Meditation and YOU MUST BELIEVE IN REINCARNATION

People seem to equate various practices with beliefs. I was once meditating in my room when my father entered and saw me there. Now, I had only recently informed him that I no longer wanted to practice Catholicism. In response to seeing me meditating he informed me that it was absolutely crazy to believe in reincarnation. At that time I had not known that the rebirth that Buddhism speaks of is not a literal transferring of souls. I was, however, meditating for more practical reasons, so I found it slightly far-fetched to see that he had equated mediations so hastily to believing in reincarnation. I don't particularly believe or disbelieve in reincarnation and I was only meditating to relax. People do often tend to assume that partaking in certain activities must necessarily have been caused by some ideological opinion change.

Meditation and Hearing

I practised meditation for two reasons that I can remember. The first was to relax after some sort of strong emotional distress. The second was to to focus on my hearing ability. I would sit in quiet-ish areas and try to focus on one noise that was distinctly more quiet than other noises, the hum of an electronic device is a good example. I would work on concentrating on that until it was easy to pick that thing out from others. Then I started to try focusing on more than one thing. I would find a recording of a simple drum beat and then I would concentrate on both the hum and the beat. After that, I started to try to count the drum beats and concentrate on the hum again. I continued with this sort of thing, until I was able to focus on three things with proficiency. After that, I tried to concentrate on things that were more distant from me. This worked fairly well, and at one point in time, I could sit in crowded rooms and listen in to one conversation over others.

Meditation to Relax

Response to Ryan - full post here

I practised meditation for a while. I was not doing so in search of spiritual experience so I never really had one related to meditations. It was, however, useful in relaxing and controlling breath. It helped to sort out problems that mattered from problems that didn't, and it helped to determine solutions to those that did matter. I used it countless (not really though) times in order to calm myself down after any sort of large emotional distress.

Proper Noun Church

In response to Lauren's post - full post found here

When you think of lip balm, adhesive strips, tissues, slow cookers, and cotton swabs, you likely think of, respectively, chapstick, band-aids, kleenex, crockpot, and Q-tips. These companies who own the brand names that we associate with products are incredibly talented and maybe slightly lucky. My point here is that sometimes it is the work of organisations to replace a general product with a brand name. The catholic church, actually, is one of those organisations. They do not object to the association of the word church with Catholicism. In fact, they often do it themselves; I would not doubt if this were completely intentionally done. You can look at the Catechism on the Vatican website and see examples of that all over the place . This part, here (http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P29.HTM), mentions the Church often.

Crossan and Catholic and History

I do wonder why people chose to identify with one denomination of Christianity over another. Mostly I am concerned with Dominic Crossan's denominational choice. I wonder why he decided to call himself a Catholic. Surely there are other denominations which more closely follow or resemble his view on Jesus. The Catholic take the gospels more literally than most other denominations of Christianity, and they back their claims up with a history that is non-existent, or lean a history in their favour when clearly it was not meant in that manner.

Surely Crossan does not support having only male authorities because Jesus chose men as his followers (Catechism 1577 - Part(p) 2 Section(s)2 Chapter(c) 3 Article(a) 6). Surely he doesn't agree with the Catholics when they say that "it is through Christ's Catholic Church alone, which is the universal help toward salvation, that the fullness of the means of salvation can be obtained" (Catechism 816 - p1s2c3a9 Paragraph3). Jesus did not, after all, think that one could only reach the Kingdom of God through a single establishment/building. Does Crossan agree that those who deliberately do not attend Sunday mass commit a grave sin (Catechism 2180-2181 p3s2c1a3) and thereby a mortal sin (catechism 1857 p3s1c1a8)? If not, then why does he call himself a Catholic? If you believe all of those things, then feel free to honestly call yourself a Catholic. If you do not honestly believe all of those things it would likely be best, to avoid confusion, if you correctly identified yourself under the correct denomination.


Most of the ideas that Crossan supports and believes about the historical Jesus, I also support. Most of these ideas however, do not line up with the catholic church's beliefs

Life and Death - Two sides of the same coin?

Is death necessary for life? In class today someone said that death and life are part of the same thing; the only way you can have death is if you have life. But is it true that in order to have life, you must have death? Does the very nature of receiving life equate to receiving death? Many religions would have us think so; there is a common place belief that death must always accompany life. The Vatican, for instance, said that "disposing of death is, in reality, the most radical way of disposing of life" (Communion and Stewardship - Paragraph 93). In the same document they say that it would be radically immoral to extend human life through production or genetic engineering. Basically, they are saying that death is a part of life and that it would be wrong to change that. I disagree with that assertion and I do not think that death necessarily has to exist due to life. With transhumanism, it could be possible to extend human life to near immortality. Though presumably with this technology it would be possible to kill yourself if you were bored. Maybe everyone would get bored with that sort of life span, making death an inevitable part of life still.

Beliefs That Override Truth?

In response to Lauren - full post here

If there is lack of evidence in favour of something and lack of evidence against something, it is fair to believe one over the other. However, if there is conclusive or overwhelming evidence in favour of one of the option, it would be most inadvisable to accept the other option. So, if there is no evidence in favour of or against the hypothesis that Jesus had a relationship with Mary, you can choose to believe either way, just don't assert it as truth.

Beliefs, I'm afraid have little power over the truth. You cannot determine truth with beliefs. This is evidenced by the fact that beliefs can run completely contrary to truth. If, for instance, I chose to believe that I could draw a triangular square, I would be severely disappointed, for the truth is no such thing can exist. If I chose to believe that I could jump from a building and then rewind time before I hit the bottom, I would be disappointed to find out that my belief did not effect reality. At one point in time people thought the world was flat, they had no evidence either way, so they could have believed what they wanted, but their beliefs did not change the fact that the world is an oblate spheroid. Beliefs can ignore truth, but they can never 'override' the truth.

Evidence has to play a pivotal part in society's thought process because without it we would not have made here as a species. Without evidence we could not invent things; we cannot build wheels out of things that we believe exist though those things do not. Without evidence we could throw ourselves from bridge because we believed that a magical net would save us. Without evidence we could, during the Salem Witch Trials, hang 19 people for being witches, though no such things exist; they simply believed that witches existed thought they had no evidence to support their beliefs. Due to having believed that belief was better than truth, the people of Salem in 1692 decided to kill those innocent people anyway.

I hope you can see the negative consequences of thinking that belief can override truth; basing society on truth and evidence has gotten us much further than basing society on just beliefs. Beliefs are strengthened with truth; justified and true beliefs constitute knowledge.