Icebreaker:

The human species is an animal species without very much variation within it, and it is idle and futile to imagine that a voyage to Tibet, will discover an entirely different harmony with nature or eternity.  What harmony have you discovered on “getaways” to foreign lands, religious sites or nature’s kingdom?  Do you find anything disagreeable in this Icebreaker statement?

Question of the Night: 

Religions form around great shards of fabrication adhered together by thin layers of profundity and empirical truths while being coated with miraculous and unprovable myth.

Does this statement sound like other religions or your religion?  What tenets in other religions sound fake?  What preaching in your religion sounds profound?  What provable truths evidence themselves in any religion?

Other Questions:

From Alias Grace, by Margaret Atwood ~ A psychologist analyzing a murderess, theorizes that she has been possessed by a dead friend, who orchestrates the murder without the actual murderess’ knowledge.  Ha, if getting away with murder were only that simple!  Do you have acquaintances possessed by long “dead” friends (i.e. traumatized by the transgressions of family, teachers, preachers, jeepers, creepers, etc.)?  Do you allow that “the Devil made them do it”?  How long will you endure this “possession” before cutting them off?

Northern Uganda 2005, kidnapped village children are tortured by their cruel captors and converted from innocent wretches into a stone-faced zombie army.  A grieving tribal elder portends ~ Children who have felt cruelty know very well how to inflict it.

When have you been a witness to the conversion of an innocent to an inflictor by way of cruelty?

Just as spilled milk can never be recovered, lost innocence can never be found.  What is to be done with the spilled, the spoiled and the subjected?

To know a person, don’t watch the mouth but watch the feet.  Do the preachers and prophets also believe, or do they too just “believe in belief”?  When leaders implore you to follow, are their feet going the same direction as yours?  Discuss.

Do you think irritating people should only be discarded from your relationships when they have full awareness of their malicious behavior? If so, how do you decide when to move them OUT?  Is it by severity of injury or by accumulation of bad behavior – to a breaking point?  With the arrival of your new friends with better benefits, do the burdensome and vacuous soon depart of their own accord?  Or does it take a long while until ex-friends in low places get the hint?

Craft Singles (One sentence with questions)  Take a bite!

What if there is an afterlife but no god? What if there is a god but no afterlife?

What happens when a plain racket turns into a serious religion before your eyes?  Vice versa?

Dalai Lama ~ You can visit a prostitute as long as someone else pays for it.  Who gets the change?

Is a high moral character a precondition for great moral accomplishments?  Examples?  Exceptions?

When priests go bad, they go very bad.  When lay people go good, they keep bad as an option.  True? False?

Pope John Paul II ~ An excuse is worse and more terrible than a lie, for an excuse is a lie guarded.  Discuss?

Holy Cow Part Deux

Pious Jews are at this moment trying to breed the spotlessly pure “red heifer” mentioned in the book of Numbers, chapter 19, which if slaughtered again according to the exact and meticulous ritual will bring about the return of animal sacrifices in the Third Temple and hasten the end of time and the coming of the Messiah.  Where is more money spent: On proving religious beliefs?  Disproving secular science?

The Guide for the Perplexed, Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon’s book seeks to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy with Hebrew Bible theology, by finding rational explanations for many events in the text.

When you try to rationalize theology with philosophy what do you get?

When you try to rationalize philosophy with theology what do you get?

Just like one can take vengeance only to its extreme, so it is also with deception, exploitation, and abuse.  Is it exhaustion or loss that cures the morally corrupt?  What extremes in human degradation can cause such bromides as “honesty is the best policy” and “to forgive is divine” to root profound and grow within?