A flyer about Brahma Baba by BKs with clarifications by PBKs

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Mr Green

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Re: A flyer about Brahma Baba by BKs with clarifications by

Post11 Feb 2016

button slammer why do still have faith in made up stuff? You are too smart.
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ex-l

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Re: A flyer about Brahma Baba by BKs with clarifications by

Post13 Feb 2016

I missed one possible reason for our attraction to such things ... accepting groupthink is a way of being part of and accepted by a tribe.

Although the attraction of the feeling of being superior has to be part of BKism, I wonder if for some it just acceptance into a smaller tribe with a simpler credo and a more tightly defined code of conduct than the outside world?

For many, the outside world is too big, to contrary or confusing, and they are too small and impotent within. For example, I am thinking of Indian BKs in the West for whom BKism is a simplified and perhaps even more elegant form of Hinduism, a 'familiar rock' amongst the storm of Western culture. I am thinking for others, often Westerners amongst them, it could be 'being a big fish in a small pond' ... I am wondering how much, in our time, it was because we got special attention because we had something they wanted and added value to their business as "Missionaries"?

May be as PBKism has not developed so it is a little the same ... does Virendra Dev Dixit tell Western PBKs that they are special and get a special karmic deal like they did in the BKs?

That was a really funny joke. They used to tell us that Western BKs got a special ... I forget what percentage ... 25% added extra 'benefit' because of the extra efforts they had to make and the loss of hearing the Murli in its native tongue.

That's a trick straight out of the markets of Karachi and Hyderabad ... telling the memsahibs they were getting an extra special bargain, when actually they were being ripped off 400 or 500% more than the locals.

I agree, Button is not stupid ... but then it's been written time and time again in studies on cults that it's not stupid people that get caught by cults.

I am still not sure how we are caught ... more research needs to be done on it.

Although BKism in the West appears, at least on the surface, to be becoming diluted into some kind of executive New Agey business with some very comfortable venues for esoteric musing ... and the average BK reduced to be becoming a servant fo the Kirpalani Klan as they entertain their welathy and powerful guests ... I think what any sincere spiritual seeker needs to do is demand and set a firm deadline for the sign of some big manifestation, e.g. Destruction.

I believe that currently, 2018 is meant to be a big date for PBKs. Two years and then if nothing happens ... would you consider a Plan B, Button? Or will you carry on until you die.

Hold old will you be in 2036?
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ex-l

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Re: A flyer about Brahma Baba by BKs with clarifications by

Post17 Feb 2016

Being accused of being the "Founding Father of Atheism" by Bottom Slapper (my exaggeration), I was going to post on this aspect ... but came across an article discussing this.

BKism and PBKism posits wrong that atheism only arises at the end of the Kalpa Cylce. Not true from history. Not even true within India. But a useful for the BKs to reinforce their cultic beliefs on their ahderents.

It's worth mentioning that, historically, it is thought that religion first arose as a misunderstanding of, or explanation for, meteorological phenomena which the ancients and primitives could not comprehend.

And now we have Weather Girls instead. Proof that humanity is actually evolving and life is getting better ...

India certainly has had many notable atheistic traditions including, arguably, Buddhism.
Atheism has ancient roots and is not ‘modern invention’, claims new text

Cambridge academic’s new book disputes that atheism is a ‘modern invention’ and sets out evidence that ‘disbelief in the
Atheism is not a modern invention from the Western Enlightenment, but actually dates back to the ancient world, according to a new book by a Cambridge academic – which challenges the assumption that humanity is naturally predisposed to believe in gods.

In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh, professor of Greek culture at Cambridge University, lays out a series of examples showing that atheism existed in polytheistic ancient Greece. It is, according to its author, partly “an attempt to excavate ancient atheism from underneath the rubble heaped on it by millennia of Christian opprobrium”.

Whitmarsh, a fellow of St John’s College, believes that the growing trend towards seeing religion as “hardwired” into humans is deeply worrying. “I am trying to destabilise this notion, which seems to be gaining hold all the time, that there is something fundamental to humanity about [religious] belief,” he told the Guardian.

His book disputes that atheism is “a modern invention, a product of the European Enlightenment” and a mode of thought that “would be inconceivable without the twin ideas of a secular state and of science as a rival to religious truth”.

It is a myth, he writes, which is “nurtured by both sides of the ‘new atheism’ debate. Adherents wish to present scepticism toward the supernatural as the result of science’s progressive eclipse of religion, and the religious wish to see it as a pathological symptom of a decadent Western world consumed by capitalism.

“Both are guilty of modernist vanity. Disbelief in the supernatural is as old as the hills. It is only through profound ignorance of the classical tradition that anyone ever believed that 18th-century Europeans were the first to battle the gods ... Most cultures in human history have had a form of supernatural belief, of one sort or other. It would be hard to deny that that is the norm. But that’s not to say that every person in every culture has subscribed to that,” he writes.
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Pink Panther

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Re: A flyer about Brahma Baba by BKs with clarifications by

Post18 Feb 2016

– although not in the case of Socrates, who was executed in Athens for “not recognising the gods of the city”

They couldn't have cared less about his “not recognising the gods of the city”. He was executed for irritating certain people with political power and they used any and every trick in the book to punish him.

In the same way, the theists who are bothered by atheists don't care if the atheists argue against other forms of theism but as soon as they turn their sights on their preferred form or any similar form, the theists gang up on the atheists. For instance, if Richard Dawkins rubbished animist beliefs, Scientology or Wicca, the mainstream religionists couldn’t care less. But if the critique is turned to monotheism ... well, Christians, Muslims and Jews who’d normally be at each other’s intellectual ‘throats’ suddenly, ‘ecumenically', find a common enemy! BKs seeing themselves as "topknot" theists and as having true knowledge of God, see other monotheists as down the scale but ahead of polytheists and pantheists, then animists below that and so on.

Not sure why you say "arguably Buddhism”. Buddhism is definitely non-theistic (rather than atheistic). Although much mention is made of gods and deities, they are mentioned contextually (they provide a language or metaphor understood by the people of the time) to make a point, e.g. Brahma bowing to the Buddha, references to Indra’s net, Avalokiteshvara (a Buddhist deity) and so on. They are considered in Buddhism as existing as transiently as anything else, they ”live" longer than human beings as they are conceptually accepted across generations, but have no autonomous own being, arising into and falling out of existence depending on many co-factors, particularly in their case ”conceptualisation” just as transient as any person’s notion of self.

Apart from those the author mentions, another ancient atheistic philosophy found in India is the Carvaka/Charvaka.

http://www.britannica.com/topic/Charvaka.

They were materialists. There is a story I once read of the Buddha convincing one Carvaka of his ”middle way” by firstly arguing the counter view of the ”logical" reality of eternal soul and gods versus total materialism, then once agreed, then arguing that there is the reality of non-material experience which does not need to include, nor is there any proof of, eternal souls or gods.

From my understanding, the Carvaka were likely misrepresented as hedonists in the same way the Epicureans were.
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then from where does evil arise?
Is he neither willing nor able, why call him God?

- Epicurus 341-270 BCE
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ex-l

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Re: A flyer about Brahma Baba by BKs with clarifications by

Post18 Feb 2016

Pink Panther wrote:Christians, Muslims and Jews who’d normally be at each other’s intellectual ‘throats’ suddenly, ‘ecumenically', find a common enemy! BKs seeing themselves as "topknot" theists and as having true knowledge of God, see other monotheists as down the scale but ahead of polytheists and pantheists, then animists below that and so on.

Inter-religious organization dynamics amuse me no end ... half a dozen people in a room, all considering themselves to be the real Chosen Few, practising politeness to the other misled and deluded not Chosen Few but, like you say, prepared to 'circle the wagons' in case any of their rights to exploit ignorant, vulnerable, uneducated, superstitious or brainwashed individuals.

And it's true ... I've noticed a treat of BKs not just sitting politely in the circle but getting themselves elected to administrative positions as way of establishing the validity of their cults as an authentic religion. Whatever the difference might be ... (For me, mostly that difference just boils down to how expensive one's funny hat and costume is. Or how much real estate one owns).

Buddhism ... yes and no. I don't know what classes as a god or god spirit in discussions these days. We need an ISO standard for gods, religions, and spirituality.

Whereas I would agree the Buddha was not a theist, or avoided the question as utterly irrelevent in the hear and now, in many countries Buddhism involves the belief in gods and deity worship and does not look much different from, say, Roman Catholicism to me.

What I found interesting from the book reviews, the book being stuck in Western tradition, was the difference between the Greek "every city with its own gods", and the Roman's using monotheism as a tool of domination and Empire building. A model that the BKs are still using to this day. It seems to be that much of the recent discussion of the Ancients portrayed them as far more stupid and ignorant than they were, and that many of them they clearly understood their gods were poetic shorthand or metaphors for other things, e.g. collective consciousnesses ('group spirit' or egregores), natural phenomena, as we might today.

Button seems to have given up the discussion ... has he given up on any thought outside of evangelising for PBKs?
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Pink Panther

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Re: A flyer about Brahma Baba by BKs with clarifications by

Post19 Feb 2016

It seems to be that much of the recent discussion of the Ancients portrayed them as far more stupid and ignorant than they were, and that many of them they clearly understood their gods were poetic shorthand or metaphors for other things, e.g. collective consciousnesses ('group spirit' or egregores), natural phenomena, as we might today.

I think it was much like Buddhism i.e. a few do/did understand that anthropomorphised qualities are represented by gods and deities, daemons, muses and geniuses, while the many don't have the time to bother with the intellectual niceties of analysis and theorising, they simply practice turning their mind and ritual activities to whatever "concept" they need the ‘blessings’ of to keep their life on track.
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ex-l

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Re: A flyer about Brahma Baba by BKs with clarifications by

Post19 Feb 2016

Pink Panther wrote:... they simply practice turning their mind and ritual activities to whatever "concept" they need the ‘blessings’ of to keep their life on track.

Or ... to put it into blunter terms ... to conform to which ever authority best suited their self-interests.

The primary self-interest being, to not be killed or outcast.

That powerful sub-conscious psychological component is, I believe, key to our understanding of BK/PBK adherence.

Many of us ... perhaps most of humanity ... have been breed to be submissive and comfortist to a threatening authority; even if that 'threat' is just social outcasting.

WIthin the context of PBKs and their relationships with BKism and the authorities with the BKWSU, they are like those social outcasts or pariahs who remain close to the outside of the village wall ... still hanging onto the hope of final acceptance.
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Pink Panther

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Re: A flyer about Brahma Baba by BKs with clarifications by

Post20 Feb 2016

I’d agree with that. People who join a group or community whose values differ from those they left behind do not care what those they left behind think. We are more interested in acceptance and validation by the new group we want to identify with. Just like now, I couldn’t care less what any BK, senior or otherwise, thinks of me, whereas it was very important while I was a BK.
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ex-l

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Re: A flyer about Brahma Baba by BKs with clarifications by

Post20 Feb 2016

And so, if Button still follows this ... I wonder if he can ask himself what of the ordinary and mundane (sub-conscious/familial etc) might have drawn him first no BKism and then to PBKism?

BKism gives explanations, that individuals such as our self swallows indiscriminately, e.g. a sense of being different and an interest in oriental culture is translated as "your last life was in India" ... an intelligent, quick witted individual able to easily digest and regurgiated BKism (not hard), is translated as "must have been a BK in your last life".

Those two examples were given to me personally, in oder to encourage me deeper into the cult. They were just "yukti"s (methods" to do so). Not one shred of evidence to suggest they were true.
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