[Buddha-l] g-d

[Curt Steinmetz]

Richard Hayes wrote:
> 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.
>
>   
As they say in England I think Richard is "spot on". Because of the 
varying ways in which people use terms like "God" and "atheism" I often 
find that I am in agreement with people who self-identify as atheists, 
and also in agreement with people who say they "believe in God". A lot 
of times it's possible from the context to understand how a person is 
using those terms - but all too often things get garbled because a given 
person assumes that "I believe in God" only means what that person 
thinks it means, whereas in reality it can mean almost anything. The 
same goes for "I am an atheist" or even for the statements "Buddhism is 
atheistic", or "Buddhists believe in God".

I think that anyone who has been around Buddhists long enough knows that 
there are Buddhists who are atheists, Buddhists who are also Christian 
or Jewish, and Buddhists who embrace neither atheism nor 
Judeo-Christianity. And in each of those groups there are multiple 
subdivisions. In particular there are many Jewish and Christian 
Buddhists who are fairly "orthodox" in their Judaism or Christianity but 
who are also practicing Buddhists (as opposed to the Quakers who don't 
believe in God that Richard describes).

Curt