Stephen Batchelor & Buddhist Atheism 

Apatheist is great. At first I read it as Ape-theist. Which would be the belief that God is an ape?

Could be!

Aw. Thanks!

That seems correct to me.

I haven't read Spinoza, but that's really interesting Thanks!

@@HardcoreZen welcome. He also has a striking similarity to some of the vedanta schools, despite never having come across Eastern philosophies 👍

That's also how I use Tao. Do you know where Snyder mentions that?

@@davidcreuze6856 That's on p.11 in The Practice of the Wild, which I think is almost a commentary on the Tao Te Ching, though not expressly so.

Isn't that who God smites all the time?

@@HardcoreZen Philistines is what you mean...Peloponnesians are Greeks.

We're working on it!

Thanks!

The very basics of Buddhism is relative and ultimate truths. Merit karma reincarnation... all relative, but ultimately transient and illusory. 🤔🙌

The Diamond Sutra was not written or dictated by the founder of Buddhism. It is at least a 2nd century CE text.

I think so. We are planning to record it. I'll makes some kind of announcement once I know more.

Sort of. But not really. I guess a pantheist believes everything is God. If so, maybe you could say I fit in that category somewhat. I just think that the concept of God is not altogether wrong.

I'm sure it will be archived somewhere. I'll try to remember to let people know once they tell me where it is.

@@HardcoreZen Hopefully, the talk will eventually be posted on RU-vid.

I'll see what I can do.

This quote from Secular Buddhism: 'The self, like a work of art, is transcendent. It is not reducible to its parts, nor does it exist independently of them. Yet such transcendence is not in any way permanent or unconditioned.' definitely states that a self exists (even if it is greater than the some of its parts). I would love to hear what this means, or a clarification if this is simply a different way to define what many people would term 'god'. It appears to agree with the concept of 'no self' in that the 'transcendent self' is more like an event (loved Brad's video on this 15 Oct 20), not inherent to one's own collection of 'physicality, feelings, perceptions, inclinations and consciousness' (another quote of Batchelor's). Yes? No? Maybe?

I argued with a friend once that atheism was a religion. :) I said that if you back it up just a little bit, and say that "your religion" is your set of beliefs about religious things (this is good, that is bad, this exists, that doesn't), then atheism occupies the same place inside a person that religion does, so it's a religion. :) I don't know if it is logically sound, but I think I won the argument, and we had a laugh.

That sounds interesting. I was initially interested in Richard Dawkins et al, the neo-Atheists. But when I read their critiques of God and religion I thought they were kind of shallow.

Phenomenological descriptions of "religions", "religiosity", and so forth, draw a more nuanced picture than your short axiomatic formula. E.g., the concept of "Dào" doesn`t seem to fit into it very neatly, because, for instance, taking Master Lâozi´s Dàodéjing as source, a) the Dào is said to be "older than god", and b) the Dào is said (paraphrased) to be, in a "mysterious" way, simultaneously both "inside our world" (immmanent) and "outside of our world" (transcendent). (--> Parallels in formal logic: "definition gaps" inside set theory; ---> D.R. Hofstedter, 1979, "Gödel, Escher, Bach..."). These propositions already complicate the picture in profound ways, i.m.o. My hypothesis is: Formal logic arguments have their value and can contribute to clarifications, but they can´t cover the whole "story", they have to be complemented by other forms of "knowledge" to approach the "real (no)thing".

There are not supposed to

@@leovere what is not supposed to what ?

Nice use of a Buddhist cliche!

I did address this matter in the book itself. I tried to come up with a way to avoid the gendered pronoun in that phrase, but doing so always seemed to call too much attention to the fact of having changed the pronoun, The statement then seemed to be more about pronouns than about God.

@@HardcoreZen What is the difference between saying God is with you...and saying God is you?

Sara...two wrongs dont make a right.

@@Teller3448 When I use those phrases I don't make any important distinction between the two ideas.

@@HardcoreZen The distinction is critical. When you wrote... "In fact, this personal and private something was, I now saw, the personality of the entire universe from the beginningless beginning of time right on through eternity. I saw that this thing I thought was located so deeply inside of me that no one could ever even think of touching it was actually spread throughout all the universe." This term "spread throughout" is what the Vedanta writers mean when they use the word 'pervades'. Its very different than being 'identical' with. Zen writers use the same principle when they employ the phrase 'penetrates heaven and earth'.

i have been looking at videos of russian orthodox ceremonies and the occasional "patriarch" missive, its very off-putting and the failure of the church to have any sort of contact with everyday reality was part of the reason for the revolution

@@osip7315 makes sense. Religion and science has really created a divide. It was a strong reason for Nazi Germany. They believed, scientifically, that certain race were superior. Science has really put religion in a pickle with society. Religion will have to evolve but science is just so fast

@@deanmccrorie3461 the Nazi-ideology was a crude mixture of bits and pieces, taken form the world-view supermarket at that (weirdly dynamic) times. The Nazis were heavily biased toward the sciences: what and/or who did no fit their (somber) purposes was censored, inhibited, persecuted... (often justified by chauvinistic, eugenic, racist reasons, resp. rationalisations). That was not an acting according to what I would call the "scientific ethos" (whose development was complicated, got big momentum with the eras of Renaissance and Enlightenment, harkened back to historical precedences, and so forth, but that`s another story).

@@deanmccrorie3461 Buddhism and "Religion" in a Buddhist sense get on very well as the Dalai Lama's discourses in the Mind and Life Institute have shown over many years. People are just too incessantly busy and careless to listen. We are natural born troublemakers.

North Korea is so fucked up precisely because of its god. 😉

What is "relative reincarnation"? Anyway, I guess we can go to you to define Buddhism for us from now on. Thanks!

@@HardcoreZen Relative reincarnation? AKA "cyclic existence"! SAMSARA! 🙌🤣 The very reason we practice Buddhism in the first place. 🤷🏼‍♂️🤣

@@dublinphotoart Oh! THAT'S the reason? Thank you.

@@HardcoreZen You can go to ALL the major Buddhist texts going back over a thousand years to define it...and they ALL uphold reincarnation. Including the ones written by Dogen.

Good comments Dublin! Its really only in the last few decades that people pretending to be Buddhist have tried to rip out its core principles to suit their petty preferences. Its part of the self-referential ego-centric culture we live in.