What do you REALLY believe?

[LMNO]

Define "harm".

"Anal"?

"If done properly."

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Define "harm".

"Anal"?

"If done properly."

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Define "harm".

"Anal"?

"If done properly."

It's stuff like that which makes girls say "Nooooooo" 

[Cain]

So harming someone attempting to break your legs would be negative?  Any philosophy that teaches you to let your legs get broken is a bad one.  I can easily prove this, with a sledgehammer.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

So harming someone attempting to break your legs would be negative?  Any philosophy that teaches you to let your legs get broken is a bad one.  I can easily prove this, with a sledgehammer.

AH, but harming a person trying to break your legs means that your 1st circuit is 'positively' charged... it moved forward with a program of positive bio-survival.

limberjim is on his own, but I got a shiny toy model to play with so...

[Telarus]

So harming someone attempting to break your legs would be negative?  Any philosophy that teaches you to let your legs get broken is a bad one.  I can easily prove this, with a sledgehammer.

Ueshiba would argue that whipping out a blade and hamstringing your sledgehammer wielding opponent would be the least ethical response to that situation possible.

If you had started the fight by needless actions/insults, then it jumps into unethical harm.

If he just runs up and knocks you down out of nowhere, then raises the sledge over your feet, well... then cutting his feet off is still ethical, just barely.

The most ethical thing you could do, argues O-sensei, would be to roll backwards with your attacker when he charged, flip him, bring his sledge handle down and on his throat and across one arm, and gently kneel on it...... and ask him to rationally re-examine his motivations for assaulting you while he works up a good apology.

And there's the range of values in between. Which is true enough, in some sense.

[Vene]

So harming someone attempting to break your legs would be negative?  Any philosophy that teaches you to let your legs get broken is a bad one.  I can easily prove this, with a sledgehammer.

Almost as good as the barstool, but not quite.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

What do I really believe?

I believe that you're all wrong, myself included.

Put that in your little report.

[Bu🤠ns]

...or anyone else, i guess.

In the What do you REALLY believe? thread you said:

I went with the Buddhist/Taoist option, primarily because I see Erisian thought as an Americanized melange of Eastern philosophy underlined by a presumption of a Christian context for the adherent.

The original Discordian thought obviously draws strongly from the Orientalism of sixties radicalism, the partially understood Taoism and Buddhism popularized by Alan Watts, but it is also an quintessentially American artifact.  A proper Taoist text would have no need to undermine and attack Christian assumptions of spirituality, but the Principia does just this, and necessarily so -- the near total domination of Christianity in the West means even the atheist's thought is influenced by Christian assumptions.  The humor and anti-professionalism of the Principia also challenges these assumptions -- the "nobility" of spiritual teachers in this case -- in a way the slick and propagandistic packaging of Buddhism and other Eastern thought categorically does not.  No one confuses Greg Hill with Discordianism, not the way Westerners conflate the hero-worship of the Dalai Lama with Buddhism in the exact same way Catholics conflate the hero-worship of the Pope with Christian piety.

etc...

Would you please elaborate a bit more on the differences between the Orientalism of sixties radicalism and "genuine" buddhism or Taoism.  I'm not sure if i agree that Alan Watts partially understood Buddhism or Taoism simply because his method of conveyance was through using one religion to illuminate another.  He did this sure, but, at the same time, the principles of taoism and buddhism aren't really too complicated to end up getting lost in translation.  One of the most illuminating things i realized after reading/listening to Watts was how the model of Christianity didn't include other religions but how Eastern religions did.  Watts' had a great way of putting eastern ideas into a western context which helped remove "ghosts", as he called them, from our lanugage. I even recall him freely admitting that a proper lecture on Zen would be to sit in a room and say nothing.

In my opinion if anybody helped distort eastern concepts (especially Tantric ones) were occult societies such as Helena P. Blavatsky's Theosophical Society or Theodor Reuss' O.T.O..  among many others.  A combination of half-understood eastern concepts combined with western occultism i would say contributed more to the interpretive vagueness of sixties radicalism.  If anything, people half understood Watts' rather qualified attempt conceptualize eastern ideas for a western audience.

unless i'm totally missing something here, lemme know

[Dead Kennedy]

Would you please elaborate a bit more on the differences between the Orientalism of sixties radicalism and "genuine" buddhism or Taoism.  I'm not sure if i agree that Alan Watts partially understood Buddhism or Taoism simply because his method of conveyance was through using one religion to illuminate another.  He did this sure, but, at the same time, the principles of taoism and buddhism aren't really too complicated to end up getting lost in translation.

Is a religion only it's principles?  When I think about Christianity, I think of a lot of different things, and few of those things have much of anything to do with principles.

I think about coke-snortin' and gay cruising Ted Haggard, the latest hypocrite, and Jimmy Swaggart doinking his secretary who went on to strip for Playboy, the first hypocrite (in my lifetime, not history).  I think of Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, James Dobson, and a thousand other turd-polishing shitbirds.

I think about Kurt Warren who clearly has tremendous faith and draws great willpower from that faith...so he can throw an inflated leather sack down a field.  And I think about every boxer (I'm a big fan of the fights) who thanked God for granting him the power to smash another guy's face to pulp.

I also think about the woman who stopped as I walking down a street, lost in a world of my own pain and suffering, who touched my arm and gently said "You know, Jesus loves you too." and made me cry because it was exactly the kindness I needed in that moment, even if I know that the love of a flying Jewish zombies is insubstantial at best.

Christianity is also that inexorable, unexciseable moral juggernaut that shapes all of our worldviews.   If you can't speak in terms of Judeo-Christian morality, you simply cannot speak to most Westerners.

And mind you, I don't mean the "Christian morality" of fringe christofascist's with obsessive sexual issues.  I don't mean the legions of politically active fathers obsessed with their daughter's sex lives, or the repressed homosexuals who seek to punish others for their unwanted desires.  I mean the Judeo-Christian morality that Thomas Jefferson sought to highlight with The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, that Tolstoy explored in The Kingdom of God is Within You, which inspired the peaceful resistance of Martin Luther King Jr., that Kant sought to codify with reason guided by intuition.  Western humanism is simply what Jesus was teaching rephrased for the modern era.

We eat, breathe and live in an environment where these presumptions are all present.  We Discordians cling fiercely to a sense of our own individuality, our self-perceived right to decide what is right, but how many of us recognize that modern "Erisian" thought traces a line from this conversation now through the permanent rebellion of the 60's counter-culture through the Enlightenment's recognition of cogito, ergo sum through the Protestant revolution all the way back to Jesus saying we're all equal in the eyes of our Lord.  This is an idea absent in the East, this assumption of some metaphysical equality between all people.

Is my point clearer now? 

Have you ever seen the movie Ninja Resurrection?  It's sort of in the "Wrath of God/Christian Mysticism" genre (like American films The Ninth Gate, End of Days, Omen, etc.)  but it's mostly interesting for its demonstration of how completely and totally the Japanese don't understand Christianity.  The Japanese do not eat, breathe and live in an atmosphere of Christianity, and it shows when they try to do "Wrath of God" stuff.

Westerners can't understand Buddhism and Taoism the way it really exists in the wild as it were, because we do not eat, breathe and live it.  Our understanding of Buddhism and Taoism is principles only, without the deeper awareness of the hypocrisies, the realities, the idiosyncrasies, and other dimensions of these religions.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

The Tao isn't the road you read about other Taoists following.... the Tao is walking the road.

If the road in the Far East has different Billboards, Rest Stops, Gas Stations and Hotels than the road here in the States, that doesn't mean it isn't the road. In our case, the billboards run ads for getting stoned on Zenarchy brand joints. Hotels range from Best Western 'Eastern Religions',  to Hilton 'Western Occultism', with gas stops at Philosophical Absurdism, Christianity, the Sixties, pop psychology, Beatnicks, Dadaists and a lovely resturant run by crazy motherfuckers that sent letters to Playboy magazine.

What I really believe is that none of us know what's going on... the best we can do is wildly guess at concepts based on assumptions extruded from what we perceive. I believe that any system which claims otherwise, be it Phelps Fundamentalism, Materialist Atheism or the Paramis of Buddha, are probably full of shit. I believe that the only reality is experiential reality and that only tells you what you experienced, not what IS or WAS or WILL BE.

[Requia ☣]

Ninja Resurrection is supposed to have something to do with God?  I missed that...

[Golden Applesauce]

@Dead Kennedy: I like where you're going with this.

i'm defining negative as a force that leads you to do things that harm others or are motivated by cruelty or anger.  the force is your own , not external.

we are all god.  we are all the devil.

Ah, so it is a value judgment after all.  Rather than going on about "positive" and "negative," wouldn't it be easier to just name whatever moral framework you're working from?  It seems like your "positive" and "negative" just mean "right" and "wrong."

Could you clarify your last statement?  I think you mean to say something along the lines of "everyone has the potential for both Godliness and evil," but I'm not sure.

[Pariah]

@Dead Kennedy: I like where you're going with this.

i'm defining negative as a force that leads you to do things that harm others or are motivated by cruelty or anger.  the force is your own , not external.

we are all god.  we are all the devil.

Ah, so it is a value judgment after all.  Rather than going on about "positive" and "negative," wouldn't it be easier to just name whatever moral framework you're working from?  It seems like your "positive" and "negative" just mean "right" and "wrong."

Could you clarify your last statement?  I think you mean to say something along the lines of "everyone has the potential for both Godliness and evil," but I'm not sure.

Good and evil. I scoff.
For something to be truly evil no good can come of it, for something to be completely good no evil can come of it which makes it immposible. Every action of good has an bad effect and every evil, a good.

[Lies]

I didn't write this, but I got it off some random webpage on meditation, from the kids section. Deep.

http://meditation.org.au/class1.asp

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Sometimes things aren't what we expect.

Sometimes it is hard to understand exactly what people mean, and sometimes for the biggest questions in life everyone has a different answer.

When people talk about God and what we are doing here on earth, for example, you'll find that most people don't agree on very much at all.

If you have heard of the word religion, you might know that there are many different beliefs about who God is or whether he or she exists at all.

Atheists don't believe in God. They say that there is no scientific proof for God's existence. Other people believe in a God that is like a really nice person who loves us all, or that God is just another name for the universe and existence - it just IS.

But do you know what? We think every one is right. How can that be?

Have you ever thought about all the names that water has? We know the liquid is called 'water', it is wet and it is easy for us to see. Then there is 'ice' – it is frozen water and it is so hard it can be like a rock. Then if you heat water up it becomes a 'vapour' or 'steam' and is practically invisible.

Lets think about God like water for a minute. Sometimes he (or she, or it) is invisible like a vapour but if you were to stop and look really closely you would be able to see tiny water droplets in the vapour. Other times, God is like a liquid, that you can swim in and other times God is so real, it is like a block of ice right in front of you.

Sometimes you can't actually see the water, but it still exists. Everything on earth needs water for life. Plants need it, animals need it.

We are all like that too, we all need love for our lives too. To be simple, love is another name for God. So some people say that they don't believe in God, but they still believe in love. So they experience God that is very hard to see, like vapour.

Then there are others that say they can see God like an energy, swim in him, like a liquid. For them God is just as real as drinking water.

Then there are still others that believe that God is as real as a block of ice. If you ran into a block of ice you would crash into it. For some people, God is like that, so real you can't miss her.

Then there other names for God. I might call God - 'love', but someone else says no is he is a person like you and me and his name is 'God', or 'Supreme', or 'Allah', or 'Rama' and others say that God is not a male or a female, that God is more like a 'force' or 'energy'. Do you see what i mean about all the different names for water? ...and all the different ways people think of God?