Re: Obama's Faith in the Golden Rule

On Sun, 12 Apr 2009 02:00:24 -0500, Damaeus wrote:

Reading from news:talk.origins,
Mark Isaak <eciton@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> posted:

On Fri, 10 Apr 2009 04:27:56 -0500, Damaeus wrote:

The Gnostic Bible - Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer
The Secret Gospel - Morton Smith
The Lost Book of Enoch - Joseph B. Lumpkin
The Complete Gospels - Robert J. Miller (editor)
The Essential Rumi - (translation by Coleman Barks)
The Way of a Pilgrim - (translation by R. M. French)
Tao Te Ching - (translated by Victor H. Mair)
The Bhagavad-Gita - (translated by Barbara Stoler Miller)
The Essential Kabbalah - Daniel C. Matt
The Tibetan Book of the Dead - (translated by Robert A. F. Thurman)

That's a decent start, though, as Wilkins noted, there's not much
Gnosticism there. Here are some other recommendations:

Whether a text is gnostic or not would depend on what you get out of
it. Gnosis is an experience, not a text.

Gnosticism refers to a specific religion which holds that some people are
higher beings imprisoned in a physical body, and that a specific secret
knowledge (not knowledge in general) can free them. For what you refer
to, "mysticism" would be a a better label.

The Metamorphoses - Ovid (Roman mythology) The Prose Edda - Snorri
Sturluson (Norse) The Epic of Gilgamesh - several translations exist
South of the Clouds - Lucien Miller (several peoples of Yunnan, China)
The Speaking Land - Ronald & Catharine Berndt (Australian tribes)
African Myths and Tales - Susan Feldmann The Epic of Qayaq - Lela Kiana
Oman (Inupiat) Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest - Ella Clark
Wisconsin Chippewa Myths and Tales - Victor Barnouw California Indian
Nights - Gifford and Block The Popol Vuh - Dennis Tedlock
The Huarochiri Manuscript - Salomon and Urioste (Quechua) Xingu: The
Indians, Their Myths - O. & C. Villas Boas (Brazilian tribes) Primal
Myths - Barbara Sproul (creation myths from all over)

Those should give a good representation of world myth. [...]

I wouldn't disagree with anything in any of those books, I'm pretty
sure.

You should. They say different, incompatible things.

And anything I could read in those books would only solidify my
thoughts of immortality.

That is not a helpful attitude for learning about immortality. Advances
in learning come from the willingness to throw out previous ideas when we
find contradictions with them. I guarantee that some of your thoughts
about immorality are wrong. That's not because I have seen them and
disagree with them, but because *everybody* who forms lots of thoughts on
*any* subject will have some of them wrong. It's part of being human.
If your thoughts can only be solidified, you will be solidifying error.

[...]
The Romans adopted and adapted a lot of Greek mythology, so yes, there
is crossover there. They are not so easily compared with the mythology
of, say, China or Hawaii, though. There are certain things that keep
recurring, too, like dragons, tricksters, ogres, people turning into
animals, and sibling rivalry.

Yes. All these would come about in a previous universe if it was
inhabited by Gods unaware of their immortality or how it worked, but
maybe not aware that the universe was being "condensed". These
devolving gods would experience tricks of their own creative power, and
they would experience that kind of rivalry.

In my view of a pre-existing universe before the Big Bang, these
gods-in-unawares would eventually be killed. Stories about gods who
are killed, then reborn are all over mythology.

Not just gods. Ordinary mortals get resurrected, too. (Read Grimms'
Tales.) Resurrection is an obvious wish, and wishes get made into
stories.

But consider evolution in reverse. These people continued devolving,
getting uglier and uglier as the gross functions of natural selection
began injecting disease and began giving people traits that made it
more difficult for them to survive, not easier.

Evolution in reverse is time in reverse. "Devolution" is a personal
value judgment with no correspondence to the real world. The scenario
you describe has neither evidence nor theory to support it.

At one point, I had a kind of "moment of mercy" in the pre-big-bang
universe. Like some time at which life became nothing about actual
experience of each other, but was just about slithering around in the
mud looking for breakfast. But if the old universe became the
information blueprint for the new universe, then our old consciousness
would be spiritual and connected to our new bodies in this new creation..

Hell seems like an illusion, then, because The Big Bang /was/ Hell to
the previous universe, and it was destroyed. Fortunately by that time
we had devolved to non-existence.

That's just one possible scenario. It makes our story that much bigger..

It's an addictive story, though, . . .

Keep in mind that reality is not constrained by how much you like a
story.

But there are few instances where you read a myth and say, "Oh, I
remember that story from another culture halfway around the world."
Such instances occur, but only rarely.

Once you've read so many, the parallels surface. I see them all as
having a piece of the same truth. These pieces were not delivered by
some entity, but were just the work of the imagination an intuition of
those who thought about how the universe could have come to exist.

Those common truths are probably more mundane than you would suppose.
Perhaps the most prevalent story (as opposed to a simple motif such as
"god creates people") with independent development worldwide is about a
powerful being traveling incognito who is denied hospitality by all but
one family; that family gets rewarded and the others get punished. The
common truth that I get from that story is that hospitality is a virtue
which is highly valued worldwide.

--
Mark Isaak eciton (at) earthlink (dot) net
"It is certain, from experience, that the smallest grain of natural
honesty and benevolence has more effect on men's conduct, than the most
pompous views suggested by theological theories and systems." - D. Hume

.

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