Eid al-Adha

Originally posted by sonhouse
To me it smacks of being man made, not something from a god.

Can you name a religious festival or commemoration that is not "man made"?

Originally posted by FMF
Can you name a religious festival or commemoration that is not "man made"?

My point is I don't think ANY religion is coming from a god. I can't deny the idea there might be gods or A god, but I sure as hell can deny what crap is passed off as coming from a god as told by humans. We have in Burma, or Myanmar as it is called now, Muslims and Buddhists are at each others throats, literally thousands killed, thousands of houses burned in this 100% religious violence. And we see the stories of Muslims raping girls BECAUSE they are Christian or Shia Muslims killing Sunni's and Vs versa.

This is all BULLSHYTE from my POV. NO GOD WOULD HAVE PEOPLE DO THAT.

Of that I am forever convinced.

I think a real god would come down and say WHAT IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT I CONSIDER HOLY are you asssholes doing? Killing in MY name. NO WAY.

I denounce the whole lot of you.

What is happening today is a great motivation for a real god to pull a real Noah.

What is happening today is a million times worse than anything that happened in the original Noah story and the fact that no god comes down to stop it just more firmly convinces me each day, no god is involved either in the creation of the universe or the creation of Earth.

We are on our own as evidenced by all this religious fighting.

The sooner people realize that, the sooner we may, and I say may hopefully, start to mature as a race. Right now even the most religious person would agree the human race is in a near permanent state of immaturity.

I would think a real god would want to gently guide us to true maturity not this mismash of religious conflict going on around the world as we speak.

True maturity would help us in so many ways, like solving conflicts of non-religious natures, wars over resources and such.

True maturity would have the whole race see we don't need billions of people on Earth and the planet is at a breaking point specifically because of all the billions of people here now.

Truly mature societies would deal with that situation in a humanitarian way.

True maturity would allow all aspects of humanity to co-exist, skin color, sexual orientation, the recognition that sexual orientation is not a choice and people need to understand that, like in Ghana where to be gay is to break the law.

True maturity is where women are given the chance to become the person they see in the future where now in some muslim countries shiria law says a women cannot even have an education or in Saudi, a woman can't even have a drivers licence. All these atrocities tell me in BIG letters, no god is involved in any of this, only the obsession of male humans for control of men and subjugation of women.

Since a god is supposed to be omniscient, it would know of ONE case of women's rights being trampled, sometimes literally. A woman being stoned to death for imagined adultery, then found later to have been innocent.

An omniscient god would know all about such atrocity and would have certainly known about the ravages of human animals like Pol Pot and the rest killing literally hundreds of millions of people thought to be dissidents in their respective countries like in communist china and the Soviet union, entire villages hauled off and killed because they thought there were dissidents there.

No god would just allow such monstrous multi million person atrocities to go on.
A god would be sickened to know of such filthy behavior by some people.

I would expect a god to be morally way above human level and would therefore view such atrocities with the spiritual equivalent of vomiting.

The fact it goes on century after century is a sure sign to me, it is humans and only humans starting religions and keeping up the killing in the name of these gods.

The sad part is, every religion tries to convey the idea that only THEY are the true religion while all others are the work of a devil.

This is not the way of a god. This is the way of control obsessed immature men.

Originally posted by sonhouse
Seems like a sick holiday to me. This so-called god stopping the killing of the son in a sacrifice but says, ok, you can kill this goat instead. Just the kind of thing you want to hear from a god, its ok to kill.

To me it smacks of being man made, not something from a god.

Why wouldn't that so-called god just say, ok guys, I see you like me, lets all have a cup of wine and celebrate the love of life?

According to the Hebrew and to the Christian tradition, G-d intervened this way because he wanted to stop the ritual killing of the children as an offer to various gods, which back then was widely practiced. Instead of sacrificing their children, he wanted the people who felt the need to keep up this way of worship to sacrifise animals😵

Originally posted by sonhouse
My point is I don't think ANY religion is coming from a god. I can't deny the idea there might be gods or A god, but I sure as hell can deny what crap is passed off as coming from a god as told by humans. We have in Burma, or Myanmar as it is called now, Muslims and Buddhists are at each others throats, literally thousands killed, thousands of houses burned ...[text shortened]... devil.

This is not the way of a god. This is the way of control obsessed immature men.

So in other words, you can't name a religious festival or commemoration that is not "man made"?

Originally posted by FMF
So in other words, you can't name a religious festival or commemoration that is not "man made"?

I would think that obvious, of course not, they are ALL man made including the religion that hosts said festival.

It seems to me humans as a race is not very high up on either the intelligence scale or some arbitrary unknowable spiritual scale either.

For instance, we as a race KNOW humans are destroying the Earth and setting the climate up for a devastating change, devastating for not just humans but for an unprecedented mass extinction which has already started and could just maybe include the human race in the bargain, which would serve the planet much better without humans than humans on the planet.

It would give the planet maybe a hundred million years of breathing space to recover and brace itself for the next onslaught of 'intelligence'.

[i]Originally posted by FMF Id-ul-Zuha, is an important 4-day religious holiday celebrated by Muslims worldwide to honor the willingness of the prophet Abraham to sacrifice his young firstborn son Ishmael a as an act of submission to God, and his son's acceptance of the sacrifice before God intervened to provide Abraham with a ram to sacrifice instead.

Eid al-Adha is the latter of the two Eid h ...[text shortened]... ess players on this web site for whom today is a special day of religious commemoration.[/b]

This story about Abraham and the attempted killing of his son is just that [a story].

The story is not true and was simply fabricated to give some authenticity to false and mundane religion.

It is said that Abraham was the father of monism but this is not true either.

Monism has been taught by the Vedas for eternity teaching that GOD IS ONE.

The holiday Eid al- Adha is a holiday celebrating animal slaughter and unlawful killing.

They believe that simply chanting the name of their God before killing makes everything alright [ but it does not ]

A sin is a sin.........and animal slaughter is the gravest sin for those on the spiritual path.

We have discussed the false religion of Islam in this forum before ......and we shall surely not give respect to a holiday that celebrates animal cruelty and myths by false religion.

Footnote: before running to the moderators - research what I have just commented and you will find that it is all true.

My purpose is to put things right and if something is false it is my right and duty to inform the uninformed.

Originally posted by sonhouse
My point is I don't think ANY religion is coming from a god. I can't deny the idea there might be gods or A god, but I sure as hell can deny what crap is passed off as coming from a god as told by humans. We have in Burma, or Myanmar as it is called now, Muslims and Buddhists are at each others throats, literally thousands killed, thousands of houses burned ...[text shortened]... devil.

This is not the way of a god. This is the way of control obsessed immature men.

Your anger is authorized.

And you should be angry.

We should all become angry at false religion and its absurdity.

But do not band together false religion with true religion.

You do not know true religion..................so please make it clear to what religion your anger is directed.

If it is Christianity say so.

If it is Islam say so.

However in the history of the human race ......The Vaisnavas have never raised weapons towards their fellow man in sectarian violence.

The Vaisnavas are the followers of TRUE religion.

Originally posted by Dasa
Your anger is authorized.

And you should be angry.

We should all become angry at false religion and its absurdity.

But do not band together false religion with true religion.

You do not know true religion..................so please make it clear to what religion your anger is directed.

If it is Christianity say so.

If it is Islam say so.

Ho ...[text shortened]... rds their fellow man in sectarian violence.

The Vaisnavas are the followers of TRUE religion.

Perhaps to you but they are just as made up by man as any other religion.

The sooner the human race realizes we are alone on this planet and no supernatural help is forthcoming the sooner we can start to mature as a race and stop the horrible religious atrocities.

I think you don't know the underbelly of your religion. I doubt VERY seriously your statement they never raised weapons against humans. Perhaps so if they are a small minority sect inside a larger population but if they are numbered in the millions, people will be killed just as much by your hero's as any other religion.

Since Jewish interpretation has been mentioned, and since I haven’t worked with this stuff for some time (and my Hebrew is even rustier than it was), even though non-dualistic Judaism was my personal way for some years, after I discovered about the age of 50 that I had a long-kept-hidden Jewish heritage (and I am contemplating revisiting it)—

Judaism, being a hermeneutical religion based on a highly polysemous language (biblical Hebrew), discourages what rabbi and scholar Marc-Alain Ouaknin called the “idolatry of the one right meaning”. Rabbinical Judaism insists that the Hebrew itself does not permit of a one-and-only-true meaning, and Jewish hermeneutics keep the possibility of multiple, and new, meanings open—sometimes quite playfully. You’re not really studying Torah if you don’t bring your own torah to the task (also, traditional Torah study is done as argument between at least two people).

In the story of Abraham and Isaac, it is ha elohim who tell(s) Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, and YHVH who stops him. ha elohim literally means “the gods” (although elohim is also used to designate the single god with a plural noun). A Jewish hermeneutics recognizes the difference, sometimes reading one way, sometimes the other. Abraham hears two voices in the story: the voice of ha elohim (which, as a singular voice, allows the singular pronoun), and the voice of YHVH (quite literally “the One that is”; traditional substitution of “LORD” confuses the distinction, as so often happens in translation).

One interpretation, given by a rabbi in a talk I heard, was that Abraham was tested by God (or “the god”: taking elohim as singular)—and failed! No just man (tzaddik) would sacrifice his child, even if commanded by God! But—God here fails too , being cruel in the test. (Remember, the Jewish covenantal relationship with God is not one of submission—and does not require apologetics for what are seen as unjust or atrocious acts.) This reading glosses over the distinction. [Note: an irony here is that this is the same Avraham who justly and rightly argued with god over the unjustness of punishing the good along with the wicked by destroying a whole community.]

Another reading that does not rely on the distinction notes that God never actually told Avraham to slaughter Isaac: my Stone Edition (Orthodox) Tanach renders verse 22:2 as “…bring him as an offering…” [The phrase v’ha’alihu sham l’olah can be read more than one way, depending on how the vowel points one chooses—bibilcal Hebrew has no vowels; the Masoretes devised a vowelized text between the 7th and 11th centuries CE, but there is no requirement to adhere to the Masoretic text in Torah study: it is just one reading among many. I think it could also be read, in what would seem to be a fairly common Hebrew word-play, something like: “and climb to the heights”] Here, Avraham perhaps makes a dangerous and ethically unconsionable assumption.

Another interpretation by a rabbi that I came across (which does play on the distinction) is that Abraham’s act of faithfulness was in listening to YHVH, rather than carrying out the traditional sacrifice of the first-born by a tribal leader to the gods, to ensure prosperity for the people. Does the text support this reading? (A good rabbinical shrug)—Well, it can. In this reading, although Avraham fears ha elohim he does not withhold his son from YHVH, and from life.

[“Aha, but the poor ram!” Agreed. One can do without the killing and the barbecue. But the issue of Judaism and vegetarianism (which many Jews hold to be the original intent) is another one…]

Other readings treat the whole thing allegorically and/or psychologically. For instance, in theological kabbalah (the non-dualist Judaism that is pretty much mainstream), elohim and YHVH represent two aspects of the non-personal godhead: ein sof. The story can be seen (allegorically) as an argument or tension either in the “mind of god” or in our minds, between harsh strictness (including with regard to law and commandments)—gevurah, represented by ha elohim—and expansive compassion—chesed, represented here by YHVH.

______________________________________________

Those just really touch the surface, and I haven’t fleshed any of them out. They are just intended as illustrations, and I am not going to make further argument. Of course, Christian and Islamic readings can also be validly added; I do not simply dismiss them, they just do not reflect my torah. A few quick points, though:

> Historically, literalistic readings appear to be more modern than older readings (perhaps even before the stories were written down); and Jewish exegesis (midrash) does not favor literalism. From my point of view, a literary-critical approach dos not either.

> This approach to reading (midrash) was extant before the time of Christ, even though it often seems to have a “post-modern” flavor.

> There are really no “dogmatic” interpretations of the written Torah in Judaism—except the singular creedal formula, Sh’ma Yisrael YHVH eloheinu YHVH echad, which has long been seen as a non-dualistic formulation as well as a monotheistic one; and the non-dualism is in no way heretical (in fact, likely predominates).

> The hermeneutic approach of Judaism is open-ended and ongoing; there is no final “one right meaning” in the text. As a Torah student, I am called upon to bring my “meaning” (my torah, the torah/story that is my life experience) to the text—and that kind of engagement is what sustains the expanding nature of Torah.

> I know that many are uncomfortable with the absence of “one right meaning”—generally being the one that they adhere to. Some people are also uncomfortable with poetic language that requires interpreting metaphors with many possibilities (perhaps the major portion of the Torah is written poetically, despite what we have come to see as a poetic layout on the page).

> The notion of a covenantal relationship takes on interesting dimensions within a non-dualistic (as opposed to monotheistic) framework. I think it recognizes the reality of self-reflective consciousness as part of nature (or the Tao, or Ein Sof—or Torah, expansively considered).

> It does seem to me that a lot of Christianity (including that which I grew up in) has, like Islam, become more a religion of submission. I can’t go there. Even in the context of a non-dualistic expression (such as the Sufis in Islam).

I have found that cross-religion argument about these points on here is fruitless. The above is, from my study and experience, an accurate representation of Jewish hermeneutics, from a “liberal” (think Reform or Reconstructionist) and neo-Hasidic perspective—although I don’t think that any of it is far outside the bounds of Orthodox Judaism either. As I say, it is reflective of the tradition. The only real “apologetic” on my mind is three-fold—

1. Vis-à-vis my longstanding pet peeve about the assumptive normativity of modernist and literalist readings, as well as “closed” readings in general.

2. The notion that, as a Jew, I am required to defend the atrocious behaviors of either a dualistic god or my ancient ancestors who told these stories (torah is story). I no more need to do that to find relevant meaning in the stories than I do to find meaning than I do in any other stories (myths and poems, etc.).

3. To remind folks who are unaware, that Judaism is neither the “religion of the ‘old testament’” nor necessarily (or perhaps even predominantly) a religion of dualistic theism.

Other than those points, I am not intending to defend anything.

Originally posted by Dasa
This story about Abraham and the attempted killing of his son is just that [a story].

The story is not true and was simply fabricated to give some authenticity to false and mundane religion.

It is said that Abraham was the father of monism but this is not true either.

Monism has been taught by the Vedas for eternity teaching that GOD IS ONE.

The ...[text shortened]... to put things right and if something is false it is my right and duty to inform the uninformed.

No. Stop lying!

The first two lines of your post is a bald-faced lie.

It's not a giant leap of logic to assume the rest is, too.

My purpose is to put things right and if something is false it is my right and duty to inform the uninformed.

Better start "informing" everyone that you cannot speak with knowledge of anything you have no knowledge of.

Hypocrite!

Originally posted by sonhouse
The sooner the human race realizes we are alone on this planet and no supernatural help is forthcoming the sooner we can start to mature as a race and stop the horrible religious atrocities.

The only help we are going to receive came about 2000 years ago.

No other help will be forthcoming. However, there will soon be a correction, "just as in the days of Noah".


Btw, I find it hilarious how you've started throwing around the word "maturity" like Dasa throws around the word "honesty".

Maturity includes knowing when it is time to grow up and stop ignoring the only way left to guarantee our futures.

(It's okay though, he finds it really difficult to be honest.)

Originally posted by sonhouse
Perhaps to you but they are just as made up by man as any other religion.

The sooner the human race realizes we are alone on this planet and no supernatural help is forthcoming the sooner we can start to mature as a race and stop the horrible religious atrocities.

I think you don't know the underbelly of your religion. I doubt VERY seriously your st ...[text shortened]... ered in the millions, people will be killed just as much by your hero's as any other religion.

Sadly you have banded the one true religion presented by the Vedas with the thousands of man made and false religions of the world.

Did you know that the Vedas are the only eternal religion on earth.

The worst thing you could do is to go "online" to get your information from the Vedas because there are so many false interpretations of the Vedas on offer by unqualified persons.

One day in the future when you are ready and the time is right you will go to the Srimad Bhagavatam by Srila Prabhupada and start your spiritual journey.

Originally posted by Suzianne
No. Stop lying!

The first two lines of your post is a bald-faced lie.

It's not a giant leap of logic to assume the rest is, too.

My purpose is to put things right and if something is false it is my right and duty to inform the uninformed.

Better start "informing" everyone that you cannot speak with knowledge of anything you have no knowledge of.

Hypocrite!

The meat eaters and animal killers religion relies on its many stories to give it some authenticity.

You know this.

Originally posted by Dasa
The meat eaters and animal killers religion relies on its many stories to give it some authenticity.

You know this.

Just because a religion permits the killing of animals for food and killing in self-defense and in war does not automatically mean it must be a false religion. I would say a religion that requires one to go hungry rather than to eat meat is a false religion. A religion that prohibits killing in self-defense and requires its adherents to live in slavery and poverty rather than fight for life, liberty, and justice is a false religion.

Originally posted by Dasa
Sadly you have banded the one true religion presented by the Vedas with the thousands of man made and false religions of the world.

Did you know that the Vedas are the only eternal religion on earth.

The worst thing you could do is to go "online" to get your information from the Vedas because there are so many false interpretations of the Vedas on offer b ...[text shortened]... ght you will go to the Srimad Bhagavatam by Srila Prabhupada and start your spiritual journey.

Not in THIS lifetime.