But as for the other sort of materialism ... I really don’t see what’s so horribly catastrophic about people believing in God. Worst-case scenario: they’re wrong. Yet I don’t see the biggest problem in philosophy as being that people are wrong about things. We’re all wrong about an awful lot of things, as we all realize when modifying our previous views on anything. When reading people’s work let’s look for depth, seriousness, originality, commitment, and insight, and not measure people by what we ourselves think to be their ratio of true to false explicit propositions.
Non-theism (eg Buddhism) means you have stopped identifying with theism--and thus also with atheism...
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
God, Meh
Harman:
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4 comments:
If that is what non-theism is (ceasing to identify with theism—and thus also atheism), would it be fair to say that we find, scattered here and there within the Abrahamic religions, some non-theists, even if the traditions as a whole are theistic (obviously)? I'm thinking of figures like Dionysius the Areopagite, or various Sufis, or someone like al-Hallaj.
I mean in one sense you could say that non-theism, as it manifests itself within the theistic traditions, is just a strong attempt to avoid idolatry: the notion that any name/concept one assigns to the source of all things fails, whether that name is affirmative (theistic) or negative (atheistic).
But perhaps that's not what you were getting at.
Hi--definitely. Couldn't agree more. No one has a monopoly on non-theism. As far as I can see it's just something that pops up spontaneously, though one can prepare the way for it.
And plenty of Buddhists are theistic! And nihilistic!
Is there one branch or sect or group within Buddhism which avoids the theistic 'trap' as it were? I've always sort of assumed this would be Ch'an / Zen Buddhism, but I don't know that much about it.
Well I think they all do, in their different ways. Practitioners, on the other hand, are another story.
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