Being Determines Consciousness

Being determines consciousness. Educators abuse this fact. They try to determine their pupils' lifelong beliefs and values. I was told that I knew that matrimony was a sacrament. Children of American Fundamentalists are told that evolution is a myth.

Young people need to learn that:

each person is born at a particular time and place and in a particular social context;
people with different starting points necessarily have very different beliefs;
anyone could have been taken at birth to be brought up as a Muslim in Pakistan, as a Mormon in Salt Lake City, as a Maoist in China etc;
each of us needs to learn for him or herself;
learning includes understanding alternative points of view.

My mother, an Irish Catholic, did not even understand Anglicanism. Educators need to encourage learning, not propagate beliefs. 

The One And The Sun II

The One sees itself by the light of the Sun.
The One is reality.
The seen world is manifestation.
The Sun is the agent of manifestation.

Each conscious moment can be religious practice.
Gods are personifications.
Temples are foci.
The beyond is here now and within.

Iupiter Optimus Maximus.

Experience, Words And Concepts

We rightly differentiate between experience on the one hand and words and concepts on the other. However, our experience would not be human experience if it did not incorporate words and concepts, if it were not verbally expressible. Knowledge may be concrete and experiential or abstract and conceptual but nevertheless acquisition of experiential knowledge involves application of concepts.

If I consider the consequences of a religious doctrine as I walk into town, then the doctrine is a distraction from immediate manifestations of reality: trees, gardens, the sky etc. Of course, I recognize trees as such because I have a conceptual framework as well as a sensory apparatus. There are perhaps four stages of development:

unconscious organismic sensitivity to environmental alterations;
mere immediate sensory impressions;
non-verbal conceptual frameworks applied by animals to their immediate environments;
human consciousness.

However, the doctrine that is a distraction to me is some people's way of relating to reality. They live rebirth or salvation through Christ. We relate to the eternal in different ways. For human beings, different ways involves different, mutually incompatible, concepts.