and then the same in [...]
Comment on Armstrong
James said,
November 26, 2009 at 3:43 pm ·
It’s amazing that a third-rate thinker such as Karen Armstrong is getting this amount of air time. I’ve never read anyone who can just spew out bad idea after bad idea. Amazing…she makes Dawkins and Friends look like geniuses.
I feel sorry for her, she has been [...]
Islam’s Darwin problem
In the Muslim world, creationism is on the rise
Americans familiar with the long and bitter battle over the teaching of evolution in our schools likely have a set of images of what creationism looks like: from the Scopes trial, and its dramatization in “Inherit the Wind,” to more recent battles over textbooks on [...]
A Sufi myth: Fourth Ways,…and The Great Freedom Sutra
The question of religion and secularism has been hopelessly confused. The reality, beyond religious form, is that secularism can be the foundation for a true religioin for the first time.
The issue of Buddhism is a confusing one. But one thing to consider is that it came into existence in the wake of the Axial Age, and then straddled an entire age until the modern, at which point its impetus began to fail. We see the desperation in the attempts to cast its ’seeds’ in [...]
‘Reflections on the Revolution in Europe’ by Christopher Caldwell
In Europe, the author argues, the clash between Western civilization and the Muslim world has already been lost — in the latter’s favor.
The abuse of the idea of revolution, and Burke, here is a distraction from the issues.
I find this conclusion strange: it may be [...]
The Taliban and music By Zubeida Mustafa
In her latest book, The Case for God, Karen Armstrong describes music as ‘the limit of reason.’ She finds it inseparable from religious expression when religion is at ‘its best.’ We do not get the best demonstration of this connection in the Taliban brand of Islam. The [...]
A Sufi myth: Fourth Ways,…and The Great Freedom Sutra
I need to rewrite this essay without the allusion to ‘fourth ways’ and sufism, but the point is clear that there future dimension to ‘religion’ is beyond religion, and that secular society has all the potential for a religious culture, except better.
The historical position of the great [...]
archive: March 13, 2006
After a post on Gurdjieff I got a question about Ouspensky and evolution. Below is a quote from A Secret History of Consciousness, by Gary Lachman.
Warning: be very careful of these people, their claims, and the innuendo they give out that since they are ‘esoteric’ they have all the answers. [...]
Do Shamans Have More Sex?New Age spirituality is no more pure than old-time religion.
By Robert Wright
Posted Wednesday, July 29, 2009, at 1:59 PM ET
Wouldn’t it be great to be back in hunter-gatherer days? Back before the human spiritual quest had been corrupted by the “relentless onslaught of Western scientific materialism” and “dogmatic male-dominated religion”? Back [...]
Archive: January 4, 2006
George Johnson reviews a new Dennett book on religion, which I will have to read, unfortunately. Here we go again. Get a grip on it, Dan. First, Johnson is a closet Darwin heretic, the ghostwriter it seems of ‘At Home in the Universe’. So I won’t trust what [...]
Addressing the issue of Islam critically in several posts over the last few days requires some clarification, viz. that this is a view from the left.
The questions of immigration, and Islam in Europe are of course highly controversial, and many rightists have addressed the question earning the label of ‘Islamophobia’ from the left, which has [...]
Comment on Conservative Confusion of Western Civilization….
James said,
July 20, 2009 at 5:53 pm ·
” Islam has exactly the potential that emerged with Protestantism from Catholicism to be a secular religious matrix in the context of modernization. In fact, it might be too fair to hope for such an outcome in what seems a religious culture [...]
We had a series of posts on sufism (’sufi hyenas’), Islam, and the perils of Islamophobia a while back, about when Londonistan by Melanie Philipps appeared: Blog search on Londonistan
Hucklebird comment on Certain?
I think Hucklebird has gone totally astray on the freedom issue. First, the discussions of the Discete Freedom Sequence in the eonic effect are about historical patterns of data. There are givens of history, so what’s the argument?
Next, conservative critiques of modern freedom are mostly baloney. Either you believe in democracy and [...]
Debating ‘methodological naturalism’ is confusing in and of itself, but then we must deal with the hopeless quagmire created by Christian beliefs in particular miracles. Discussion ends, and the terms of the debate are bent out of shape.
So while the stance of Darwinists is lamentable, the manufactured antithesis of Christian dogmatists forces them into negations [...]
A Sufi myth: Fourth Ways,…and The Great Freedom Sutra
This essay from World History And The Eonic Effect might help those confused by the way in which modernity is made to seem devoid of ’spiritual’ content, when in fact it has the key to a true form of spirituality. Human self-consciousness in freedom has all the [...]