Reincarnation

[Sufjon]

But again, I’m not talking just of modern day attitudes, and I’m sure I’ve made that clear. Yes, the specific examples I gave in my first post were modern day, but I specified history as well. The Buddhists and the Sikhs, for example, faced trouble with Hindus.

I absolutely agree this is not indicative of the religion itself, but of humanity as a whole, the entire point of my original post was to note they are no different on this front, either now or in the past, than anyone else.

I notice however, that though you opposed any level of violence in Christianity or Islam, you’re happy to explain it away in Hinduism as a fringe group.

Anyway, if you want to get back to the original point of this thread, that’s fine and I accept that, but as long as you claim Hinduism is somehow more peaceful than other religions I will be responding. As I noted at first I absolutely accept your contention that Hinduism has a moral code.

Peace, and God bless.

Yes, I am opposed to violence by any religion. When I gave the example of Muslims and Christians I kind of did give them a pass on the point that each felt they had been wronged by the other. In the case of Hindus, Christians and Muslims or anyone, I see the reasoning behind the violence. I simply don’t accept it as an excuse. I am thinking we are in agreement. Promoting non-violence is easy to say and so hard to do. In my faith, non-violence extends to avoiding anger or mean thoughts as well as so many other things. When you start watching yourself, you become amazed at how much effort it is to avoid those things, because the mind is up to foolishness all day. I have to watch myself all day every day, and it gives me a lot of challenges, like how to disagree in a discussion without getting into an argument. It’s just plain not easy. When I see things I don’t like or find inexcusable in other people it’s so hard to see that they are only reflections of the things I don’t like in me as well. But seeing them in yourself is the only way to start working through them, and that’s a pretty humbling experience, but I find it liberating too.

Anyway, now that you and I have elaborated on what we meant, I don’t think we are in any major disagreement.

Your friend,
Sufjon

 

[Nine_Two]

Anyway, now that you and I have elaborated on what we meant, I don’t think we are in any major disagreement.

Your friend,
Sufjon

No, I don’t think we are. My “need” to respond has more to do with being sick of pop culture and its anti-western bias (although I’m a bit of a hypocrite here, since it could well be argued I work in the culture industry), then believing that Hindus (or most other religions) are inherently violent.

 

[Sufjon]

No, I don’t think we are. My “need” to respond has more to do with being sick of pop culture and its anti-western bias (although I’m a bit of a hypocrite here, since it could well be argued I work in the culture industry), then believing that Hindus (or most other religions) are inherently violent.

Hello again Nine Two: I’m not sure I get what you are saying, but it sounds like you are saying that religions are inherently violent and something about you working in a culture environment and you are sick of pop culture. My questions are:

1. What is a culture environment?
2. What do you consider pop culture to be? I remember that Jesus was pop culture back in the early 1970’s.
3. Are Thoreau, Emerson. Melville, Jung and the like considered pop culture in your view?
4. Do you really think religions are violent?

I’m just confused on what you are saying. It sounds interesting though.

Sufjon

 

[vmancha]

I do not understand what it means to say, “The ultimate truth is that there is no Ultimate Truth.”

 

[Nine_Two]

Hello again Nine Two: I’m not sure I get what you are saying, but it sounds like you are saying that religions are inherently violent and something about you working in a culture environment and you are sick of pop culture. My questions are:

1. What is a culture environment?
2. What do you consider pop culture to be? I remember that Jesus was pop culture back in the early 1970’s.
3. Are Thoreau, Emerson. Melville, Jung and the like considered pop culture in your view?
4. Do you really think religions are violent?

I’m just confused on what you are saying. It sounds interesting though.

Sufjon

Actually what I was getting at was the previously agreed upon point that people in general can be misguided and violent, and that religion doesn’t change this.

1. “Culture Industry”, a term coined by Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer (Intellectuals behind the Frankfurt School, and with it the Hippie movement, and though I disagree with them, I don’t think they were too far off the mark), basically means media.
2. I didn’t live through the '70s so I can’t give my opinion on that, but pop-culture is, simply put, whatever is popular in culture. Jesus can certainly be without Christianity being so. Today’s popular culture is the one which says all-relions are equaly valid paths to the truth, and the Eastern religions are superior to the Western ones because they are non-violent.
3. Jung certainly is, you don’t have to go far to find someone who will quote what he’s said/written without bothering to figure out where it stands within a modern context. The others less so, I don’t hear them getting bandied about very often, except by people who know what they’re talking about, but that’s just my personal experience. It’s also very arbitrary to decide.
4. Religions themselves are not violent, people are, particularly when confronted with those who disagree with them, almost all religions tell their followers to be nice and act in a peaceful manner, yet every single religion, that I know of, has failed to enforce non-violence on its adherents. The religion, again which I am aware of, which has come closest to this is Quakerism. At one point they enforced non-violence in Pennsylvania, but finally the authorities relented and allowed the frontiersmen to defend themselves by violent means.

 

[bosnian_muslim]

…

 

[bosnian_muslim]

I think what he was saying is that there isn’t much of a history of Hindu wars of conquest or persecution. Other than some attacks by some extremists recently, even these are not on a scale enough to call a war or a holy war. This is his point. He is most correct, and it is not even an argument. Does it mean Hindus are better people? Of course not.

Respectfully,
Sufjon

thats true sufijon

I do not like hinduism because its a polytheist faith but fact is fact

 

[Sufjon]

thats true sufijon

I do not like hinduism because its a polytheist faith but fact is fact

Hi Friend Bosnian Muslim: Good to hear from you again. Actually, that is the misconception that people outside of Hinduism have about Hinduism. It is Monotheist. One God. Many forms. Everything in the universe is of God, inside of God, part of God. One God, infused throughout everything. Very confusing to those outside of Hinduism, because they hear of the Hindu “Gods,” like Hanuman, Ganesh, Lakshmi, ect ect. They are aspects of the one God, which is actually a Trinity. They use the word Trimurti, so westerners miss the Trinity part as well. Anyway, it takes many years to properly understand Hinduism, but that is not an enterprise I would recommend, since you already have a perfectly fine religion of your own.

Of course, you are free not ti like them based on whatever you like, but you’ll have to remove polytheism from the list . But remember - not liking people isn’t good for our spiritual development

Your friend,
Sufjon

 

[Sufjon]

Actually what I was getting at was the previously agreed upon point that people in general can be misguided and violent, and that religion doesn’t change this.

1. “Culture Industry”, a term coined by Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer (Intellectuals behind the Frankfurt School, and with it the Hippie movement, and though I disagree with them, I don’t think they were too far off the mark), basically means media.
2. I didn’t live through the '70s so I can’t give my opinion on that, but pop-culture is, simply put, whatever is popular in culture. Jesus can certainly be without Christianity being so. Today’s popular culture is the one which says all-relions are equaly valid paths to the truth, and the Eastern religions are superior to the Western ones because they are non-violent.
3. Jung certainly is, you don’t have to go far to find someone who will quote what he’s said/written without bothering to figure out where it stands within a modern context. The others less so, I don’t hear them getting bandied about very often, except by people who know what they’re talking about, but that’s just my personal experience. It’s also very arbitrary to decide.
4. Religions themselves are not violent, people are, particularly when confronted with those who disagree with them, almost all religions tell their followers to be nice and act in a peaceful manner, yet every single religion, that I know of, has failed to enforce non-violence on its adherents. The religion, again which I am aware of, which has come closest to this is Quakerism. At one point they enforced non-violence in Pennsylvania, but finally the authorities relented and allowed the frontiersmen to defend themselves by violent means.

Hi Nine_Two; Those are some interesting observations. I gather you are referring to the Hipster crowd. I bet the media world is full of them. They’re not bad people. They’re just tied up in something they don’t understand like most everyone else. They imitate what they see and hear, which is what people are trained to do. So, they see people they admire dabbling in Buddhism and Hinduism, so it becomes part of the scene. It’s foundationless. They don’t understand the unglamorous and constant work involved in the proper practice of these paths. It is not a lot of fun.

As for religion and violence, well the problem is that we live in a causal reality, where nothing can exist on entirely self referential terms. For their to be peace, there must be violence to contrast it with, or things start to disappear. No good without evil, no long without short, no straight without crooked. If you take away something’s opposite, you take away the thing itself. That is the nature of the illusory world that our sense organs and mind perceive ourselves to be operating in. Realty is outside of all of that. Beyond sense and intellect.

Your friend
Sufjon

 

[Nine_Two]

As for religion and violence, well the problem is that we live in a causal reality, where nothing can exist on entirely self referential terms. For their to be peace, there must be violence to contrast it with, or things start to disappear. No good without evil, no long without short, no straight without crooked. If you take away something’s opposite, you take away the thing itself. That is the nature of the illusory world that our sense organs and mind perceive ourselves to be operating in. Realty is outside of all of that. Beyond sense and intellect.

Your friend
Sufjon

I disagree with that, while language relies on comparisons, and language is an invented thing, reality does not. The idea that everything comes down to internal emotion is quite wrong, and itself built upon hard and fast axioms, which contradicts the idea of relativity.

To say that if you take away somethings opposite is to take away it is incorrect, take for example any number of jobs, where how well done the job is, is directly proportional to how much you notice the job. For example take an electrician wiring a room, while his job is to properly wire the room, it is also to remove any other sign that he was there. For example he’s wiring a light switch but places it directly behind a door making it hard to reach, this becomes noticeable, however he places it where it can be easily clicked when someone enters a room no one will ever think about it. If the whole room is well wired no one will ever think about the wiring, and will have no “bad” wiring to compare it to, that doesn’t stop the job from having been well done. Likewise a horrible job with no redeeming qualities does not necessitate a good job to compare it to.
We might, were this the situation, lack the words to describe the situation since most such words rely on the concept of the other, but that won’t change the fact of what reality is.

 

[rossum]

I do not understand what it means to say, “The ultimate truth is that there is no Ultimate Truth.”

You are not the first person to notice my sig. The original source is Mark Siderits, “Thinking on Empty: Madhyamika Anti-Realism and Canons of Rationality” in S Biderman and B.A. Schaufstein, eds, Rationality In Question (1989). Dordrecht: Brill.

I have not read Siderits but saw the quote in a piece on Nagarjuna. The “Madhyamika” in Siderits’ title refers to the religious and philosophical school of Buddhism that Nagarjuna founded. I have seen the same quote again in other places in reference to the Madhyamika and Nagarjuna - it seems quite popular. The quote is intentionally paradoxical; paradox is necessary to remind us that words are insufficient when trying to describe the fundamental nature of reality.

For a philosophical discussion of Nagarjuna and reality see the web article Nagarjuna and the Limits of Thought. The Siderits quote is at the end of section four of the article:

There is, then, no escape. Nagarjuna’s view is contradictory. The contradiction is, clearly a paradox of expressibility. Nagarjuna succeeds in saying the unsayable, just as much as the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. We can think (and characterize) reality only subject to language, which is conventional, so the ontology of that reality is all conventional. It follows that the conventional objects of reality do not ultimately (non-conventionally) exist. It also follows that nothing we say of them is ultimately true. That is, all things are empty of ultimate existence; and this is their ultimate nature, and is an ultimate truth about them. They hence cannot be thought to have that nature; nor can we say that they do. But we have just done so. As Mark Siderits (1989) has put it, “the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth.”

rossum

 

[Sufjon]

I disagree with that, while language relies on comparisons, and language is an invented thing, reality does not. The idea that everything comes down to internal emotion is quite wrong, and itself built upon hard and fast axioms, which contradicts the idea of relativity.

To say that if you take away somethings opposite is to take away it is incorrect, take for example any number of jobs, where how well done the job is, is directly proportional to how much you notice the job. For example take an electrician wiring a room, while his job is to properly wire the room, it is also to remove any other sign that he was there. For example he’s wiring a light switch but places it directly behind a door making it hard to reach, this becomes noticeable, however he places it where it can be easily clicked when someone enters a room no one will ever think about it. If the whole room is well wired no one will ever think about the wiring, and will have no “bad” wiring to compare it to, that doesn’t stop the job from having been well done. Likewise a horrible job with no redeeming qualities does not necessitate a good job to compare it to.
We might, were this the situation, lack the words to describe the situation since most such words rely on the concept of the other, but that won’t change the fact of what reality is.

Sorry but I don’t think that makes any sense. Reality seems very much to be linked to and dependent on consciousness. That’s science, not me.

 

[Sufjon]

You are not the first person to notice my sig. The original source is Mark Siderits, “Thinking on Empty: Madhyamika Anti-Realism and Canons of Rationality” in S Biderman and B.A. Schaufstein, eds, Rationality In Question (1989). Dordrecht: Brill.

I have not read Siderits but saw the quote in a piece on Nagarjuna. The “Madhyamika” in Siderits’ title refers to the religious and philosophical school of Buddhism that Nagarjuna founded. I have seen the same quote again in other places in reference to the Madhyamika and Nagarjuna - it seems quite popular. The quote is intentionally paradoxical; paradox is necessary to remind us that words are insufficient when trying to describe the fundamental nature of reality.

For a philosophical discussion of Nagarjuna and reality see the web article Nagarjuna and the Limits of Thought. The Siderits quote is at the end of section four of the article:

There is, then, no escape. Nagarjuna’s view is contradictory. The contradiction is, clearly a paradox of expressibility. Nagarjuna succeeds in saying the unsayable, just as much as the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. We can think (and characterize) reality only subject to language, which is conventional, so the ontology of that reality is all conventional. It follows that the conventional objects of reality do not ultimately (non-conventionally) exist. It also follows that nothing we say of them is ultimately true. That is, all things are empty of ultimate existence; and this is their ultimate nature, and is an ultimate truth about them. They hence cannot be thought to have that nature; nor can we say that they do. But we have just done so. As Mark Siderits (1989) has put it, “the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth.”

rossum

Kind of like a tangled hierarchy or strange loop?

 

[rossum]

Kind of like a tangled hierarchy or strange loop?

I suspect that it is far simpler than you seem to think.The emptiness of emptiness is the fact that not even emptiness exists ultimately, that it is also dependent, conventional, nominal, and in the end it is just the everydayness of the everyday. Penetrating to the depths of being, we find ourselves back on the surface of things and so discover that there is nothing, after all, beneath those deceptive surfaces. Moreover, what is deceptive about them is simply the fact that we assume ontological depth lurking just beneath.

– Jay Garfield, “Empty words, Buddhist philosophy and cross-cultural interpretation.” OUP 2002.
Our brains tend to overlay a lot of extraneous and unnecessary complexity over our perception of reality.

rossum

 

[Sufjon]

I ]
Our brains tend to overlay a lot of extraneous and unnecessary complexity over our perception of reality.

rossum

Yes, that is because the monkey mind likes to play and must be tamed. Well, we call it the monkey mind. I think you guys might call it the bull or something. I’m pretty sure it’s the same thing pretty much.

 

[rossum]

Yes, that is because the monkey mind likes to play and must be tamed. Well, we call it the monkey mind. I think you guys might call it the bull or something. I’m pretty sure it’s the same thing pretty much.

Tibetan Buddhists use the image of a monkey. Zen Buddhists use the Ox-herding pictures.

rossum

 

[Nine_Two]

Sorry but I don’t think that makes any sense. Reality seems very much to be linked to and dependent on consciousness. That’s science, not me.

Our perception of reality is, not reality itself. Science is based on cold hard facts, what happens with a meets b, or whatnot. Science certainly refutes the idea that all is relative.

 

[flower_of_God]

How many of you believe in the possibility of reincarnation?? what does your religion teach about it?

We don’t! Reincarnation would make Jesus’s sacrifice inutil! Reincarnationl does not exist.

 

[Sufjon]

Our perception of reality is, not reality itself. Science is based on cold hard facts, what happens with a meets b, or whatnot. Science certainly refutes the idea that all is relative.

Hi Nine Two: Well, I would agree that what appears to be reality is not reality. Agreed. Although I do think we have an active role in creating reality. There is a good deal of evidence that a strong relationship exists between consciousness and the world around us. Delayed choice experiments with quantum wavicles prove that idea pretty conclusively.

On your first point about human words to describe characteristics of what exists, yes they are words, but the characteristics exist regardless of what word is used or if no word is used. Values such as good and bad - yes, those are entirely human. Everything else beyond the singularity of God is relative to something else, or it doesn’t enter the realm of causal reality. If you would please, tell me what scientific theory refutes relativity? Not to be argumentative, I am just confused as to what you meant.

Your friend,
Sufjon

 

[Sufjon]

We don’t! Reincarnation would make Jesus’s sacrifice inutil! Reincarnationl does not exist.

Hi Flower of God: You know in my heart I don’t think anything could make the life of Jesus inutil. It would make some folks ideas on the meaning of His life inutil, but to me that would only mean His life must have meant something more, because there is no possibility of His life being pointless.

Respectfully,
Sufjon