Sunday, July 28, 2019

The Problem with "Religion" (Alan Watts)

Alan Watts via WDYD (fb); Dhr. Seven, Ashley Wells, CC Liu (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
(WDYD) Alan Watts, "The New Religion: God is Dead" brought to us by "What do you desire?"

Decolonize mind or the butt will stay stuck.
"God is dead?" "Kill the Buddha"? "Burn the Bible"? What the Avici are you talking about?

This talk by the self-described "spiritual entertainer" Alan Watts is prophetic. He points out how and why the West stopped believing in God and is dying to gain faith.

It's likely the intelligent never did believe, but the rest of us sure had to. There was no choice about it. It was rammed down our throats with the most fearful threats imaginable. And the very people we trusted most were the ones ramming. They had been lied to and turned around and lied to us.

How, for instance, can we as Americans choose to live in a republic if we actually believed the universe were governed as a dictatorial monarchy?
  • [Perhaps that's why Republicans prefer neo-fascist dictatorships and distrust Christian monarchies  -- or at least that's the way it seems under Trump and the Bushes before him -- and why we liberals like monarchies but prefer democratic-socialism. Do Catholics distrust dictatorships because they know monarchies first hand and would rather rule themselves through some fairer process in which they have some say? Buddhists will say, "Let's move on to something that's intellectually respectable and doesn't insult our intelligence."]
Watts proposes an alternative solution: Let's have a secularization of religion, getting rid of a great omnipotent creator "God" -- respectfully -- as proposed by some theologians and philosophers throughout history.

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