[Buddha-l] Philosophy of Religion

[Richard Hayes]

On Wednesday 02 May 2007 23:22, Bob Zeuschner wrote:

> In a western university, the only religion that the students know
> anything about is Christianity and maybe some Judaism (and they don't
> know much about either).

Amen to that, Brother Bob! Every year I find the ignorance that students have 
managed to accumulate about religions they profess to follow a little more 
breathtaking. This was true even in Canada, but the ignorance of American 
students has surpassed my wildest expectations. It has been my experience 
every year to encounter at least a few students who tell me that their 
ministers have told them to be very careful of what they hear about religion 
on university campuses. I can see by the looks on their faces that when the 
topic of religion comes up, many minds in the classroom slam shut.

> The entire field of Philosophy of Religion grew up around critical
> thinking about Christianity.
>
> Indeed, one can apply all those tools to Buddhism.
>
> The problem is that the professor would have to spend half the semester
> teaching the students what the Buddha (Nagarjuna; Dharmakirti, etc.)
> said, what evidence they offered to support conclusions, etc.

You have hit upon the biggest practical problem facing not only the teaching 
of Asian religions in a philosophy of religion class, but also the teaching 
of Asian philosophy in a philosophy department. Before one can think 
critically about anything, one has to have a fair to middling idea of what 
the person being criticized has said. This is not an easy thing to do.

> The philosophy of religion as taught in the universities that I am
> familiar with challenges the claims of theism, but they also focus on
> theism. The text books I am familiar with do focus on monotheism and
> related problems like arguments for existence of a supreme being, and
> theodicy.

For a few years I have been asking to teach our course in philosophy of 
religion. While I would deal with some of the standard Western thinkers, I 
would spend most of my time offering a critical examination of topics in 
Hinduism and Buddhism. In a way, I do that already. I had a seminar last 
semester in which we really tore the Buddhist doctrine of anaatman to pieces, 
and next semester I'll be tearing Dharmakiirti to shreds to determine whether 
he wrote anything defensible on logic and epistemology. The trouble with such 
courses, I find, beyond the issue of people not really having enough 
background to do serious critical work, is that people with a leaning toward 
Christianity feel triumphant when they discover that Buddhist theoreticians 
had feet of clay, and people with a leaning to Asian religions come away 
feeling their faith has been trashed. So rather than coming away exhilarated 
at being a little more skilled in critical thinking, some students seem to 
come away feeling a bit deflated. Perhaps that is always what happens in 
philosophy of religion, or indeed in any critical academic approach to 
anything.

Perhaps we should all just drink our hemlock so the world can get on its 
shallow way.

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes