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  1. Vishvavajra

    God Recreated the Earth 6,000 Years Ago!

    True, dating is a red herring. There are a lot of people whose precise dates are sketchy or nonexistent, yet there's corroborating evidence to support their existence. Jesus is one of those. The Gospel authors didn't know the date of his birth and couldn't even settle on a year (the range given...
  2. Vishvavajra

    Loving God = Eternal Torture?

    No, Biblical scholars do not generally regard the epistle to Timothy as having been written by Paul and have not for quite some time. As for whether it's referencing ransom theory as such, that's another question. Its apparent references to emergent Gnosticism may be evidence of 2nd-century...
  3. Vishvavajra

    Religion & Logic

    Well, you're not wrong. The thing people have to understand is that even Protestantism--although it changed a lot of superficial things--still retained the majority of Catholic doctrine at the heart of the religion. In other words, Protestantism is part of the Latin tradition, not a totally...
  4. Vishvavajra

    (Strong) Atheism's Burden of Proof

    I agree with you that there has to be a simple, easily digestible version of the moral precepts for people who aren't ready for the deep philosophical underpinnings. At any rate, understanding sophisticated philosophical underpinnings can't be a prerequisite for moral behavior. I think they do...
  5. Vishvavajra

    (Strong) Atheism's Burden of Proof

    I don't agree. "Nature" is an abstraction, just like "God." Nor is successfully killing something the same thing as being right. A person can rule over others with an iron fist and die surrounded by riches, but that doesn't make their actions right, nor will it make that person truly happy.
  6. Vishvavajra

    (Strong) Atheism's Burden of Proof

    Buddhists aren't just monks. The lay community outnumbers the monastic one many times over. And unlike the 10 Commandments, basic Buddhist precepts apply to everyone equally. Nor are they particularly difficult to understand, and they can be seen to work even without fully understanding the...
  7. Vishvavajra

    Vatican City rejects French Gay Amb

    The problem is he wasn't a pederast, in which case they'd have offered him a job and legal protection.
  8. Vishvavajra

    Anger

    Yes, anger has been a great obstacle to me through much of my life. Recently it has reduced to the point where it seldom comes up, and when it does arise it is weaker and easier to manage. After going on a brief retreat I stepped up my meditation practice to a (mostly) daily thing, and that has...
  9. Vishvavajra

    Religion & Logic

    It's more accurate to say that Western culture is a child of Greco-Roman culture generally. Roman Christianity was one manifestation of that. Yes, Christianity started as a Judaic movement, but Catholicism is more Roman in character than Judaic. I won't dispute that Western Christianity (i.e...
  10. Vishvavajra

    (Strong) Atheism's Burden of Proof

    I agree with you completely. The problem, as I've mentioned, is the assumption that ethical systems must either be objective and deontological, or relative and pragmatic. A lot of theists peddle that nonsense, but it's never been true. You can have a system of ethics that is both objective and...
  11. Vishvavajra

    (Strong) Atheism's Burden of Proof

    Not really, although it can seem that way if your knowledge of history stops at the 18th century. Liberalism as an ideology got formulated in the Enlightenment period, but its basic premises go back much, much further to classical antiquity. In fact the word itself refers to the rights of free...
  12. Vishvavajra

    (Strong) Atheism's Burden of Proof

    That is indeed the only definition of "god" that holds up over the millennia, across all the different traditions. It seems to be more or less how the ancient Greeks understood the word theos (ditto the Latin deus). Attempts to define God in a more restrictive, essentialist way seem to come out...
  13. Vishvavajra

    (Strong) Atheism's Burden of Proof

    Yes, atheism is no more guilty of exalting the powers of the human mind than theism is. If anything, it's somewhat less so, since only theism claims that the human mind is capable of grasping things that are outside its experience. But they are both mental attitudes that rely on faith in one's...
  14. Vishvavajra

    (Strong) Atheism's Burden of Proof

    Only when those ethical systems were fundamentally deontological, such as divine command theory, which is ultimately not really objective, just subjective in a very limited way (i.e. whatever God thinks is right or wrong). Buddhist ethics is both objective and functionally atheistic. As for the...
  15. Vishvavajra

    Practicing the Buddhas teachings

    Shamatha-vipashyana is another way of saying Buddhist meditation, in its two aspects of mind-calming and insight. Methods tend to favor one or the other aspect, but most methods feature at least some of both. As for the other thing, Theravada practitioners are often saying stuff like that. In...
  16. Vishvavajra

    About becoming an educated buddhist priest/monk

    As for the monk-priest thing, non-monastic priests are unique to Japan, where a hundred years ago the emperor decided to undermine the Buddhist tradition by forcing monks to marry, break the dietary precepts, etc., hence the proliferation of lay priests. That requirement was a long time ago, but...
  17. Vishvavajra

    Finding a open cloister?

    Rather than "cloister," try searching for "Tibetan Buddhist retreat." I don't know Tibetan practice well, but many Mahayana Buddhist monasteries offer retreats to laymen, usually from a day to a week. Sometimes at the monastery, other times at a separate retreat center. You probably won't be...
  18. Vishvavajra

    Two kinds of religion?

    Yeah, I'm not buying the exoteric/esoteric dichotomy as defined above. Esoteric practices are ones that are only open to the initiated, which traditionally implied an organized structure of some sort, not solo mysticism, whereas exoteric practices might feature relatively little hierarchical...
  19. Vishvavajra

    It's said Jesus' sacrificed himself to save us...

    Yes, thanks for bringing that up. It just so happens that the Latin perfectum also means "finished/complete," which is how it eventually took on the meaning of "flawless" in modern English. But it's very important to remember that in antiquity it didn't have the latter sense, just the former...
  20. Vishvavajra

    Two kinds of religion?

    I don't know where you are exactly, but here is the website for a retreat center in Pine Bush, NY. If you look under "Teachings," the site also has online resources such as Youtube videos of dharma talks at the center and some things to read about the basic philosophy of the Chan tradition. If...
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