[Buddha-l] Re: Anyone up for another year?

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Tue, 2006-01-03 at 11:42 -0500, curt wrote:

> Protestants are actually a worst case scenario when it comes to defining 
> Religion solely in terms of belief.

That is why I suggested that belief, rather than creeds, is the
important issue. Most of the influential American Protestant sects
abandoned formal creeds in favor of a general view that acceptance of
Christ as one's savior, and the resultant moral action that allegedly
comes about only when that conversion has occurred, is far more
important than the propositions that one affirms. 

This emphasis on post-conversion moral purity is why, in the United
States at least, so much emphasis has been placed on "social gospel,"
which often takes the form of legislating righteous conduct. It is to
this emphasis that we owe such arguably positive developments as the
abolition of slavery and the suffrage of women, and such arguably
negative developments as the prohibition of alcohol, laws against
abortion and same-sex marriage, and the abundances of laws against doing
anything but praying on Sundays. (Many of those laws are no longer in
effect, but just recently the Rose Bowl parade had to be held on January
2 rather than the traditional January 1, because of an old Christian-
inpsired law against holding parades on Sundays. One has to be impressed
by any force strong enough to interfere with the sacred game of football
in this country!)

> The business model for Protestantism seems to be for every two-bit
> self-proclaimed preacher to set up his or her own church based upon
> yet another hodge-podge of ideological idiosyncrasies.

What has driven American revivalism since before the American revolution
is a deeply anti-intellectual emotionalism. This was true during the
revivalist period that made Jonathan Edwards famous, and it was equally
true of the revivals in the 19th century, both before and after the
civil war. It was true of the revivals of the early 20th century, and it
is true of the "born-again" Christian fervor that darkens the minds of
the likes of George W. Bush, Bill Frist and Tom DeLay. Belief is part of
that dismal picture, to be sure, but it is a belief based more on fear-
mongering and other forms of contagious hysteria than on phronesis. What
Harris has been advocating, as I read him, is something not far from a
return to the Greek love of phronesis (moral decision making based on
wisdom derived from careful and impartial observations of the natural
world). Buddhists called the same thing mindfulness.

-- 
Richard Hayes
***
"Books are useless to us until our inner book opens; then all other
books are good so far as they confirm our book."
        (Swami Vivekananda)