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And so it says as much in the Bible? And you can see why they say abortion is wrong and homosexuality is a sin. Islam and Christianity have more in common than not. By all means talk about the evil of religious institutions. To single out Islam is utterly ridiculous. Am I sympathetic left? No, I have no sympathy for deluded individuals. My aim is to cut through the BS and start dialogue rather than cast around accusations. I know a little about Islam myself. I also know many Muslims see the "war" and interpret the words from Arabic as representing an inner struggle. Much like the Bible they take it metaphorically not literally (some get it wrong, much like those in the Bible belt who believe the world was created in seven days by some deity). Let us not forget these religious texts were written and put together LONG after the people involved had died. They no doubt hold some seed of the original persons involved, but they were used by religious institutions to gain popular favour. As a rational human being I believe the main personas involved had a great influence and inspiring affect on those around them. From this point I take what positivity I can from what remains of them and remember how they ALL generally preach peace, freedom and human worth. OF course due to political circumstances and cultural attitudes of the times it is clear that those issues have been imprinted upon the mythology of these people too. No doubt these individuals faulted also, I am sure they were aware of their own faults. What people protest against is singling out a group of people and demonizing them (also a popular tactic of Christianity). Your personal view of Islam and experience does not hold baring on everyone elses. That is probably why you fail to understand other views that are not "sympathetic", but are generally opposing sweeping statements made by individuals that paint a whole group of people as "evil".

disagree with your views; "western democracy and capitalism is the more primary problem" You cannot be that short-sighted when; 1. The terrible evils and violence from SOME Islamist started long before Western Democracy and capitalism. 2. Islamic terror started since 1,400 years ago when Islam was establish in the Middle East. 3. The Taliban, Boko Haram and Islam in essence is against anything which is not Islamic, e.g. education [note the case of Malala, and Boko Haram's mission]. 4. The genocides of the Yazidis, Armenians, Hindus has nothing to do with Western Democracy and capitalism. 5. Note the cultural genocides where historical sites, building, artifacts are destroyed for being not acceptable to Islam. Many give excuses for the current terror in blaming Western interventions but this is merely the secondary problem. Note this true real reason why true Muslims hate non-Muslims. This is what was extracted from ISIS's newsletter [mine].

From my perspective, the reason for the regressive left [re Islam] is due to Obama's placating to Muslims and allowing them to infiltrate the White House. In addition, the Islamist use their oil money to corrupt academia with their $$$ in donations of various universities in the US and around the world. This is why at present there is no room in most universities in the US for any one to give any speech where Islam is mentioned .

My position on the evils of Islam is as follows; 1. Obvious any individual who had committed crimes of any sort should face the respective Laws without exception. 2. But, no Muslims should be blamed as the primary cause for the evils and violence that is happening in the present. 3. The Muslims who commit evils and violence are the ones who are unfortunately born with an active evil propensity and are subliminally influenced by the evil verses from the Quran. 4. The primary cause for all Islamic-based evils and violence should be traced to the Quran in relation to the identified sets [not single verse] of evil and violent elements therein. So it is not Muslims at all but the primary cause is the ideology of Islam i.e. the evil and violent elements in the Quran to be proven objectively. 5. An analogy is like Hitler and Nazism in the Main Kempf. In this case it it is not the German people then who are at fault. The primary fault is Hitler with his perverted mind who started that evil ideology of Nazism. The cronies and gang who help Hitler to enhance his evil ideology of Nazism is also guilty

@Preety_India I think that if a group of people are being labelled as X and painted in a bad light then sensible people will speak up and say it is unfair to say that such a statement represents ALL people who associate with that group. Thankfully I do think the overall public are little more wiser to how political manipulation works and at the moment due to easy access to media sources we are seeing a backlash against the backlash. Are some people who call themselves Muslims evil? Yes, but not all. Are some people who call themselves Christians evil? Yes, but not all. Are some people who don't claim any religious position evil? Yes, but not all. That is all we really need to remember. The rest is simply due to religious institutions and governments agendas. As members of the public I think we should try to rise above sweeping statements about groups of peoples. Of course being human we are all going to fall prey to our own views and biases so the best we can do is guard against them and not be willing to either target groups of people or to defend groups of people. People are people, and people are different.

I guess it is because there is one group that is very noisy and aggressive. This why some of the left are redefining themselves as the Progressive Left as opposed to the very noisy and aggressive 'regressive left'. What I find disturbing with this regressive left is their drive and desperations to stop all sort of expressions, and critiques of Islam when it is Islam-in-part that would not hesitate to kill and rape them wherever the opportunity arise for SOME Muslims to do it in the name of Islam. Another point is there are NOT many [except a few] on the left who are condemning the stupidity of these regressive left.

A characteristic I notice in people in general is defensiveness. It does not matter if you are on the left or right or in the middle. Why are people, generally, defensive? I think people are because they want to be right or righteous. Who does not want to have the superior point of view? We all want to be the top dog in our own estimation. So, the question is what is the best point of view? If you lean left it is probably associated with socialism (in various forms), religious tolerance, economic interdependence, environmentalism, freedom of speech, social welfare, governmental regulation, more egalitarian characteristics, Etc. If you lean to the right your governmental preference is probably more authoritarian – capitalistic sovereignty, prefer authoritarian religions, less government regulation & environmental protection, oppose welfare and gun regulation, more individualistic characteristics, etc. These are generalized characteristics – not hardened fast rules. Most people are a hybrid of these attributes in various combinations – centrist – center right – center left. So people on the left tend to want freedom of expression, people on the right tend to want a form of censored expression. I think this is generally true – so what does it mean? It means lefties want everyone to have their point of view expressed - even views from the far right. Do people on the right want freedom of expression? No – they do not. Is Islam a tolerant religion? No – it is not.

I live in India. I think that the radical left supports Islam because they have an insulated western view of the world whereby the west are actors and all other people are acted upon, Muslim immigrants are minorities and the radical left feels compelled to defend all minorities and the Muslim nations are the result of Western imperialism, radical Islam and etc of which the radical left believes do not represent Islam or the Muslim population of the world. This further pushes the narrative that Muslims are victims, just the same way that feminists say that men are victims of the patriarchy because it restricts their freedom and punishes them for being different ie we are not able to express our feelings and we are expected to behave in a masculine way or conform to masculine ideals, with regards to Islam the radical left seems equally inconsistent about who exactly the state of Islam represents and who is responsible for it. Men are victims, women are victims, refugees are victims and there is nobody left to blame and this is not really exclusive to the west either. Obviously everyone recognises that "radical Islam" is a problem but the question is how does this relate back to the everyday Muslim? Are the majority of Muslims just law abiding people with similar philosophies, ideals and dreams to anybody else or are they hardcore misogynistic, anti-liberal and hateful people who willingly subscribe to a destructive ideology. Is the ideology itself even hateful or has it been hi-jacked by violent extremists. This is the complexity surrounding the issue of Islam and while I think the radical left have gone too far, it is difficult to take a strong stance on Islam without taking it on a case-by-case basis, the religion consists of too many people for a clear cut answer.

Is it Very simple? it's because they live in countries were Christianity is the dominant religion, and many powerful and wealthy people are christian. In other words Christianity is a strong religion with much influence, it should be able to take a punch or two. Remember that when you are criticizing Islam, no one in Muslim majority countries will hear you. Instead the one who get the criticism are the mostly poor, uneducated muslim minorities in christian-dominated countries.

I used to be in a constant state of dissatisfaction... I never truly enjoyed the things i supposedly enjoy doing because they were never as good as i imagined them to be and while i was doing them i'd be thinking if what could be better... As a simple example... When i listen to a song i love while travelling or whatever, i never actually finish it and experience the whole track. Instead im skipping through large parts of great songs in the hope that i'll enjoy the next one even more... Since ive started meditating and incorporating mindfulness into my life this is slowly changing... I recently went on holiday with an old friend and i made and effort to experience every moment of that trip... I got so much more out of it that way. This would not have been possible without mindfulness...

Thanks guys for the great helpful responses. this exact thing today while hiking in some beautiful scenery. Restlessness and higher expectations for something that I, based on past experience, should be loving every second of. On longer hiking trips (3+ days) I noticed this is pretty much non-existent. I've also noticed this sensation disappearing after long bouts of drawing, reading, converstation, cuddling, etc. which leads me to the conclusion that it's due to our short attention span. If i want to counter this, i gotta teach my brain to disregard instant gratification and relearn the value of a delayed reward. These things would be great ways to rewire my eward system: -Draw a huge, detailed drawing. It doesn't matter if it looks like shit, I'm keeping my mind on a single task long enough to complete something This is my take on the sensation, and some things that may help my brain rewire itself to move away from my short attention span that is likely causing it. Hope it helps! Thanks again.

Im driven. I push myself, i set standards & goals and see them through regardless of the obstacle, even if the obstacle is myself. I have a level of aggression inside of me that pushes me to reach my goals by any means necessary.. often times the motivation is misplaced as well, where i find myself pushing my limits in order to promote an image of myself for others to view. The source of motivation is what bothers me most, i do things to please others or to fulfill my need for stimulation when deep down i know i should be doing them to please myself. I dont think that i was ever told to behave this way, but something registered with me early in life to "be better" than everyone else, to be the best at everything i do.. i think its a fear of judgement from others, but im still working on that... Meditation works very well for me. im just now learning to adopt the role of "the watcher" in attempt to view my thoughts in meditation, however i tend to latch on to them more often than not and they lead me to a day dream state instead of that of the observer. How can i observe more and direct myself towards mindfulness during meditation? I try to follow my breath throughout the day to practice a waking meditation as i perform day to day tasks, but often this inst enough on its own. Thanks for your attention to this, i really appreciate your input.

How ?

I have been thinking about this today and wondering about how the material circumstances in which each person lives contribute to happiness or well being. It may come down to the material conditions of finance or physical health. I am aware that I have previously had a thread on attachments and that there have been threads on meaning, relating to subjective and objective aspects of life. I don't think that anyone has raised this specific question though. The trigger for me thinking about this was when the boy who lives in the room next to mine remarked how my room was such a mess. He showed me his and I saw how neat and tidy it was. For example, mine has a torn curtain provided by the landlord while he has put up net curtains. I have chaotic heaps of clothes on the floor because my drawers are full of papers and he definitely doesn't have piles of books all over. It lead me to think of the way rooms or homes may be symbolic of mental states. I think that my neighbour was trying to help as he offered to help me organize mine. The point of my little funny story is how material circumstances relate to inner states of mind. Do the circumstances affect happiness or vice versa? It is likely that Maslow's hierarchy of needs which range from the physiological to the social and those of self actualisation come into play. Each person is unique but everyone has certain basic needs. I don't know how people who are homeless manage to endure and it must involve a lot of resilience. Also, aspects of mental health are affected by physical health and factors such as poverty. It is likely that a person who is depressed but in better material circumstances can endure suffering more 'comfortably' than an impoverished person. The cognitive behavioral school of psychology suggests that human beings do not simply experience emotional distress on the basis of experience but on how they think about it. There is some truth in that but material factors impinge on this. For example, a person with poor physical health may experience an event differently from someone in good health. Also, the experience of one's own body plays a part in psychology. In particular, how one sees oneself physically when looking in the mirror is likely to influence the tone of one's experience of reality. I am not wishing to see this question as simply being one of social psychology but as one with far reaching implications, such as poverty and political factors. Climate change does come into it too because extreme environmental factors of weather impact on wellbeing, just like being without food affects the mind and cognitive processes. So, I am raising the question of material circumstances in relation to happiness. The basis of this is because happiness is sometimes seen more in terms of being able to transcend the physical as a philosophical state of mind. I am wondering about this and how it may be negotiated in the worst conditions and how it relates to pleasure and lack of it. Any thoughts on the topic and the main questions raises here

During a period of self reflection I decided to be very honest with myself and pursue my own inner truth. At the time I believed that it was always better to pick truth over happiness. As I kept digging eventually I discovered that this preference was a lie and even somewhat of a paradox. As a general heuristic picking truth over happiness is close to optimal. If you choose truth you may be able to add happiness and retain the truth. If you choose happiness the truth will likely later destroy that happiness. But if you keep digging you eventually come to the last treasure chest containing the final truths. You open the box and you discover a choice where you can take one additional truth and that truth is such that if you accept it no being will ever have happiness again. Do you choose it simply because it is true? I would not. Initially that created discomfort for me as it implies that I may have already made such a choice. But that itself is a truth I am still willing to accept. If you still think you would choose otherwise I am left wondering whether you left one more thing in the box than I did.

Hiding my identity will eventually take its toll, whether it's being done consciously or unconsciously. For me the last few years of my teens were an incredibly difficult and anxious time. As my male friends started talking about girls dating and embarking upon long term relationships, I found I had no interest in the opposite sex at all, and started to feel like there was something horribly wrong with me. Over time this certainly impacted my own mental health and self-esteem. I tried to pretend to be like the other guy, but that didn't really feel good, I became far more interested in writing and making theatre than I was in girls , so I threw myself in to that instead.

We are not really looking for happiness, because that inherently involves and inevitabely brings sadness on the other side of the spectrum - When that happines if over, which it always is, then emptiness naturally 'takes its place' - and emptiness compared to happiness is kind of sad, right? What we are really looking for is familiarity and non-change.

@SgtPepper isn't meaning a construction? Life objectiobjectively has no inherent meaning. We make up whatever meaning that suits us . As for love..I can't say because I need Awakening to the nature of love .I'm lacking in this area.

@VictorB02 @Gesundheit2 Thanks for your reply. The idea of how important are material possessions is probably the basic area of questioning. My own view is that ideally it would be better if they were kept to a minimum. However, in some ways they can be important props for human life in coping with forms of suffering. But this may be the 'trap' because as the Buddha suggested it may be going down the spiral of craving, creating more and more suffering ultimately. My own story about my room being a mess may have been an unhelpful diversion in the post really but the way it seemed worth including was in relation to the misery of having to live in the chaos of the physical world. I guess I also was wondering if my next door neighbour wishing to change my room was based on his illusion. Even though he means well I feel that he doesn't understand my private world of reading and music at all and really far more concerned about appearances in the outer material world which can be illusory. I am not sure that my introduction conveyed properly, but what I was trying to do was ask about the underlying issues of human sentience too.

Yeah man. It hurts when the community dismisses or attacks your identity as a bi person, pushes you to the fringes, stereotypes you or denies who you are as a ‘phase’ or a ‘lie.’ When I told gay and lesbian friends of mine that I was going to tell my parents I’m bi, they told me I should ‘check’ first by sleeping with a woman. When I look back at that, I’m disappointed that they would doubt me and put me down instead of raising me up the way I hoped they would. After all, I know myself better than anyone.

@Medhansh yes im an Indian. of course I'm keeping it a secret lol

@Preety_India @flowboy @Gesundheit2 @Medhansh Thanks for the helpful responses. My problem is that I wanted to be myself, but I hoped and prayed that my feelings would go away, because I feared rejection. Growing up I didn’t have the language to tell people I was bi. I knew I wasn’t only attracted to women but felt ashamed and had to hide it from my friends. At school, calling someone a gay was considered the worst insult, so I knew that if I came out, I’d risk losing people or being treated differently. That made me push down my feelings and hide parts of myself, even from myself. I think that denying my experiences lead to anxiety and negatively affected my self-esteem. I couldn’t express, explore and embrace my full self.

I was fortunate never to encounter homophobic, biphobic or transphobic (HBT) bullying at school, I didn't come out until my mid-20s. I did however grow up hearing HBT language on a daily basis, whether it was using the word gay to describe something that was 'a bit rubbish', or as an insult. So I never even considered that I might be gay. Gay was a bad thing, a negative thing. There was no way I was gay. Growing up meant that there were no 'out' teachers at school, and organisations like Diversity Role Models (DRM) didn't seem to exist. Sex education was strictly heterosexual and only about reproduction. So, without positive LGBT Role Models, healthy discussion around sexuality or the tackling of HBT language in schools, I had no point of reference for myself as a young gay man. I'm feeling my gay side getting stronger recently. Any advice?

Bisexuality is more complicated than that, of course.such as pansexuality and omnisexuality, bisexuality implies an attraction to multiple (or all) genders. The simplification of being attracted to men and women (especially wherein these genders are assumed to be cis) is not only incorrect but also harmful. But as a kid without a deep understanding of gender, I was nonetheless struck by my best friend’s definition. You see, growing up, I was confused. Many queer kids have a similar experience: We’re presented with only one option of what relationships look like—cis man plus cis woman equals true love forever!—and we can sometimes sense early on that something about our internal experience feels different. In the fifth grade, when a friend of mine sneered that I was gay as an insult, I thought maybe I had landed on a name for what I felt. But I went home and asked my dad what that meant, and it still didn’t fit. I wasn’t straight like I was supposed to be, but damn it, I wasn’t this countercultural “gay” thing either. I felt stuck. As I saw it at the time, there were girls who were attracted to boys, and there were girls who were attracted to girls, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t simply pick one. I was both—and I thought I was the only one.

Having this in mind, then with the simple fact of alluding to structures of reality we can explain how things move or behave. There would be basic structures in terms of existence, where we no longer find inferior structures, this is necessary for a solid basis of the behavior of things, but they are structures of reality as such, which could be said to move, but as basic structures movement is all of their property, besides their form (see in work “Propositions”). This is in general terms different from the idea of the unmoved mover, and we can allude to this to explain the movement, so that we do not need to speak of a first unmoved mover in the Aristotelian sense. In a way what I propose is similar to logic in the world, it is part of reality, is embedded in it to say it in a way, and it is not necessary to go beyond reality to talk about it, there are axiomatic things of reality that simply are. In the same way the basic structures of reality plus the change of state of things (the change of state as the closest thing to the movement in terms of Aristotle) would explain how things manifest in the universe, that is, we have movement that simply is and the form of it, which would be given by the form of the structures of reality, so that the movement and everything that in Aristotelian terms refers to actuality and potentiality of things is contained in the things themselves, in the material universe that we inhabit.