Narkissos
JoinedTopics Started by Narkissos
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1
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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42
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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54
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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13
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.
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What kind of atheist are you?
by Narkissos inchief rabbi leon ashkenazi said: "the difference between an atheist christian and an atheist jew is that an atheist christian does not believe that god exists, while an atheist jew believes that god does not exist.".
i'm not so sure about the jewish-christian borderline, but i love the nuance.. so which sentence suits you better?.
"i don't believe that god exists.".
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22
Anti-intellectualism and demagogy
by Narkissos inin religion (the wt being an excellent example) or politics (it's a common attitude of a lot of electorally successful leaders such as bush and chirac)... why does it work so well?
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4
Hermann Hesse
by Narkissos inin the few months before -- and years after -- my exit from the org.
he was one of my favourite authors.
i read most of his novels and he really helped me to think "out of the box".. other fans around?
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Should the Christian faith be rationally defended?
by Narkissos inin the pretty miscellaneous "global flood" thread there were a couple of exchanges on the value of "apologetics" per se.
i think this subject is worth a thread of its own.
i will here recall some statements in the aforementioned thread:.
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26
Do believers and unbelievers benefit from each other?
by Narkissos ini was thinking of this today.
we all live in religiously divided societies: in france unbelievers are probably the majority, in the us believers are.
but the minority in both cases is still influential.
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14
Demons and feathers
by Narkissos inbrummie's thread about "unwritten prophecies" made me think more broadly about unwritten stuff among jws.
this one is not a prophecy, sounds more like a "urban legend".. there were stories circulating among french jws in the 70's about people suffering of some unexplained illness, until strange demonic "artworks" were discovered in the feathers of their pillows.
some were almost dying as the "work" was almost completed.