[Buddha-l] g-d

[Richard Hayes]

On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 11:17 PM, Curt Steinmetz <curt at cola.iges.org> wrote:

Richard Hanson points out in his "Studies in Christian Antiquity" that
> the imposition of the Nicene Creed in 381 as the only legally allowed
> religious point of view "reduce[d] the meanings of the word "God" [well,
> actually, the Greek "ho theos" and the Latin "deus", to be precise] from
> a very large selection of alternatives to one only." The result,
> according to Hanson, is that today when people in the West uses the word
> God, whether they understand this or not (and in the vast majority of
> cases they do not), they mean "the one, sole exclusive God [of the
> Nicene Creed] and nothing else" [pp 243-4].
>

That's interesting. It helps me understand something I have observed among
Quakers during my forty years of hanging around them. There is plenty of
references to God among Quakers, but a surprisingly large number of them say
they do not believe in God. I have guessed that what they mean when they say
they do no believe in God is that they do not believe in a creator who
fashioned man in his own image, told the Hebrews they could invade Canaan
and call their brutal and genocidal conquest a gift from the lord, and
eventually gave the world his only begotten son so that those who believed
unto him could burn infidels at the stake and despise Jews for the next two
millennia. They reject THAT depiction of God along with their rejection of
the doctrine of original sin and the doctrine of the crucifixion of Jesus as
an atonement therefor. But they feel much more comfortable with various
gnostic and mystical texts that depict God in ways that would have made the
crafters of the Nicene Creed cringe. As far as I have been able to make out,
when Quakers talk about God they mean something pretty close to what some
Buddhists mean when they talk about Buddha nature.

-- 
Richard