Why? I know this is the Christian assumption but it is not the Buddhist assumption. You are going to have to show me reason for this.
For the record, I don’t think what he said (it must have been “
created by a higher intelligence”) is a
Christian assumption. Christian theology rejects the divine command theory - i.e. the notion that “a thing is good because the gods command it,” to use the description from Plato’s
Euthyphro - as much as every other competent philosophy.
I fully acknowledge our differences on the source of morality, rossum, but I hope you’ll believe me when I attempt to distance our Christian faith from some of the more philosophically simplistic positions in replies in this thread.
Hi Fone Bone: It’s good to see someone who understands that. It is possible in Hinduism to see all religions as part of a continuum. In fact, many of the Hindi saints in the past few centuries at least have seen it that way.
Your friend
Sufjon
Hello Sufjon!
If I may ask, what do you make of Contarini’s response to that, though - he said that that may not be true from the Buddhist perspective…
in Christianity, accepting the Holy Spirit leads to a profound understanding of the unimportance of the material world
How can the material world be unimportant from the Christian view? Yes, I know that “it is the spirit that gives life, while the flesh is of no avail” (John 6) and all that, but if the material world is “unimportant” in Christianity, how do you account for the centrality of the Incarnation, of the Resurrection, and of the yet-to-be resurrection of the dead?
Words are funny things, and we should be open to the fact that different words can mean the same thing.
I agree, and I am, but I see no reason to believe that “accepting the Holy Spirit” (according to the Christian understanding) is comparable to or leads to “nirvana” (from the Buddhist understanding).
You’ve merely asserted it, and in light of the important differences between the two faiths, your arguments only solidify the impression you first gave: that your position is merely a conflation of caricatures of the two religions that does justice to neither. I know that sounds harsh, and I don’t want to be mean, but I think you need to see that if you hope to take Christianity
or Buddhism at all seriously.
Hi Sufjon,
I’m glad you’re still here. I’ve been reading post after post saying that Hinduism is pantheistic. Of course, these posts have been made by people who aren’t Hindu.
I remember reading earlier in the thread where you made it clear that Hinduism is not pantheistic, that God is much more than just the universe and is not limited in any way. Maybe panentheism? If so, there’s a huge difference. Panentheism can be compatible with Christian thought.
I wonder if I can get you to expand on the subject of pantheism/panentheism a little more in regards to Hinduism.
Your friend,
Xuan
Some of those posts were mine, and I’m still skeptical that you guys are working with an accurate definition of “pantheism,” which I see no reason to suppose confines its conception of “the universe” or “the world” with “the
material world.”
That said, I can perhaps see that panentheism’s more precise formulation corresponds less ambiguously to Hindu beliefs.
May I ask you a somewhat unrelated question, Xuan? You say “panentheism can be compatible with Christian thought.” I disagree, though I could be wrong. Do you really think panentheism can be compatible with transcendent Judaic monotheism? I suppose it could be some form of weak panentheism which takes God’s way of existing in the world as an incredibly closely bound immanence, but is divine immanence alone enough to justify labeling such a concept “panentheism”?
