thanks chocolate... meditating and exploring...
i found this resource interesting and informative...
http://www.commonsensegovernment.com...-03-05-05.html
excerpts :
The Different World Views
by John Eberhard
03/05/05
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I’m going to give a little synopsis of the DeMille lecture here because I think it is vital to understand these world-views. People that have some of these world-views bring about constructive effects in society, and some bring about destructive effects in society, and that – you need to know about. Plus I find that just knowing about these world-views tends to make the whole political scene make more sense.
DeMille broke down each world-view according to how the belief system dealt with certain major issues, like ethics, economics, philosophy, law and so on. He covered five of the most prevalent world-views today.
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Biblical Christianity
Source: The Bible, Understanding the Times by David Noble
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Sociology: Home, church and state, in that order. If society is ailing, first fix home, then the church and then the state.
Politics: Justice, freedom, and order. The purpose of the state is to establish justice, freedom, and order.
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Secular Humanism
Secular Humanism starts with the concept of materialism. It showed up in the renaissance, with followers calling themselves Christian Humanists. They loved the Bible, especially New Testament. They wanted to help their neighbor, the poor, etc. But they didn’t like the church structure. They said "We’ll go out and help people because Christ said to do that."
The secular aspect came in when people later said, "We really like this humanism thing. We want to help people, but we don’t think you do it because of God. We don’t think there is a God. We do it because we feel like we’ve evolved to a higher level as humans. The motivation is to be a better person, not because God said so."
The philosophers of this movement were Spencer, Darwin, Dewey, and Kinsey.
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Psychology: monistic self-actualization. You will become whatever you decide to become. You have to be in touch with what’s right for you at the given moment.
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Material Humanism / Marxism
Source: Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Engels
Philosophy: Dialectical Materialism, which preaches that you have a Thesis (some idea), then an antithesis (an opposing idea), then a synthesis. In other words, there is one idea, then another opposing it, and from the opposition of the two ideas, another idea is born. The materialism aspect means that the world is all material. There is no spiritual aspect to man or the world.
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Science: Punctuated evolution, meaning every once in a while there is a huge quantum leap. There are long normal periods and then a spurt, and we just happen to be at the end of a long normal period so of course we can’t find evidence of macro-evolution ("evolution that results in relatively large and complex changes (as in species formation)"
Psychology: Pavlovian behavioralism. You can condition people to do what you want them to do.
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Cosmic Humanism
Confucian, Hindu, Buddhist and new age counterparts
Theology: Pantheism, many gods, and panantheism (everything is god)
Philosophy: Connectivity, everything is connected, nothing is disconnected
Ethics: Inner relativism, there is a right and a wrong, and I have to get in touch and figure out what that is.
Science: Evolutionary consciousness, what evolves is levels of consciousness, over time humanity evolves to higher levels of consciousness.
Gene Roddenberry was coming from this in the Star Trek Next Generation TV series.
Psychology: Co-effective consciousness, this is the concept that we are all inter-connected. My psychology is impacted by yours.
i thought it was interesting to examine the different initiatives in association to the present suffering... a suffering comparable to the times of Jesus, Noah, Moses, Abraham, Sidhartha Buddha, Plato, Shakespaere, Cavemen...
social suffering and world despair...
it poses a question in my mind.. with the belief in transcendence i trust, in what way do i apply lessons from faith towards wordly dilemmas proactively?