It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
Originally posted by SunTzu22
The greater point that i am begining to see is this:
Who was the "God" that asked Abraham to slaughter his only son?
Who really was the "Satan" than pleaded with him to spare his son"
Who is this "god" that demands blood sacrafice and absolute obidience?
Why is this "god" able to be summoned with "its" true name?
Don't sound very Christian to me. Are any of you getting my drift?
If we see ourselves as alienated from God, we have a huge problem. That's exactly what the Abrahamic faiths do to us - they alienate us from who we really are, from our divine spark. Instead of making us search for God inside ourselves, they project God onto an external figure; remote, alien, infinitely high above humanity. They make humanity bow to this being as its unworthy slaves. Humans are worthless and depraved in comparison. Nothing could be unhealthier for humanity than to be so alienated from God, to have such a negative concept of ourselves, to be so in thrall to a false god.
It is the Demiurge who is the false God. "Why does evil exist?" is one of the oldest questions. If God is perfect goodness, all-powerful and made everything, evil ought to be impossible. The Abrahamic religions can make no sense of evil. In Illumination, God did not make everything. It all evolved from the fundamental substance of the universe, driven by the dialectic. The Demiurge is one of the main products of the dialectic. Evil is a dialectical necessity in order for good, its opposite, to have meaning. That's why evil MUST exist.
[...]
The ascent of thought to pure form gives rise to the Absolute Idea, to reason that has reached its maximum expression, but at this stage it lacks all content. It can be equated to God "in himself". The spatio-temporal world is an "emanation" of the Universal Mind - Mind made "other" - in order to create an arena where content can be supplied. God cannot be God without this arena of creation. This explains why God (in himself) created the physical universe: he had no choice. The Abrahamic faiths claim that God is complete and perfect and in no way needs creation - which begs the question of why, in that case, he bothered to create the world. It becomes whimsical and superfluous; an act that makes no sense. In Hegel's philosophy, God MUST create the physical universe. It is an inescapable step on his path to maximum actualization. The physical world is a mirror in which the Universal mind can contemplate itself. Absolute Mind (God fully actualized) attains Absolute Knowledge of form AND content.
[...]
The earliest humans, it is said, lived in a state of perfect innocence in the Garden of Eden, a terrestrial paradise. Everything went wrong when they chose to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, an action explicitly forbidden by God.
Of course, there was no such tree; it was symbolic, not actual, metaphorical not literal. After all, how could eating some fruit give you knowledge of evil? In fact, it is the act of disobedience that introduces humanity to "evil", not the fruit of the tree, and it is this act of disobedience for which humanity is punished by God and for which humanity is said to be "Fallen." The actual eating of the fruit resulted in..."And the eyes of them both [Adam and Eve] were opened, and when they perceived themselves to be naked, they sewed together fig leaves, and made themselves aprons." In other words, the main consequence of understanding good and evil would appear to be the need to go shopping for clothes, which certainly explains a lot about the behaviour of the legions of women who watch Sex and the City.
[...]
Hegel's project was all about showing the intimate connection between God and man. This was the centrepiece of his philosophy. He was determined to heal the alienation that characterized so much of life: between man and nature, man and society, and above all, between man and a God that was made external to him and placed infinitely far above, impossible to reach or comprehend.
"Religion [he's referring to Christianity] wishes to educate men to be citizens of heaven who always look on high and this makes them strangers to human feeling."
Hegel
Look how well the idea of a remote God works for the Elite. The Pope is called the "Vicar of Christ" - Christ's earthly representative - so to disobey the Pope becomes the equivalent of disobeying God. If God were regarded as being internal rather than external, who would need any popes, any representatives? Hence it is not in the interests of religious leaders to encourage the idea that God is inside us.
.
The Holy Spirit (the Holy Mind) is the synthesis of God the Father (God in himself) and God the Son (God outside himself and struggling to be himself: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me."). In this sense, the Holy Spirit can be considered the highest aspect of God, the aspect with which we can truly interact, and which can infuse us with the divine spirit. That can, in short, reveal to us the Mind of God. Thesis: God the Father = Absolute Idea. Antithesis: God the Son = the embodiment of the Absolute Idea, the Absolute Idea made flesh, "alienated" God. Synthesis: God the Holy Spirit = Absolute Knowledge of the Absolute Idea as it is in itself and how it appears when embodied and reflected in the physical world. No higher knowledge is possible. In the Holy Spirit, the maximum actualization of the Absolute Idea is achieved as Absolute Mind/Spirit ("Geist", to use Hegel's specific German word.)
[...] where the synthesis produced by a thesis and antithesis is negative and unhealthy rather than a positive uplifting of the other two elements. Take an example such as democracy (as the thesis) and capitalism (as the antithesis). This might have led to the best features of democracy and capitalism being blended together in a higher synthesis. Instead, we got the most rapacious form of capitalism with the Elite paying themselves unprecedented sums of money, and democracy being turned into a farce and a mockery of any genuine concept of the people as truly empowered. Those ordinary people who buy into the Elite's version of democracy are complicit in their own oppression. They are victims of a "false consciousness" that makes them think that what is harmful to them is actually beneficial. Of course, the Old World Order have programmed them to think that way.
We are the tool of the cosmic process of ever increasing acquisition of self-knowledge of the Absolute. As above, so below. If we fail to grow dialectically, we do not fulfil our human essence. We remain self-alienated. Most people go through their lives in self-alienated, Autopilot mode. They are making little or no dialectical progress and are condemned to live low-quality lives. Because of the rule of the Old World Order, the whole of humanity is dialectically retarded. We cannot resume an upward trajectory until the OWO are defeated. Francis Fukuyama claimed that after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of communism, liberal democracy was the only show left in town, the only universal ideology left. Islam is not a viable rival since Islam has never had any strong appeal to non-Muslims. If you aren't born a Muslim, you are highly unlikely to find anything attractive about it; quite the reverse. Fukuyama was famous for his book about the "End of History". What he meant by this provocative phrase had nothing to do with some apocalyptic event but rather with the philosophical idea that history has reached its logical conclusion, its dialectically appointed end, in the shape of liberal democracy operating according to capitalist market economics. Historical events would still take place, but they would no longer be concerned with the dialectic since that had reached its endpoint. In other words, he was making the claim that liberal democracy is as good as it gets for humanity. This bungled and botched monstrosity is the apex of human political evolution, supposedly. One by one, Fukuyama imagined, countries not yet part of the liberal democratic family would succumb until the entire world was one vast liberal democracy.