Word: godly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...then killing themselves, then there are a lot of sheep out there and a lot of wolves to lead them. Moonies stalk the streets, even hold semi-respectable conventions; they and countless other groups offer an identity to people alienated by a society that doesn't give a good god damn about them. And Jonestown or not, upcoming FBI investigation or not, these cults will continue to flourish...
...analysis to exhortations to "Take it on faith." Fine, if as a result of faith people could experience their own innermost being and achieve religious ecstasy. But except for a few mystics and saints who starve themselves (and possibly affect their perceptual systems through vitamin deficiency) and thereby find God, the mass of westerners live spiritually devoid but hopeful. Religion has ceased to give them the real psychological experiences they seek...
...Eastern religions, even in the pre-packaged form they take when they are shipped over to the U.S. Many Hindus and Buddhists actually attain inner peace, actually experience their spiritual souls as part of the spiritual energy pervading the universe. Western religion is stingy: God came to earth (so the story goes) in only one incarnation, Jesus. In the East, there were many incarnations, many teachers, many who attained nirvana. The spiritual struggle in the East is not so hopeless, with divine grace coming in the last moments of submission and despair like some celestial cavalry riding over the hill...
Other facets of the great Eastern religions give them clear advantages nowadays in attracting devotees in the west. Rather than personalizing the cosmic spiritual energy as God, as a being not unlike your father who demands certain things and says certain things and before whom man is totally degraded and who maybe, if you're lucky, if he feels like it on a whim, gives you grace, the East prefers to keep such psychological games out of the matter. Each person has this energy at his core, each person can reach his innermost being (and many do) and each person...
Some of the entries are predictable and disagreeable. Both Wagners were virulent anti-Semites, occasionally to the point of black comedy. Lamenting, as he often did, the decline of morality and religion, Wagner concluded, "The old Jewish God always ruins the whole thing." Roman Catholics stood little higher in their estimation and they loathed the French too. During the Franco-Prussian War, they summed things up by saying that France "has been undermined by the spirit of the Jesuits...