[Buddha-l] Pali Sutta

[Curt Steinmetz]

Robert Ellis wrote:
>
> Nor is it pragmatic (except in a very narrow sense) to adopt what we can appreciate as a falsehood on the assumption that it will be useful and motivating. It?may be useful and motivating only in the light of narrow assumptions which will have a regressive effect in other respects. To educated, Westernised populations it will not be useful at all. Who is actually motivated by belief in karma and rebirth, amongst the highly-educated readers of this list for example,?to do anything better than they would have done it otherwise anyway? A consideration of conditions and of the consequences of our actions may motivate us, but that does not require a belief in the law of karma.
>   

First of all we should avoid defining modernity too narrowly, and we 
should especially avoid defining it arbitrarily. Here is what I mean by 
"arbitrary": to include folks like Newton and Kepler when it is 
convenient to do so, but to exclude anything more than 50 or so years 
old when that is seen as more convenient to one's argument.

But regardless of how we define things, we simply cannot by any 
reasonable stretch of the imagination insist that ideas that were 
"useful" to highly educated western people who lived in the 17th, 18th, 
19th and 20th centuries are now somehow wholly foreign, bizarre, 
incomprehensible, primitive, superstitious, or otherwise beyond the pale 
for us today.

Of course some people might for their own reasons choose to reject ideas 
that were deemed useful by Kepler, Newton, Goethe, Schiller,  Emerson, 
Blake, Leroux, Reynaud, etc. But that is a personal choice, not some 
absolute constraint dictated by the happenstance of the date and place 
of one's birth.

In fact, the more "well-educated" we are the broader our thinking should 
be, and the greater should be our ability to comprehend, appreciate, 
sympathize with and even adopt different points of view.

Curt