[Buddha-l] the existence of God in Buddhism

[jkirk]

Emilio Gentile in a newly published Politics as Religion, (Princeton 
University Press, 2006) in his discussion related to the term "secular 
religion" (used interchangeably with "political religion" or "secular 
religion") states the following: " If, for example, your definition of a 
religion is premised on the existence of a supernatural divinity, then you 
would be justified in denying that a belief system that considers a secular 
entity to be sacred could be a religious phenomenon.  However, if we accept 
this definition, we would be obliged to deny that Buddhism is a religious 
phenomenon, because it does not allow for the existence of God, whereas the 
Nazi political religion could be considered a religious phenomenon, because 
it did not deny the existence of god, even though it dressed that god up in 
its own ideology" (3).

I wonder if anyone could comment on the highlighted?

Thank you

Ilana Maymind
=========================
If you consider institutions as explicated by social anthropology, for ex., 
then a consult of Mary Douglas, _Purity and Danger_, to offer but one 
example,  will provide a framework whereby Buddhism, as well as communism 
and other secular social arrangements, can be viewed as "religion."  The 
point is that the term "sacred" simply means "set apart" and treated with 
social distance and/or even awe, as Stalin or Hitler were.  Analytically, 
this term does not require belief in deities. Such leaders became 
metaphorically transformed into "deities"--they were treated like deities--  
by the social arrangements. Most ordinary views of the term "religion" are 
that it refers to "the sacred," hence the confusion.

The political aspect appears when such arrangements of the sacred serve 
political interests, as they did in Soviet communism and Italian and German 
nazism. So it's
an historical crock from earlier times that in order to find "the sacred," 
gods and religion must be implicated or involved. Thus, some commentators 
continue to apply the term "religion" to such entities as communism, etc. 
Systems employing "the sacred" as social arrangement also exhibit 
accompanying belief systems and dogmas of various sorts that legitimize the 
social and power arrangements.

The political interests usually served by such entities are hierarchies of 
power.
If we observe the social etiquette of monks toward abbots in various 
religions that have them, to offer only one example, we see the abbots (or 
bishops or
Popes) treated as if they are sacred personages. Here again there is a 
political hierarchy of power.  In the case of dogma, Popes are thought by 
believers to have more "godly" power (what anthropologists use to call 
"mana") than ordinary priests have, but yet even ordinary priests have some 
of it because they have been empowered by their institution and its beliefs 
to perform mass, receive confessions, give absolution, etc.

This way of viewing "the sacred" can sort out a good deal of commonly 
encountered confusion.

Joanna