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Notes -
I don’t think Jesus should be quoted in a post* reminiscent of the prayer of the Pharisee
This is every single person on earth, we are all influenced by our social ecosystems. A social ecosystem can influence families toward good or for bad. Few boomers grew up believing that they should maintain a strong community network for the express purpose of finding their child a spouse.
Christianity has always been my least favourite of the three Abrahamic religions. I thank myself (and God) that I am a follower of Muhammad the Conqueror instead of Christ the Redeemer.
I try to say some variant of this prayer every day. It's an expression of gratitude towards God for pairing my ka with the ba I have (If you'll excuse the Ancient Egyptian terms). I don't think this is a bad thing but rather, in a world with a severe paucity of gratitude for what it has, something that marks me out from people. I recommend other people to be regularly thankful of their station in life too and recognise that it isn't (after a point) our own deeds that got us here but rather the blessing of God smiling down upon us (long may it continue). Of course this doesn't mean we shouldn't recognise that we are all sinners and also repent for that.
I could have been born a few hospitals over and right now would be tilling fields by hand to earn a meagre amount just enough feed myself twice a day but by grace of God I was born me, and I will always be thankful for that.
EDIT: Although you can argue just how possible it is for me (the person I am today) to have been born as an IQ 80 minimally literate farmer. Just like how a human consciousness can never be born in a C. Elegans and experience such a life (because such creatures don't have the neural architecture to support something as complex as a human conscious), I wonder just how possible it would be for the consciousness I have today to have developed in an IQ 80 person (of course the differences between me and the farmer are far far smaller than the differences between humans and nematode worms but I wonder where the cutoff is). But regardless, I should still be extremely grateful, if not for that then for the fact that I got to experience reality at all because just the right sperm combined with just the right egg.
I feel a sudden urge for poetry coming on!
Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri’s knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunset and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees,
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king.
They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn,
From temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn;
They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea
Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be;
On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl,
Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl;
They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground,—
They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound.
And he saith, “Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk can hide,
And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide,
And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving rest,
For that which was our trouble comes again out of the west.
We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun,
Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done,
But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
The voice that shook our palaces — four hundred years ago:
It is he that saith not ‘Kismet’; it is he that knows not Fate;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey in the gate!
It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth,
Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth.”
For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
Sudden and still — hurrah!
Bolt from Iberia!
Don John of Austria
Is gone by Alcalar.
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Either the God of Abraham is real, in which case your aesthetic preferences among the various cults claiming to be His true Faith are irrelevant compared to your considered impression of thier relative accuracy, or He is not, in which case you should not be thanking Him for anything, or yourself for getting involved in one of said false religions.
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Gratitude is obviously good, but the gratitude should not be in comparison to the perceived immorality of your neighbors. Even if someone “deserves” some poor circumstance, it is still a bad idea to situate yourself as superior to your neighbor whose inner life you don’t know. The reason the Pharisee is unjust whereas the Publican is made just, is that the Pharisee is only grateful in relation to those he feels are inferior, and he judges a random neighbor as inferior even when that very man is crying out to his same God! And then, the next omitted part of the Pharisee’s prayer, is that he congratulates himself on his superiority because he pays tithes and fasts twice a week, which are really of secondary importance in the moral life. Those external, ritual-based details are criticized by Jesus on many occasions, because they should not be one’s focus in comparison to love for God and neighbor. (Sometimes online I see Muslim content about how farting disrupts their ritual purity and requires washing with prayer, or I see Jewish content about purifying one’s oven for dairy after it was used for meat, or even Christian content about the theologically correct minutiae of the Trinity, and I can’t help but see this all as identical to Pharisseeism, a completely false spiritual focus).
An alternative righteous Pharisee’s prayer would be to thank God for His delivery from evil and health and any sort of progress without bringing down others; to thank God and then to ask God to deliver the Publican; then perhaps to ask forgiveness for having the wrong moral focus, to recognize one’s mistakes (which every person on earth makes), and to seek what more can be done to please God.
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