Re: Secular Intolerance
Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2017 1:45 pm
Scripture may have more than one purpose but its primary purpose serves awakening to what secularism struggles against - awareness of conscious evolution. Secularism speaks of what we should DO. Scripture is concerned with what we ARE which sustains the fallen human condition.Lacewing wrote: ↑Tue Jul 18, 2017 5:32 amDon't you think scripture is MANY things? Was it not created by many, based on their own limitations, understandings, and purposes?
Doesn't it seem rather obvious that you're defining it NARROWLY to validate/glorify your belief in it, and to discredit others' criticism of it?
Do you think it is more spiritual to live by the words of other people and other times, than to live vibrantly in the here and now with all of the clarity and wisdom that we, ourselves, possess?
Why do you worship the past and those of it? What do you think they had that we don't? How would that make any sense?
The Gospels speak mainly of a possible inner evolution called "re-birth". This is their central idea. ... The Gospels are from beginning to end all about this possible self-evolution. They are psychological documents. They are about the psychology of this possible inner development --that is, about what a man must think, feel, and do in order to reach a new level of understanding. ... Everyone has an outer side that has been developed by his contact with life and an inner side which remains vague, uncertain, undeveloped. ... For that reason the teaching of inner evolution must be so formed that it does not fall solely on the outer side of man. It must fall there first, but be capable of penetrating more deeply and awakening the man himself --the inner, unorganized man. A man evolves internally through his deeper reflection, not through his outer life-controlled side. He evolves through the spirit of his understanding and by inner consent to what he sees as truth. The psychological meanings of the relatively fragmentary teaching recorded in the Gospels refers to this deeper, inner side of everyone.
- Maurice Nicoll; The New Man
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