The Self-Thinking Thought
"Modern arguments and evangelists and New Atheists have duped us into thinking that the interesting question is whether God exists; no, what mattered for Anselm was how we think about God and about one another."
GOD, in and of itself, is an idea. An idea that dictates to us several other ideas. More specifically, it communicates to us how we should live our day-to-day existence.
[What is more interesting to me is that the author of this article runs a website "Killing the Buddha" that has in its manifesto an explanation for the name of the website:
The idea of “killing the Buddha” comes from a famous Zen line, the context of which is easy to imagine: After years on his cushion, a monk has what he believes is a breakthrough: a glimpse of nirvana, the Buddhamind, the big pay-off. Reporting the experience to his master, however, he is informed that what has happened is par for the course, nothing special, maybe even damaging to his pursuit. And then the master gives the student dismaying advice: If you meet the Buddha, he says, kill him.
Why kill the Buddha? Because the Buddha you meet is not the true Buddha, but an expression of your longing. If this Buddha is not killed he will only stand in your way.
Why Killing the Buddha? For our purposes, killing the Buddha is a metaphor for moving past the complacency of belief, for struggling honestly with the idea of God. As people who take faith seriously, we are endlessly amazed and enraged that religious discourse has become so bloodless, parochial and boring. Any God worth the name is none of these things. Yet when people talk about God they are talking mainly about the Buddha they meet. For fear of seeming intolerant or uncertain, or just for lack of thinking, they talk about a God too small to be God. ]
Several months ago, I was engaged in a discussion about spirituality and beliefs - how we are neurologically pre-disposed to be spiritually minded; if not for anything but that we can co-exist as a society. The end result of the discussion was my saying that "GOD, therefore, must be a idea that we created to understand this neural phenomenon that drives us to be spiritual."
"Modern arguments and evangelists and New Atheists have duped us into thinking that the interesting question is whether God exists; no, what mattered for Anselm was how we think about God and about one another."
GOD, in and of itself, is an idea. An idea that dictates to us several other ideas. More specifically, it communicates to us how we should live our day-to-day existence.
[What is more interesting to me is that the author of this article runs a website "Killing the Buddha" that has in its manifesto an explanation for the name of the website:
The idea of “killing the Buddha” comes from a famous Zen line, the context of which is easy to imagine: After years on his cushion, a monk has what he believes is a breakthrough: a glimpse of nirvana, the Buddhamind, the big pay-off. Reporting the experience to his master, however, he is informed that what has happened is par for the course, nothing special, maybe even damaging to his pursuit. And then the master gives the student dismaying advice: If you meet the Buddha, he says, kill him.
Why kill the Buddha? Because the Buddha you meet is not the true Buddha, but an expression of your longing. If this Buddha is not killed he will only stand in your way.
Why Killing the Buddha? For our purposes, killing the Buddha is a metaphor for moving past the complacency of belief, for struggling honestly with the idea of God. As people who take faith seriously, we are endlessly amazed and enraged that religious discourse has become so bloodless, parochial and boring. Any God worth the name is none of these things. Yet when people talk about God they are talking mainly about the Buddha they meet. For fear of seeming intolerant or uncertain, or just for lack of thinking, they talk about a God too small to be God. ]
Several months ago, I was engaged in a discussion about spirituality and beliefs - how we are neurologically pre-disposed to be spiritually minded; if not for anything but that we can co-exist as a society. The end result of the discussion was my saying that "GOD, therefore, must be a idea that we created to understand this neural phenomenon that drives us to be spiritual."
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