[Buddha-l] Views of morality, culture, and religion

[Vicente Gonzalez]

Malcolm wrote:

MD> This feeling of being  "forced to consider" troubles me. Perhaps
MD> I'm wrong, but I thought  Buddhism was about karma, its results,
MD> and liberation therefrom,  not about morality, and especially not
MD> about any morality  delivered from "on high" or enforced as a
MD> social or cultural code. 

why? "Be forced to consider" also it's a karmic process.
I think Buddhism finally is a Moral goal, and the behavior of
Buddha teaching others after his Nirvana reveals that.
Note that I talk of Moral as knowledge; a problem of the nature
of knowledge.

MD> So the purpose of religion is simply to channel "religious
MD> feelings?" Such criteria are relative to specific times and
MD> places, to societies and cultures. They are not based on any
MD> explicit scientific or logical process; they are implicit products
MD> of cultural and cognitive entropy, often invisible to the
MD> participants themselves, but given the credibility of a deity.
MD> Perhaps I'm wrong, but I thought that Buddhism was one attempt to
MD> go beyond that. 

I mean that impulse is rooted in a moral problem: to know what is
the good, harmonious, right, etc... This impulse is developed in front
the visible or the invisible. The alive or the death.
>From the primitive religions until complicated mystics, any Religion
(here yes understood like a set of rituals, doctrines, social
structures, etc... ) exists to be a canalization of that inner
impulse to facilitate that search for the individuals.

I think a main problem remains in the actual way to conceive the
knowledge. In a scientific approach, Intelligence is used like the
applied reason. It becomes the only exclusive access to the knowledge.
However, the purpose of Religion for the human being it's a moral one,
so it is not a consequence of logical processes. Of course, the actual
way to conceive the knowledge it's good and needed. The point is when
it reveals itself not enough.

By the way, note this problem of the nature of knowledge related with
Moral is the main character of the drama in our times. Intelligence is
the higher magnitude to decipher our world. Phrases like "collateral
damages" reveals themselves  "logical", and our rulers are not shy to
explain their actions using that. These things are consequences of
unavoidable and refined processes of the Intelligence. These damages
are not errors because there is the conviction that another way to act
was not possible. Because Intelligence was developed in a intense way.
Under these parameters of Intelligence, we arrive to the point in
where all seems to be already thought in this world. However, our
situation becomes worse. Why is that?
This assumption of what is knowledge reveals itself as something
not only stupid but really dangerous. Destruction in the past 100
years is proportional to the progress of confidence in what we
understand it's the Intelligence.

We have spend the last 200 years devoted to Reason and Intelligence.
Today we are in point in where we are forced to administer the many
questions because we don't know the consequences of many of them.
We know that this notion of Intelligence it's not enough, because in
deep the human being knows very well that the success of this funny
planet it's not a scientific problem but a moral one.
Reason and Intelligence are not enough to drive this world until
a safe place when Moral (and compassion being his only basis) is
absent to decipher Reality and to design the future. This actual
incomplete view of knowledge it's not other thing that applied
reason, and ignoring other means to know and improve the world
which also are Intelligence.

So, thinking in that moral purpose of any Religion, I wonder how one
can avoid this problem of the nature of the knowledge to know when
Religion exists or not. 


best regards,