God's law or private law?

[Leonardo17]

...
Whether you agree or not to the final result is another issue. But if you are someone who likes these issues I think you should look deeper into religion itself. Usually the meanings are highly spiritual and philosophical. Not superficial and material. One example is that it really doesn’t matter what a man or woman wears in his/her daily life at all. True spirituality focuses on inner work with an emphasis on your understanding of what is spiritual. And people have to know that.
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Taking a religious writing out of context (or even in-context) to justify doing bad things is a problem.

What you haven't addressed is the alleged deeper, highly spiritual and philosophical meanings.  Please share some with us, so that our minds can be purified, expanded and enlightened.

Poetic meaning can be found in any place.  Ancient religions is one of the worst places, though I don't mind the Tao Te Ching.

Here is something to keep it simple

Prayer of St. Francis


Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is Hatred, let me sow Love.
Where there is Injury, Pardon.
Where there is Doubt, Faith.
Where there is Despair, Hope.
Where there is Darkness, Light, and
Where there is Sadness, Joy.

O Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much
seek to be consoled as to console;
To be understood, as to understand;
To be loved, as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive,
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
And it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

[Leonardo17]

If I were religious, I might very well think that afghan girls playing soccer was deeply wrong…..as some religious people do.  I might think that afghan girls having fewer, rather than more rights was an improvement….as some religious people do.  I might think that the eradication of any other religion was a good thing, as some religious people do.  

All intelligent scholars is just another excuse and admission rolled into one….and another irrelevant one, at that.  You ask us how someone knows god said something without an ounce of self awareness, it seems.  You’re -all- doing the same thing with your competing claims as to what god has or hasn’t said.  You think theirs are ugly, but so what, maybe gods are ugly?  Maybe gods are ugly because ugly people made them?  As you say….there are many examples.  

-but no, you prefer to imagine some distortion of a wholly unevidenced “original message”.  I don’t think that -any- of you have any business in any of these subjects.  As I already mentioned, what a god does or doesn’t say is completely irrelevant to any of it, and all of these attempts to rehabilitate your shitty gods reputation are transparently irrational, and pointless.

1) Well if I shared that view I would go all the way. Why not just create an all male population while we’re on it? That would spare neighboring countries from the current refugee crisis lol
 
2) That’s the atheist point of view and I respect that because it’s an entirely legitimate point of view (as I have already admitted). But being someone who is religious myself and having read the books of really serious theologians (who were even guest professors on Islamic faith in the U.S.) I think I know enough to claim all of these territories of distortion and ugliness back for myself
 
3) I’m starting to think that my arguments seem a little too theoretical for you because I mostly gave example from my own culture or from the Hindu belief system. You’re from a Judeo Christian tradition and you seem to be more knowledgeable on that. So you could check out just one chapter (of your own choice) from Marianne Williamson. She was a democratic presidential candidate in 2019 and is from a Jewish family and you probably have friends or relatives who own one of her books. Just read one chapter from any book. This is intended to give you an idea on what I would call “our 21st century way of approaching such issues”.

[LinuxGal]

Here is something to keep it simple

Prayer of St. Francis


Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is Hatred, let me sow Love.
Where there is Injury, Pardon.
Where there is Doubt, Faith.
Where there is Despair, Hope.
Where there is Darkness, Light, and
Where there is Sadness, Joy.

O Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much
seek to be consoled as to console;
To be understood, as to understand;
To be loved, as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive,
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
And it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Prayer is telling the creator of the universe, using ESP, that his perfect plan is fucked up and here's some ideas on how to improve it.

[The Grand Nudger]

1) Well if I shared that view I would go all the way. Why not just create an all male population while we’re on it? That would spare neighboring countries from the current refugee crisis lol

[quote pid='2132625' dateline='1672481622']
Not really sure how that's going all the way with anything..as if it followed from any of those beliefs that your co-religionists hold..but it's not surprising to see another non sequitur used as a dismissal.  
 

2) That’s the atheist point of view and I respect that because it’s an entirely legitimate point of view (as I have already admitted). But being someone who is religious myself and having read the books of really serious theologians (who were even guest professors on Islamic faith in the U.S.) I think I know enough to claim all of these territories of distortion and ugliness back for myself :

It's not just the atheist point of view, as you don't have to be an atheist to hold it.  It's the logically consistent point of view, and I see how little that matters as soon as it's inconvenient for your own beliefs about magic books.  
 

3) I’m starting to think that my arguments seem a little too theoretical for you because I mostly gave example from my own culture or from the Hindu belief system. You’re from a Judeo Christian tradition and you seem to be more knowledgeable on that. So you could check out just one chapter (of your own choice) from Marianne Williamson. She was a democratic presidential candidate in 2019 and is from a Jewish family and you probably have friends or relatives who own one of her books. Just read one chapter from any book. This is intended to give you an idea on what I would call “our 21st century way of approaching such issues”.

They don't seem "too theoretical".   They appear to be inconsistent, poorly researched, and irrational.  Meanwhile, I'm not from any tradition, not a democrat, don't give a shit about whether a person is from a jewish family, and I certainly won't find any such book in any friend or relatives house.  A quick bit of googling tells me she's one of the nuts that got wrapped up in some other nuts new age babble - "converting to christ" and, like you, relies on the mistaken notion that any terrible thing in a magic book was a misinterpretation.  

Magic books say terrible things because those terrible beliefs were common to their authors.  They were not, then, seen to be terrible the way you see them now.  They are not deviations from the original message, they are the original message.  In this, the people and the forms of religion you have no time for are more faithful to the original message than your own.  As I've mentioned before, I do appreciate that beliefs like yours and hers are an improvement over some others - but that's obviously from a secular point of view, and whatever improvement may be had it isn't well served by any of the arguments you've made.  

To borrow from you, up above, I think you might want to look into going all the way with this rejection of the original message of your respective faiths.  To acknowledge that you're creating your own new gods, your own new religions.  I understand that in lieu of having any reason to believe x, people will often invoke tradition, and in this it seems like it might be useful to capture the very notion of tradition's perceived authority from others - but like so much else in this thread, traditional authority is irrelevant with respect to whether or not a religious belief is ugly or irrational - no indication that a belief is accurate, and it is no argument whatsoever for following such a belief in life.  






[/quote]

[Leonardo17]

Not really sure how that's going all the way with anything..as if it followed from any of those beliefs that your co-religionists hold..but it's not surprising to see another non sequitur used as a dismissal.  

I don’t really see them as my co-religionist. I will accept traditionalism, dogmatism, even un-scientific approaches (as long as I believe there is some sort of sincerity behind it). But if I am convinced that something is entirely superficial and that it lacks any type of depth in terms of adherence to whatever ideology we are talking about (like the example of the PRC that has nothing of a “peoples republic” but is simply pretending to be a peoples republic) I have the right to call them people who are not my co-religionists.
 
In fact I think this is a case of Sodom and Gomora (meaning todays Afghanistan). Just like the biblical story. They hate women and if the prophet Lot was sent to them, I think history would repeat itself all over again. See today’s Saudi Arabia for instance, can be simply seen as a society that it at the same social evolution level as the society of Victorian England with women still fighting for their right to play soccer or be allowed to ride a motorcycle. It’s a society that is slowly evolving so I am ready to accept their difference as “cultural realities”. On the other hand, more or less everything they have been doing in Afghanistan is just Barbary pure and simple.
 
   So there are those limits in religious thought also. The Pope Benedict XVI was also a man who was greatly criticized for his protection of pedophile priests and medieval-style ideas on homosexuality. What I am saying is that (believer or non-believer) we have the right to be more vocal about this. And I am not a catholic. But if I was I would probably directly say that he was someone who doesn’t seem to understand the spiritual message of the gospels. (That’s my point of view).

All intelligent scholars is just another excuse and admission rolled into one….and another irrelevant one, at that. You ask us how someone knows god said something without an ounce of self awareness, it seems. You’re -all- doing the same thing with your competing claims as to what god has or hasn’t said. You think theirs are ugly, but so what, maybe gods are ugly? Maybe gods are ugly because ugly people made them? As you say….there are many examples.

What I mean is that I agree with people simply not believing there are spiritual realities etc. I have no real undeniable observable and repeatable evidence to support any type of spiritual belief.

 
What I am talking about is a problem that occurs within every belief systems. We have a problem with the ignorance of the individuals and the masses. There are simply too many people who are unable to understand what the original message is and are distorting these messages and are than becoming completely fanatical about their distorted belief systems. Jaggadish Vasudev is clearly talking about how the general masses prohibited him from accomplishing serious spiritual services (like the establishment of a dedicated temple) in his previous lifetime and that he had to reincarnate to finish this job in our time. There are also great sages (very important Yogis) who were even stoned by the people because of their new interpretations of existing scriptures. These tensions existed in the Christian world during the renaissance. So faith itself is an area of constant struggle between some established but false approaches and more rational and more easily acceptable approaches. And yet change is happening for the betterment of faith itself. Do you know anyone who use the ancient self-punishment techniques that were still used in the beginning of the 21st century? You probably don’t. This doesn’t mean that all the work is done. There are still some old-school approaches that must still be dealed with.
 
   But still, there are also / and has to be limits to these approaches as well. Today we are not afraid to be more vocal about these things. Like one of those things I would talk about immediately is the forced assimilation in boarding schools of the Canadian Amerindians by the Catholic Church. The new pope did admit it was a big mistake. Still, this is something I would immediately denounce as something that is not related to the sincere religious attitude of many persons around the world. This is a case of genocide. So again, what is it doing in my personal relation with what I see as the Higher Reality?

Magic books say terrible things because those terrible beliefs were common to their authors.  They were not, then, seen to be terrible the way you see them now.  They are not deviations from the original message, they are the original message.  In this, the people and the forms of religion you have no time for are more faithful to the original message than your own.  As I've mentioned before, I do appreciate that beliefs like yours and hers are an improvement over some others - but that's obviously from a secular point of view, and whatever improvement may be had it isn't well served by any of the arguments you've made.

That’s the widespread interpretation of the Muslim Holy Book actually. People used to say “it simply contained too much violence” for instance. And the truth is that a superficial reading will not give you anything more than that. It’s an old book (1400 and so years old). Written by someone who died long time ago for a culture that no longer exists in our time. Leaving the Quran aside, I don’t even fully understand Persian poets like Rumi. The language is highly mystical and I find myself reading and reading without understanding anything. I do understand the philosophers of antiquity or the poetry of Omar Khayyam (because they are very worldly, and down-to earth). But Holy books and mystical writings have a language of their own and as I said before, you need some preparations before reading them.

 

   But this is not my main issue here. My main issue is when I see something that’s degenerate and completely unrelated even for a more “traditional” way of seeing things I will speak up against it. One simple example is the issue of women’s rights. Religion (of all sort) has been used to scare people, to make them obedient and submissive to authority figures. Yet, think of the movie Malcom-X for instance. In this movie the young Malcom-X is standing up to the prison priest and asking him (according to the new): “How do you know that Jesus was white?”. And most of the time it’s as simple as that. “Female child shall not study” – “Says who?”

   Neither you nor anyone else can refute those arguments. In fact, in the area today’s Israel people are generally “brown” and the Gospels clearly describe him as someone who could have been black in terms of skin color. + I even heard that the Eva being created from Adam’s rib in the Old Testament is a translation error.

 

   But anyway. There can be different points of view of course. But there is a limit. In today’s world, if I see someone who id inflicting pain on himself / herself “for God” I would go ahead and talk to this person. This isn’t the time of Charlemagne anymore if you know what I mean. Everything is evolving. We are evolving. Faith is also evolving. We see this in prehistoric societies. First there is one pottery tradition. Than another, than another. People change, societies change. Not only in terms of technology. But attitudes change, ideologies change. And this is a part of what we are. And Atheism is a part of that too. So is the new approaches in terms of spiritual belief.

 

One thing I may add: these “new” approaches are not completely new either. They existed in the past but were limited to some occult societies or small groups of people like Sufi’s, Rishi’s of India, Zen-Buddhists etc. What is happening now is that information is moving faster. So we are able to discover these new approaches more easily without having to listen to some bearded man with a turban and a prayer bead whose job is to act as if he knows everything starting from creation to the end of times

 
So I personally am critical of everything that I can clearly demonstrate that it doesn’t have anything to do with religion at all. This Y.N. Ozturk has countless books and TV programs on that. And this is an issue for people who are believers in our time. So when you take the time to do some research, you can find out that there are many, many lies that have just been acquired at some point in history have been transmitted from one generation to the next, that are nothing but uselessness or some sort of extra weight in your backpack that is not going to be useful in doing anything in the spiritual path. So we have to clear our rooms and make it into something we can live in.

To borrow from you, up above, I think you might want to look into going all the way with this rejection of the original message of your respective faiths.  To acknowledge that you're creating your own new gods, your own new religions.  I understand that in lieu of having any reason to believe x, people will often invoke tradition, and in this it seems like it might be useful to capture the very notion of tradition's perceived authority from others - but like so much else in this thread, traditional authority is irrelevant with respect to whether or not a religious belief is ugly or irrational - no indication that a belief is accurate, and it is no argument whatsoever for following such a belief in life.  

Yes. That’s what I am saying. The individual is the most important piece of this puzzle. It is us who is deciding to believe this or not to believe that etc. But it’s not a complete castle in the clouds either. Because we still have some guideline and some sort of method too. But this is still the reason why I am against religious indoctrination before the age of 18. I think that you must have an adult, critical mind that will allow you to make some choices (just like you have decided to be an atheist) that will serve you in one way or in another way.

 

Ex: I personally don’t believe the headscarf is truly an object that every Muslim woman has to wear in her lifetime. I saw no evidence for that in the Quran. Yet if a woman (who is an adult of course) has decided that “her” religion is telling her to do that, well than that’s her spiritual path.

 

This is how it works. Yet if you are an Al-Shabab militant killing and raping “in the name of God” Both of us mentioned here, we have the right to refer to these people as barbarians. Because there is nothing, no dogmatic interpretation, not an element even in the old-school system that even allows such an attitude. Just like the inquisition. It’s man made. Did Jesus say “Inflict unbelievable methods of suffering on all those who refuse to believe in me?” – He didn’t. The pope decided this was a good path to take. And he did that without anything to support this attitude. He (one man) decided it was the most logical thing to do.

 

/And let’s not have a game of words on that. My choices are personal. I will criticize and debate with people with different opinions. I will oppose everything that is barbary by definition (like female genital mutilation for instance) But I am not issuing a decree to murder some writer in the other end of the globe.

 
Their choice is to distort religious messages in order to serve their own ego based needs and they are ready to sacrifice many other in the name of their ego based distortions. I never murdered anyone because of my choices. And that’s just one example

[The Grand Nudger]

People can and do sincerely believe in things that you or I might see as superficial just as they can and do believe in things we both find ugly. This doesn't actually place them outside the realm of being the true or original message of some religion - it simply means that this message is superficial and/or ugly. Some religions are truly and originally misogynistic, as that was your example. OFC a misogynistic religion will produce a misogynistic society full of misogynistic people. Up to and including their various head shamans and witchdoctors. See: abrahamism.

I'm not too concerned with you lacking hard evidence for your beliefs, but this repeated assertion of posessing the original message is, itself..not them getting it wrong. It's their gods, their magic books, and their religions getting it wrong for you. You're not correcting them on anything - they would be in that seat. You may be correcting what you see as a moral lapse or outright immorality - and you do so by rejecting the original message in favor of some other. It's a pretty common factor in secularized new age beliefs.

Magic book, for example, doesn't contain too much violence because people read it superficially. It contains that violence no matter how hard we want to plumb the depths for wisdom..or..just as often, no matter how willing we are to overlook it if we feel that we can manufacture wisdom of our own and then borrow it's perceived pedigree. As for obedience, it's the nature of a religion to demand obedience as a set of shared normative principles. If this is a failure condition - all religions fail..and we couldn't even construct a religion that didn't. Obedience to good principles is probably not something that we could really find issue with, obedience to degenerate principles..well, for folks like you and I that's probably a no-go. Whether jesus was white or black is simply irrelevant to whether the principles of jesus religion are good or degenerate, just as whether or not a god actually said x is irrelevant to the same.

Case in point...there -is- a sincerely held and well sourced belief in the virtue of religious militancy in the original message™ of magic book. The abrahamic god, apparently, loves it. That doesn't stop us from calling it degeneracy. Barbarism. They're not doing their religions wrong, and it isn't on account of having read a superficial message - doing their religion right, according to that message, and even if a god (white god, brown god, blue god) said it..is shit. It needs to be distorted in order to be less shit. I'm glad you're not murdering people...that seems like an awfully low bar...but you are doing exactly what you give the murderers shit for with respect to your critique of their religions.

[Leonardo17]

I am not sure I understood the very last part. I simply believe in the power and necessity of open debates. I believe in the confrontation of ideas. The lack of these confrontations may be one of the main elements that brought religion to the place where it is today. When there is just one guy (or a group of people) talking and the rest are shaking their head in approval no matter what, this can be a big issue.

So if I am wrong, maybe we should debate this. Now, without referring to some historical events that were mostly man-made, where do you think there is misogyny, incitation to violence, oppression of the masses, denial of scientific facts and reason in the religious teachings themselves? Other than the Quran, I read the New Testament, the beginnings of the Old Testament, and a little bit of the Bhagavad Gita and listened to some other Vedic texts, + the Tao Te Ching of course. I know that there are many stories in the Old Testament (that I know from one source or the other). These stories contain things like murder, adultery, in fact many negative elements that we don’t really like in our civilized societies. Yet I have come to believe that these are all allegorical stories, with a deeper spiritual meaning. I don’t know a lot on the Bible in these terms, so it is possible that you may come up with some elements that I may not be able to answer.

But as long as you don’t have hard evidence, I am part of those who like to think that the original message of these teachings were mostly correct but that the people to whom those messages were sent were what I would call “first chakra level” persons. That is persons who had a 100% materialistic perception of the world with little to no abilities of philosophical thought who “had” to distort these messages because otherwise they wouldn’t understand it at all + who decided to murder all those who understood the contents of these messages because their ego’s found it threatening to have other people understanding things that they were simply unable to understand. Or at least that’s my current interpretation.

Take the Poem written above by St-Francis for instance. Repeating it is quite easy. What if you met people who could put it into practice? What if you were a roman of equestrian order with 200 or so slaves working for you in your property and you met such a person immediately after having given some 20 lashes to one of your slaves for attempting to steal a loaf of bread. – You would think they are weird. Your Ego would push you to the conclusion that they are not respecting your emperor (who is the one and only God, as everyone knows) and you would be pushed to do them some sort of harm. You just wouldn’t like them.

400 years later: Same think. Byzantine scribe or priest. You are a well-educated, literate person. You would be discussing with your mentor: - Could Jesus really have meant “Love your neighbors as you love yourself” when he said that? Maybe what he meant was “All the non-believing pagans must be converted to Christianity whether they like it or not”. And these debates go on and on. And the Jews who were seen as equals in the 4th century East-roman Empire, gradually became unwanted heretics who were procecuted in the high middle ages. And during the Spanish inquisition, they had to convert to Christianity or be murdered or flee here to the Ottoman Empire. But the same process is going on here. Those people who were seen as “ehl-I-kitap” (or people with an equal level of faith) in 1492, became “Kufar” (infidels) in 1955.

Same event. Original message. Than degeneration. And then even more degeneration. And than degeneration to a point in which no logical person can willingly decide to adhere to something like that.

But my argument remains. I believe that in all cases the original message was quite good. But the people were simply not at that social and intellectual (and spiritual) level. So only the lucky few understood this. And (my theory) That’s why you had things like Rosicrucian, Mithraism, Neo-Platonism in the west, some mystical teachings in the east, or some special monasteries in the far east with “zen” teachings. Which had some “secret” teachings, simply because the overall population was far, far, far away from being anywhere near those teachings.

That’s the main theory. But still. Indian mystics still define our era as an era of material perception some than spiritual perception (just don’t ask). So my view is that philosophy and science is our main tool of perceiving the reality about ourselves and the rest of the universe. So I have faith in this supremacy of reason and science while keeping an open door to more spiritual teachings. That’s my personal approach.

[The Grand Nudger]

Here again, you claim that the message has degenerated somehow - but ofc you excuse the fact that it began as a bunch of horrible shit by calling it allegory, giving up the game entirely.

You think gods and spiritual messages shouldn't be about horrible shit, and so you find a way to deal with the fact that they are about horrible shit. Presumably, because you think that Real Gods™ and Real Spirituality™....True Religion™, even..... must be good..despite all evidence to the contrary. This is not a rational approach to the various texts or their contents. In mere reality, they were simply products of their time. People who believe that gods have given them rules for the proper organization of slavery, for example, can't really be said to have misunderstood or misinterpreted something when their magic books do, in fact, give them proper rules for the organization of slavery. One thing that always mystifies me about new age revision, is that it often ends up saddling itself with exactly the sort of shit it purports to leave behind in the insistence on retaining these myths. "Ah, but there's wisdom in this story about slavery" they may say. Okay, for whom? Slavers and their human property? It's just so swell that a god came along and gave them an Original Message about how hard they could beat a slave, and which ones they could fuck...and I guess god was just doing them a solid by telling the slaves to obey?

Hard pass. You're not really reading the magic books yourself. You're inserting your own wisdom -into- them, even if it means rejecting or memory holing the actual content. I think this is a good thing. Largely useless, especially in some dispute between you and a person more faithful than yourself, but at least it shows that you aren't entirely lost in the sauce, even if gods and their magic books and their cultists are.

[Leonardo17]

I believe that the first step taken against slavery in the western world were the monotheistic religions. The economy of the Roman Empire relied almost entirely on slavery. Christianity replaced it with serfdom. Islam put some limits to it and placed it inside some sort of legal context. And serfdom, not slavery was the basis of the medieval labor economy in the Islamic world as well. Slaves were still much less used in comparison to the Roman way of doing things.

1) If there is a God that we can simply define as “The highest or Supreme Being” and this being is a good being (The word “God” in old German meant something like “The highest good”) and if we are logical beings by creation, then the message given by that being has to be a positive, constructive, helpful and logical message. Otherwise there are only two option a) He doesn’t exist, b) He is a man-like person like the Gods in the Greek Mythology who doesn’t really know what he is doing. I don’t agree with the b) option

2) I don’t think these are simply “the products of their times”. I read ancient philosophers as well. If you like simple wisdom, you might read the works of Marcus Aurelius as well. Plato and Socrates were also great thinkers of their times. I also like modern philosophers and other thinkers as well. I think spiritual knowledge is different. While reading a book on philosophy all that you need to do is to remain well focused. And the end result is a sort of knowledge that accumulates. Faith has a different mechanism. It’s a life-long process. We in the west we are meditating on some texts, trying to decipher their meaning in a lifelong process. They don’t even do that in the east. They just sit down and remain silent. So this is not really wisdom that we are after. The goal here is spiritual growth and increased spiritual understanding.

3) On reading the magic books: I don’t think you just “read” these holy books. I even knew someone who had learned Arabic and saw some meaning that were hidden in the Arab Alphabet and grammar itself. And in my Ancient-Greek class I met people who would learn Ancient Greek in order to be able to read the New Testament more effectively. There are even people who learn Aramaic in order to be able to do that. And that’s where it gets complicated: There are several methods of spiritual awakening. Learning about the messages hidden in the scriptures is one of them. Meditation is another. Devotion alone is said to lead us to spiritual enlightenment as well.
You seem to believe that there no such thing that is spiritual and that all mystic traditions were an invention from the very beginning. That’s not a bad theory either. We have the archaeological record that shows us how we started from the cult of the mother-Goddess, then switched to organized religions before finally inventing monotheistic religions. I see what you mean. The history of mankind is clearly older than the history of organized religions.

Let’s say I’m working on the possibility that there might be some sort of common knowledge that existed since at least the time of the builders of the earliest religious structures. Like if this is some sort of Matrix we are in. There has to be a switch that allows us to get out of the Matrix if we want to. The idea may seem crazy to some. But that’s my idea on what might be happening in this world.

After all Socrates said “All that I know is that I don’t know anything”. So everyone is free to have his or her theories on these things right?

[HappySkeptic]

I believe that the first step taken against slavery in the western world were the monotheistic religions. The economy of the Roman Empire relied almost entirely on slavery. Christianity replaced it with serfdom. Islam put some limits to it and placed it inside some sort of legal context. And serfdom, not slavery was the basis of the medieval labor economy in the Islamic world as well. Slaves were still much less used in comparison to the Roman way of doing things.
 
1) If there is a God that we can simply define as “The highest or Supreme Being” and this being is a good being (The word “God” in old German meant something like “The highest good”) and if we are logical beings by creation, then the message given by that being has to be a positive, constructive, helpful and logical message. Otherwise there are only two option a) He doesn’t exist, b) He is a man-like person like the Gods in the Greek Mythology who doesn’t really know what he is doing. I don’t agree with the b) option

2) I don’t think these are simply “the products of their times”. I read ancient philosophers as well. If you like simple wisdom, you might read the works of Marcus Aurelius as well. Plato and Socrates were also great thinkers of their times. I also like modern philosophers and other thinkers as well. I think spiritual knowledge is different. While reading a book on philosophy all that you need to do is to remain well focused. And the end result is a sort of knowledge that accumulates. Faith has a different mechanism. It’s a life-long process. We in the west we are meditating on some texts, trying to decipher their meaning in a lifelong process. They don’t even do that in the east. They just sit down and remain silent. So this is not really wisdom that we are after. The goal here is spiritual growth and increased spiritual understanding.

3) On reading the magic books: I don’t think you just “read” these holy books. I even knew someone who had learned Arabic and saw some meaning that were hidden in the Arab Alphabet and grammar itself. And in my Ancient-Greek class I met people who would learn Ancient Greek in order to be able to read the New Testament more effectively. There are even people who learn Aramaic in order to be able to do that. And that’s where it gets complicated: There are several methods of spiritual awakening. Learning about the messages hidden in the scriptures is one of them. Meditation is another. Devotion alone is said to lead us to spiritual enlightenment as well.
  You seem to believe that there no such thing that is spiritual and that all mystic traditions were an invention from the very beginning. That’s not a bad theory either. We have the archaeological record that shows us how we started from the cult of the mother-Goddess, then switched to organized religions before finally inventing monotheistic religions. I see what you mean. The history of mankind is clearly older than the history of organized religions.

Let’s say I’m working on the possibility that there might be some sort of common knowledge that existed since at least the time of the builders of the earliest religious structures. Like if this is some sort of Matrix we are in. There has to be a switch that allows us to get out of the Matrix if we want to. The idea may seem crazy to some. But that’s my idea on what might be happening in this world.

After all Socrates said “All that I know is that I don’t know anything”. So everyone is free to have his or her theories on these things right?

1) There is no basis to believing in a supreme being that is good.  There could be a supreme being who is completely amoral, or there might not be a being any more "supreme" than you or I am.

2) Yes, writings are a product of their times.  The questions may sometimes be universal, but the answers are a product of the times.

3) You are searching for "hidden meanings" in texts, like a game of Where's Waldo?  Here's a thought - how about the writers meant what they said.  If there were writing a parable or allegory, the meaning was clear.  If they were writing a story, they had an intended religious message of the story that was meant to be clear (whether or not they expected the reader to believe the story was history).

If you read the bible, with the assumption that the writers meant what they freak'n said, you get a portrait of an ignorant culture that believed their tribal god did all the good and the bad.  God isn't good - he is simply THERE and will do good things to those who worship and obey him, and bad things to others.  This is the worldview.  You don't need to be into numerology or look for hidden mysteries.  When a list of laws are given, the priests are just trying to give laws - they aren't some mystical hidden gems from an omnipotent deity.  The laws give an insight into the culture, but the applicability to current culture is extremely limited (and in 90% of cases must be ignored for moral reasons).

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As for your assumption that "there might be some sort of common knowledge that existed since at least the time of the builders of the earliest religious structures", I think I'm finally starting to understand where you are coming from.

I am going to give you one concession - our common humanity means that all cultures have questioned cosmology, morality, community, happiness.  If you want to read ancient writings on these topics, and meditate on them, go ahead.  Assuming that ancient answers to these questions come from some mystical source (god, etc.) is not reasonable.