This link has been bookmarked by 8 people . It was first bookmarked on 04 Sep 2006, by Mike Wesch.
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24 Nov 08
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Well, explain that. What is religion?
Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn't necessarily sited in an external god, which can be a very unspiritual, unreligious concept. The sages were all extremely concerned with transcendence, with going beyond the self and discovering a realm, a reality, that could not be defined in words. Buddhists talk about nirvana in very much the same terms as monotheists describe God.
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That's fascinating. So in Buddhism, which is nontheistic, the message or the experience of nirvana is the same as the Christian God?
The experience is the same. The trouble is that we define our God too closely. In my book "A History of God," I pointed out that the most eminent Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians all said you couldn't think about God as a simple personality, an external being. It was better to say that God did not exist because our notion of existence was far too limited to apply to God.
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So would you say religion addresses those questions through the stories and myths?
Yes. In the pre-modern world, there were two ways of arriving at truth. Plato, for example, called them mythos and logos. Myth and reason or science. We've always needed both of them. It was very important in the pre-modern world to realize these two things, myth and science, were complementary. One didn't cancel the other out.
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Well, he hates religion.
Yeah, this is not what the Buddha would call skillful. If you're consumed by hatred -- Freud was rather the same -- then this is souring your personality and clouding your vision. What you need to do is to look appraisingly and calmly on other traditions. Because when you hate religion, it's also very easy to hate the people who practice it.
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30 Aug 08
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03 Oct 06
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04 Sep 06
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31 May 06
m rmodern religions address relationships with present others. what addresses relationships with future others or with the world of objects and fields? science? paganism? animism? how did they create a moral obligation to others and how are moral obliga
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