Jagat

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...

The ontological proof for the existence of God takes many forms. For some philosophers it is strong, for others it is almost laughably weak. “Because the idea exists, the reality must exist” certainly does not seem tenable; it can be reduced to the form, “God exists because I wish Him to exist.” If we imagine the moon is made of green cheese or that pigs have wings, does that make it so? Just because I can imagine something does not make it real. Of course, there is something more persuasive about the argument. For instance, if we hold that the search for God and meaning is inherent or instinctual, then the implication that this search must end somewhere seems more tenable. We feel hunger, for instance, and this implies food. We feel sexual desire and this implies some kind of necessary purpose, namely procreation. So since many of us need to find meaning in life, the implication is that there is a meaning. Many atheists insist that they feel absolutely no need for God, but it is ha...

I have been distracted with other things, especially Gopala Tapani, but now I have branched off into the  Vṛndāvana-rasa-tattva-samīkṣā , also by Bhagiratha Jha. I enjoy this stuff tremendously. It seems a great shame that I am not able to make my living at it. Bhagiratha is steeped in the Upanishads and Vedanta, so he is the perfect source of understanding for these foundations of Gopāla-tāpanī . But in the Vṛndāvana-rasa-tattva-samīkṣā , he concentrates more on topics of rasa, citing the customary sources in that area, like Bharata Muni. Nevertheless, he continues to emphasize the Upanishadic basis of things. This book begins at the same place the Prīti-sandarbha does: with the famous Chāndogya passage (7.22ff) that inquires into happiness. The prayojana , or goal of life and all our activities, is to find happiness. Anyone who gives another reason is being disingenuous. The debate lies in where one can find it. In free Western societies, it was decided a few centuries ago...

Madhavananda's second objection to Sahajiyaism is based in those numerous verses that I call misogynistic in character. Such verses tell us that there is nothing worse for a person's devotional life than the association of women. This is a question that needs to be explored in much depth and I will try to make a preliminary assessment of the subject. My daughter visited recently. Among the little bits of bitterness that she served up in relation to her Iskcon experience was a reference to the Gita's verse: māṁ hi pārtha vyapāśritya ye'pi syuḥ pāpa-yonayaḥ striyo vaiśyās tathā śūdrās te'pi yānti parāṁ gatim Those who take shelter of me fully, even those of sinful birth, women, merchants or common laborers, they too can attain the supreme destination. (9.32) My daughter uttered the words "even women" with portentous disdain--women are considered inferior beings in the bhakti world view. They have, according to different sources, two, four, six or eigh...