Narkissos
JoinedTopics Started by Narkissos
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35
Religious / philosophical exotism and cultural identity
by Narkissos inthis post is going to be shamelessly ethnocentric.
i am a european.
christianity, both catholic and protestant, as well as post-christian secularism, make up my cultural background.
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Conversation with 2 JW "sisters"
by Narkissos inon wednesdays i often see jws offering literature before the railroad station in the town where i live.
tonight i felt like stopping by.. "have a look!
i pick up a book i had never seen.
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18
Hello!
by Narkissos inwell, i'm finally back before my usual computer after a few weeks away.
not all of it fun, but some of it pleasant though.. however jwd was on my mind and i've been thinking of many online friends here -- especially ian (dansk) and mario (utopianreformist).
sometimes i managed to get updates from public internet access.. to be true, i've been around for a couple of days now and read a few topics (some very interesting), but strangely i didn't feel like engaging in biblical, theological or philosophical discussions as i used to do.
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Centre or fringe?
by Narkissos inas jws we were weekly told about making "jehovah," "the kingdom," "spiritual" or "theocratic interests" the centre of our lives.
many of us bought into it and really tried hard to do so.
committing oneself to full-time service was thought of as a natural way of "putting kingdom's interests first" and focusing on what was "most important".. forget a moment about the specific wt crap.
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Personal "God" and self-representation
by Narkissos init is commonly assumed that monotheism, in its jewish, christian and moslem forms, resulted in (or was related to) a specific development of human self-representation.
before a unique creator and judge the individual had to stand as an indivisible unit (e.g.
the "soul" in the middle ages) which was either justified or condemned, either saved or lost.
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The Bible and divine revelation
by Narkissos inin two recent threads eduardo (oroborus21) makes the following assertion:the bible is not itself the revelation about god to mankind.
the bible is a record of the revelation about god to mankind.. .
i find this nuance interesting, although problematic imo, and i think it might be worth its own thread (i hope eduardo doesn't mind).. what do you think?
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Kingdom Songs
by Narkissos inlistening to chopin's nocturnes reminds me that there was one kingdom song (sorry i don't remember the title or number, and the french lyrics i have in mind wouldn't help), still sung in the 80's, which clearly borrowed the melody of nocturne # 4 in f major.
there were many more "worldly tunes" in the former songbooks, but they had been either suppressed or modified to make the themes less recognisable (e.g.
beethoven's appassionata theme in a song about noah if i remember correctly).. are those songs still sung?
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What's your take on morality?
by Narkissos inas former jws we were part of a highly moralising religion.
we have experienced the disastrous consequences of it in terms of hypocrisy, judgementalism or pathologic guilt.
most of us have changed our "moral parameters" drastically, but how far have we gone in questioning morality itself?.
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The tyranny of religious experience
by Narkissos inin the discussion of religious or mystical subjects on this board, the "experiential vs. intellectual" issue often comes up.
while mostly those on the "experiential side" of the debate are content to share their experience without imposing it on others, sometimes the appeal to "experience" sounds like a subtle way of disqualifying the comments of "intellectuals" who cannot know what they are speaking about as long as they haven't got the "right experience".. i remember once discussing that with a welsh evangelical lady: she complained that pentecostals and charismatics in her neighbourhood dismissed her views because she was not "baptised in the spirit" according to their definition of the term.
i pointed to her that her fellow churchgoers were doing exactly the same thing when they dismissed the views of "unbelievers," or traditional believers who didn't claim to be "born again" in the evangelical style.. here the issue of qualitative or quantitative appraisal of religious/spiritual experience steps in.
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Juxtaposition and Bible understanding
by Narkissos inthe "genealogy" thread made me think about the following: .
one of the big problems in reading the bible comes from its practice of simply juxtaposing different stories apparently relating to the same "events": the two creation accounts in the first pages of genesis, the flood narratives (although there is some redactional weaving there), samuel-kings // chronicles, and of course the four gospels.
our theoretic (=> spatially-structured) mind tends to put the stories side by side (synopsis) to compare them: whether we use the comparison to criticise or to harmonise, we actually build a third (or fourth, or fifth) story of "what really happened" (even if it is close to nothing) and then look back to see how the alternate narratives developed from it.