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Osho Meditation

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 14:15:00 -0000

Osho an Indian spiritual Guru shares about Meditation

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Osho an Indian spiritual Guru shares about Meditation posted by joyous

Tags: guru india indian life meditation osho

Posted by: joyous

Don't Want to Let You Go - Associated Content

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 19:35:12 -0000

This is a religious poem written by Alexis Sullivan. In this poem the author expresses the desire to remain with Christ forever. It is simply a declaration to never let Him go.

Tags: christianity encouragement inspiration

Posted by: lexies17

One Last Chance - Associated Content

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 06:25:17 -0000

This is a religious short story written by Alexis Sullivan. In this story a prostitute attends church and receives Christ.

Tags: and gets god's inspiration love mercy prostitute redemption salvation saved

Posted by: lexies17

Is There No One? - Associated Content

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 06:23:26 -0000

This is a religious poem written by Alexis Sullivan. In this poem God has taken a look around and seen the despair and desolation flooding the world and begs his Children to take action and spread His Word.

Tags: god's helping others salvation spreading word

Posted by: lexies17

Come Away with Me - Associated Content

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 06:22:47 -0000

This is a religious poem written by Alexis Sullivan. In this poem God speaks and asks his children to dwell with him in his Secret Place.

Tags: god god's place secret spending time with

Posted by: lexies17

Love - Associated Content

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 06:13:41 -0000

This is a religious short story written by Alexis Sullivan. In this story God (called Love) has created Earth, watches our birth, is with us throughout our life, and holds us when our life ends and we reach heaven.

Tags: being god god's heaven love with

Posted by: lexies17

Flight of the Butterfly - Associated Content

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 06:08:09 -0000

This is a religious short story written by Alexis Sullivan. In this story a young woman lives an empty and incomplete life until she receives Christ and experiences a life-changing transformation and becomes a new person.

Tags: butterfly god's inspiration love mercy salvation transformation

Posted by: lexies17

Mercy - Associated Content

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 06:05:22 -0000

This is a religious short story written by Alexis Sullivan. In this story a man has lived an incomplete life and after years of searching for meaning he waits in the Room of Despair when he is saved by Christ.

Tags: god's inspiration love mercy salvation

Posted by: lexies17

Saved - Associated Content

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 06:01:33 -0000

This is a religious short story written by Alexis Sullivan. In this story a man's spirit is being tormented by Satan in the Room of Hopelessness until He is rescued from Satan's grasp by Christ.

Tags: god's inspiration love mercy salvation

Posted by: lexies17

The Desert - Associated Content

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 05:56:49 -0000

This is a religious short story written by Alexis Sullivan. In this story an ordinary man is living his life but in the "spirit realm" his spirit is aimlessly wandering a barren desert until he saved by Christ.

Tags: forgiveness god's inspiration love mercy salvation

Posted by: lexies17

Words from Him: Come Back - Associated Content

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 05:55:04 -0000

This is a religious monologue written by Alexis Sullivan. In this monologue God is speaking and He asks His children to return to Him.

Tags: god god's inspiration love mercy returning salvation to

Posted by: lexies17

Love, What is Love? - Associated Content

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 05:51:14 -0000

This is a romantic blog written by Alexis Sullivan. In this blog the author expresses confusion over what love is and what causes it.

Tags: causes is love what

Posted by: lexies17

FAITH FORENSICS

Tue, 27 May 2008 23:05:31 -0000

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Tags: bible culture journey religion spiritual theology

Posted by: stech1

The Use of Cross-References in Bible Study

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 02:08:30 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

"The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself: and therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any Scripture ... it must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly."

Tags: links

Posted by: stech1

Wayne Hudson,"THE ENLIGHTENMENT CRITIQUE OF‘RELIGION’.

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 18:27:06 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

In the context of the early seventeenth century Hobbes can be read as a political Calvinist who unquestionably supported a

Christian

Commonwealth, provided it was regulated by the state.

Whereas Spinoza sought to limit harm done by religion, the English deists sought to show that revealed religion could not differ from natural religion and that there were no rational grounds for accepting mysterious doctrines or miraculous stories simply because it was claimed that were revealed.

he dominant pattern of thought in France, to which even those who disagreed with it tended to respond, alleged that natural religion taught every human being some conception of a Supreme Being and also the rudiments of morality, whereas Christianity, in the sense of a positive religion based on priestcraft, was contrary to reason, harmful to society, and discredited by the discoveries of historians, travellers and natural scientists.

For Hegel religion was the self-knowing and the self-relationship of spirit (Geist). It was not merely the relationship of the finite consciousness to the infinite, but the self-consciousness of absolute spirit mediated in and through finite consciousness: “The simple concept that we have established is the self-consciousness of the absolute spirit, its self-consciousness of being for itself as spirit”.[8]

eligion remains as a form of representation (Vorstellung), but philosophy makes possible a new level of comprehension of it.[9] And religion survives the transformation, in the sense that it remains within philosophy as something preserved at a higher level (aufhebt), not something left behind or cancelled. Hence Hegel wrote that ‘religion can exist without philosophy, but philosophy cannot exist without religion, for it includes religion in itself’ (Enz.,Vorrede zur zweiten Ausgabe, 12).

Religion for Feuerbach was the self-alienation of human consciousness, the projection of the human essence as other (Wartofsky 1977: 217).

that philosophy itself was not an uncontaminated source by which religion could be criticised.

Religion conceals from human beings the real tasks that confront them; it also reconciles human beings to the world in which they suffer and sanctions it. Even worse, religion robs human beings of their dignity and renders them sheep-like; it also perverts the natural relationships and proportions of human life by repressing and transposing into a heavenly mode important human dimensions such as sexuality.

Against Feuerbach, he insisted that there was no abstract ‘human essence’, that the human essence was only the ensemble of social relations, and that religious feeling was always a social product.[15]

he argued that the ‘essence’ of religion was not to be found in any ‘essence of man’ but in the material world which was already in existence

Of course, as is well known, Marx characterised religion as the opiate (not opium) of the people, the illusory happiness which consoles and comforts them in their suf

ferings.

e ‘heart of a heartless world’, ‘the sigh of a distressed creature’, a protest against misery, and, most important of all, ‘the spirit of a spiritless condition’.[18]

Marx’s critique of religion was weakened by his lack of clarity about how religion related to the world that produced it.

The religious reflex of the real world can only vanish, when the practical relations of everyday life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible, reasonable relations with regard to his fellow men and to Nature.[23]

Marx ‘s contribution was to shift the focus from the critique of religion itself to the critique of the world in which religion arises.

Marx’s shift implies that religion arises from objective rather than subjective causes, and not out of free but mistaken decisions of human beings. It also implies that the traditional kind of criticism of religion will prove ineffective as long as such conditions continue to exist, and that the true overcoming of religion results from transforming its secular basis, not from criticisms of religious ideas and institutions.

Marx's theory is that man's obsession with religion is based upon a social world that leaves man wanting. Thus, creating the need for some belief that there is meaning and satisfaction transcendent of his earthly confines.
posted by stech1

Marx’s claim that religion is epiphenomenal in so far as it is determined by the socio-economic structure in which it is found, does not exclude the possibility that the negative character of religion results from the negativity of contexts that condition it, and not from the practice of transcendent projection.

Nietzsche was a bitter critic of superstitious belief in other-worldly powers. He was certainly a bitter critic of religion in the sense of superstition and belief in other-worldly powers.

Similarly, for Nietzsche, humanity projected its impossibilities, and not its possibilities, into the God topos, and this topos then made humanity ashamed of its own finitude. Hence, for Nietzsche, religion was not, as it was for Feuerbach, a necessary form of alienation on the way to a future reconciliation. For Nietzsche there was no possibility that human alienation could ever be overcome.

Nietzsche can be read as producing a non-metaphysical this-worldly religious outlook which says yes to life and affirms the eternal joy of becoming[28]

Here the crucial implication is that getting rid of all enchantment would be a mistake, because raising the body to ‘spirit’ requires some form of disciplined practice, if not ‘religion’ of a traditional kind.

Tags: no_tag

Posted by: stech1

Responses to religion - LearningSpace - OpenLearn - The Open University

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:36:51 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

Natural religion was a form of religious belief founded on the observation of nature rather than on revelation or scriptural authority.

deism, a particular religious belief which holds that God designed and created the world, but so effectively that there would be no further need for his intervention.

Deist views were expressed by those who questioned conventional Christianity and who believed in a universal rather than a sectarian God.

‘argument from design’

Voltaire

According to this author, Voltaire was both a Universalist and Deist.
posted by stech1

others were keen to embrace a belief in God apparently grounded in empiricism.

empiricism

The doctrine that all knowledge is derived by sense experience.
posted by stech1

to challenge forms of belief based on an unthinking acceptance of tradition and authority.

Enlightened rational scrutiny could assist in religious reform without destroying faith.

one of the major developments of the Enlightenment was an increasingly secular approach to morality

Tags: enlightenment history religion

Posted by: stech1

Toward a Theological Understanding of Postmodernism, by Daniel J. Adams

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 20:02:05 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

Theologian Tyron Inbody compares it to "intellectual Velcro dragged across culture" which "can be used to characterize almost anything one approves or disapproves."(1)

Umberto Eco, himself classified as a postmodern writer due in large part to his novel The Name of the Rose, has written of postmodernism, "I have the impression that it is applied today to anything the users of the term happen to like."(2)

We might say that postmodernity is the condition in which late twentieth-century culture finds itself; postmodernism is a reflection upon that condition and a response to it.

The postmodern is, therefore, a movement which has arisen in reaction to the modernism of Western civilization.

the process of modernization continues to bring capitalism, urbanization, technology, telecommunications, and Western popular culture to virtually every corner of the globe.

the postmodern should not be considered surprising, for the postmodern is a way of recognizing that the world is in a period of transition. It is a world "that has not yet discovered how to define itself in terms of what is, but only in terms of what it has just-now-ceased to be."(6)

"unsecularization of the world."

In the words of one observer, people "have seen these. . . . false gods fail. So now we have the old gods coming back."(9)

as a re-enchantment of the world that modernity tried to dis-enchant."(10)

postmodernity is restoring the sacred.

religion lies at the very heart of the postmodern condition.

The postmodern era can best be understood in terms of four major characteristics: the decline of the West, the legitimation crisis, the intellectual marketplace, and the process of deconstruction.(12)

Today there is an attempt to recover the fragmented remains of these cultures as well as make certain that Western cultural hegemony comes to an end.

The first of these characteristics of postmodernity is the decline of the West.

he second characteristic of postmodernity is what has come to be known as the legitimation crisis.

In the postmodern era it is no longer taken for granted that development is unlimited or even that certain kinds of development are necessarily good.(15)

When previously held metanarratives are deprived of their authority, what follows is a plurality of values.

In Western culture this has resulted in a fragmentation of society into special interest groups based on ethnicity, religion, and economic issues.

this same fragmentation is taking place in the mainline denominations and in contemporary theology.(17)

With postmodernity, however, comes a momentous change; no longer can cultural and religious knowledge and value be effectively controlled by the intellectual and political elite. Satellite television networks, computers, and fax machines have made both censorship and control obsolete.

A fourth characteristic of postmodernity is what has come to be known as the process of deconstruction. Deconstruction is exactly what the meaning of the word implies; it is the taking apart of texts somewhat like the process of peeling away the layers of an onion.

Deconstruction seeks to examine a text from all possible perspectives so that individual bits of information are extracted and separated from each other.

Thus "deconstruction categorically asserts the absolute impossibility of attributing to any text one single ultimate meaning."(21)

This means that sacred texts, such as the Bible, do not have a single ultimate meaning nor are such texts necessarily authoritative.

that postmodernity is a socio-cultural state of being.

Without universal standards, the problem of the postmodern world is not how to globalize superior culture, but how to secure communication and mutual understanding between cultures.(24)

Things which are plural in the postmodern world cannot be arranged in an evolutionary sequence, or be seen as each other's inferior or superior stages; neither can they be classified as "right" or "wrong" solutions to common problems. No knowledge can be assessed outside the context of the culture, tradition, language game, etc. which makes it possible and endows it with meaning.

pluralism is perhaps the most obvious result of the postmodern condition, and deconstruction eschews all forms of ultimate meaning. It can be said, however, that "postmodernism arises out of the disillusionment with the modern ideals felt by European intellectuals after World War II."(28)

a rejection of classical metaphysical thought.

In theology this rejection of classical metaphysics has taken the form of a shift from deductive theology to inductive theology.

the second major theme which is a rejection of human autonomy.

heology does not "fall from the skies" but is constructed within a complex socio-cultural matrix.(31)

nonfoundationalism,(32) which seeks to disassociate theology from objective foundations such as Scripture, creeds and confessions, and ecclesiastical tradition.

A third theme in postmodernism is praxis, that is, serious concern for the practical ethical aspects of human life.

The fourth major theme is a strong anti-Enlightenment stance.

"Theologians are the last universalists"

Nonfoundationalism in theology would seek to minimize the importance of Scripture, creeds and confessions, and church tradition.

We must purify our minds of the restrictive Christendom-centered theologies that have blurred the universality of Jesus Christ. . .

It may be that the time has come for theology to move a bit toward universalism in an attempt to recover that delicate but ever so important balance.

Tags: postmodernism religion theology

Posted by: stech1

Boston Collaborative Encyclopedia of Western Theology: Sallie McFague

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 19:35:39 -0000

Tags: language religion theology

Posted by: stech1

Theology Today - Vol 40, No. 4 - January 1984 - BOOK REVIEW - Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 19:33:52 -0000

Tags: language religion theology

Posted by: stech1

CrossCurrents magazine: the best thought and writing on religion and the world.

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 19:17:03 -0000

Tags: ecumenicalism pluralism religion

Posted by: stech1