[Buddha-l] it's not about belief

[Erik Hoogcarspel]

curt schreef:

> Richard P. Hayes wrote:
>
>> Just our of curiosity, are any of your reading Sam Harris's book, The
>> End of Faith? It has pretty well convinced me that Judaism, Christianity
>> and Islam are all seriously diseased ways of being human and that the
>> survival of our species depends on putting those religions into the past
>> tense. My lifetime commitment to religious pluralism and to classical
>> liberalism is being deeply challenged by what Harris writes. I am
>> thinking of leaving of selling my books and moving to Mars.
>>
>>
>>  
>>
> I am looking over this book at amazon right now, as well as checking 
> out Harris' very interesting website at http://www.samharris.org/. It 
> looks to me like Harris makes the mistake of failing to distinguish 
> adequately between Christianity in particular and Religion in general. 
> Christianity, in the form it has taken since the First Council or 
> Nicaea, is radically different from almost all other Religions in that 
> it assumes that human beings are, by nature, fundamentally ignorant 
> concerning spirituality absent proper (ie, Christian) Religious 
> instruction. In contrast to this, most other Religions inherently 
> accept what John Locke might have called a "self-evident" spirituality 
> that is universal to humanity. The emperor Julian said it better than 
> I can in his treatise "Against the Galileans":
>
> "It is not by teaching, but by nature that humanity possesses its 
> knowledge of the Divine, as can be shown by the common yearning for 
> the Divine that exists in everyone, everywhere - individuals, 
> communities, and nations. Without having it taught to us, all of us 
> have come to believe in some sort of divinity, even though it is 
> difficult for all to know what divinity truly is and far from easy for 
> those who do know to explain it to the rest."
>
In that case I leave it up to you to decide whether I'm not human or a very stupid exeption to your definition of humanity. I never felt any sympathy for the idea of divinity and never could understand why people bothered to count it and would say it is far more superior to believe that the divinity is one than that's 26 and a half. I used to go to camps in the French Alps with Pir Villayat Khan, who allways was talking about The One and I never for noen moment thought he was talking about more then his own phantasy. It was ususally a very nice group and I enjoyed the atmosphere. I call this the theosophic fallacy: rising in your judgement above all religions, saying that you're impartial and have taken the essence out of all and turning this into a new religion.
There is a tendency to religion in most cultures, but this may be due to the definition of religion. Dürkheim came close in my view to see religion as a kind of hidden tribalism. If we want to live and if we want our grandchildren to live, we should overcome that. In fact it's not very difficult: we can maintain all religions, but we have to let go of truth. Believe anything you want, but accept that it's not the truth. Leave this idea of one and only eternal unchanging truth behind. Let religion be your lifestyle, but place ethics above religion, so that nobody hinders anybody in his or her lifestyle.
Four hundred years ago our ancestors burned each other singing at the stake because of the one and only truth. Nowadays young men in the Middle East do something similar. I think it's just a bad idea and I hope many people will reflect on this in 2006.

Erik


www.xs4all.nl/~jehms