[Buddha-l] 'Nature' and eating meat

[Gad Horowitz]

thank you.  while stewing over this, I unsubscribed.  I have now
resubscribed as gary harrow at boltfarb at hotmail.com.  but I shall always be
yours, gad


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Richard P. Hayes" <rhayes at unm.edu>
To: "Buddhist discussion forum" <buddha-l at mailman.swcp.com>
Sent: Monday, October 24, 2005 4:40 PM
Subject: Re: [Buddha-l] 'Nature' and eating meat


> 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
>
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