zoofence.com

I am so pleased with this, a place to go to babble on and no one critisizes my spelling.a while ago i would post on the steelers[football]site ,lots of conflict. I ike this a lot better and hope it grows bigger than the politicl and sports sites.Someone said that if we spent 1 tenth of the resorces we spent on "Defence" in the last 50 years we could not imagine where the human race would be. I wounder why so many of us say we believe that we have an imortal soul and live like there is no tommrow.I believe in universal salvation,I am a Course guy but i came to that realization a long time ago.Does any one out there know if other ages were more or less concerened with spirituality?

Miko, I'm not a historian, but I do know a little bit about history. Your question re whether or not other ages were more or less interested in spirituality caught my attention. In my own personal opinion, I would suggest, no. I think that the human situation, as it is within the world with all its attractions and horrors, is a world of good and evil, and is eternally so, so long as the world continues, and there will always be those who are more universal, perhaps more gentle, less aggressive, and those who aren't. And it simply depends on where you personally stand: if you asked the President of the U.S. if our government and therefore culture, under his direction, was militaristic or spiritually motivated, he would chose the latter, because he believes he is "doing God's work", and so does a good percentage of this culture. But ask me, and I would say we are doing quite the opposite. So it all depends upon where you stand personally as to whether the present age, or another age, is more or less spiritual, and it is always a personal perspective that determines the answer, I think.

As for other ages, and others within those ages, it also depends on where they stood at that time in history, and not particularly how we NOW interpret that time to bend to our own present and personal conditioning and wishes. Some believe now that during Jesus's time, there was a great upheaval of spirituality due to his presence: in the end, he had, after all, only 12 disciples, most of whom, in my own opinion, had no idea what he was talking about, and ultimately, his own culture killed him. It is only today that we consider his appearance at that time to be spiritually signficant. The same can be said of any culture, at any time - at the same time they are bowing to their Gods, they are planning wars, often in their God's name. Apparently, still are! So long as there is good and bad, there will be good and bad, both counteracting and complimenting each other.

To bring it down to an individual level, so long as one individual thinks his or her God is better than another's, we will have, eventually, killing and war, and suffering. It may start with disagreement, but let it impinge on our own comfort and our own self-righteousness and fluffed up opinion of our rightness, and it quickly develops into something more sinister. There is no way around this, I am afraid. If we insist that "my God", or my spiritual culture, is the true one, the best one, the way, or the better way, then that essentially is stating "I am chosen, I am better, because I am God's advocate, and I KNOW God therefore". How can that do anything but create friction and antagonism amongst those who think differently, or indeed, similarly, but with a different face on their God?