baker

Sure, but the responsibility is also on those who popularize the Bible. Arguably, their responsibility is bigger. The Bible (usually in a simple versi...

But those non-chosen people are also said to be doomed, are they not? They are automatically classed as the enemies of the Lord, as the enemies of the...

The scary thing is that we're living in times where we feel we need to discuss such topics to begin with. In an ideal society, the OP and the essay it...

No, it was a genuine question seeking clarification. You didn't need to assume evil intent. The Boss of this forum once said words to the effect that ...

So this is a place where might makes right? That's what you, as moderators, really believe in?

I wasn't being criticized. To criticize me, they would have to refer to something I actually said, a position I actually hold. Instead, someone in a p...

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Relying on magic is tricky, it simultaneously gives one a sense of power and of ...

Perhaps some day you'll get tired of being a dick. Or not.

You're just providing further evidence for my points.

What use is fairness, when people can live just fine without it? Actually, it's the kind of thinking that some Christians impute upon outsiders. It's ...

You didn't answer my question.

Refer to

Or it's a book that forces us to think in terms of existential urgency. A tribe that wants to survive and obtain and keep power has to maintain strict...

But they refuse to do so. Now what? - - - You can hold up your sign all day long, for years, and no Christian will come along. IOW, the situation you ...

LOL. I once posted a couple of posts where I expressed my concerns over the safety and effectiveness of the covid vaccines. From this, a prominent pos...

Surely there are principles. Watch it, you might get banned, and not having seen it coming!

The simpler explanation is that religion/spirituality is exactly as it appears, exactly as it is practiced by religious/spiritual people. Thus: It _is...

Wrong. Buddhism isn't after the truth in the general sense you're using the word here. For the Buddhist quest, most truths that people tend to be afte...

No, it means it's advisable not to be a dick. You guys have been displaying here a pervasively passive attitude toward religion/spirituality. As if re...

The difference of opinions shows only that there is a difference of opinions. Nothing more. I'll translate this into language that you might be better...

Because when foreigners invade your country, the only sensible thing to do is to kneel before them and let them have your country, right? Or is that o...

The Nazis didn't think so, obviously. Anyway, the point is that you're setting yourself up as the epistemic and moral authority over Christians when y...

The ultimate solution to the problem of solipsism is watching your teeth rot.

What use is illusory fairness?

I didn't study Freud, I observe people who claim to be religious/spiritual. Why not? How do you explain the consistency with which religious/spiritual...

In their eyes, it does. Just like the Nazis didn't consider the Nuremberg tribunal to be a valid judicial authority, so religious/spiritual people don...

It's not clear how this is the case. For one, the secular constitution protects religion, but it doesn't protect philosophy. Religious people can alwa...

And of the naive who think discussions are about arguments, and not about the social power hierarchy.

You keep focusing on these externals and incidentals, as if they would be the defining factors of Buddhism, or, more specifically, the Dhamma. They ar...

Not if you claim membership in a group and demand to get special, preferential, or lenient treatment on account of such membership.

Gang laws, tribe laws. If you're a member of a gang, you are accountable for what another gang member does. Even if you were nowhere near when he comm...

Heh. I turned to Buddhism in order to figure out which Christian religion is the right one. (It seems absurd in hindsight, but this is how it happened...

E.g. from Mormon doctrine:

Not my circus, not my monkeys. They can. This is the normative aspect of art theory. While I don't know how the art critics do it, they appear to be f...

And whose problem is that? What I find so ironic about you, and I do so to the point that I actually laugh out loud, is how you ascribe to me that I a...

I'm not too keen on expressing hatred, nor on taking up the time of the moderators, however, Where is the dividing line here at this forum, between th...

Religious people tend to be authoritarian, and their critics tend to be such as well. That shouldn't be too hard. If a family are only Sunday saints a...

Because they themselves might not be safe from hell yet. A proper Roman Catholic, for example, is expected to his last breath to consider himself capa...

Actually, this is precisely what was disputed by some posters this thread, and is in general disputed in society about some beliefs. Ultra political c...

It opens fine on my computer. There used to be quite a bit of talk about the River of Fire about 10+ years ago (and several online sources for the tex...

Then such a person is not an ascetic. Eh? Where did you get that? It's not clear where you're going with this.

Is it or is it not? Men can be priests, monks for any amount of years, and then still disrobe. It's far from unheard of.

Re judging people by their actions: This is a very generalized heuristics, and thus often unfair or useless for judging people. By the time someone do...

Look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Which of them are actually needs?

Yes. People who are in the position to voluntarily abstain from some worldly creature comforts aren't actually renouncing anything yet, even if it ext...

In asceticism, you don't "reject the physical body", you reject some popular notions about who we are and what we supposedly need.

Machiavelli's The Prince, Green's 48 Laws of Power, and other such literature and its popularity suggest that it is possible to deliberately, in a 'cl...

What if someone says, flat-out, "I hate New Agers" or "New Agers are stupid, worthless people"?

And you are the judge of who is "genuinely imbued with religious feeling"?

Like I said in the same post of mine you quoted: