Nature and the fall of man

Robin,I'm back briefly as the vacation gives me a little time. Either/or's are seductive rhetorical devices but do you really wish to limit your hypotheses in such a binary fashion?I get frustrated by the dominance of Christian literalism vs. science polarity on this forum. There are at least several alternatives. I have tried to give some sense of the nondual or advaita viewpoint, think Taoism, Buddhism, advaita Vedanta.Suffering and evil are major problems for people. What if the solution is not at the level of the manifest universe of space, time, matter, and energy? What if like a Shakespearan play polarity is an absolute requirement for human existence?But I will offer the majestic poetics of the great Bard: The great non dual traditions are far from the literalism of either religion or science. They point to a solution that cannot be formulated by language. Once you assume the reality of the "self" and identify it with the organism you are then in the realm of duality and many paradoxes.Literalism attempts to define the paradoxes away.Non dualism points to a solution that is prior to manifestation. The solution is not at the level of the problem.This I offer to you as a third approach to your dilemma. Look to the source of consciousness not to the play of manifestation for meaning.
I believe I've suggested the Heart of Awareness Sutra to you before. There is a very good translation of it available on the internet. It's a very succinct statement of Vedantic Advaitism.You argue well. Hope this adds to your fun!lfen

Rev,To be semantically hip I suggest you recognize that there exists variations in Christian doctrine. I would guess it best to ask Randman what his interpretation is as that I would think be the definition he knows best and should be able to defend in depth.The sorry state of religious semantics may be what led Wittgenstein to write, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent."Try and get a functional definition of "sinful" and "sin", and what the abstraction "perfection" refers to. They are as far as I can tell relative referents that speakers employ to a number of ends. I suspect the function of all this is a way to psychologically sooth a sense of suffering by a mental picture of a happier future supported by an extensive social network of the church. "I can be reassured my desires will be met because all these people tell me they believe they will."Once an individual has invested in this reassurance to the degree the religion they subscribe to uses literal textual interpretations then science may be perceived as a threat to that believer's happiness. The rationality of science is thus a threat to fundamentalist muslims as well as christians but also to UFO believers, etc.The OP for this thread stated the problem in either/or terms which set a tone of black and white but there is a lot of variations in this problem and the solutions that humans have proposed. I know of no instances of an extra human i.e. divine being writing anything at all let alone a solution to this percieved problem. I know that at various times and places human has said things they claimed they received from extra human sources. Often they may sincerely believe that but every thing I've seen indicates the origin was from human brains. But human brains often seem to really go for these sorts of claims. Fall or no fall it's clear to me that humans are often irrational.lfen

The suffering is important. The Buddha emphasized the importance of suffering. In Buddhism suffering has a key function indicating the possibility of awakening, of motivating awakening.The realm of birth and death, called samsara, though it holds pleasure is fundamentally suffering. Literal western religions unfamiliar with nirvana attempt to imagine a samsara without suffering i.e. no birth and death hence the notions of paradise, eden, heaven as something in the past, the future, or celestial.Suffering is real. It should not be explained away however or cursed etc. but understood. The process of insight in suffering and into who suffers can lead to transformation and understanding.This is tangential to the purpose of your OP as I am introducing non Christian viewpoints.lfen

Faith,It's been quite a few years since I read much in Zen (a Japanese sect of the Mahayana Dhyana sect) of Buddhism. Sartori is I think a Japanese word that was used in regard to enlightenment or enlightenment experiences. I understand this to be an experience so it's not the final awakening as there is still an ego or self left that returns to "possessing" an experience. The descriptions are very rough tools to point attention somewhere else and this is made even harder because the nondual is not an experience! The so called "experience" of the non dual is the dropping away of the illusion of a concrete individual "experiencer".This dropping away is something that happens and I think has happened to individuals in many religions. In the case of Buddhism it happened to the founder and so was fundamental to the development of the practise.I've not read all you've written here so my impression may be wrong but I don't think the Catholic contemplative traditions of Christianity are of great interest to you. However that is one tradition within Christianity that has resulted in awakening.Many times here I have recommended Bernadette Roberts book The Experience of No Self as the best Christian treatment of this subject that I know of. Well, the "Fall" as an explanation is satisfying to you and to many others. It never satisfied me, and you read others on the forum who find it lacking. I'm not sure what you mean by "nothing explains". Perhaps you are saying that you find all other explanations meaningless? Certainly different religions as well as philosophies offer explanations. One example would be karma.lfen

Rev,A thought struck me reading that sentence. Does the concept of "original sin" simply refer to the fact that every human has the possibility of doing things like that and the story of the Fall imagines that at one time humans either didn't have that capacity or perhaps didn't know they could do those things?There does seem to be some relationship of suffering and sin. At least some of the things designated as "sinful" result in suffering. The idea that one time life was idyllic is found in many ancient origin stories. I think it expresses psychological longings, wish fulfilments, etc. But those of literal bent choose to believe that life without suffering is actually possible and was the norm a long time ago. Ah well ...lfen

Brian,Faith is not the only fundamentalist (I am using the term to include the few Muslims literalist who have posted here as well as Mormon and I don't know who else)to read the old books as absolutely literally true.I'm not sure those who passed the traditions along or the scribes who wrote believed it was true in the sense that modern history understands the term. But it doesn't matter. There are millions of people it appears who can live today and yet mentally prefer the old beliefs and take them to be literally true. Amazing but I've read enough here on the forum to believe it that it happens a lot more than I would have thought.lfen

Linear,I'd like to toss in a 6th possiblity that the fundamentalist God is a early model of reality that for a number of deep psychological reasons is more reassuring to a large number of people than later refinements of understanding.Because of some situations I've become aware of I've been studying about victims of abuse. One interesting finding is that some of them blame themselves for the abuse because they believe they were bad and deserved it. This is particularly true for children who are abused by caregivers. They seem to have a need to preserve the authority and "goodness" of the parent or parent figure.Fritz Perls was the first place I encountered this idea decades ago that the priests of Judaism had hit on inducing their followers to retroflect their anger and assume blame for anything bad that happened to them. Instead of being angry with God and his priests they were encouraged to feel guilty and unworthy. So the conviction of guilt supports the power structure.I am now seeing that this psychological vulnerability of humans is more widespread than I thought and thus is probably deeper and more fundamental to our brains than I had suspected.lfen

Okay, but that just shifts the problem a bit. I mean it seems to me that at least some of the fundamentalist here assert that the God of the bible has set up standards of absolute good. Yet, for example it was good for Joshua and his army to kill the infants of Jericho. Yet killing infants is supposedly wrong.Well, unless the priests, prophets, or scribes dictate that Jehovah approved it? It seems to me like the fundamentalist assumption always end up somewhere in contradiction.lfen

I'm not sure how many people claim to live entirely by conscious decision. It's very clear to me that consciousness depends on the total organism and most of the critical functions are not directly under the control of conscious, like heart beat, blood pressure, digestion etc.The ego doesn't create itself. The question is where does the ego get its sense of the world? The ego is always part of a system by birth or other factors and participate in one or another of the major or perhaps minor systems of belief. Some egos are largely influenced by the rather recent emerging attempts at rational scientific explanation of the universe while even more are influenced primarily by more traditional systems.I don't regard humans as particularly rational. Rather rationality is a rather recent development in our history. Prior to that and concurrent with it we are animals and it is our biological organism that primarily functions. Sometimes that function is enhanced by rational consciousness and other times it is impaired by it. It is so confusing I have some sympathy with those who choose an absolute belief system that assures the ego that it is contained within a system that works for it and can be understood by it.lfen

mmm, possibly? but probably not Over my life time I've had more than one, lost count of how many. Of what interest is it to you?

Faith,Have you a succinct statement, yours, or from a source you approve of that defines this choice? What you, or fundamentalist Christians mean by choosing for or against God?I think this may be a key issue in understanding why it appears to me anyway that most Christians deny the validity of other religions, for example Hinduism, but it could be other religions, whose adherents believe in God and are devout but have different sacred texts or traditions.It may not be possible to provide a brief statement but I thought maybe there is.Thank you,lfen

Hows this as an example: lfen