there is no such thing as truth. one does not need a mythological god to enjoy art. both chaos and complexity theory deal very well with the chaos and complexity of human existence. and since you mention it: i pity your family having to deal with someone who is unable to love without an external illusion to help him, your article does nothing but display the depth of your inferiority complex.

Oh dear, Peter. This is where you always find yourself on shaky ground mate. Why not just embrace your belief system and stop trying to put it on the same pedestal as tested science? What deep seated insecurity you display. If you want to apply the same rules of tested hypothesis to your belief system just start at 1 Kings Chapter 18. If your belief system is "fact" or "truth" then you of all people can easily prove it using the test set forth in that Chapter of your "Belief Manual". I await the proof.

Another attempt at a neat sidestep, by our very own master of side-steppery.

>>It is “hard” rationality in that contradictions or paradoxes cannot be tolerated... a loving relationship cannot hold both love and hatred, devotion and resentment. Evils in the world cannot have a shade of good.<<

If this is the extent of your attack on "hard" rationality, Sells, it doesn't stand up to a great deal of exposure to real life. From most available evidence, the Christian view of life contains a great deal less flexibility in accepting difference, than that of the rationalist.

But hold on a moment.

Do you not, in your earlier offerings, rail franically against the liberalism that underpins the rationalist's viewpoint? Is your normal target not those wishy-washy folk who have no moral underpinnings?

"Liberalism stands for freedom, tolerance, fairness, self expression, choice and fulfilment. It stands against doctrine, discipline, self sacrifice and discipleship."

That's a quote from "The trouble with Liberalism" that you wrote a mere five months ago.

If your idea of being controversial is to change your mind twice a year, I'd say you were right on target.

Incidentally, I know you won't believe it, but non-Christians have non-linear thought processes too.

"How can they understand a poem? Or be deeply moved by an opera? Or understand the complexity and contradiction of characters in the great novels? How can they fall in love and rear a family?"

Amazingly, we somehow muddle along, Sells.

Your argument relies totally on the conflation of "non-Christian" with "computer". The idea that anyone unable to subscribe to your particular brand of mysticism, is somehow cut off from life.

Won't wash, I'm afraid.

And this, Sells, is probably the most arrogant statement that you have made so far.

"For paganism, individual human beings had no faces, they were resources, wives were incubators, slaves were non human, soldiers were fodder for battle."

The fact that you clearly have no concept of the sheer, blind, insulting, overweening arrogance contained in that sentence, by itself renders the entire article irrelevant.

Uh oh! Peter has done it again!

Peter is a repeter. Peter wrote: While paganism could only seek to escape from the material world of the body, Christianity, with its proclamation that God had become a man, affirmed the body and gave rise to hospitals and medicine to care for the body.

Dear Peter,

"Christianity, with its proclamation that God had become a man" adapted a pagan concept to make a religion that could be accepted by the pagan world. It was a retreat from Jewish quasi-rationality to pagan superstition. The Jewish God had by the time of Jesus had lost all anthropomorphic elements. When Roman soldiers broke into the shrine of the Temple they found it empty. A Roman chronicler ridiculed the invisible god of the Jews who didn't even have a statue to him.

Jesus was invented to appeal to the pagans. It is obvious that the miracles in the New Testament are myths. Possibly all the rest is also mythical. However, Christianity had invented a God that would appeal to the pagans.

Even the manner of his birth followed pagan myth with a spirit impregnating Mary as Zeus did to Leda and many others. This is truth? Nonsense is nonsense even though many accept it.

Always remember that your inherent heart-disposition wants and needs Infinite, Absolute, True, Eternal Happiness.

---- ooooo ----

Therefore, true religion must retire to Light!
The heart must be permitted to achieve a universal feeling-ecstasy.

---- ooooo ----

Happiness IS the Conscious Light of the World!

How/why does Sells keep repeating his dim-witted nonsense?

I guess most of you are tired of these references. All of which, in one way or another, point out that christian-ISM has helped, or really laid the foundations for, the current DISASTER. And that the drive or motive of the ideas behind christian-ISM is the drive to achieve total power and control over every one and everything.

http://www.adidam.org/teaching/aletheon/truth-religion.aspx

http://www.dabase.org/2armP1.htm#ch2

http://www.beezone.com/AdiDa/jesusandme.html

http://www.dabase.org/proofch6.htm (especially the 1st essay--Prophetic Criticism)

Sells also complains that science now dominates our current definitions and parameters re what is Real and possible.

This is entirely true.

But he doesnt seem to understand that his entirely EXOTERIC religiosity (and ideology) shares the same presumptions about what we are as human beings, and of Reality altogether, as those that mis-inform the ideology of scientism.

These references point out why and how. And also why the usual exoteric religiosity does not, and cannot, make any real difference to anything at all. At best they may offer a more positive hopefulness, and at the worst, the essentially psychotic nature of right-wing religiosity.

http://www.dabase.org/ilchurst.htm

http://www.dabase.org/noface.htm

http://www.dabase.org/nirvana.htm (chapter 1 The Purification of Doubt)

http://www.aboutadidam.org/newsletters/toc-february2004.html Right Human Life