Response to Lauren - full post here

Well, as we were saying in class, many of the ideas behind Christianity are indeed heavily related to Greco-Roman and Hebraic histories and cultures. Many of the stories in Christianity can be found be in other religions which predate it. I would recommend that you look into the similarities between the Zoroaster and Jesus. In fact, I would recommend you look up many other son of god - death and resurrection god-men, like Osiris, Dionysus, Attis, Tammuz, and so on. Stories of deities becoming flesh, dying, passing through hell, and being resurrected are a religious commonplace. Which is fine, given that these are often metaphors; often times, however, religious people claim that their religion is unique and more correct than others.

Hidden Openness

In response to Lauren - full post here


I agree, the Westboro Baptist Church is really outlandish. I think it is a terrible thing when a group is so incredibly openly hateful towards everybody. On the other hand, it's also a good thing that they are so openly hateful. Due to the open method they practice most people have grown to understand that the members of the WBC are unreasonable; Few people support the WBC's endeavors; in fact, I wouldn't doubt if it brought more people to the cause for gay-rights.

Sometimes an even worse thing can be hiding your discrimination from the world, while you continue to try to indoctrinate people into thinking that this discrimination is warranted. Imagine if the WBC had an enormous wealth and the ability to lobby the government, because it provides aid to those in need, to prevent gay marriage. The Catholic Church, for instance, decided to try to lobby the government in Washington D.C. When the Catholics found out about the new legislature with potential to allow gay marriage they threatened to discontinue providing services for 68,000 people in need; they threatened to cease providing shelter for the homeless, offering food to the hungry, and helping cure the ill. This is probably largely due to the fact that equality for homosexuals is against the catechism (Part 3, Section 2, Chapter 2, Article 6, lines 2357-2359).

Apples, Oranges, and What You Don't Know

I do not think that you should be disappointed with coming to a new conclusion. It could always make you happier. Imagine that you were communicating through speech but found out that you could convey your exact feelings through telepathy, if you chose. Or what if you were satisfied with eating your favourite food but there was another food that you would like more if you tried it.
It's as though apples were your favourite food (Christianity, your religion) but you would like oranges (Deism) more if you tried them. Keeping your faith far from the class is like actively choosing to avoid oranges. If you try the orange and you don't like it, you can keep eating apples. Or, better still, you could combine the two!!

It could very well be worth giving up your favourite food for something you enjoy even more. You do not, of course, need to change your beliefs of course but it could be very beneficial to do more than say 'oh that's nice for other people, but not for me; I was raised into Christian Orthodoxy."

Trees of Knowledge

In response to Caryn: Full post here
Caryn noted that trees often appear in many stories and they always represent knowledge.

I wonder how much of that comes from the fact that trees have incredible life spans. When you mentioned Legend of Zelda, I instantly became more interested. The Great Deku tree in that games was one of the first living organisms created, and as such, has obtained a vast amount of knowledge. If I remember correctly, the great deku tree was based off of Jomon Sugi, a tree whose age is estimated to be between two and seven thousand years old. Additionally, there are many other tree's that have incredible ages, like the Methuselah tree in California (named after Methuselah from the bible). There is also a clonal colony of Aspens which has been  determined to be part of the same organism. OECD estimates that it's roots are upwards of 75,000 years old. With age comes knowledge, I suppose.

Also, it's pretty strange that religions like Christianity and Zoroastrianism deal out punishment for becoming knowledgeable. From the very beginning, it appears, these religions don't want anybody to know anything.

Teaching Independence - Hold My Hand

What does it mean to teach? What does it mean to learn? When I've learned something, or learned how to do something, it means that independent of other people. I suppose, by that definition, to teach means to guide someone so that they can eventually do something for themselves. To teach is to teach independence. I can imagine then, that the best scenario is that the teacher promotes independence, and the student seeks it. The worst would be that neither promotes or seeks independence. I was reflecting on this earlier this week while observing a teacher whom I would not consider good, trying to teach a student whom I would not consider good. Later I was told that the teacher was teaching well, I disagreed. The teacher was essentially leading a blindfolded child, by the hand, across a street and congratulating him for having succeeded in crossing it. The student, essentially the blindfolded child smiled because he had accomplished something even though he didn't know what he did or how he did it.

This happens often in Christianity, I think; though I don't know much about the frequency of such in other religions, I can imagine it's fairly frequent. They claim the lord has taught them something but then continue to pray for guidance in the same situation, they are convinced that god has helped them/will help them, so they rush blindly into a situation. If the situation works out favorably, they get happy and proud. They need to be lead by the hand and told how to live. After all, without god and government, who will tell us what to do?

To help people understand why children don't owe anything to their parents, I have drafted this scenario/example.


A - is the parents
You - are the child
book - is the 'gift of life'


A, because he wanted to, put a book in your house, unbeknownst to you. When you finally discover the book, you start to read it. The book is, in general, uneventful (kind of monotonous), though some parts in it made you laugh, other parts make you cry out of sadness, and some parts, yet, fill you with rage or disappointment. Person A, then, demands, not only that you keep the book which he wanted to give to you, but also that you pay him back for having given you the book in the first place. Though you enjoyed a few passages from it, or even if you enjoyed all of it, why should you have to pay him for slipping a book, that you didn't ask for, into your house?

Crawling Back to the Cave

In the allegory of the cave people are entertained by shadows on the back wall of a cave. They have to desire to see things that are real on the outside of the cave. When they are told to let loose their chains and to see the real world, they sometimes choose not to, or have a really difficult time in deciding to abandon their unjustified beliefs. It occurred to me that going into the cave is much easier than exiting it, You can spend you entire life enjoying reality and not being mindlessly entertained with fiction or things that are unknowable, some people, however, will find their way back to the cave to die. When faced with death, yearning for more life, or for some great sense of comfort and so on, many people crawl back to their cave and become content with and enjoy the storytelling of the shadows of religion.