A new forum called "Other Topics (Politics)" has been created for political and economic threads. Now that we have a forum specifically for these controversial topics, political and economic threads will no longer be allowed on this forum.

I have deleted the Politics / Economics forum due to abuse. Please discuss your Politics on a polictical board. I want to keep this site focused on Living and Raw Foods.

Maybe it should be no politics, economics, or religious discussions. Nobody is going to change anyone else's mind, that's for sure.

Religion is a very intimate part of who people are...often way more so than a person's political beliefs. Not being able to share that part of oneself would unnecessarily stifle conversation. Having taken part in religious discussions on this board in the past, they were always very respectful...not nearly as divisive as politics.

I agree, Musicbebe! I wish some people didn't freak at the word "God." I realize that some people have been abused by organized religion or its members, but that isn't how all people are.

Belief is a funny thing, isn't it? We are so wrapped up in our beliefs that we think (that is, we believe) that we are what we believe.

And what are beliefs? Words, just words. And what are words? Byproducts of our human mental processes which purport to capture, however imperfectly, the myriad reality all around us.

I'm an atheist, but I wasn't always one. And something that's always struck me was psychologist Erich Fromm's interpretation, as a former Orthodox Jew-turned-atheist, of Moses' request for God's name.

Moses wanted to know God's name -- because the people below Mount Sinai would never follow any deity who doesn't even have a name! Why, a name is the very first thing anyone ever owns, isn't it, and what kind of a deity doesn't have a name? Yet God rebuffed Moses' pleas three times, until finally He said, Okay, tell them the I AM has sent you.

Why did God not want to give out his name?

Because it's just a word, something which would seek to limit reality by capturing only a small part of it. And what does a name really tell you? It doesn't actually say anything. You might as well just point at a person.

But we forget that. We forget that words, and by extension beliefs, are nothing but pointers -- mistaking, as the Buddhists say, the finger for the moon being pointed at.

That's why talk of religion, politics, and sex can be so acrimonious. We miss the forest of reality for the separate trees of competing beliefs.

And yet, talking about sex, religion, and politics is so fundamental to us as human beings because they lie at the heart of how we (believe we should) relate to others -- and, indeed, who to categorize as "other!"

So what's to be done?

Awareness. Awareness of why we hold to certain beliefs, what these beliefs do for us emotionally, how they satisfy us like no other belief.

That's the real conversation. Reality, the reality of perspectives, and not whose perspective of reality looks most proper.

it seems awfully presumptious of you to assume that we are all of one mind or that your opionion that ron paul was or is the best candidate is supported by all as its not

...Jodi, the banana eating buddhist