Jagat

Being yourself is not being someone you remember being in the past, someone lost in the judgment of others. Being yourself, finally, is about becoming that which you feel is perfect. Be yourself. Make yourself. Sartre says, "Hell is other people." Because of other people's judgment we are never free to be ourselves. Therefore, in a way, the worst hell is to love and be loved, because as soon as we become involved with another conditioned human being, we immediately become wrapped up in their expectations of what we should be or become. On the other hand, Scott Peck defines love as the ability to "extend oneself" or to make sacrifices for the spiritual welfare of another person. I think that what he means here by "spiritual welfare" is that selfish expectations are not what a person who loves is interested in, i.e. conditional love. But, of course, we are all fallible and conditioned, and even our concept of other people's spiritual welfare is ...

Everything hangs on the decision. Everything culminates in action. There is no meaningful thinking or feeling without action. And action comes of the will. And will is manifest in the making of decisions. So, Arjuna, when he says kariṣye vacanaṁ tava , he is not saying I will follow a scriptural injunction or a particular religion, he is responding to the inner imperative as understood and purified by knowledge and devotion. I did not use the terms "categorical" imperative or "moral" imperative because I am not following Kant here, at least not consciously or intentionally, but certainly "moral imperative" would be justified. In Vaishnava philosophy, the jiva has will, which we call kartritva. This is inherent in the jiva and the very meaning of the conditioned state of existence is independent will. Since it culminates in an act, the Gita is an existentialist philosophy. God is the source of the imperative, he says, tasmād yudhyasva bhārata . The...

Following on from this post and its comments . These are mostly disorganized notes. Writing in the 1950's, French Catholic theologian Henry Duméry wisely observed, “ On ne repousse l’Absolu qu'au nom d’un Absolu meilleure .” ("One does not reject the Absolute except in the name of a higher Absolute.") In other words, one needs to have some ultimate concern or ground from which to orient one's world view. If one does not believe in a traditional God-image as it comes through a tradition, then one replaces it with some other ideal. He also observed that atheism criticizes caricatures of God rather than the real God. (" L’athéisme critique plus des caricatures de Dieu que le vrai Dieu. "). Quite often these caricatures are served up by believers themselves who are still on a very literal and childish level of comprehension of their own system. In other words, whatever ideals are presented as the "absolute" -- even if they are consciously s...

My basic idea here is simply this: I don't think that after Marx, Nietzsche, Huxley, Spenser, Freud, Sartre, Camus, and the rest of the 19th and 20th century's giants of atheistic thought, that there will be much new to be said. I have read most of these authors and also responses to their thought by Christian authors like Borhnoeffer, Tillich and Niebuhr. Nevertheless, I think that there is value in the contribution all these thinkers made, and atheism had a strong influence on the development of Christianity in the post WWII period, both as a transformative in liberal mainline Protestantism as well as in the reactionary fundamentalisms. Of course, I find liberalism more attractive, and that is one of the reasons I appreciate the atheist critiques of fundamentalist thought. In India, the influence of Buddhism meant that the most basic arguments of atheism were given much more credence philosophically and theism could not credibly grow in India without the intermediate ste...