Can you imagine the Pope or an Ayatollah saying such a thing?
Not to mention the more fundamentalist among America's Christians like Jame Dobson, or Franklin Graham, or the late Jerry Falwell. They would no more admit to any fallacy in the Bible as admit that what makes them vilify homosexuals, blacks, and women has nothing to do with their religion, and everything to do with their own prejudices.
And no I am not a Buddhist, but if every I decide to take the plunge I can tell you which religious faith would be on my short list.
I consider myself something of a Buddhist. I live in Thailand & am in contact with the outward expression daily. I do not have any belief in god or gods & am suspect of anyone claiming any authority in Buddhist thought...after all Buddha told us to think for ourselves.
ReplyDeleteYou've said exactly what I feel. Thank you. My experiences in Thailand over a decade ago literally changed my life; a change for which I will be forever grateful.
DeleteBuddhism is a way of life, not really a "religion" in my opinion. I read the book- Siddhartha - about Buddha's life journey, then went on to read - Awakening the Buddha Within, by Lama Surya Das. Lama Surya Das was a New York Jew before living in a monastery. The book is enjoyable reading. "Throughout the book, he reminds us to be responsible for our own thoughts and actions and to find the kindness, compassion and grace that are inherent in all of us."
ReplyDeleteFrom wikipedia: Lama Surya Das was born Jeffrey Miller and raised in Valley Stream, Long Island, New York.[5] He attended the State University of New York at Buffalo, graduating in 1971, with a degree in Creative Education.[6] After his best friend's girlfriend, Allison Krause was killed during the Kent State shootings,[1] Surya Das began his spiritual journey.[1]
Some folks hold a prejudice and or a hate and scour the Bible to find (and then do find) some obscure passage to support their despicable view - regardless of the mountains of passages that conflict with their preconceived notions.
ReplyDeleteYou don't find that with Buddhism.
Fairy tales are fairy tales. No brand is any better than another. They are all harmful to modern society and should be outlawed before they do humanity any more harm. What's so fucking hard to understand about that?
DeleteMy experience with Buddhists is that they accept and do not try to twist things to fit the way they want. It is a great part of both its appeal and its strength in my opinion.
DeleteWhat I really appreciate about Buddhism is its emphasis on clarity and really using your head to reach greater understanding and achieve the sort of life that is beneficial not only to oneself but to others. I have yet to encounter anything more virulently negative and hostile as what I have encountered among right wing Christian zealots. There are no fairy tales in the Buddhist texts: it is all about mindfulness, love and compassion for all sentient beings, and achieving enlightenment, but you will find Buddhist parables that the Buddha told, just as you will find parables in the New Testament.
DeleteM from MD
Jude,
DeleteI really appreciate your posts.
Unfortunately, there is seldom enough respect to go around to discuss religion here.
I think a lot of us just "mosey-on" because these really aren't conversations.
There are people who believe, and those who don't. What they believe doesn't really seem to matter.
Those who "believe" without scientific evidence (which is the definition of "faith") are usually insulted and made to feel like uneducated children, when in fact, many of us have read and studied much more about the various religions, religious theories and practices than many here, but so be it.
Verbatim from Science Insider, January 18, 2011:
ReplyDeletePope Benedict XVI has appointed Swiss microbiologist Werner Arber as the new president of the Vatican's scientific advisory body, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Arber, a Protestant, becomes the first non-Catholic to head the organization, which has roots dating back to the early 17th century. He succeeds Italian physicist Nicola Cabibbo, who died in August last year.
The academy is designed to keep the church up to date with the latest scientific advances and so help it avoid making the kind of errors that brought it into conflict with science in the past. Set up in its present form by Pope Pius XI in 1936, it consists of 80 distinguished scientists, both men and women, who have a variety of religious affiliations or are nonreligious and who include a significant number of Nobel Prize winners.
Arber, 81, of the University of Basel shared the Nobel Prize in 1978 for his discovery of restriction enzymes, proteins that cut genes into fragments and whose understanding could help combat hereditary diseases and cancer. He has been a member of the academy for 30 years, the last 15 of which have seen him serving on the body's council. He says he doesn't intend to make many changes to the running of the organization, maintaining that it succeeds in influencing the pope's views on science. He believes that the academy is most effective when its members get together to discuss the big scientific questions that most interest the Vatican, particularly in cosmology and biological evolution, noting that the church no longer adheres to a literalist interpretation of the biblical creation story. "I think that the church has views which are consistent with scientific knowledge," he says.
"the church no longer adheres to a literalist interpretation of the biblical creation story."
ReplyDeleteI think that would come as quite a shock to... pretty much EVERY catholic. If this is the new official position of the vatican, one would expect the Pope himself to be promoting it, yes? I find it unbelievable to think this statement is accurate. Just imagine the Pope saying: "we don't take the bible literally anymore". Not ever going to happen.
It's in the catechism, and has been for quite a while, just as evolution has been taught in Catholic schools for decades.
DeleteScripture should be considered through several lenses: non-factual literary forms such as parables; the human limitations of the authors; and the almost-insurmountable difficulties of translation (especially of the Old Testament, written in Hebrew without vowels,) just to name a few.
You will encounter many Catholics who don't get this, but in any faith, especially such a huge one, you'll find a range of beliefs, and many people who can't clearly define the tenets of their own faith.
You can read a comment on this thread from a person who asserts that Buddhism is not a religion. That's a valid viewpoint. Millions of others world-wide would disagree.
I lived in Korea and Japan for years, and came to know Buddhists whose beliefs and rituals included animism, shamanism, ancestor worship, and other elements of pre-Buddhist religions.
Tibetan Buddhism is a patriarchal faith, with a hierarchy much like that of RC. The Dalai Lama depends on acceptance of a supernatural belief in order to hold his title as the umpteenth reincarnation of a revered bodhisattva of compassion. (He's pretty safe there; I doubt there are any scientists trying to disprove his Holiness.)
No disrespect is meant, but if there are cafeteria Catholics, there are cafeteria Buddhists as well. I have techie hipster friends who give high-minded discourses on the Buddhist paths they're following, while they wear expensive clothing, eat steak, and drink wine.
Slightly OT, but I wish Gryphen's religious posts garnered as much attention as his political ones. Comments on Ted Nugent and Sarah Palin are funnier, but the religiously-oriented ones are often more interesting.
I was taught that the Church does not believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible in catechism class way back in the mid 1960s. It's been a distinction between Catholics and the Fundies for a long, long time.
DeleteAll religions are evil. For fuck sake, get that straight at least! Then continue on with that understanding. Pumping up the rep of any of them here on your blog is just plain wrong.
ReplyDeleteWhoa! Gryphen can write what he chooses on his blog. It's a nice change of pace when he posts the occasional spot about religion. His sharpest wit comes out with political issues, but he has gotten beyond seeing all spiritual matters as "fairy tales with nothing of value to offer." He has noted doing a lot of reading, and "deeper thinking" in these areas.
ReplyDeleteEven Sam Harris, one of the so-called Four Horsemen of Atheism, acknowledged that Buddhist contemplation (and logically Christian contemplation as well) potentially offered great wisdom. His objection is that it also involves faith.
Pigeon-holing religions with sophomoric opinions like "all religions are evil," is nonproductive. Most people grow past this tendency sometime in high school.
If I were G, I wouldn't print comments such as the one above about his daughter. He's clearly more broad-minded than I am, at least in that regard.
One of the many things I appreciated about Buddhism, that led me to converting to it was that you are encouraged to think and to question. Something that seems to have disappeared from the Baptist Church in which I had been raised.
ReplyDelete"No disrespect is meant, but if there are cafeteria Catholics, there are cafeteria Buddhists as well. I have techie hipster friends who give high-minded discourses on the Buddhist paths they're following, while they wear expensive clothing, eat steak, and drink wine."
And I am not one of these 'cafeteria Buddhists' either, whatever that means. I became vegetarian and use clothes only to cover my body and shoes so that I may walk without undue pain. I do drink wine once in awhile, but I do not see why that is considered a negative, unless you mean that it is exorbitantly priced: a prestige item - suggesting an attachment to luxuries and the egotism of flaunting such things.
The key is truly mindfulness and having non-attachment to things, to people, to thoughts and beliefs. Everything is impermanent and love and compassion for all sentient beings is also important, which frankly can be difficult when one is dealing with folks like Inhofe of OK, or Ma and Pa Palin. That said, if Enlightenment were a mountain peak, I would still be on the path leading up to the foothills. I have a long and humble way to go.
M from MD
Please google: Quantum Physics and Buddhism ( or Taoaism) etc.
ReplyDeleteThere are soooo many good books available on amazon that discuss the similarity of the basis behind both physics and buddhism AND THEY ARE WRITTEN FOR LAYMEN.
You dont have to be a science major (though an interest in science helps) and you don't have to do the math of quantum physics to understand the books, the explanations of the experiments, or the results.
Remember Quantum Physics ( tho there are about 10 current explanations for how it works) accounts for about a third of our economy.
There is the saying: If you think you understand QM, then you don't !
This is why there are so many possible theories on how it works. BUT THE POINT IS, IT DOES WORK ! AND IF YOU DONT THINK SO, THEN STOP USING YOUR IPAD, YOUR CELL PHONE, YOUR COMPUTER, YOUR MICROWAVE ETC ETC ETC.
And if you are "against science" then please go back to the stone age prior to the wheel because just about everything since then came about because of "science."
In my chemistry class, my lab partner and I referred to it as cooking class: cooking i.e. boiling an egg, is the same as an experiment. You take a substance (egg) expose it to a certain specific level of heat(boiling water) and you thereby change the texture, taste, smell, shape of the egg. This is done by rearranging the molecules within the egg and you repeat this experiment enough times so that you learn that altering just one of the variables changes the outcome of the experiment i.e. egg is runny and not hard boiled. Also, altitude of the location of the experiment must be taken into account as altitude affects the boiling ability of the water.
Still dont believe in science. How do you ever get up the courage to into an airplane if you reject the venturi effect ? You think God is holding that airiplane up in the air? :)
TO CLARIFY VENTURI EFFECT: IT IS RELATEAD TO BERNOULLI'S PRINCIPLE
ReplyDeleteFrom Wikipedia:
Bernoulli's principle can be used to calculate the lift force on an airfoil if the behaviour of the fluid flow in the vicinity of the foil is known. For example, if the air flowing past the top surface of an aircraft wing is moving faster than the air flowing past the bottom surface, then Bernoulli's principle implies that the pressure on the surfaces of the wing will be lower above than below. This pressure difference results in an upwards lift force.[nb 1][23] Whenever the distribution of speed past the top and bottom surfaces of a wing is known, the lift forces can be calculated (to a good approximation) using Bernoulli's equations[24] – established by Bernoulli over a century before the first man-made wings were used for the purpose of flight. Bernoulli's principle does not explain why the air flows faster past the top of the wing and slower past the underside. To understand why, it is helpful to understand circulation, the Kutta condition, and the Kutta–Joukowski theorem.
Subsequently Bernoulli's principle then shows that there must be a decrease in the pressure in the reduced diameter region. This phenomenon is known as the Venturi effect.
Lots of unfamiliar words and math attached, but whether you understand or accept the science involved, none-the-less it works.
Unless you can support why science is not valid, you either have to accept that it works, even if YOU cannot explain why or how or else believe in creationism, deny evolution, accept men had dinasours as pets :) etc.
Jeeze, even bicycles and roller skates work on the principles of science.
And forget about ever going to a doctor again or letting them perform expensive test on you that you don't believe are real or God forbid, let them anethesize you and perform surgery !
Damn that stupid science stuff anyway. Palin's right !