[Buddha-l] teaching creationism

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Thu, 2005-10-06 at 11:14 -0400, curt wrote:

> Here is a tentative reading list for a class (that exists only in my 
> mind) on "Creation and Cosmology"

I would wish to add to that list Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry's
thought-provoking book The Universe Story. A shorter, but no less
thought-provoking, piece by Berry is his address to Harvard Divinity
School in 1996 (http://ecoethics.net/ops/univers.htm) in which he speaks
of the shortcomings of the modern university, the inadequacies of a
legal system that has as its principal frame of reference the deeply
flawed US Constitution, the institutionalized greed of international
corporations and the failure of churches to address the most pressing
issues of our time. (The churches are criticized for failing to realize
that God's primary form of revelation is the world of nature, not a
bunch of sentences in a book.)

It's a beautifully thought out and eloquent diatribe that every educator
on the planet Earth should be required to read. The tone is more gentle
in many ways but every bit as compelling as Ralph Waldo Emerson's
trenchant address to Harvard Divinity School a century and a half
earlier.

If one is looking for intelligent versions of Intelligent Design, Swimme
and Berry are a good place to start. (You can get a clear-worded
introduction at http://ecoethics.net/ops/tucker.htm). Theirs is not the
two-dimensional presentation of Christian Fundamentalists whose agenda
is to smuggle the Bible into biology classes, but the combined work of a
physicist specializing in gravitational field theory and a Jesuit who
spent his life studying not only Christian theology but the religions
and philosophies of India. While it is pretty obvious that Berry owes a
big debt to neo-Vedanta and to some of the later forms of Buddhism, it
is also obvious that he is prepared to be every bit as critical of
institutionalized Buddhism as he is of the US constitution (the
document, not the battleship) and of traditional Catholicism and
Puritanism.

-- 
Dh. Dayamati
Albuquerque, New Mexico