I really really enjoy your posts and your take on things. You’re one of a handful of great posters here I always read, even when I’m not involved in the topic, because I love your approach, your perspective, your ability to say what needs to be said on occasions
and because you always make me go
Occasionally
Sometimes :hypno:
Rarely :bigyikes:
But when you do this:
you make me go :banghead:
Sarah x
Oh, Dear, don’t hurt yourself! Sorry, it was just too obvious not to take advantage of, both in the statement and the thread title.
But it points to something relevant: the idea of dimensionality in the turn of phrase, and words as fulcrums or the kind of puncturing of limits we enjoy from humor due to the unexpected use of a word or situation that points to another facet. And perhaps this is where the ideas of liberalism and conservatism have differences?
I have mentioned before the study and book that looks at the differences of conservative and liberal thinking. And while as someone who is liberal, I can acknowledge the usefulness, within certain bounds, of conservatism, that mind set is not as useful for deeper, broader, and more encompassing views than what to me is preservationism. And of course that is wonderful, until we need to get out of the box that caused our problems. We can’t solve problems on the level or within the parameters of what caused them.
As this might apply to religion, I wish to clearly distinguish between an acquired, inculcated faith taken at face value and used as a sheild, and the activity of mining a faith, any faith, or even lacking of one, for universal values pertinent on here, at least to the idea of being made in the image and likeness of God. Elsewhere I might very well use other terminology, but that suits here.
All of my criticisms of any faith or belief system, religious or not, boil down to this: the one thinking about it and making comparisons and drawing conclusions most very often does not have a clear and useful grasp of the very instrument and its nature that they are using to accept their premises and use those to come to conclusions. In other words there is a lack, sometimes profound, of self awareness. The accepted paradigm is substituted for a working knowledge of one’s not so dinkum thinkum. So yet while we merrily go into fields of complexity in economic, political, religious, social, and other areas of endeavor, the last thing we tend to do is look at the looker.
Now we might do that if the looker seems to be broken, which means a person is not agreeing for one reason or another with consensus reality. That would be the reality that on a day to day basis we consider, very mistakenly, to have a 1/1 relationship to Reality Itself. But we most certainly do not do that if we fit comfortably into a group of consentuees. Catholics, Shintoists, Atheists, Cargo cultists, Mormons, Jews, you nameem, look to their won for agreement as to what the world is about, because faith is safety from the unknown and any explanation of the Unknown/able that does not contradict physicality in a gross way will do. Raelians, for example, get along perfectly well in the world so long as it doesn’t come down to an argument about origins.
But no one, or precious few, look at the very water they are swimming in. The reflexive quality of human awareness is used in passing or by accident, and sometimes in and awkward clinical way, But it is very rarely systematically delved into, save by mystics and contemplatives of any stripe. And what is remarkable is that over the ages, regardless of circumstance, location, culture, religion or lack of it, all of the proponents of that search come up with a nearly indistinguishable model of human relationship to what on here is called “God”
From the perspective of that search as conducted to its end by those Saints and Sages, Catholic or not, all of the particulars of what is considered the main body of doctrine of our religion or any or lack thereof is easily seen and accounted for, and in a far simpler and much more useful manner. All of it. Without, I might add, destroying one iota of its signification, meaning, importance, value, or portent.
What does hap[pen, is that all of that is put on the biblically proverbial Rock that is recommended as a foundation for a structure, that structure being the mind in conformity to Reality as it IS, not as it is thought. Why? Because as it is thought, the light to the thinking is not accounted for experientially. If it is, the accounting is in a descending mode from actuality as destinct from and ascending mode based on belief.
So all that has this to do with the thread: it is far more likely, imo, for a “liberal” to undertake and impartial study of self and its mysteries, because ideas can grow in and as experience, than it is for a “conservative” who by dint of faith believes that all answers are at hand in their paradigm as intellectual or believed knowledge to be applied legalistically.
those very same conservatives will either deny or extol the virtues of the mystic life, usually up to and only up to the eight level, but will decline the actual tools available for such exploration and thus keep it theoretical as far
as their own experience. Andthe mistake in that is that the search I propone here is about identity as it actually IS, not as it is thought about. The difference is like reading about the sport of swimming by a Tuareg and a water baby in an LA pool.
And it has nothing to do with being Catholic, or not, or being atheist, or any such thing. But at least the atheist is not necessarily hampered by belief and has, actually the advantage of not anthropmorphizing THAT into a “Person.” And really, neither one is in a better position. You can’t accomplish what you already are. You can only discover something rather astounding in the place of thinking about it.
Many non-Catholics are under the impression that Catholics are severely restricted by ecclesiastical doctrines but there is an astonishing richness and variety of opinion on important matters which reflects the influence of different cultures from all over the world. Like St Paul the Church makes herself “all things to all men” (which includes women and children!)
– next time you see something that seems out of character you might want to point it out before reacting; it may have been an edit I failed to make but would like to have made. 
