Go to The Reverend Kooka Speaks About Religious Bulls#!t
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gheeghee
Any and all.
One of the main aspects of missionary life is to get these groups to change they ways because their lives are so 'wrong' and filled with bad things. I have a friend who does the missionary work and I have read some of the stuff the has written about it and I completely disagree with what he is doing. We are not letting this people find themselves and grow on their own as all the great civilizations have done. Instead we are going in and telling them, and in some cases forcing them, to become what one group wants they to become. It ruins the natural evolution of a people to do this and most likely we are going to lose out by not getting to see what these groups might have been able to figure out that could have changed the world.
posted by
kooka_lives
on April 17, 2004 at 6:59 AM
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To which missionaries are you referring? Do you mean Christian missionaries?
posted by
Gheeghee
on April 16, 2004 at 9:08 PM
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well
I never did say that tribe was real. It was just the best example I could come up with for what I was saying. It is an example that people could go and find. What we do know is that the kind of tribal society I was referring to has existed, the problem is that once a tribal unit starts to grow, it becomes harder to keep such simple values and soon you have to form some kind of governing body. And now days with the missionaries getting everywhere and screwing things up, it makes it harder for any of these tribe to keep it going. You can not help but wonder what might come from letting the tribal societies go for a few hundred years without any influences form the outside world and see if they don't figure out something that we missed about the world.
posted by
kooka_lives
on April 16, 2004 at 1:55 PM
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Kooka, your tribal arguement is interesting, but it loses credibility when you use a scripted, idealized farce to back you up, rather than real accounts and examples.
The San (formerly refered to as "Bushmen"), on whom "The Gods Must Be Crazy" is loosely based, do, in fact, have a political and economic hierarchy, not a "utopian" society of equality. The San peoples also believe in a supreme God as well as some lesser gods. In fact, their belief systems are ritualistic and traditional, and do follow a structured religion, albeit not Christian.
If you ever want to verify your historical data, I suggest "The Internet History Sourcebooks Project" at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall. Here you will find an extensive compilation of very useful information.
posted by
Gheeghee
on April 16, 2004 at 7:46 AM
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Finally...
...it's a decent, well-written, intelligent piece about the nature of good and evil!
I don't necessarily agree with all of what you say, kooka, either in the post or in your long comment below, but I can see completely where you're coming from, and much you say I do agree with.
But y'know what? If I agreed with everything you said, the meaningful dialogue ends! It's FINE to disagree! (I'm not saying this for your benefit, obviously!). What's NOT fine is judging and condeming people and ideas just because they don't match yours!
And kooka - you didn't get the dictionary out once! God (or whoever) bless you for that, sir!
More depth later, perchance, if I get...a chance.
D
posted by
DamonLeigh
on April 16, 2004 at 6:53 AM
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cantey
We throw out all religion, all greed, all ideas of how to point out that people are different from each other. Go back to a more tribal way, where everyone had equal say and equal responsibility. Where everyone had to work just as hard as the next guy in order to keep the tribe alive. Where it was a bad thing for all concerned when bad things happened to anyone in the tribe, so if you wanted to live you had to care and had to do good.
Go watch the movie 'The Gods Must Be Crazy' to see this kind of tribe in action. Without greed, religion and such the tribe function peacefully and is doing good with their lives. And just to clarify here, their beliefs in the gods is not really a religion because it is just the idea that anything they can not explain is a god or a monster, so there is no set of beliefs there.
The problem is that could never work with the population we have. Right now there is just too many people to get any kind of sane society going. All we can hope for it that enough people get the idea that they need to go and make sure they are doing good so that it will hopefully get others to follow. There is not way to get everyone to do good, most will stay at their comfortable, safe neutral level and ignore the rest of the world.
posted by
kooka_lives
on April 16, 2004 at 6:34 AM
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but why are we not perfect?
why are we not a perfect, utopian , noble. fully functioning species with all knowledge. Whats the impedement as you see it Kooka? we have so much potential. Whats the bottom line? Damint! Lets move on! How do we do this?
posted by
cantey
on April 15, 2004 at 9:23 PM
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shawn
it was suppose to be 'good', not 'god'. Thank you for pointing that out it has been corrected.
posted by
kooka_lives
on April 15, 2004 at 8:30 PM
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Kooka
Well, you speak of “creating God” (or did you mean to say Good) in the next to last paragraph, second line up from the bottom. It seems that you may agree that God is expanded within the person by the nurturing of the good within. Is that how you envision that people create God?
posted by
telemachus
on April 15, 2004 at 6:28 PM
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