[Buddha-l] 'Nature' and eating meat

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Mon, 2005-10-24 at 17:32 -0400, horowitz at chass.utoronto.ca wrote:

> Sorry if this response was inappropriate.  I thought you might ask what
> misnagged means. 

I assumed it means nagged inappropriately or for the wrong reasons. For
example, when my wife asks me to do something that I have already done,
she is misnagging me. (That's just a hypothetical example. In fact my
wife neither nags nor misnags me.)

>  In the Jewish tradition it means, roughly, one who is
> so devoted to rational thinking that he has little patience with myth
> (like the Tree, or the Lotus Sutra)little patience with paradox
> (Nagarjuna,Zen,Derrida, Magliola).

That would be a sad and impoverished state of affairs to be in. In fact,
it sounds dangerously close to being a Republican.

As you probably realize, I have nothing at all against myth and paradox.
I do tend to feel that systems of mythology that have evolved over
centuries and millennia work best when they are not mixed up with one
another. For this reason, it tends to strike me as a pity when one
speaks of, say, Christ as a bodhisattva or an enlightened being. That
does violence to the tradition in which he placed himself, so I would
rather show respect for that tradition and historical context by not
importing too many alienisms into it. Having said that, I am well aware
that myth is very dynamic and is constantly being renewed through
redefinition, as when Paul redefined all manner of Jewish terms and
symbols to arrive at a new mythology, or when the Buddha deliberately
redefined a bunch of brahmanical terms to come up with a new mythology. 

Redefining a former myth to arrive at a new mythology is a way of
keeping mythology relevant. The danger, as we all know only too well, is
when acceptance of the new myth leads to a denigration of the older one,
and of the people who still abide by it. Thus we have the ugly history
of anti-Semiticism in much of Christianity, and the equally ugly
phenomenon of dismissive rhetoric in the Lotus Sutra.

> Please accept my apology.

I don't need it, but if you are giving them away, what the hell, eh?
Maybe I can give it to someone who needs it more than I do. Who knows, I
might someday misnag somebody and then need to apologize to them.

> I promise no more obfuscatory ad hominems.

A really nicely turned ad hominem is pretty hard to resist. And, as the
history of democracy show us, a good ad hominem, tu quoque, straw man or
slippery slope fallacy will almost always get more votes than a valid
argument. So never sell fallacies short. But if one is going to use a
fallacy, it is better not to mix it with obfuscation, lest the fools
whom the fallacy is intended to dupe miss the point and vote for the
wrong party.

Be well, my friend, and give Toronto a hug for me. (But not Mississauga,
eh?)

-- 
Richard