AJ Philips,
We can well recognise you have no admiration, praise or meditation of great and pure character which is the foundation of human dignity and aspiration. The world would be a better place if we were without attitues of such hostility to greatness, and hate of a great character.

Your spirit is antagonistic and negative to pure thought and motive.

Christianity is based upon the teachings of Jesus Christ who said in Luke 4:18 - 19 God has sent me to liberate the captives, and the opressed. Note he says God sent him, obviously he believed God wanted slaces freed in his kingdom.

Dear AJ.. I'll address just one (rather central) point.

<...until you can demonstrate this, your claim is indistinguishable from any just old made-up nonsense>

I appreciate your viewpoint is valid to you. I'm coming from "Divine Revelation" which involves a reasoned faith in what came through the old Testament, to the New....through Christ and finally Paul, but the 'God is sovereign' assertion is found articulated in Romans 9... which I take as divinely inspired by the Holy Spirit.

ETHICS and the ESELON INSTITUTE. My head has exploded probably uncountable times over the past week, since I came across the video's I listed above..earlier. Now..I'm watching day by day.. time after time to try to capture as much as I can.

The Eselon institute changed the whole of the American psyche so it's not unimportant. Here are the dots joined.

FREUD.. "Neuroses are based on the dark inner conflicts in the subconscous, which must be controlled" (Summary position)

REICH (you cant make this up) his student (also Jewish) tried to find a 'final solution' to Freud's position by going opposite:

"Neuroses are based on LACK of expression of the subconscious which is the true peron"

REICH believed the most fundamental energy of man was LIBIDO.. sex!
He was destroyed by Anna Freud in a bloodless coup at the International pshychoanalytical association, which saw Reich made an outcast. (He was later jailed for selling something which he touted as having 'libinal' energy to fight cancer, he died 1 month later) "Freudians had won"....

or had they ?

REICH's ideas were taken up by the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society.. radical leftists) and the WeatherUnderground, but promoted mostly by a small group of radical psychoanalysts who taught his views at the Eselon institute.

2 important books

"On becoming a Person" 1961 by Carl Rogers.
"Toward a Psychology of Being" 1962 by Abraham Maslow.

*ENTER...STAR WARS* (The SRIinstitute of research)

http://www.strategicbusinessinsights.com/vals/free/2010-08-VALSfaq.pdf

Very...VERY *interesting*

Philo,

Thanks for the insult; responses like this often indicate a bullseye. But your ad hominem response doesn’t say anything about whether or not what I’ve said is actually true - just that you don’t like it.

<<Your spirit is antagonistic and negative to pure thought and motive.>>

No, my “spirit” is antagonistic to potentially harmful and unfounded nonsense that offers more bad than good, while having received, and often demanding an unfounded respect that it hasn’t earned, but thinks it’s owed purely by virtue of being itself.

How is Christian thought and motive any more “pure” than non-Christian thought and motive?

<<Christianity is based upon the teachings of Jesus Christ...>>

And you don’t think that the slave holders and heretic burners throughout the past hadn’t read the words of the Jesus?

Of course they had.

But this goes back to my point about Christians relying on secular ethics and morality to know how to interpret their own holy book: it obviously has nothing to do with the Holy Spirit and/or god, or we would have known hundreds of years ago how to believe. And what purpose would a god have for such a delay in telling us how to correctly interpret them other than to hide their appearance by making it look like they were never needed in the first place - as they’ve apparently done with evolution?

<<Luke 4:18 - 19 God has sent me to liberate the captives, and the opressed. Note he says God sent him, obviously he believed God wanted [slaves] freed in his kingdom.>>

Yes, the slaves that god himself specifically endorsed the enslaving of in the first place, and this presents yet another critical problem for Christianity: A perfect and eternal god would remain unchanging because what their perfection had determined was good/evil in the past, would remain good/evil in the future and forevermore. Thus Jesus would not be able to just come down and change the rules without debunking himself.

But note that god still didn’t condemn slavery, he just expresses a desire for the slaves to be freed.

It may be worse than I thought, Boaz.

If you can find sinister meaning in a straightforward presentation on marketing techniques...

"VALS is a lens for understanding consumer psychology. The VALS consulting and consumer-research services provide clients with tailored, real-time, marketing solutions for customer Targeting, Positioning and Communications"

...then I'm afraid that your own "lens" has become hugely distorted.

The Esalen (not Eselon) Institute is equally harmless. Just because some people find odd ways of pursuing self-discovery, and addressing their own "personal growth" agenda, does not mean that they intend to subvert the ethical standards of a continent.

I suspect - no, I know for a fact - that you have great difficulty understanding that many people do not share your core tenet, which is that your version of Christianity is the ultimate in ethical choices. People who find, for example, that there are too many contradictions in it, from the sheer implausibility of an omnipotent and omniscient deity, to the massive difference between preaching and practice that they see, every day.

Nevertheless, there are such people.

And some of those people look elsewhere for a form of thinking that helps them make sense of what is, let's face it, a fairly confusing existence on one tiny planet in a massive, mind-blowing universe.

What puzzles me is why you spend so much time, trying to link together a sequence of perfectly normal and harmless quests for knowledge, into the semblance of a vast conspiracy aimed at corrupting the entire globe.

I would guess that it is insecurity. An insecurity that has the same roots as your visceral hatred of any religion that is not your own.

But hey, what would I know?

It might just be your Highland ancestry.

Boaz,

I understand that you’re coming from the “Divine Revelation” angle. But revelation is necessarily first person. What has been “revealed” to you may be a good enough reason for you to believe, but it’s not a good enough reason for others.

So there really is no point in quoting the Bible (as if it held some authority) and expecting others to suspend their critical thinking, when so many of your religious claims and Christianity in general are in direct conflict with everything we know about reality.

As I alluded to before, non-believers exercise a healthy scepticism because they care about the truth value of their beliefs; Christians, on the other hand (or the more fundamentalist types anyway), are so convinced that the Bible works for them that they immediately, automatically and instinctively shun anything and everything that contradicts their beliefs without the slightest appreciation for the actual truth.

AJ Philips,
I suggest you read History and find out just who were the ones fighting to remove slavery, and racial opression. The devout Christian Wilberforce in England, Harriet Becher Stowe, and Martin Luther King of recent times in America etc etc. All were followers of Christ who believed in the equality of every man to self determination, and responsibility.

The Torah and the Kor'an both endorce slavery. However there are more slaves in the world today than ever before in history used by atheists for monetry gain. Some of the products found on shop shelves in Australia are produced by slaves. Some brothel owners and clothing manufacturers in Australia import girls from Asia to work in Australia for mere board and basic keep.

The NT says every worker is worthy of his hire. Labor today is hired and paid on the acceptable rate. We are free to choose our employment.