Jagat

I was just leafing again through a book, Dieu des Athees , by a French Catholic theologian from the 50s, and was reminded of his argument that faith and science/technology are distinct domains dealing with different aspects of human reality. Because they are distinct, nothing in science can really disprove God, who is mediated through faith, and indeed the critiques of science actually do believers a favor by leading them to recognizing that distinction. They will then understand that God acts in the natural world through the natural law, and reveals himself through the human will. We agree with this, as all Indian sciences are sciences of the soul. Any knowledge of the world is validated only through its value in achieving the ultimate goal of the Self. Even if scientists were to produce life in a test tube, or artificial intelligence, or (as I was saying in my class today) a way to duplicate mystical experience by prodding certain parts of the brain, it would not change anything...

Impersonalism or personalism, what is the real difference? It is not so much in the doctrine, but in the behavior that the real test comes. The problem is projection. We see the body or the religious affiliation and so on and we don't see the soul, the person. We don't see the divine or sacred reality of the other. That happens, sadly, as often if not more with people who identify themselves as theists, because they see the religious affiliation as the identifier, i.e., they see the upādhi or covering as the truth, and not the spiritual being. And, like it or not, your religion is an upādhi . You cannot dance around that fact with philosophical word jugglery. So-called impersonalists are often more aware of this problem than so-called personalists. Now whether you call that spiritual truth Brahman or anything else, if you accept that the person with whom you are engaged is a sacred entity and you treat them accordingly, that is personalism. This is true whether you do ...

Reposting from a comment on this blog .  =========== Atheists believe that much of the problem with humanity lies in religion. They have many good reasons for so doing, as one can read in the intelligent critiques made by Chenna Keshavan in the discussion on the above thread. But even though religion is often seen as a culprit, I would like to say that it is not religion per se, but immature religion, that is the source of the problem. There is no reason to believe that mature individuals with a rational and scientific understanding of the world will still not be persuaded of things like God and the soul when they reach the limits of their rational outlook. The answer lies in "mature" religion. Even Krishna in the Gita mentions four kinds of people who take up religious life--the suffering, the desirer of benefits, the curiosity seeker and the knowledgeable. Moreover, he distinguishes between knowledge and other kinds of religious activities in terms of  sattva, ...

Ultimately all Krishna devotees will have to give up the literal interpretation of myth and turn to a symbolic understanding, or their faith will collapse on its own contradictions. The reason a Gaudiya Vaishnava cannot be a literalist is because a literalist is always an unconscious dualist. As with all seekers of Truth, we hold that "when one's ultimate concerns are relative truths, that is called idolatry." (Paul Tillich) In other words, it is misplaced and misguided faith. The literalist may appear to be unitarian who has resolved the problem of duality, but in fact he has a big unacknowledged Jungian "Shadow". Therefore his views are unsynthesized. This is why I say his position will ultimately collapse on its own contradictions. We are acintya-bhedābheda-vādis . Acintya means paradox or mystery. Acintya-bhedābheda is not about artificially throwing up one's hands and saying, "It is all one anyway!" it is about the experiential and con...

I recently came across the following headline on Alternet, Don't Look on the Bright Side: Pessimism, Not Magical Thinking, Is What Will Save Us . My immediate reaction was, “Optimism is NOT magical thinking.” I have written about this before, that religion, reduced to its essence, is simply an optimistic world view . Religion means optimism. Faith means accepting that Something is behind everything after all, that there is a meaning to existence, a purpose that has more depth than mere survival and the trivial enjoyments and pursuits that preoccupy the majority of people. Even an atheist has to find, accept or devise -- if for nothing more than practical reasons -- that there is some structure, some purpose to his own presence in the world. Science, for instance, cannot stand without a faith in the existence of structures and laws that are fathomable. In a world where suffering is omnipresent, on//e needs a reason for living. Otherwise, the only logical option, in the face o...

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...

Most people who are atheists are arguing against a specific concept or definition of God. They are pretty much all arguing straw men. Here are some examples: They are arguing against religion, like Christopher Hitchens. "The Catholics exterminated the Cathars. Muslims forcibly converted their conquered enemies." Or against stupid traditions that have been part of religion. "Religions have always been misogynistic." They are arguing against specific beliefs. "If God is good, then why is there evil in the world?" They are arguing against a particular concept of God. "If God is all pervading, why do you think of him in human terms, which is obvious projection?" They are responding to poorly constructed defenses of theism. "Why should there be a cause of all causes, when infinite regression makes as much sense?" And, of course, a real favorite: The concept of faith itself. Belief in revelation, etc. Basically, they are all mi...

Yesterday, Swami Veda gave a rather animated lecture about atheism. He likes to tell the story of how he wrote a book called simply "God" which he proudly showed to his guru, Swami Rama. Swami Rama apparently countered a few months later with his own book, based on the Mandukya Upanishad, called "Enlightenment without God." In this lecture, though, Swami was talking about imbuing life with the sacred. How the lack of awareness of the sacred element in life makess it dry and empty. He used the words astika and nastika several times in order to make his point. Since I have been working on Bhagavat-sandarbha , following a discussion on several verses from the Bhagavatam where the words neti neti are discussed, I wanted to ask what the relation between negation and assertion of Divine Truth were, in his vision. Of course, I think I know what he will say--pretty much the same thing that Osho says--"Being empty [of illusion] is the same as being full [of the divin...