Watching my wife sleep is spiritual. It’s a connection with something more tangible than entertainment. Althought I do think a lot of people have a spiritual attachment to television. These are shallow lives, but it is easier to relate to a thing than a person.

I don’t think religion is hardwired. Spirituality is as far as it’s related to relating to people and things (and god with regards to religion). Spirituality is not religion (definition #4 here: http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=spiritual), at least from my perspective.

Comment on your other articles: Great stuff, I didn’t realize I had an interest in anthropology… I’ve been trying to dig into some of Nietzche’s ideas on morals and it’s a lot easier to see how morality isn’t inherent by studying the beginning of a civilization (wish I had more time and a better attention span for this effort). Keep the ideas coming.

Personally, I see a difference between spirituality (which is what’s “hardwired”, Jason) and religion (which is simply a form of government, social teaching and control). Chrstianity is the latter more than the former (in large part because of Paul’s diversion from what Jesus actually said.)

You’re probably right, marts, that Xianity wouldn’t have survived as it did without such a change… or, maybe, more accurately, it wouldn’t have GROWN. Paul got off on the idea of Jesus’s suffering and instilled it in his followers, reinforcing it with a divide and conquer attitude toward everyone else.

Had he not done that, Xianity would’ve probably remained a minor cult among the many that already existed in that region, a historical footnote with maybe as many followers today as Judaism has. By doing that, though, Paul set the stage for Xians to provoke their own repression under Emperor Julian & others (through their absolute refusal to cooperate with the other legal cults of the time) that, unfortunately for the Pagans, only served to reinforce the Xian sense of “specialness” & dualistic attitudes to the point of delusion in several famous early leaders & “saints.”

The agnostic attitude (I agree) is the only viable option. This is based (in my case) on the impossibility of either proving or refuting the tenets that (Christian) theistic religion is based on. It seems to me the most honest position and therefore the one that can be maintained with the most intellectual integrity. Which is not to say one shouldn’t sometimes try to entertain the others …

I have relatives that can hunt, but for the present, I’m not one of them. I don’t know how to take down, dress, and prepare a deer. If I did, I would. But I don’t.

That means my meat-eating is relegated to what I can purchase–all of which is the product of petroleum-based industrial agriculture, or, “petroculture.” Even confining myself to USDA-certified, organically grown vegetables–probably as far as you can get from petroculture while still having grocery stores involved–is participating in agriculture, the ultimate root of the problem. In fact, because petroculture has such higher yields, a Kantian acceptance of organic foods as a categorical imperative would create even greater resource depletion than our current predicament. So the moral imperative is not nearly as cut-and-dry as your simple insult would have us believe.

Moreover, McDonald’s sins are not merely nutritional or even ecological. They are also a driving force in the Ethnocide threatening the existence of all cultures but our own. Burger King, while certainly no sainted organization, lacks McDonald’s ability to project such a culturally imperialist force upon the rest of the world. Its competition, however, draws funds away from McDonald’s that would otherwise be put to the ethnocidal cause. Buying a Whopper goes a few dollars towards undercutting our staggering losses of cultural diversity.

In short, the only way any of us can escape rampant hypocrisy is by foraging all our food. Unless we do that, we’re all living in varying shades of hypocrisy and support for hierarchical domination and terror. For one hypocrite to stand up and denounce the hypocrisy of another is, oh, what’s the word?

Marts, I’m very familiar with Thomas; it’s by far my favorite gospel. Which isn’t to say Thomas doesn’t have problems of its own. Thomas is a sayings gospel: it’s just a collection of Jesus’ teachings. Q has been reconstructed from the shared material in Matthew and Luke that isn’t in Mark, and it also appears to be a sayings gospel. Naturally, these gospels don’t have anything about the trial, execution or resurrection of Jesus, since they’re simply collections of sayings. Even more interestingly, the oldest versions of Mark contain nothing of the resurrection, either….

The resurrection figures prominently in Paul’s vision of Christianity–if the resurrection did not happen, then our faith is in vain (quoting loosely from memory). Yet the presence of sayings gospels, and its absence from Secret Mark, would seem to belie its centrality. Could it be that the resurrection was only so important to Paul’s churches (which eventually prevailed), and that the rest of the Jesus Movement focused less on how he died, and more on what he said? The contradictions between Jesus’ and Paul’s teachings strike me as massive and unreconcilable; it would not surprise me at all if Paul focused people on Jesus’ death, so they would forget everything he’d said.

That aside, the historicity of Thomas is not iron-clad, either. It’s relatively late, but probably more historical because of its nature: short, pithy, Aramaic proverbs, rather than the long, winding Greek-philosophy-style speeches of John. Also, Thomas was written by a community of ascetics, and like the canonical gospels, that community was not above putting their own agenda in the Son of G-d’s mouth. The important part is simply understanding what each community’s unique agenda was; then, you can correct for its biases and outright concoctions.

And FUCK TGOT, it’s all (ALL RELIGIONS) a bunch of HOO HAH anyway, you xian freaks.