Category: Religion
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Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac
If there is divine light, sexual indulgence prevents it from streaming in. Herein lies the best argument for continence. The sex monkey may not be as destructive of the body as the booze monkey, but he may be even more destructive of the spirit. You may dismiss what I am saying here either by denying…
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Nirvana as Asphyxiation
E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered, tr. R. Howard (New York: Seaver Books, 1983), p. 118: In the Benares sermon, Buddha cites, among the causes of pain, the thirst to become and the thirst not to become. The first thirst we understand, but why the second? To long for nonbecoming — is that not to…
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Report from Afghanistan and More on Religious Zealotry
Spencer Case reports from Afghanistan, and I comment in blue (older comments of mine in dark orange): Greetings again from Afghanistan. I've been reading your blog regularly although I haven't written in a while, so I hope you'll forgive a few preliminaries. Things are winding down in my tour, despite an attack on my base…
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Buddhism on Suffering and One Reason I am Not a Buddhist
(This entry touches upon some themes discussed with greater rigor, thoroughness, and scholarliness in my "No Self? A Look at a Buddhist Argument," International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 4 (December 2002), pp. 453-466.) For Buddhism, all is dukkha, suffering. All is unsatisfactory. This, the First Noble Truth, runs contrary to ordinary modes of thinking: doesn't life…
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No Provision in Islam for Mosque-State Separation
John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion (Yale UP, 1989, pp. 48-49): From the point of view of the understanding of this state of islam [submission to Allah] the Muslim sees no distinction between the religious and the secular. The whole of life is to be lived in the presence of Allah and is the sphere…
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Test Your Religious Knowledge
Here. Your humble correspondent answered 14 out of 15 questions correctly for a score of 93%. Jews are at the top, which is no surprise. As I once said to my Israeli friend Peter, "I have never met a stupid Jew." He immediately shot back, "Then you've never lived in Israel." The alacrity of the repartee…
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More on Whether Atheism is a Religion
Peter Lupu e-mails: Your post provoked these thoughts: I agree with you that most religions include as indispensable certain core metaphysical tenets about some kind of transcendental existence that is vital for the understanding of the nature and identity of our own self and that these core tenets distinguish religious ideologies from secular ideologies such…
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On ‘Spirituality’
The trendy embrace the term 'spirituality' but shun its close cousin, ‘religion.’ I had a politically correct Jewish professor in my kitchen a while back whose husband had converted from Roman Catholicism to Judaism. I asked her why he had changed his religion. She objected to the term ‘religion,’ explaining that his change was a…
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Is Atheism a Religion?
From the mail: Just read your On Religious Pluralism and Religious Tolerance entry, and I have one concern. Is it really right to view the New Atheists, and atheists in general, as "not religious"? I imagine this really depends on how you yourself define religion, and I admit to not knowing that. [. . .]…
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Religions: Problems, Solutions, Techniques
Simplifying a four-part schema employed by Stephen Prothero in his God Is Not One (Harper, 2010, p. 14), I propose, in agreement with Prothero, that each religion can be usefully seen as addressing itself to a problem; offering a solution to the problem, a solution that also constitutes the religion's goal; and proposing a technique…
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On Praying for Christopher Hitchens
There is something strange, and perhaps even incoherent, about praying for Christopher Hitchens if the prayers are not for his recovery or for his courageous acceptance of death, but for conversion or a change of heart. Let's think about it. I do not play the lottery; I have good reasons for not playing it; I…
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On Religious Pluralism and Religious Tolerance
If you are an adherent of a given religion, why ought you tolerate other religions? We must tolerate other religions because we do not know which religion is true, if any is, and this would be something very important to know if it could be known. So we must inquire, and our inquiry will be aided…
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Religions and Languages
Religions are like languages: If you know only your own, then you don't truly know it.
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Hitchens on Mother Teresa’s Dark Night of the Soul
In some measure one must admire that professional contrarian, Christopher Hitchens, whose mind is incandescent in its brilliance, and whose speech is preternatural in its articulateness, and who has the audacity to go after anyone, including Mother Teresa. In a piece in Newsweek he comments on her Dark Night of the Soul. But what are…