Tuesday, March 12, 2019

What isn't said is that the truths, the character, tone and guiding beliefs, the ethos of the revealed religions, have their source in asceticism


When we hear that all lies have their source in Satan, the father of lies, and all truth is Christian truth, we need to understand that we are seeing the world from the point of view of ascetics. What isn't said is that the truths, the character, tone and guiding beliefs, the ethos of the revealed religions have their source in asceticism. That is, in a lifestyle of abstinence from sensual pleasures, including celibacy, while pursuing spiritual goals, withdrawing from the world, and general renunciation. Christ lived that way, so did Buddha, and thousands of ascetics before them, which is where the values and morals they preached came from. 
 
That was not a practical source of values and morals for the much larger population of non-ascetics, so in the West at least ascetic values were reinterpreted for the people, and the central ascetic goals of the religion were toned down, or not featured. 
 
The Hindus, perhaps the oldest religion on earth derived from the Vedas, found a wise way to handle this dilemma by saying that man has to go through four stages of life. The first, as described by Vandana Singhal, is the "Brahmachari (or a bachelor or you can say a student life). The second is Grihasta meaning a householder. The third is the Vanaprasta or the one who dwells in the forest in a semi-retired state. The fourth is the Sannyasi known as the renounced or a person who has left the material world...The four stages of life represent training, creation, service and retirement...These four stages of life known as Ashramas, gain your fulfillment."

Yet how much clearer are the truths of theological materialism, which is more or less placed in the worldview of “philosophical naturalism, with the difference being that philosophical naturalism is generally irreligious, and theological materialism is religious in seeing Godhood as the goal of material evolution, first mirrored in the Father-Within of the ascetic traditional religions, now transformed but not rejected by new truths from science and philosophy, and not lies coming from Satan who was just a symbol to aid ascetics.

No comments:

Post a Comment