EDITED: To fix the images (Thanks smexy man! ;D)

I'm going to preface responses with a question: Were you high when you wrote this?

No offense, but you're starting to sound like a religious zealout who's more interested in an excuse to not have to understand than what's real. You should simmer that down, and get some balance, because going over the deep end isn't gonna help you. A lot of the things you said in here are fluff. They don't explain anything, they just sidestep the question.

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The world is far, far faaaaaar more mysterious and interconnected than meets the eye.

It's far LESS mysterious than you're giving it credit for it seems, though I think you're spot on with the interconnected. Quantum theory FTW.

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The best we can do is to listen to our innermost feelings, the very core of our being, the force of life.

We don't have logic so we can throw it away and listen to feelings. I'm pretty sure if you asked Charles Manson whether it was logic or feelings that kept him murdering, he wouldn't come back with "Logic was the driving force in my desire to kill. It just seemed logical." You need a balance. Maybe you're not arguing that we only need to listen to our feelings, but this statement seems like a justification for doing what you want, instead of what you should more than anything. (To me at least)

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Because ultimately what we want is to "be happy"-if we are disatisfied at all or imagine what could be better- it only makes sense to figure out why, and change.

Yes.

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Repentance. Alas, some of us don't because we either have no hope or ambition.

Or don't understand it, or don't feel like we've done anything that needs repentance in the religious sense.

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Hope comes a lot easier than ambition, which is why they say blessed are the poor, money is evil, the last will be first, etc. It's hard, I'm not gonna lie.

Really? Knowing some of your personal situation, it seems more like you're taking the easy way out by not confronting some of your shortcomings with aversion to authority, commitment, and asking questions that are hard to answer. This isn't a dig, just an observation.

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The very fabric of our society is sin, ie missing the mark, missing the Truth.

I'm assuming that you're talking about religious truth here, but I'll expand that to all truth, be it about whatever you want to consider the creator of everything (Physics or some advance being, or some mythical/mystical entity). If someone starts thinking truth is exclusive to religion, they're going to end up in a bad way, because not only is that naive, it's dumb. Any truth should be sought after, and the entire scientific research community (ideally) is dedicated to that. In my experience, those who are passionate about scientific research are much more interested in the truth than religious people. The problem lies in the inability of many (most) religious people in communicating things they find true, ways to test those hypothesis, etc.

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One needs to unplug to plug into God.

Quotes like this bug the hell out of me. They really say nothing. It's like saying "You should stop being sad so you can be happy" or "Just let yourself believe." That doesn't help me at all. If you really want to connect to people who are looking for answers (Or people who seem more on the intellectual side) you can't expect them to take quotes like this seriously. I don't, and I'm religious.

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In so doing one realizes how utterly absurd and trivial are some things they and others used to think were central to life.

Priorities change all the time. When you prioritize one thing over another, other things seem trivial or absurd. That's part of growing up, or becoming more involved in one thing over another. Everyone prioritizes things. In this case, when you prioritize religion as a method to understand/attain happiness, other things seem absurd. When you prioritize logic as a method for understanding/attaining happiness, the same thing happens, but different things seem absurd.

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So essentially humanism, science etc is there to decieve us.

This statement pisses me off. Straight up makes me angry. Humanism, Science, Religion, or any other systems of belief in the broad sense are not there to decieve, they're there to explain. The whole point is trying to explain observations, motivations, etc. Just because they might be wrong at explaining something doesn't mean their intended to decieve.

I think the part that really pisses me off about statements like this is how one sided and closed minded they are. Assuming that what you believe to be truth is the only thing that could possibly be correct is ridiculous. Science and humanism for the most part are very honest about not knowing all the answers, at least in theory. The same could be said of religion too, but the reality is that if you don't have an open mind to the fact that you might be completely wrong, then you're too closed minded. Science and humanism are not there to decieve us, they're tools for viewing the world that some people value more than others, and making a broad statement that they're there to decieve us is ridiculous. Check yourself dude, because that's straight up retarded. Maybe stop blindly following what a preacher says and regurgitating it.

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It's a progression of the forbidden fruit of the knowledge of good and evil that made men make false gods out of their imperfect understanding resulting from the original sin of ignoring the truth for the temptation of the fruit of evil. We have to undo the sins of our fathers in addition to our own!

I feel like you're trying to say something significant here...but it's just coming off as using religion as the only method for explaining choices, etc. At least to me.

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Ask the Ph.D Physics who is homeless how much science has done for him. He goes to AA meetings to have a semblence of sanity

The obvious first thing that science did for him was give him alchohol. Are you really trying to argue that science doesn't give enough? Aside from the entire medium with which you're communicating right now, flight, medicine, every synthetic plastic out there, life saving surgergical techniques, and just a *few* other things? (I'm going to make a separate post for what science has given us. We'll see how far that goes compared to what religion has given us.). That statement is ridiculous.

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- meetings of which the central tenet is faith in a higher power. Of course, he's 60 something and life sort of revealed itself to him in that time.

Life sort of revealed itself to him...so he because an alchoholic hobo with a PhD? Or did life reveal itself to him because he was an alcoholic hobo physicist?

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What has science done for humanity? Raped the land and spread diseases war and mental illness.

I'll refer you to my point above. This is !@#$ing ridiculous, and I am honestly, IRL, disappointed in you. Science raped the land and spread diseases, war, and mental illness? Who the !@#$ are you talking to about what science is? You're so off the boat on this one it's not even funny. You better lock it up.

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There's a reason most enjoyable activities are regressive.

I have an idea...lets make a sweeping generalization that's based entirely on individual taste!

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Social systems and philosophy? How close they are to the Truth of life determines their worth.

The exact same thing SHOULD be said about any tenet of religion. You seem to be making a correlation that if it doesn't agree with the religious tenets, then they're not worthwhile. Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but if I'm not, that's ridiculous as well.

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This is pretty obvious- love thy neighbor. It's that simple. The more that is done the better the society. Everything should sprout off that.

Finally starting to sound a bit better.

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Of course many of us don't really know what love is. It's a spirit which often takes the form of wanting as good or better for someone else than you want for yourself despite their flaws.

Aaaaaand we're back to the drawing board. I think you meant to type *emotion, when you put spirit. Not everything has to be spiritual or religious, and when you turn it into something mystical and mysterious, you belittle it. Many of us DO know what love is. Doesn't mean we're great or successful at it, but conceptually it's pretty easy to grasp.

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Spirituality in gaining the great spirit of creation itself rather than the evil spirits spawned of it is the key to heaven. The form this takes will be unimaginable by those of a worldly spirit, just as few of yore could have imagined present, which has come to be as it has by accessing, for better or worse, the spirit of God.

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It's no coincidence that the most advanced civilizations have been the most spiritually enlightened.

How about no. The most advanced civilizations in the past believed in all sorts of weird shit, and if we're going to take it a step farther and assume you mean Christian or some sort of derivative of a monotheistic religion, then hell no. By definition, we, today, are the most advanced civilization, and I would hardly be right in saying we're the most spiritually enlightened. Of course, I'm making some assumptions about what you mean by spiritually enlightened, but given the general undertone of evangelical zealotry throughout this post, I'm gonna go out on a limb. You might want to read up on the roman pasttimes, hedonistic tendencies, what roles religion played during the renaissance, etc. History books are your friend, even if they are written by the victors.

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That's assuming your path to heaven treads on this world. Perhaps it is in another, higher place. Life here on the earth is fleeting and overstated, it is not nearly as rigid and ordered as we imagine. That is to say you can do far more than your imagination of a worldly nature permits. How? Do you really need to know how? Just do what is good and let God be God. Everything will be revealed in time anyway. I hate evil with a passion and that is what drives me to overcome it, as I do. There is so much deception that requires some serious reconsideration of fundemental aspects of being required.

Do you really need to know how? You're damn right I do. If you're Christian you get the commandment to be like God, so you'd sure as hell better try and learn how. Just because everything will be revealed in time anyway doesn't mean we get to sit on our thumbs and not do a damn thing on our own. That's such a bullshit cop out, and the mentality behind it is infuriating. "I don't really need to do the work, because it's gonna be done later anyway."

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Certainly there are some ideas out there that are relatively good. They are certainly not ideal, but they are the lesser of two evils

Are good and evil absolute, or are they relative? I would argue that they're completely relative, and the lesser of two evils is in fact, good. I'm making the assumption that you only have those two options, because if you have a third option, it's no longer a lesser of two evils, it's a choice between three, and the argument still stands that the lessest of three evils is still the best.

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What was absurd before becomes accepted now. The change comes when the standard is boldly challenged.

Actually, most societal changes occur over time as a society becomes used to them. I may be misremembering things, but I'm pretty sure slavery wasn't over the moment the first african said "Hell to the no, you can't make me no SLAVE, nigga!" (Read that in a Samuel L Jackson voice). Oh, and blacks weren't a despised minority the moment Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of the bus. Gays still aren't completely socially accepted, can't marry everywhere, or easily adopt children. Absurdity is completely relative to the society in which the judgement is based. Here in 'murica we generally would think it's absurd to kill a woman for infedelity. In some countries it's absurd that we DON'T kill a woman for infedelity.

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Starving children in Africa. This is a biggie. The problem is that we've been decieved by religion to think that God is a certain way which He is not. God is the God of the Old Testament and the New Testament. He is both merciful and wrathful, and seemingly unjust but truly just by the Truth which few know in some cases. Life is not a material cakewalk. Spiritually it is, when you've achieved enlightenment, but that's less visible. Man does not live by bread alone. Those in horrid conditions may not be as bad off as they seem and those in material bliss may be in spiritual hell.

Tell that to a starving child in Africa. I would love to see a homeless man here in the US tell a starving child in Africa how tough it is, and that they should just be grateful, and then see how they react. Let me know how that goes. "By the way little african boy who will probably die within the year, you should stop being so focused on material things, because, you know, it's like Sidhartha, you just need to find the enlightenment in the situtation."

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Life isn't about feeding the poor. It is about feeding the poor WITH LOVE. See, religions missed that part. Condescension is not love. So yeah, it's not about how you're body lives but how your spirit lives. It is good to have a good body, but it's importance is vastly overstated.

Did a starving person in africa who is mentally stable tell you that?

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What is a spirit? You are a spirit. All that composes you. Thoughts are spirits. Worded and unworded. The unworded, unimageried, unbound thoughts are the closest to the spirit of God, and they are far more powerful but harder to have. Doing is a spirit, everything is a spirit. When you gain good spirits, more come. The power to do comes from having good spirits. Of course, not everybody has them, because not everybody recognizes them, or else everybody would be supermen. Why don't we recognize them? Our attachment to the spirits of deception INGRAINED in our psyche and surrounding us. It is essentially binary. Good and bad, like computers are 1's and 0's we are a collection of good and bad spirits, which form to make a greater whole, just as we as individuals form to make up the greater whole of God. Bad spirits are zeroes, nothing, death. We want to be good, 1's. Yeah being all 1's might not seem as interesting, but interesting is a deception. There is so much more energy in being all good spirits even if it's not as interesting. Moving my hand to touch something is done by the same spiritual power that I create concepts in my head, their natures diverge at some point, but the same power is ultimately behind them as it is behind all that is, at one point. Accessing that power is the power by which Jesus attests that one can move mountains. But nobody has ever done that! So? And how do you know? Deception is pervasive. The world is fleeting.

Insights and wisdom don't come from ruminating, but from increasing ones general level of good. Essentially what you have to do is increase the degree of the spirit of creation in you. You can get crumbs by ruminating, but counterintuitively- real breakthroughs on a particular matter come from greater understanding of the big picture. Some people have an intuitively better way of ruminating that lends to getting a better understanding of the whole puzzle while they are working on a section and are thus seen as wiser, but that is simply their endowment. One can match such innately capable spirits by consciously accessing the power that they access. We aren't weak, stupid, strong or smart- we are what's in our heart- for out of the overflow of a man's heart he speaketh and doeth.

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Speaking of eths. God is not a priest, he is not a devout prayer monger, he is not a charitable donor, he is not lofty words and theology, he is not pretense, religion or anything .if you got this far you're in good shape. of that nature. He is as close to me as he is to the Pontiff. As he is to you and everyone else. What he is... is that which is good, that which overcomes your every distress.

No offense man, but you really need to bite back a bit and find some balance, because religious zealotry is just as bad as being closed minded. I prefer Artificial's logical assessments with his cynicism towards religion over the ignorance and zealotry that you're beginning(...) to foster.