• Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Access to private conversations with other members.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

Search results

  1. Vishvavajra

    Abortion

    As far as some people are concerned, being born a woman constitutes consent. One thing that doesn't get enough attention is the strong correlation between the hard-line anti-abortion stance and rape culture. There's a disturbing amount of similarity in the arguments and assumptions.
  2. Vishvavajra

    Abortion

    For some people, the love of God in Christ only extends to abstract concepts, not to actual sentient beings. Ergo a collection of cells without a functioning brain is more important to them than a woman, not because it can feel (it can't), but because of what it represents.
  3. Vishvavajra

    My problem with atheism

    It is impossible to even conceive of ideas outside of a conceptual framework, much less to communicate them to others. What you're saying sounds suspiciously like the fundamentalist claim that they don't interpret scripture, they just read it as it is.
  4. Vishvavajra

    Abortion

    The same genes that give us cancer? The ones that carry crippling and even terminal genetic disorders? The ones that often are so degraded even at the early embryonic stage that the whole thing spontaneously aborts? Genes code for the reproduction of specific sequences of proteins. That is...
  5. Vishvavajra

    Did Jesus actually exist as a historical figure?

    The question really isn't whether there was a Jesus of Nazareth at all (it's far more tenable to accept that the mythic Jesus was based on a real guy than to posit that he was wholly fabricated). The question is what, if anything, we can know about him in a historical sense. The answer is...
  6. Vishvavajra

    Did Jesus say he was God???

    There are times when an argument from silence has no merit, and then there are times when the silence screams. It is inconceivable that Paul would have been silent on this point if he'd known about it. The way he appears to talk around it, he would have to be deliberately avoiding the point...
  7. Vishvavajra

    My problem with atheism

    No, still doesn't make sense. If I said that an article in a classical journal was couched in academic terms, and for that reason might be difficult for non-academics to understand if they assume the words have the same meanings as in casual discourse, there would be no controversy or accusation...
  8. Vishvavajra

    Historical Evidence For the Existence of Jesus

    You've gone too far in the other direction. Paul repeatedly associates the Christ with Jesus by name, up to and including the earliest biographical sketch of Jesus's life and death that we have (Paul predates the Gospels by a generation or two). While it's true that to Paul the Christ is more...
  9. Vishvavajra

    Did Jesus say he was God???

    The "I am..." statements appear only in John, which is from the end of the 1st century, and they're doctrinal statements of the early church-in-exile placed into the mouth of the founder. You have to understand that a lot of the 4th Gospel is the author's program of placing Christianity as the...
  10. Vishvavajra

    Did Jesus say he was God???

    Jesus seems to have regarded his ministry as the important thing, the thing he was willing to die for. Later Christians weren't satisfied with that and imagined that he must have been Yahweh making a human sacrifice of himself to himself in order to accomplish some occult purpose that was way...
  11. Vishvavajra

    Did Jesus say he was God???

    Er, the virgin birth thing enters the tradition late in the 1st century. Paul was unaware of it; he says simply that Jesus was born of a woman (i.e. like everybody else). The virgin thing seems to rely on a particular understanding of Isaiah that requires that it be translated into Greek first...
  12. Vishvavajra

    My problem with atheism

    Paul refers to the Judaic Messianism of his day, which was based on their reading of prophetic books such as Ezekiel and Isaiah. The function of the Messiah was to perfect the world and turn it into the Kingdom of God, not to send souls to heaven after death or anything like that. This makes no...
  13. Vishvavajra

    Ethics of creating your own religion

    Tradition is important. Every traditional religion was based on what came before, even when it deviated from it. The reason why it's important is that religion is a kind of culture and needs to remind people that they are a part of something bigger than themselves. Also, we rely on the wisdom of...
  14. Vishvavajra

    Questions about organisation and relation to buddhism

    Could be that what we call the Gnostic understanding of Christianity arrived at the same observations as Buddhadharma, only couched in a Hellenistic Judaic framework. Some of the statements are eerily similar if you decode them, but I doubt there was direct influence. After all, if it's true, it...
  15. Vishvavajra

    Is pro-gay Christianity really a tenable position?

    It's a huge problem. If I had a dollar for every time I've heard someone claim inspiration from the Holy Spirit to justify their hateful, self-righteous, narrow-minded interpretation... If the Holy Spirit is anything, it's the part of us that is greater than us, that can go beyond our petty...
  16. Vishvavajra

    Is pro-gay Christianity really a tenable position?

    Agreed, and this deserves emphasis. When people say that the stuff about slavery, anti-Semitism, and racial segregation is irrelevant to this topic, they're not looking at the totality of the situation. This is the same song, slightly different words. And yes, the social ramifications are...
  17. Vishvavajra

    Is pro-gay Christianity really a tenable position?

    Far from trolling or obtuse, what Sojourner is saying is in line with classical scholarship. The surrounding cultures (which at the time of Jesus and Paul pretty much means the Hellenic culture) did not have an understanding of homosexuality that resembles ours. My department offers a course on...
  18. Vishvavajra

    The monetization of mindfulness

    It's a good question. Our group, which is led by a student of Master Sheng Yen, advertises meditation as the draw, including a monthly stress-reduction workshop aimed at the general public. Then if they come to the center, there's meditation practice every week, and the Q&A sessions answer...
  19. Vishvavajra

    The monetization of mindfulness

    I'm with Dorothy on this one. In trying to divorce certain Buddhist methods from the rest of the Dharma, one typically ends up performing those methods incorrectly and to no real benefit. Meditation is something everyone should do, but it isn't easy, and there's a reason it's suggested that one...
  20. Vishvavajra

    Is pro-gay Christianity really a tenable position?

    I, on the other hand, have yet to see a cogent argument that it's not OK. "I think I read it in a book somewhere" doesn't hold water as a moral rubric. In fact that's one one of the main points of Jesus's sermons. True. The real rubric is whether the tradition expresses love, which is the true...
View older results
Top