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Home -> Community -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> (Fwd) RE: (Fwd) Re: Please pray for Victims of World Trade Center
...
> > America, and its libertarian and democratic traditions, are weakened
> > by godlessness, hypocrisy, racism and bigotry.
> >
>
> Eric,
>
> I am with you 99.9 percent. The one word I have to disagree with is
> "godlessness". There are many people in the world who lead good, honest, and
> selfless lives whose belief system does not include a God in the
> muslim/jewish/christian sense of a divine being, but whose world view,
> ethics, and morality still lead them to condemn evil and support good. Those
> people include many Buddhists (Buddhism includes theistic, pantheistic,
> polytheistic and atheistic views), humanists, and others.
My brother is a Buddhist (and arguably a redneck truck driver, but a damn authentic one!), and I grew up for 4 years in Japan.
As you inply, not all Buddhists would are dogmatic about needing to be atheists.
I have seen extremely involved discussion between God-believers in the western spiritual tradition, and people that label themselves as "atheist buddhists", and from what I gather, the atheist budhists do a have a fairly strong theological/scriptural case.
What the Buddha himself would have thought of such "angels on the head of a pin" discussion is probably more interesting. :)
In my opinion, the vast majority of the humanist and other moral systems that exist specifically as "non-religious" philosophies is that it is impossible to seperate the origins of those philosophies from the historical existence and reality of the spiritual traditions of the world.
In other words, since they are derivative, they can't invalidate Revelation.
Of course one could argue the opposite, and maybe both are true. :)
>
> I hate to be seeming pedantic at a time like this, but I think of we are to
> embrace tolerance and reject intolerance, then the acceptance of people who
> worship God in ways other than our own also has to include people who choose
> not to worship God at all. Or as somebody once said of the US Constitution,
> "the guarantee of freedom of religion includes a guarantee of freedom from
> religion".
That is not the problem at this point in history as far as I know.
The problem is that there is a very powerful effort by marxists/leftists, and large numbers of people duped, or at least influenced by, radical/leftist thought, that are making decisions about the nature of the very "structures of knowedge" in academia, the public education system, the "media" and government. If you research "political correctness", you will find that the left is in the process of seriously undermining the entire foundation of democracy, which is based on the western spiritual tradition (see Joh Taylor Gatto - http://csf.colorado.edu/sine/transcripts/gatto.html , linked from http://www.preservenet.com ).
What you will find is that the atheist-left is just as doctinaire and hegemonic in forcing their ideology as anyone else. And their ideology, unlike the western spiritual tradition's emphasis on deep contemplative self-examination, has virtually no internal mechanisms to prevent such excesses.
Note that the above speech by Gatto was at the zen Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, which was co-founded by the great Buddhist thinker and universalist Ken Wilber. I would urge you to take a serious look at Wilber's writings on the nature of human conciousness, and where we are at right now in history. At least do some web searches, there are some great interviews of Wilber on Shambala Publisher's web site.
As a mystic (and universalist) since early childhood, I'm not impressed at all by the Ayn Rand school of libertarian thought, so sorry if that is what you are getting at. The idea that all of humanity ought to be pushed to the edge of staring over the brink of oblivion and into the great void of the universe on a daily basis seems bizarre if not psychotic. I just don't see why, given a serious rational investigation, the anti-religious limits in thought that the Randists advocate make any sense at all.
(eg, here is an alternative approach: http://www.ssq.net )
regards,
ep
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