After death.

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As opposed to the unassailable Logic that is the rest of it...

Ah well, there is that. But as I've said, I'm not good at mixing logic and religion. Actually, it's probably my lack of logic in this matter that makes me feel so aggrieved by that idea. It's not the theology I object to so much, more the effect that belief has had on women throughout the ages. Although one led to the other.

There aren't many religions where women come off well. Bahai's maybe.

ryan, do you find religion interesting in itself, as an anthropological study? Or does the whole thing just make you angry/strident?

For all that has been said on the subject, there seems to have been very little looking at realities.

Proposition:

Christianity has put down women.

It would seem reasonable, then, to look at the status of women where other religions are in charge.
It would seem reasonable, then, to see what religious ideas are found where women are a. more downtrodden than here and b. less subjugated

Proposition [I am keenly aware of this one]:

The use of the masculine pronoun as unmarked in a language with sex-based grammatical gender is sexist and correlates with male hegemony.

It would seem reasonable, then, to look at languages where the feminine pronoun is the unmarked one to see how that correlates with social structure [useful hint - in a lifetime of checking out all kinds languages I have yet to find or hear tell of such a language]

It would seem reasonable, then, to look at languages with no gender system [like Japanese] or no sex-based gender system, like Cree, to see how thast correlates with social structure.

Proposition:

Religions with a dominant male deity reinforce masculine hegemony.

It would seem reasonable, then, to look at religions where the head of the pantheon is occupied by a female deity, to determine the position of women.

It would seem reasonable. then, to examine religions and similar belief systems which do not postulate a supreme humanoid deity, to determine the position of women under suych conditions.

I freely admit I have not carried out the study. But I have been around and looked around, and I THINK if these investigations are in fact made we will find there is no statistically significant correlation. We may in fact find that a society with no organized religion, with some postulation of powerful female earth spirits, using a language lacking grammatical gender, in some cases assigns women a more subservient role than we see in a Catholic culture using gender-marked Italian.

Or Albanian. Ever interacted with Albanian women? I have here and in Albania. Read up on Mother Teresa.

Gotta love religions which are LITERALLY patriarchal.

Yes, I do. A Church that centralized which covers up so much pedophilia and pedastry is repulsive. Furthermore, I know of at least one Catholic branch that's tried to intimidate important members who are politicians:



http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/archiv ... l/05070703

This all happens while the Catholic Church worldwide is hiding and defending pederasts and pedophiles.

Of course, the institutional patriarchy just takes the cake in terms of repulsiveness.

Oh, and don't worry, despiting the disgusting, immoral, heartless, and morally depraved opposition of the Catholic Church, Same-Sex Marriage passed in Canada and, as of 2005, they've been legally available from Coast to Coast to Coast.

I don't actually have a solid belief in rebirth. I'm agnostic.



Well, I'm glad you don't see it so negatively, as it is not.

Dukkha (often straight translated as 'suffering') has a particular meaning in Pali that has no exact correlate in the English language.

"Dukkha is a Pali term roughly corresponding to a number of terms in English including suffering, pain, discontent, unsatisfactoriness, unhappiness, sorrow, affliction, anxiety, dissatisfaction, discomfort, anguish, stress, misery, and frustration."

I think for westerners, the Noble Truths might not the best entry point to Buddhism. A lot of people seem to get hung up on the first noble truth. I emphasise meditation. With regular meditation comes an experiential understanding of what the Buddha (and all the mystics of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, et al.) meant.

I came to Buddhism during a period of intense depression, an existential crisis. And since then, the Eightfold Path has become the structural framework of my life.



I don't know how to express it in any very understandable way, but I think that mostly we humans misunderstand suffering and the purpose of life and death in a fundamental way.

You mean ones where certain church officials hold the title "Patriarchos"?

Or do you include those where certain characters in the early layers of scripture - being eponymous ancestors of certain groups, get labelled patriarchs?

Ok , I have to say I do not believe in an afterlife. Or at least I didn't. BUT , I have had an experience and a friend was with me ,I was used by ? (i think it was a dying woman who wanted to see her adopted son before she died).
Anyway for reasons I did not know I went for a 10 hour drive to pick up a friend and we had a car problem on the way back to his mothers home which was in the same town as my own. A police officer stopped me on my way back and to make a long story short, this officer did not have a good grasp of the english language .He said some things that made no sense at all.
He had a plan that would keep me going and it was not legal and he insisted i do this and kept on me until i agreed to do it . I was 4 hours from my destination and he told me to but on my hazard lights and to get in the fast lane and go go go and do not stop and he promised me i would not get stopped by another cop and get a ticket (my tail lights had gone out and that is why he stopped me) it was dark. When I finally agreed he said good now go.
I had not turned off my car during this , so I put on my left blinker and looked back as I was waiting for the cop to go ahead and pull out before I did..........and he was not there......he literally fanished ...no joke this off the wall could not even speak english properly cop and his car had disappeared. My friend and I had not been drinking we were not taking drugs.
I still did as he said and after a few mins i looked at my friend and asked "we did just get pulled over right? " and he looked as if he were in a trance and nodded yes. But i knew we did .....anyway I got that man home to his mother just in time to say goodbye to his mother before she died, nobody even knew she was sick until we arrived at her house and if the cop had not intervened and told me to keep driving with only hazard lights i would have gotten off the freeway and did whatever it took to fix that even if it was just a fuse ,his mother would not have been able to tell him goodbye. this happened about 12 years or so ago and I am still left wondering , that cop can not be explained in any way that us humans know . WHO AND WHAT WAS HE....all I know is he was not a figment of mine or my friends imagination. SO WHAT WAS HE ...also there is much more to this than I have space for ive already used too much.

ANY SUGGESTIONS? or experiences like this ??

I think forgiveness is possible for suicide.