Jagat

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...

It is interesting that atheistic humanism is more often than not associated with the political left, while belief in God is, especially in America, immediately identified with the socially conservative right. This kind of prejudice is clear on The Guardian "Comment is Free" pages, where there are often articles discussing different aspects of religion, and any positive comment is invariably clubbed viciously by strongwilled leftists. Recent examples are Sue Blackmore's A Dangerous Delusion and Dave Hill, who in Faith and the Left , asks for a more nuanced understanding of religion without abandoning his own atheist credentials. Blackmore is basically rehashing the currently ubiquitous Richard Dawkin's ideas, including that of the meme, the cultural equivalent of genes. Dawkins first came into prominence by suggesting that genes themselves were engaged in a struggle for survival, and that all evolution could be looked at from the point of view of the genes, the fittes...

In the context of the discussion on modernity and Bhaktivinoda Thakur, I had the following notes that were not included. These are more or less disorganized. ...It should be noted that the general response of liberal Christianity has been to identify religion most generally with the search for meaning (See Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life ). The influence of modernism, however, has been such as to "demystify" the religious tendency: the experience of God and the experience of the world have somehow become indistinct. In other words (in the Christian way of expressing it), since God created the world as an expression of his own desire, (or in the Hindu way of expressing it) the world is a manifestation of Himself or His energies, that therefore the highest value in life can be found in this world--in its pleasures and pains, in the life experience itself. In the hierarchy of values, of course, justice, love and compassion stand at the forefront, and to act in accordance wit...