Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Religion

  • Buddhism, 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 routinely offer us, besides pain and…

  • Is Buddhism a Religion?

    Julius Evola in The Doctrine of Awakening, pp. 9-10, states unequivocally, . . . Buddhism — referring always to original [Pali] Buddhism — is not a religion. This does not mean that it denies supernatural and metaphysical reality, but only that it has nothing to do with the way of regarding our relationship with this…

  • If you don’t doubt it, do you really believe it?

    Your resting in subjective certainty may be only a form of somnolence. What makes a living faith living is its self-maintenance in the face of doubt.

  • Why Did Thomas Aquinas Leave his Summa Theologiae Unfinished?

    Burnout or visio mystica?

  • Two Guises of Religion

    Religion can appear under the guise of a childish refusal to face the supposed truth that we are but a species of clever land mammal with no higher origin or destiny. It can also appear under the guise of transcendence and maturity: the religious seek to transcend the childish and the merely human whereas worldlings…

  • Synchronicity, Alain, Monasticism, Sense of Life, and the Unseen Order

    The other morning I recalled the passage in Alain where he recorded his boyhood visit to the abbey at La Trappe and his visceral revulsion at the life of the monks. So I pulled his On Happiness from the shelf and to my surprise opened right to the passage in question. Coincidence, or synchronicity? I'll…

  • Some Questions About Animal Suffering and Religious Belief

    This just in from Karl White: A couple of questions.   1. The gist of your posts seems to be that we can never know for sure that an evil is pointlessly evil, therefore no evil rules out definitively the potential existence of an omni-loving God.   Yes, that's the gist of it, but strike…

  • More on Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil with Responses to Caiati and Pollack

    Vito Caiati, to whom I responded earlier, replies: In your excellent response to my email on animal suffering and theism, you write, “If one suffers from the problem of (natural) evil, there is little a philosopher qua philosopher can do. Pastoral care is not his forte. But if one can gain some intellectual light on…

  • A Mormon De-Conversion

    I have a category called Conversions. De-conversions are equally interesting. Here Spencer Case tells his story. If memory and the engines of search serve, I have written only two extended entries on Mormonism, both of which mention our old friend Spencer. Religion and Anthropomorphism with an Oblique Reference to Mormonism On the Mormon Conception of…

  • Vows

    Vows make for stability of life in a changeful world. But change is sometimes improvement, and this includes change in belief. The vows that stabilized can come to cramp and confine. Doubt sets in and commitment wanes. Fervent belief becomes lukewarm. A monk like Merton can come to wonder whether he has thrown his life…

  • Religion as a Drug

    Not all drugs are narcotics; some are stimulants. Philosophers of religion take note.

  • Islam as religion’s most virulent subspecies?

    I agree with the gist of Claude Boisson's statement below (via e-mail) who takes minor issue with what he quotes me as saying in the header, turning my declarative into an interrogative. (I haven't checked all his factual statements.) I myself have referred to Islam as a 'hybrid' ideology: it is as much a political…

  • Two Assurances of Religion and the Case of the Philosophically Sophisticated Rapist

    Karl Britton, Philosophy and the Meaning of Life, Cambridge UP, 1969, p. 192: Religion tries to provide two great assurances: that there is an absolute good and bad in the world at large, and that the absolute good has power. I agree that religion does attempt to provide these two great assurances. The first assurance…

  • Too Late by Five Months! Remembering Robert C. Coburn

    This morning I happened to re-read the chapter "Metaphysical Theology and the Life of Faith" in Robert C. Coburn's, The Strangeness of the Ordinary (Rowman and Littlefield, 1990). I first read it in May of 1997.  I was so impressed with it this second time around that I resolved to send Professor Coburn a note…

  • Does Everyone Have a Religion? Even Atheists?

    Andrew Sullivan opines, Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being. [. . .] By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to…