Religious people have forgotten their own morals because they are accustomed to the ones they get from god
I was looking for a new book to listen to, and I don’t want to go into too much detail, but one was written by a christian scholar (Nigel Biggar, Colonialism. A Moral Reckoning) who more or less was downplaying the harm of wars and imperialism. After some research, I understand that he has an agenda and started with a conclusion instead of looking for one, but what made me write the lines above was that he is a christian who follows the morals of his (instituted) religion. You have to put in a lot of effort to see, even if it is just a little, the good things in imperialism and suppressing whole groups of people just because they interfere with your way of doing things. I think you can only learn this behavior from the society around you, and what better to use a book for this with the stamp of some higher power on it and supported by a state and institutionalized religion.
Later in the day, I looked on Mastadon, and one of the posts quoted 3 peaceful parts of different religions as if to say that we all have to believe that we should live in peace because it says so in these holy books. I don’t know, but it is pretty easy to quote some terrible lines out of all these same books, so why not forget them if you can use them as an excuse for everything you do, good and bad.
I think it was somewhere in my early twenties that I for the first time red something of/about Jiddu Krishnamurti. I think I got to him through my interest, back then, in Annie Besant, she’s quite a character, though she has some strange religious ideas. Krishnamurti is for me someone that represents both an eastern and western approach to philosophy. I often recommend people that are interested in life’s question and/or struggling with these questions to read some Buddhist texts. When you read them superficially, they can often uplift you and help you to relativize your problems. If they like reading these Buddhist texts I will make sure that they hop over to Krishnamurti before they go to deep into Buddhism, because at the end Buddhism is not much more than a doctrinal religion like Christendom or Islam, a “do this, than that will happen” religion.
Krishnamurti is a critical thinker with a deep and personal history with eastern philosophy, religion and mysticism. I see him as a good bridge to western philosophy when your interest is mainly eastern philosophy. A lot of western, mainly young people, gravitate to eastern ideas because western ideas seem to them “dirty” and the cause of…I don’t really understand this, as if there are no “problems” in the east, but a bigger problem is that these people that are looking for a solution…are looking for a solution. They look for some kind of overarching system that would solve their problems, as if you are not responsible for that yourself. This is in short, the philosophy of Krishnamurti and a good gateway to western philosophy, a philosophy that is more rooted in critical thinking, questioning why and not telling how.
“You know, if we understand one question rightly, all questions are answered. But we don’t know how to ask the right question. To ask the right question demands a great deal of intelligence and sensitivity. Here is a question, a fundamental question: is life a torture? It is, as it is; and man has lived in this torture centuries upon centuries, from ancient history to the present day, in agony, in despair, in sorrow; and he doesn’t find a way out of it. Therefore he invents gods, churches, all the rituals, and all that nonsense, or he escapes in different ways. What we are trying to do, during all these discussions and talks here, is to see if we cannot radically bring about a transformation of the mind, not accept things as they are, nor revolt against them. Revolt doesn’t answer a thing. You must understand it, go into it, examine it, give your heart and your mind, with everything that you have, to find out a way of living differently. That depends on you, and not on someone else, because in this there is no teacher, no pupil; there is no leader; there is no guru; there is no Master, no savior. You yourself are the teacher and the pupil; you are the Master; you are the guru; you are the leader; you are everything. And to understand is to transform what is.
Nochrisis 