[samsara15]

I don't even want to deal with the the idea of human suffering, free will, and the contradictions of an all-everything God here, just looking at the rejection of the world inherent in most religions, Eastern as well as Western.

What prompted this thread was a posting on another board in which a Yoga advocate was presenting the Adam and Eve story as an analogy of the superiority of ascetism over our 'brute animal' instinct. Which also leads to treating the animals badly. How crass, this person said, to support sensuality, we should rise above our animal instincts to achieve true spirituality. To which my response was that the 'crude animal sexual act' humans engage in is one of the highest points of most of our otherwise mundane lives.