A Question for Believers and Non Believers

[Nick_A]

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FNM wrote

Your analogy fails because it is not necessary to believe in god for spiritual enlightenment.

Well I see this topic goes over like a lead balloon on this site which is to be expected. I was hoping for one with a bit more curiousity but it doesn't seem so yet but who knows.

If we are in Plato's cave psychologically what is the sense sense is believing in anything? The solution is not in belief but in acquiring an impartial mind that neither believes or denies but remains open.

"To believe in God is not a decision we can make. All we can do is decide not to give our love to false gods. In the first place, we can decide not to believe that the future contains for us an all-sufficient good. The future is made of the same stuff as the present....

"...It is not for man to seek, or even to believe in God. He has only to refuse to believe in everything that is not God. This refusal does not presuppose belief. It is enough to recognize, what is obvious to any mind, that all the goods of this world, past, present, or future, real or imaginary, are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying the desire which burns perpetually with in us for an infinite and perfect good... It is not a matter of self-questioning or searching. A man has only to persist in his refusal, and one day or another God will come to him."
-- Weil, Simone, ON SCIENCE, NECESSITY, AND THE LOVE OF GOD, edited by Richard Rees, London, Oxford University Press, 1968.- ©

The unification of religion and atheism isn't through belief but rather through conscious impartial attention within which imagination is no longer dominant. It is imagination that attaches us to false gods including the secular gods such as money at the expense of a higher more human perspective.

Plato suggests that the path to wisdom is in the practice of "Know Thyself." Once one begins efforts at self knowledge we see how far we are from it. Socrates experienced this which is why the Oracle said he had wisdom. Socrates came to experience that he knew nothing.

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The topic went over like a lead balloon because the point of all of this is not being expressed very well. First start off by explaining exactly what you mean by the unification of religion and atheism.

It can only have one meaning. Unification is what they have in common. In this case it is the need for truth. The atheist is enchanted with the truth of analysis, the associative dualistic mind. The believer is attracted to the truth of the heart: objective quality.

They both become deluded in Plato's cave through imagination. But as a person becomes more inwardly free, the mind and heart, quantity and quality, become complimentary.

Einstein was one that understood this:

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
Albert Einstein, "Science, Philosophy and Religion: a Symposium", 1941