I normally quick scan something before I read to learn. I see parallels with us one after another.

Here's one we wouldn't be---"Judaeo - Christian" God. We say there's no such idea in Christianity. Christianity (according to us) cannot be combined with anything else or it's contaminated/cancelled. The Adamites weren't Hebrew, as Hebrews were only one tribe in the descendants of Adam. The Hebrews is a tribe that was fallen away form being Adam as all other middle eastern tribes . The Jews today are still a fallen entity and can't be linked to Adam except genetically. They carried forward the idea/concept of a non-material entity but the knowledge of Adam was lost. Today their religion is even different then that, and no different then any other religion on the planet as the Hebrews of today accept the term "God". Being that Adam had no concept of god the term doesn't apply to Adam or Christianity. Christianity is the same as Adam but with additions in understanding. Technically then . Christianity also would have no concept of God. God is strictly a Euro attachment from their ignorance of climatic environment, basically. The Euro term merely means something that is not understood but greater then themselves as they had little material science knowledge. Christianity is not a matter of the material/physical sciences but rather a matter of the mental sciences. I may have mentioned before that Adam was the first Psycho dudes on planet earth that were know of, and farther advanced then even today. They counted the inner elements and found a total of 144. No one has more or less then the 144---that is what the equalness is that the Apostle points to that ---all are created equal. There 72 on the animal side and 72 opposites on the human side. You'll eventually see this number in the apocalypse as the measure of a man- relating to the spiritual as the full measure of ones personage.

But you'll have to make up you own mind as to what is what. We're not preachers and leave our input to the receiver to decide. You may be able to do better then we in time. We're not a tight together unit anymore for safety reasons so I may get some things a bit off.

The application of the term can be put on the old testament as I see it also. I didn't think of that time period. That's what makes the book a real darn'er at times. They were in the fallen state at those times so the combo is likely what produces the ideas of Christianity in the world of today. That's probably why the book looks to be nonsense, and under those terms it would be as I would see it.

I'd would be happy to join in on the site. Keep me informed.  

 

I don't know what the lyricist intends but it certainly could be read as an expression of a similar idea.

I think that our beliefs about Jesus say more about us than they do about the man who (I believe) inspired the myth. We can't know that man and we can't know for sure whether he existed. We don't have a time machine. He is a mystery. And where there is mystery we fill the gaps from our own imagination.

As a pantheist, I believe that God is everything, that what we experience as our conscious identity is nothing more than a skin on the surface of who we are, that in a very real sense every single one of us is the entire universe because we are made up of the same stuff as the universe which is everywhere in essence the same. I can't prove that in any empirical sense, but I have yet to find any other concept which enables me to integrate what I know of life in a way which has no inconsistencies. To me pantheism of this sort is essential to holism and thus essential to true rationality. So if there was this man whose words profoundly changed the world, then I fill the mystery with myself and put forward the view that he was a pantheist.

If someone lives in fear of God, i.e. from my perspective in fear of their true self, then there will be a huge barrier (as R. D. Laing put it "fifty feet of solid concrete" ) between themselves and this interior reality. Any contact between this realm and their conscious mind, through cracks in the concrete, will be of something so alien and bizarre that they will interpret it in supernatural magical terms. I know what this is like as I've experienced a psychotic episode. But psychotic episodes are temporary. The magical thinking which characterises religion can last for many centuries because it is shared. If I were to see an hallucination and talk about it I would probably be locked up in a mental hospital and given anti-psychotic medication. When some little girl a few centuries ago saw an hallucination of Mary it was culturally embraced and preserved as something valuable. Such hallucinations are valuable as a kind of blasting through from the poverty of strictly linear, rather than holistic, reasoning, but their value depends on rational interpretation, not on worship. Those who are in this position - perhaps the majority of people in the world today - the Jesus mystery (or whatever figure of mystery is central to their belief system) will be viewed in this light as a magical figure. The entirety of the literature of Jesus was written by people in this position.

Then we have those whose state of alienation is so great that they live their whole lives (accept perhaps when they are asleep and dreaming) on the most superficial level of existence. Like the pantheist they don't believe in the supernatural, but they fear their own deeper selves, they cling to mechanistic linear reasoning because they are even more afraid of the pantheist's God than the religious are. It is notable that scientists who embrace holism are very often not afraid to use the term "God" though they use it (as Einstein did) in a non-magical non-supernatural sense. To embrace holism (something which the fearless pursuit of rationality makes essential) means to acknowledge that selfishness, egotism, aggression, greed, etc. are pathological, are forms of sickness. This then leads us back to religion which said that "sin", i.e. selfishness, was against God. This doesn't mean that religious dogma is sound, far from it, it is often riddled with the pathological hierarchical, superstitious, anti-sex, anti-woman, etc. prejudices of the men who wrote it down. But there is still in the true holistic integration of rational understanding something which terrifies many - the naked face of a non-supernatural God of which we are all a part. It is easy to dismiss the God of the magical thinkers, but not so easy to dismiss the pantheistic God which lies at the heart of who we are and to which the path of scientific enquiry will inevitably lead us. And so those who are afraid of reality in this way, will look at the mystery of the man who may have talked about this reality and perhaps try to prove that he didn't exist, just as they would perhaps like to prove that their own deeper self does not exist, that deeper self which is capable of pulling the carpet out from beneath their ordered but delusional existence. 

The memories are personal to us. The thoughts are a mixture of things we have taken in from others and our personal response to them. Our feelings, while personal, come from a more limited palate of biological tendencies which we share.

What lies beneath these things is what we are born with - the experience of not just being alive but being life itself.

One could argue that it is not so much a deeper self which can pull the carpet out from underneath us as reality itself. Much of our thinking is dishonest and based around attempts to normalise our neurosis. So when I talk about our deeper self, I mean a consciousness which combines the perception of being life itself with an holistic and rational ability to integrate information about ourselves and our environment. My belief is that such an honest awareness and complete acceptance of factual reality are unifying tendencies. There can be many lies and delusions, there can only be one reality, and everyone who lives there is united in peace and love and creativity with everyone else who lives there. What divides us from each other is that we are internally divided against ourselves. It may be our sexuality or our mortality that we don't accept. Some people seek to become more "spiritual" by trying to transcend the physical. But we are our bodies. Our bodies are our deeper selves. But our bodies are expressions of the creative principle of the universe, expressions of life itself. It is through bodily perception that we can feel we are God. Our mortality and our sexuality and everything else which religions have struggled to transcend or repress, are intrinsic to what God is, like a crawling blob which becomes more complex and more capable through a process of death and birth, and which is motivated by the desire for pleasure. But there is a purpose and meaning running through all of this - that each level reaches a higher level through integration of individuals into communities which become the individual of the higher level. Thus some single-celled organisms found an advantage in forming a group which eventually became an multi-cellular organism. And now we are on the verge of forming a single entity made up of all humans. One way or another this will happen, and this is what I mean about the carpet being pulled out. We will find that our superficial concepts of who we are will not longer cut it as society changes in ways our philosophy can't account for.

Interestingly science fiction depictions of the unification of the species tend to emphasise enslavement, suppression of thought and uniformity. These are actually the qualities which keep us divided now. We are too fearful to behave as truly free individuals, we cling to restrictive dogmas and we try to conform to what we view as social expectations. The body is a whole comprised of individual cells. if those cells were uniform and had no ability to respond spontaneously to need but required orders to come from some central point in all situations, the body would not work. The way to become a working entity is throw off fear, dogma and conformity and operate on the basis of genuine personal best interest and the pursuit of good feelings. It feels good to be in loving communication with our fellows and it feels good to solve problems and it feels good to find a deeper understanding of how the world works. Each of us has our own unique talents and the whole can only prosper if they are unleashed. This is the opposite of Borg enslavement.

How does evolution ensure that we will never be a singular entity? There are examples of singular entities composed of individual entities in nature. We are made up of cells after all. And a beehive is essentially a single entity. Where there is a survival advantage to a group becoming a whole it will happen. The reason we are social animals is because it is easier for us to survive in groups than as lone individuals. But our neurosis compromises the group in a way that it does not, for example, amongst a troop of bonobos.

The chances of us surviving by the way we live now are zero.

Who said anything about morality? I'm talking about self-interest - survival advantage and the pleasure principle. I don't see a bacterial super-colony as being moral or being a symbol for any form of morality. I see them grouping together because doing so confers survival advantages and because if feels good. They don't have intelligence so how could they have a concept like "morality"?

Morality was a human invention which grew out of our neurosis. Only when we began to feel bad about ourselves and question our self worth did we need to invent a system by which we could try to "prove" our "virtue" by doing "good" and avoiding "evil". This is the personal reason for morality. The social reason is that it provided a structure for enforced discipline to keep society from disintegrating under the influence of the aggression and selfishness which were (and are) entirely a product of our mental suffering. The non-neurotic individual needs no morality. To such an individual the pleasure principle (supported by the use of intelligence to avoid situations in which a short term pleasure may lead to longer term suffering - e.g. eating lots of ice-cream is pleasant until you get sick) is a sufficient system of guidance. This leads to a cooperative and creative society characterised by love - i.e. open, honest, spontaneous and generous communication - because friendship feels good and creating feels good. It is neurotic feelings such as irrational fear and guilt etc., arising from poor understanding of the world and ourselves, which impedes our natural desire to create and be friends with everyone.

When I talk of a pantheistic God, I'm not talking of something which has any moral implications. Nothing can harm the creative principle of the universe. If life ceases on earth it doesn't matter to the universe, because no doubt life exists elsewhere. If the universe is infinite then all of us are infinitely unimportant to the universe. Death and suffering are just part of the creative process. It doesn't matter to the universe, but it does matter to us as individuals. We care whether we survive. We care whether or not we suffer. And it is for our own sake that we should do what will maximise our chances of survival and minimise our suffering.

It depends on your definition of "good" and "bad". I don't see the need for these distinctions when it comes to the pleasure principle. There is pleasure and there is unpleasure. We seek pleasure not because it is "good" but because it is pleasure.

Of course the pleasure principle plays an important role in morality. While a neurotic fear of our own desire for pleasure can lead to a masochistic seeking out of pain, whether as a sexual fetish or a religious observance, mostly we seek pleasure or try to avoid unpleasure through our moral choices. This is most obvious in religions which believe in Heaven and Hell. But even if we don't believe in after-worldly reward or punishment, we may avoid "bad" behaviour to avoid unpleasant feelings of guilt (think of a vegan who wants to avoid adding to the suffering of animals) or pursue "good" behaviour because it makes it possible for us to feel good about being a "good" person. But guilt and pride are neurotic symptoms. The conscience is something which was made necessary only by our neurosis. Only when we developed the desires for anti-social behaviour did we need to develop an internal carrot and stick system to control those desires.

What do you mean by "prescribed ways"? Their behaviour is limited by their physical nature. They can't fly because they don't have wings. And they are not going to do something which is directly destructive to them, such as give up taking in nutrients. But I see no evidence that they are following dictatorial orders. They don't have intelligence so one presumes they can't think about what is in the best interests of the colony. I assume they follow their own interests and these happen to coincide with the interests of the colony.

I don't believe that genes determine behaviour. Genes determine the physical structure of the organism and the organism's behaviour is a free improvisation with its environment. If you have a bunch of species where most individuals are alike then their behaviour is likely also to be alike because the palette of behaviours for that physical entity is limited. What is a bird going to do but fly and breed and eat and shit? It has no hands to make anything more sophisticated than a nest. And if a species of bird always makes the same kind of nest without learning how is that not explained by the fact that the same kind of brain confronted with the same kind of problem is going to come up with the same kind of solution? This is not the case with humans. We vary greatly and our environments vary greatly and we have great mental capacity and imagination. A good deal of our conformity is due to a neurotic desire to not go against the tide. I'm not writing this because my genes tell me to, but because they have given me the tools with which to do it.

It sometimes seems to me that a lot of people are afraid of freedom. They free themselves from the dictatorship of God only to replace that with the dictatorship of the gene. Nobody and nothing dictates to me.

What could be deeper than the heart of the universe? Creation is the essence of the universe. When I talk about getting in touch with our deeper self I mean realising that we are a creative expression of the universe. This is deeper than our dogma-obsessed neurotic mind, which is really very superficial as anyone who has ever had a psychotic episode (or presumably taken LSD) knows. There are powerful forces of the creative imagination which lie just below the surface of the "rational" mind.

I don't believe that it has ever existed for Homo Sapiens. I'm no paleo-anthropologist. I don't know my early human and proto-human species very well. But I think the human neurosis may well have had its origins well before the time of Homo Erectus or the Neanderthals. I don't know. Certainly well before Homo Sapiens. All known civilisations have been deeply neurotic, characterised by egotism, sexual repression, selfishness and aggression. To get an idea of what a pre-neurosis proto-human civilisation might have been like we would have to look at our nearest currently living genetic relatives the bonobos. They have a very strong communal culture with no pair bonding, little aggression, and group harmony maintained through unrestrained sharing of genital pleasure. My view is that our proto-human ancestors would have been even more harmonious than that as humans have a longer nurturing period.

Now you might ask : If you are talking about something which has not existed through the whole of human history how are we going to make it happen now? And the answer is that we are not going to make it happen. It is a natural process which can't be stopped. The universe unfolds in the only way that it can. Systems become disordered in the process of jumping to a higher level of order. That is what we have been going through during the whole of human history. The fact that belief in long standing dogmas such as religion are breaking down is a symptom of the process. The old mental armouring is breaking down so that something organic and spontaneous and healthy can manifest itself. It is only the old neurotic structures, personal and social, which stand between us and the improvisation of paradise which is our deepest desire.

Getting back to Jesus, this is what I think he meant when he said : "Now learn this lesson from the fig tree: As soon as its twigs get tender and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near." Matthew 24:32 Religion and other forms of dogmatic rigid unfree thinking are like the hard bark of a tree. They are dead. But the dead bark protects the tree through the harsh winter. The first sign that the harsh winter is over (in this case the harsh winter of humanity's journey through neurosis) the first sign is that the tree begins to express itself freely and spontaneously again by putting out fresh leaves (i.e. people begin to think and behave openly and spontaneously rather than in conformity with old conservative ways). Of course this is something which happens periodically in greater or lesser manifestations, i.e. ancient Greece, the Enlightenment, the Sixties. In each of those cases the repressive forces ended up being stronger, but today I'm not sure that they are. And the other thing which makes things different now is that we are reaching the limits of sustainability for our society.

 

I'm sure that could be fun, but I'm not the patriarchal kind. I'm much happier serving people than bossing them around, which is why I've worked 30 years in a subsidiary position in a library serving under women and serving women customers. That is where I'm happy. To be the boss of anyone, female or male, would be repugnant to me. Much as I love sex, sexual pleasure is not necessary to socialise me. I already am attuned to the other rewards of cooperative living. But there are many bossy men and women out there who might lighten up if they had some erotic pleasure shared with them more freely. One of the problems with patriarchy is that it represses women's sexuality even more than men's sexuality. Pakistan is a case in point. It may be legal to have an arranged marriage with a 16 year old girl, but a woman who commits adultery may get stoned. Our society is much better. While women who don't conform their sexuality to patriarchal expectations may be called "sluts" they are not legally prosecuted. A sexually free society is not just one where men can be as promiscuous as they want to be. Women very often have stronger sexual desires than men. But one can also abstain. I've only ever had sex with one woman and then only about three or four times in my fifty years. Being free of sexual repression means being comfortable about your sexual desires and enjoying having them, it doesn't require acting on those desires. Freedom means that if you want to do something you can do it and if you don't want to do something you don't have to. And since the society I describe is necessarily non-hierarchical, nobody can have a patriarchal relationship to anyone else.

I'm talking about people doing what they want to do, not what someone else wants them to do. If people looked to me as some kind of a leader I would feel that I was a failure. I'm already relatively happy and satisfied with my life, but it would make me happy to see freedom and happiness come to others less fortunate, which is why I share the ideas which have helped me. But I do it using a pseudonym because I don't want my life complicated by attracting attention to myself.

And, just for the record, I've never tried to chat a woman up at a bar. 

I'll try posting a reply to each comment in its own post. I just spent over three hours writing a hugely detailed response to the entire post only to have the screen freeze and lose the lot.

If I chose to play a cooperative serving role, that doesn't mean I'm being dictated to. I can be quite stubborn if someone asks me to do something I think is not appropriate. But I like to help people and to be a part of making things happen. What is more fun that being in a position to grant people's wishes? And I don't want to be in a position of authority because I hate dictating to others as much as I hate being dictated to.

You say that comment is arrogant. Sometimes my writing can come across that way. It is free expression. Very often I write something down and then ask myself if it is true afterwards. And there is some heat for me in the question of genetic determinism. I was a disciple for a while of an Australian biologist named Jeremy Griffith who argued that the application of the selfish gene theory to humans was an attempt to evade acknowledging that our selfishness is psychological in origin and pathological. Fair enough. I find attempts to explain human selfishness in terms of strategies to maximise breeding opportunities pretty ludicrous. But Griffith tried to replace that with another form of genetic determinism, one which said that we have an inbuilt genetic orientation to "ideal behaviour", which, in his view, includes selflessness, monogamy and heterosexuality, and that conflict between these instincts and the conscious mind's need to experiment with self-determination has lead to selfishness, egotism, aggression, and non-reproductive sex, which he sees as "an attack on innocence". I battled with his ideas for a long time. (It would take too long to explain why they were important to me, but I will say that my current views are built partially from ideas I took from Griffith and, in same cases, reversed in order to make them fit my observations of life and personal experiences. To my mind I came to an understanding of things partly by wrestling with his unsound theories.) So when I follow up a comment about genetic determinism with a statement that "Nobody and nothing dictates to me" it is as if to say : "Fuck you, Jeremy Griffith! Fuck you, selfish gene theorists! etc." And then there is also the fact that psychiatrists sometimes insist that conditions like bipolar disorder are genetically determined. If I believed that, rather than seeing my bipolar disorder as a learned habit, would I have been as effective at minimising its disruption to my life by learning to understand the way that habit works?

Now I've said that I write something and then ask myself if it is true. In this case it isn't quite accurate. My flatmate's cat does dictate to me. I hate letting her in and out of the house, but her meowing is so annoying I can't bring myself not to.

I wouldn't imagine that most women would want to have sex with a smelly old man. A smelly old woman wouldn't be my first choice as a sexual partner. But female sexual desires vary greatly. Neurosis can produce the extremes of frigidity and nymphomania. Most women fall between those extremes.

When I was young I thought that men liked sex more than women. I thought that only men wanted to look at pornography. And I thought that women would be disgusted by the fact that I masturbated. I was the dirty man and they were the pure women.

I haven't done any sociological research on the subject. Maybe the women I chat to on the internet and my friend who runs Australia's premier porn site are freakish exceptions, but their sexual appetites far exceed my own. That doesn't mean they are not fussy about sexual partners. Some of them prefer women. There seems to me something very healthy and life-affirming about the way they enjoy the pleasures their bodies can provide them with.

My view is that our basic nature is to be bisexual. I think emotional needs, fixations and inhibitions shape that basic nature into our particular sexual orientation. I base this theory on a few things, but one is my observation of myself. I'm aware that I have desires for sensual contact with other men, but also that I have inhibitions against acting on those desires. While I find young women often very attractive and get great visual pleasure from their appearance, this doesn't mean that affection from an older and less "attractive" woman isn't immensely pleasurable. And what I find is that, the less neurotic I'm feeling, the less important physical appearance is to me feeling attracted to a woman and the more likely I am also to feel some attraction to men. And things like smell also are likely to bother me less the less neurotic I'm feeling.

The woman I had a brief relationship with was 18 years older than myself. We were good friends and I used to go to quiz nights with her and come over to her house to watch movies. I slept in her bed with her several times without either of us initiating any sexual activity. It was the convenient place to sleep when it was too late to drive me home. Sometimes her foot would touch mine and then she would pull it away again nervously. It was only because, while on a bus trip, I told her that I liked playing footsies with her in bed that she admitted she pulled her foot away because she didn't want to scare me by letting me think she was trying to seduce me. I said I wouldn't mind if she did. I was in my mid-30s and still a virgin. I'm afraid to show sexual interest in a woman in a social situation, because I'm afraid of making them feel uncomfortable. I feel the need to know before hand that it is O.K. She was having sex with two other guys at the time, neither of whom knew about the other or that I was having sex with her as well.

What I found from this brief relationship was that I was more interested in cuddling and fondling and playing around than I was in intercourse. That was O.K. and she said I was good at it, but it seemed like an anti-climax after the playful tenderness of foreplay. And I think this is a tendency with me. I say that I have homosexual desires, but they are not for anal or oral sex. I just feel a desire sometimes to touch a man's skin or imagine a naked embrace. And this is the sort of thing I tend to think about with women too. I write about all forms of sex in my erotica, that's expected and I can get into it in that context. But when I feel attracted to a women I think of fondling her or embracing in bed rather than fucking. So this leaves me a little confused as to what to think of as a sexual desire. In terms of achieving orgasm the idea of mutual masturbation always seems more appealing than intercourse, just as intimate but more tender.

I think one of the things which confuses the issue of sexual repression is that sex can be used as a way of repressing the erotic. Rape is the extreme example - a fear of the erotic leading to an attack on the erotic core of the other individual. But sex can often be more about a boost to the ego than it is about tenderly sharing an erotic experience. Some people think in terms of "sexual conquests". The erotic is one of the things against which the ego may armour itself. Armoured sex provides an outlet for frustration but it is a form of repression of the erotic. In the tenderness of the erotic the ego temporarily loses itself. But there is also repression of armoured sex. Just because it is an attack on the erotic doesn't mean that it may not be therapeutic in an consensual situation. It is important to recognise that our neurosis can warp our sexual behaviour away from the act of love.

 

I just want to be myself. My writing is self-expression. I suppose if something I say is original and proves to be important to a few people, then I might be a leader in the sense of an innovator, someone who comes to something first.

 

But I'm not interested in trying to persuade people to behave in a particular way. My aim is to do what I can to help set people free to behave however they want to behave. My psychological writing consists of sharing personal experiences, suggesting ways of looking at things or possible ways of approaching problems and expressing theories which I make clear are nothing more then my personal opinion. I think our problems arise because we can't think straight. Our heads are a jumble of received ideas without coherent integrity or accountability to reality. We cling to these ideas because the exploration of free thought necessary to disentangle ourselves is scary. But if we are able to find the simple ideas which enable us to cut through all of that confusion and find a way of thinking which has integrity and reality, then we will be more emotionally secure and able to think more clearly and solve problems more easily. Its the difference between having a computer where everything is dumped all over the desktop in a jumble and one in which everything is filed away in a coherently organised system of folders which enables everything to be at your fingertips. Free thought is scary but my bipolar disorder has not allowed me to avoid it. Over the years I feel I've done a fair bit of work towards freeing my mind from dogma, untangling some of the confusion and learning to think more honestly and effectively. It is up to others to judge whether the writing which is the product of this free thought provides something useful in this way. I can come to a judgement based on my own experience, but the final judgement can only come from others.

 

The way I express this in my book is :

 

Joe Blow is a name used for someone who is nobody special. This is an appropriate pseudonym for me to use because it emphasises that I take no credit for any useful ideas or insights that might be contained in this work.

Nobody creates ideas or truths. They simply exist. We either see them or we don’t. And the fact that we may see them is not a sign of strength or achievement on our part. It takes an act of will to maintain a delusion, to cling to a belief in spite of any contrary evidence. But when we have useful ideas or discover truths it is often because we lack the will or the ability to protect ourselves against them.

I’ve never had a very effective ego, hence my history of depression and psychosis. I’m not a brave individual. I wouldn’t have gone to those frightening places if I had known how not to.

I’m only moderately intelligent. And also only moderately well-read.

I haven’t put much effort into any of this, beyond the effort we all put into keeping ourselves afloat emotionally.

So, to the extent that these ideas may be useful, it is a quality of the ideas themselves alone, and has nothing to do with the individual who gives expression to them. No doubt at this very moment many other individuals are expressing similar ideas, as any of us might if we learn to relax and be simply who we are and not who we think we should be.

 

The way I look at it, either people gain some benefit from my writing or they don't. If they do then I hope they enjoy it and put it to use in their own unique way. If they don't, I hope they find what they are looking for elsewhere. Some people, having read my book, have asked me for advice about something. (One young guy kept asking me about foreskin hygiene, which is nothing to do with anything mentioned in my book and something i know nothing about as I'm circumcised. I just kept directing him to websites with the info.) I felt uncomfortable, but tried to give them the best advice I could. I was very nervous, because I didn't know them or their situations beyond what little they told me. I was very aware that my advice might not be the right advice. But I couldn't not try to help them. Luckily that has happened only a few times. I like to talk with people about their lives and my life and share ideas, but giving advice when someone is dealing with a serious problem is something I don't feel comfortable with.

 

Don't follow leaders is my philosophy. Listen to what anyone has to say. Seek out differing view points. But always sift the wheat from the chaff. If something someone says makes sense to you then put it to use, but don't latch onto someone and follow them because some of what they say impresses you. Of course leaders and sheep is a major part of religion. The cult of personality and sheep-like behaviour isn't unknown among atheists either. Richard Dawkins has been compared to a rock star travelling around performing to his adoring followers. One person says : "Hey lets all deny the existence of the Holy Spirit on YouTube?" and people fall over themselves to be a part of the latest childish trend. But this is to be expected. Insecure people like to be a part of a group. Mass behaviour reassures them. I'm not keen on group identification. It discourages the full flowering of individuality and it tends to lead to division and conflict. But if people feel insecure for internal reasons or because they under attack socially, this kind of group identification is a necessary crutch. I hope that, in time, greater understanding of our psychology will help to heal these kinds of insecurity and people won't have to behave like sheep.

 

My reason for coming onto forums like this and debating with religious people and atheists is different from my reason for writing my books. I come here to test my ideas out. If I have a better understanding then I should be able to handle myself well in a debate. And I find such debate stimulating. By explaining my worldview to others I come to a better understanding of it myself. Critics are the refiner's fire for any idea. You've been tremendously helpful to me.

 

The only definition of guru which I would consider applying to myself is that which Keith Johnstone gives in his book Impro : Improvisation and the Theatre : "Students need a 'guru' who 'gives permission' to allow forbidden thoughts into their consciousness. A 'guru' doesn't necessarily teach at all. Some remain speachless for years, others communicate very cryptically. All reassure by example. They are people who have been into the forbidden areas and who have survived unscathed. I react playfully with my students, while showing them that there are as many dead nuns and chocolate scorpions inside my head as there are in anybody's, yet I interact very smoothly and sanely. It's no good telling the student that he isn't to be held responsible for the content of his imagination, he needs a teacher who is living proof that the monsters are not real, and that the imagination will not destroy you."

 

If you ask me a question, I try to answer it, that is how conversation works. You don't have to read my answers if you don't want to, that is up to you. For me the reason for replying is not because I care what you think of me but rather to meet the challenge you pose by your questions. I gain from the exercise.

It is very easy to stereotype a person you barely know. You have that skill down pat. To counter that stereotype with a well-rounded portrayal of one's self as a complex individual takes a little more effort, thought, honesty and "verbiage".

Some truths can be expressed fairly simply, some can't. Prejudice is always simple.

I'm not trying to bludgeon anyone with my words. If you find reading difficult please don't strain yourself.

Once again I find you jumping to conclusions. What makes you think I  would write on a discussion board at work? Do you do that? I was writing those replies at home as I always do.

Anyway, thank you for the stimulating debate. I've found it enjoyable and profitable.

Just a quick point Dana, I think Aussie is very transparent; he’s acknowledged the fact that he’s a writer many times in his posts, just as he advertises his website as his signature. My problem with Aussie’s writing is not his ‘crafting’ style or skill which is fine but the inconsistencies in content or message and meaning if you like.

As far as I can see there’s nothing stopping you or others opening up this thread and giving it new life right now.