Are you religious?

I think you might be glossing over an era of truly dreadful history there...

I can respect your position, it's a unique view. I have no problem with ritual, and I agree that ritual and faith should not be in opposition. The problem, as you know, comes when people replace faith with a canned list of do's and dont's.

I believe that when the veil tore it signified the removal of the barriers to our access to God. We have a high priest in heaven who acts as our intermediary, and I call on Him when I pray. I do not need an earthly priest to give me permission to be saved.

I guess I was turned off by the chain smoking fathers at the Jesuit high school I attended.

 

I was raised as a Roman Catholic. However, I decided that I did not want to practice anymore, because I didn't like that it was too complex and had to many loose ends. Yet, I am still attending mass and doing the various rituals because my father will likely beat me or take away everything I have if I don't. I am interested in Buddhism, if you consider that a religion.

 

You're right and I get carried away. Back to that thing I said about the unity of the body and not arguing...

 

It's an interesting one. I come at it first and foremost from my human experience. I was originally Protestant... as long as I was rationalist. But when I starting seeing a certain poverty to rationalism, and took a larger interest in a wider history and art, I soon converted to the Church. This is why I think this issue, between the Catholic and Protestant divide, revolves more around the way in which we think and feel than around the truth. A Copernican revolution comes to mind.

 

Now ask yourself where the greater part of piety lies, and the greater part of pride.

 

Once you're on your own I might hope that you'd at least look at other churches, see that they're far from being all the same. You have ritualistic; fire and brimstone; focused on do's and don'ts as someone mentioned; unfortunately some political ones, then you also have the ones that are all about leading a decent life while following the teachings of Christ. Acting through faith, being good to others, etc.

I think Buddhism made it a point to not be like a religion. It's my understanding that they didn't even come up with rules until they needed to know when a monk should be disrobed (similar to excommunication). For example, if a monk encourages someone to do bad things, that is grounds for losing their position as a monk. Aside from that they hold common beliefs I'm not sure if they'd be considered "religious."

 

Thank you for your insight.

 

This is not quite accurate about Buddhism. Firstly, it can be considered a religion, and on the basis of beliefs/ideas about the afterlife. I would consider any faith that has some opinion on this to be a religion.
Buddhism is a collection of teachings by Siddartha Goutama the Buddha (buddha just meaning enlightened one, so there are plenty of other Buddhas and there can be buddhas today). The gist of these teachings is that you should trust yourself. By giving up desires and wants, and by understanding oneself, one will start to appreciate universal truths. And Goutama was a teacher, nothing more. So there is no central authority. Monks are there to preserve and disseminate teachings.

 

I find that Buddhism makes more sense than Christianity. Not only do the teachings make sense today, but they did 2500 years ago. There aren't all these issues that there are with Christianity, in terms of understanding something in its historical context. Plus it advocates nonviolence to all beings, ie vegetarian or veganism. If there weren't any religions and one had to come up with moral beliefs (in any case, Christianity is not so helpful in this regard either. Slavery is described in the Bible, but due to its historical context - so one still has to decide today on each issue, independent of the Bible), it's natural that nonviolence would come up, especially given that nothing we have learned points to animals not experiencing pain or fear.

 

Buddhism is more a self-contained philosophy than a religion. Where it seeks to negate desire, religion looks to direct it to its true object, or put desire in its true context. There is a whole superstructure of belief, super-ordinate to the intellect, that is non-existent in Buddhism.

 

I'm glad that there is another LDS person I'm Mormon too.

 

Am I religious? No.
Am I spiritual? Very much so.

 

Posted this here since we were hijacking that other thread.

This is what you want?

I assume you're familiar with Brothers Karamazov and the Grand Inquisitor, that's what comes to my mind.

 

My point was one of perceiving the cultural reality at play at any point of time - historical consciousness. At our particular point of time, in our way of thinking, culture is something detached from reason. So we have a tolerant pluralistic view of things. This is our cultural reality. Yet this need not also be our innermost personal reality; there is always a space for criticism, the individual can transcend the social.. without being divorced from it. The picture here is not the either/ or of the individual or society, but spheres within spheres. The existentialism of Dosteovsky is too influenced by the former.

That said, cultural reality can still be seen from the practical perspective.... as opposed to the theoretical. Any culture, or way of life, is going to defend itself. This is why the US, for example, will always seek to defend its 'way of life'.

The best we can do now, given the modern conditions of life, is to reaffirm tolerance/ rationality; one tolerates false opinions, the heretical mode of thought, whilst engaging in dialogue with them on the basis of orthodoxy. There is always the possibility that, due to a desire for coherency, some will return to the unity of the Church. However, reason itself is losing ground today, and in a 'post-modern' world, I think you'll see more intolerance and more violence in the future.

 

yes

 

"Negate" is not the right word for how Buddhists deal with desire. It is more of a release, or letting go of desire. There is certainly a "consciousness" that is superordinate to the intellect in Buddhism, it could also be described as a superstructure of belief. But I have never heard that described in Christianity, actually, at least not today. As I understand it, there was much more understanding and practice of that idea thousands of years ago in Christianity, and I have read some commentaries by priests that they feel that the emphasis there in Christianity has been lost over the centuries.

 

I'm not sure I completely follow you guys... but the bible refers to truths or concepts that are not able to be fully grasped by the intellect. Paul prays that we may " know this love that surpasses knowledge".

The holy spirit plays a part in this, but also christian meditation. Rather than an emptying of the mind, it is a prayerful focusing on a concept, the practice of which enables conscious understanding that is superordinate to the intellect.

I think I'm saying something similar to buzz. Rather than emptying the mind, there is a focus towards something which allows understanding beyond mere thinking.

 

I am an agnostic atheist, which means I don't believe in a god or gods but I also won't say with 100% certainty that a "higher power" or something doesn't exist. For me, this is the most logical mindset. Science and skepticism brought me to this conclusion years ago.

 

I think there is a process of development in Christian thought that is first dissimilar then similar to Buddhism. Very early on you have Augustine with his 'I believe in order to know'. For him, faith was a sort of consummation of knowledge, and keep in mind that for this age knowledge was primarily moral knowledge.

Later, in the middle ages, you had Anselm's 'faith seeking understanding', and here you see the beginning of knowledge as something over and above faith and couched in the long career of speculative theology. It is this form of explicit rational speculation that finally gets secularized in the course of the nineteenth century, most notably in German philosophy.

And in the secularization process in philosophy, you can see the similarity to Buddhism emerge. Take Kant, who stands on the cusp of this revolution in thought. He was concerned first to draw a line between Knowledge and Faith. Reason for Kant is like the Roman god Janus, which had two faces looking in opposite directions. Knowledge [scientific knowledge], is not really knowledge for Kant, but simply empirical 'knowledge' of appearances. It can say nothing of metaphysics, or appearances, or the 'things themselves'. But reason still consists of normative and thinkable ideas, such as an infinite universe, soul and God. For Kant, the soul/ reason is structured in such a way [because itself part of the creation?] that it is constrained to believe them in a practical sense; we experience ourselves as moral, rational and aesthetic beings therefore there must be a ground for these existential] experiences. And here you have outlined a rational faith, in defense of the old world/ culture without the rationalism of Knowledge.

Of course it is a delicate balance and a fine line to walk. The phenomena side of the equation was soon seized upon in following German thought, and the 'metaphysical things in themselves' discarded... or rather, collapsed back into each-other. We now have full blown German idealism and historicism. Where the similarity to Buddhism comes in is with Schopenhauer's 'Will and Representation'. All there is underlying this world of appearances is a blind will to power/ life. We are aware of this as desire, but desire can never be fulfilled due to our finitude. Desire is illusory so we must 'let it go', to use your terminology.

Later existentialism is in a similar manner close to Buddhism [an emphasis on 'nothingness'], which is in a way paradoxical, as it is rooted in first person experience [in contrast to the third person abstractions of so-called knowledge]. From the line of Augustine all the way through to Kant, you had a tradition emphasizing the first person experience of a rational faith. I think what is lost, in post-Kantian thought, is the idea of a rational superstructure that exists not so much transcendently as immanently in the very ground of our existence. We are like a portal to another world, with one foot here and one foot there. Yet this world seems irretrievably removed from us today; on the one hand stands the objective truths of scientific Knowledge which all but abolishes subjectivity, and on the other you have the increasingly anemic humanities and arts with some shadowy realm of aesthetic experience to defend. Christianity was not only about a robust creative subject, but also about an intelligible and just collective order. It is about our desire penetrating this world into another... which is the sublimation of eros to art.

 

And the classical vision, as outlined above, is required in order to unify our existence, and not only in our self, but of ourselves within a social order. Herein lies the idea of the Church, the institutional expression of an eternal form, where we can all belong to an intelligible reality in virtue of our rational being. Revelation is communication. The Church as a super-sensible entity, established by a divine Providence, transcends all historical contingencies such as language, ethnicity, and politics. And it is the mission of the Church to convert all individuated and alienated people and peoples to its worldview.