Yuyutsu,

Thank You for your invoking explanations.
And for being so open and honest.
I can see that I have much to learn -
from cultures that I know so little
about.

Between March and June, many Aboriginal people living in remote communities have received emails from a Queensland man named Kris Schlyder, who runs the so-called Australian Indigenous Prayer Network. Schlydner believes Covid-19 vaccination is the work of the devil and Aboriginals should reject it.

Mr Schlyder is wrong, misguided and extremely dangerous, if that's what his religion preaches then I believe he should be locked up, along with his religion.

Dear Paul,

The case of this Mr. Schlydner does not sound like a religious matter, but rather like some social ideology or alternately a mental illness.

Can you honestly suspect that God told Mr. Schlydner to send these letters or that doing so helps Mr. Schlydner along his spiritual path towards God?

If your answer, like mine, is in the negative, then this is just an ordinary social/medical incident.

Still I hesitate, because if people like you can mistake this secular affair to be a religious one, then they might as well mistake an authentic religious behaviour to be an ordinary secular one. One must be very careful.

.

Dear Foxy,

.

Thanks for that. I see that Ross Douthat was brought up by his mother as an Episcopalian (Wikipedia) until she had a transformative mystical experience and converted to Pentecostalism and then, with the rest of his family, to Catholicism (Harvard Magazine).

He wrote a book entitled “The Decadent Society”.

Harvard Magazine reports that his worldview is that of a “devoutly Catholic social conservative, reformist Republican, reliably right-wing on social issues like abortion and gay marriage … In 2017, he proposed reparations for slavery, but as a one-time payment to descendants of slaves, in exchange for an end to race-based preferences in hiring and admissions”.

http://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/11/features-the-conservative
.

I don’t know what evidence Ross Douthat presents (if any) to substantiate his claim that “mysticism is dying and taking true religion with it”. I reserve my opinion on that.

There is mystical tradition present in all of the world’s great religions. For thousands of years, mysticism has been present in religion and though religion is receding in much of the Western world, I don’t think that’s the case worldwide :

« A Pew 2015 global projection study for religion and nonreligion, projects that between 2010 and 2050, there will be some initial increases of the unaffiliated followed by a decline by 2050 due to lower global fertility rates among this demographic. Sociologist Phil Zuckerman's global studies on atheism have indicated that global atheism may be in decline due to irreligious countries having the lowest birth rates in the world and religious countries having higher birth rates in general. Since religion and fertility are positively related and vice versa, non-religious identity is expected to decline as a proportion of the global population throughout the 21st century. By 2060, according to projections, the number of unaffiliated will increase by over 35 million, but the percentage will decrease to 13% because the total population will grow faster » (Wikipedia).
.

Good to hear you’re keeping fit, Foxy. That’s great !

.

Hi Yuyutsu,

Schlydner is trying to turn the secular into the religious by attempting to hoodwink vulnerable people, in this case remote community Aboriginals, with whom it seems he has established some kind of religious affinity through his Australian Indigenous Prayer Network. There is a grey area between what is a religious matter and what is secular. Obviously this Schiydner has an opinion opposed to vaccination, whether that opinion is from a secular belief, or from a religious belief, that God has spoken to him. No matter, the bloke is attempting to sway Aboriginals away from vaccination by invoking the "word of God", and that is dangerous.

.

Dear Yuyutsu,

.

You wrote :

1. « I do not find it wise or healthy to expose identifying information on the internet. »
.

Anonymity is the prerogative of everybody here on OLO, Yuyutsu, and I am sure your real name is not Yuyutsu.

As a matter of fact, when I first registered on this Forum, I mistakenly thought it was compulsory to have a pseudonym, otherwise, I would have registered under my real name.

I don’t know about the lawyer, Yuyutsu, but I wouldn’t worry about the politicians if I were you, no matter how powerful they are. They probably receive worse criticisms from every Tom, Dick, and Harry than you could ever imagine. Australia is a democracy. It’s not like Putin’s Russia or MBS’s Saudi Arabia. You won’t get locked up and poisoned in a jail in Siberia or chopped up into little pieces in a consulate in Istanbul and carried away in suitcases.
.

2. « While I have no care to be personally understood or accepted, I do want to forward the principles I advocate .. »

I guess that’s what we all want, Yuyutsu, but to achieve that we need to be, at least, understood. If nobody understands us, we have not communicated anything.
.

3. « I fail to see why belief is so important that you need to know how I came to this or that belief … »

It is not that it is “so important”, Yuyutsu. It is just that because it is so difficult for you to communicate “the principles [you] advocate” due to the impenetrable nature of your mystic, esoteric mode of thought and expression, I suggested that you direct us to the source of the “principles” that you wish to communicate – my question of “how and why you came to believe what you believe” is a quest for the source of those beliefs.

.

(Continued ...)

.