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Tush4Christ wrote: ↑August 27th, 2024, 2:17 am
Your book systematically challenges traditional moral and linguistic concepts, such as the existence of evil and the use of 'shoulds.' Are these challenges intended to completely dismantle these concepts in favor of a new framework, or are they meant to provoke a deeper critical examination of our assumptions within existing frameworks? In other words, do you see your philosophy as a replacement for conventional morality, or as a tool to question it?
Hi,
Tush4Christ,
Thank you for your question!
The short answer would be that I don't think it's exactly accurate to say that
my book "challenges traditional, moral and linguistic concepts".
The longer answer is this...
Traditions vary greatly from culture to culture, from region to region, and from religion to religion.
There are about 195 countries in the world. Each has its own traditions, and many have multiple different conflicting sets of traditions.
Very roughly speaking, there are about 4,000 different religions in the world. And, needless to say, generally speaking, at most one of those religions could be true. That's at most. At most, one is right. Otherwise, none are.
In a sense, we can say that each and every one religion challenges all the 3,999+ other ones.
Does
my book challenge all 4,000? I don't think so. In fact, I don't think it challenges any of these 4,000 different traditions.
At most one of them could be right, but if one of them turns out to be right, then it and my book can probably both be right.
The many countless various traditions contradict themselves, but I don't contradict them.
I suspect it would at best be a little misleading to talk about what we might label "non-religious traditions" since presumably
all traditions started as part of a religion or mythology, namely since if you go back far enough all of our ancestors were religious.
Anything that's not religious is thus, also new age and non-traditional.
Nonetheless, the same logic would apply anyway.
In other words, even if it did make sense to talk about "non-religious traditions", then, still, I'd be no more challenging any of those various different so-called traditions (which often contradict and challenge each other) than I am challenging any of the thousands and thousands of various different religions in the world (which likewise contradict and challenge each other).
The reason I can build such a powerful philosophy without challenging them is this: Unlike religions, social conservatives, and traditionalists, on the issues and questions they disagree so nastily and extremely with each other, I am more than happily eager to say, "I don't know", or say, "On that, I'm agnostic".
If you find a Protestant Christian arguing with a Catholic about some religious tradition or religious belief, and then ask me which side in the debate I take, my answer would almost certainly be "neither". Even if I agree that one of them has to be right (i.e. they are arguing a question that has only two possible answers), I will still almost certainly honestly say that I don't know which one is right.
The same goes if it's a Jewish person arguing with a Hindu or a Muslim arguing with a Zoroastrian.
And the same goes if two non-religious people from two different countries are arguing about which of their very different cultural traditions is right or whatever.
I don't challenge them; they challenge each other.
My book openly admits in the introduction to not having all the answers, and indeed to not even coming close to having all the answers.
I don't know if all these religious people and all the people subscribing to these different traditions that contradict each other do so because they feel some desperate need to have all the answers or answer everything, or if they just somehow come to think they do despite not having it. I don't know if they have some emotional dislike or phobia of saying, "I don't know" to things, or if it's something else that causes them to believe they alone have all the answers and that all the many other traditions are wrong.
Almost all of them have to be utterly wrong because they contradict each other. But I don't know which one is the exception, if one even is. And I leave it at that, so I don't challenge any of them.
Finally, it's worth noting that any semantic debate in English likely has nothing to do with traditions and such because English is so relatively new.
Anytime someone claims, in English, that their religion/tradition requires them to believe in shoulds or such, my first bet by far would be that they are translating it poorly and that it would be more clearly translated into English in a different way.
For example, I believe it's more clear and accurate to say, "There's an invisible guy in the sky with nipples who doesn't like pork, shellfish, or gay stuff who will punish a copy of you in a fire pit if you eat pork, eat shellfish, or do gay stuff", than to say, "Eating pork is evil!" or "Homosexuality is immoral!"
In other words, just as an example, I don't think
my book would challenge a religion/tradition that is anti-gay or anti-pork-eating or anti-working-on-Sundays or such. Instead, I think the teachings of my book are compatible with that religion/tradition just as they are with every other religion/tradition, and following its teachings would help the person better understand and convey their beliefs.
For example, if someone believes in the teachings of Leviticus, and they go up to someone eating pork and scream, "That's evil", then the pork-eater won't even understand what they mean, because it is basically gibberish, at least out of context, and said to someone who doesn't share the same superstitions. In contrast, if they went to someone eating pork and said either of the following, the pork-eater would understand and likely just be happily interested to learn more:
"I believe there is an invisible man in the sky who has nipples, and he watches everything we do. He's like Santa Claus, but real; at least, I believe so. And he doesn't like people eating pork. He commands you to not eat pork. And if you keep eating pork, he will punish you, but not now, after your body gets declared dead. You see, you don't really die when you think you die. Instead, a copy of you is transported somewhere else, and then the invisible man will punish or reward you at that point based on whether or not you ate pork."
"In the country in which I grew up, we traditionally wouldn't eat pork."
Whether anti-porkism or non-pork-eating is a religious thing or some kind of non-religious tradition, either way,
my book doesn't challenge it.
It's other religions/traditions that would challenge it, and neither my book nor I have a dog in that fight.
The anti-pork person can read and agree with my book just as much as anyone else.
Of course, the pork thing is just an example. Generally speaking, the same goes for everything else.
Generally, anyone from any religion/tradition can adopt the agreeable truths in
my book, and then from there, they will be able to much more clearly explain their religion/tradition/beliefs/practices/rituals to others, especially those who don't happen to share them. For example, it's much clearer and met with more interest and acceptance when one explains one's superstitions/religion/traditions/habits if one doesn't use 'shoulds' and other gibberish to explain them.
"I believe there is a god who wants you to do X," is much clearer than saying, "You shouldn't do X! It's evil!"
"In my country, where I grew up, we never work on Saturdays," is much clearer than saying, "I can't work on Saturday! That would be evil!"
My book does not challenge the actual concepts, but rather my book shows how the gibberish that is often sloppily used in relation to those concepts falsely causes an illusion of disagreement in a way that is especially prone to misguided resentment and misery.
No matter what one's religion, culture, country, or tradition, one can adopt the teachings of my book to find great clarity and inner peace.
You do not need to give up your religion or traditions to find that clarity.
The teachings in
my book—the clarity and revelations my book provides—are the baby in the bathwater of most religions and traditions, the very thing that tends to make one so undesiring of throwing out their religion or traditions.
My book doesn't challenge religions or traditions. Rather, it speaks of the beautiful shared single baby that's simultaneously in all their different bathtubs. It's the thing that generally all wise teachers of all religions and traditions have taught about and agreed with. In a sense, that baby is in all of us humans, in the bathwater of our unique lives and personas and personalities and egos. In a way, that baby is you. It is what my book calls the real you. No religion argues against it, because it is the thing we all know more than we know anything, even if our words and thoughts confuse us into false disagreement.
Generally speaking, all religions agree with each other and me and
my book about the truth in my book: about the fictionality of this earthly world of forms and its superstitious illusions, and the obvious wrongness of ego-identification and egotisticalness, about the eternalness of the real you and fictionality of the unreal you, about spiritual freedom (a.k.a. self-discipline), self-responsibility, about grace and gracefulness, and about heavenly inner peace and unconditional love, meaning love for all people and all things, total unconditional acceptance, and infinite gratitude.
Different religions and traditions might include different bathwater with that same shared baby. But I don't challenge their bathwater. I have no dog in the fight of whose bathwater is best, cleanest, or clearest. If one bathwater is right and all the others wrong, I can't tell you which one it is, and I don't care regardless.
I don't challenge them, and generally, they all agree with me and
my book.
We all see the baby and agree the baby is there. And we all want you—and everyone—to get the clarity to see that baby and let go of all the egotisticalness and Earthly illusions and spiritual slavery (i.e. lack of self-discipline) that might seem to obscure that beautiful baby or seem to hide that infinite source of infinite grace, infinite spiritual salvation, and infinite peace from you.
I will leave you with one final example: if you are an alcoholic and you go to an AA meeting, and your sponsor tells you that you "should" be free rather than be a slave to temptation and a slave to fear and a slave to other bodily urges/feelings and a prisoner of the comfort zone, and to that end your sponsor tells you that you "should" do this and you "shouldn't" do that, well then he or she is likely telling you things I would tell you, but just with sloppy words that taken literally would be utter gibberish and divisive nonsense. He or she is using words I would never use to do their best to tell you what I would tell you and do tell you in
my book. The message the sloppy-word-using sponsor meant to send with their apparent gibberish is also my message; they just accidentally used apparent gibberish to send it.
Sometimes translation is more of an art than a science.
With love,
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
a.k.a. Scott
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