1. You shall have no other gods before me. 2. You shall not make for yourself any carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generations…
In an earlier essay I raised some questions about the value of suffering, especially the default assumption that suffering is to be avoided and brought to a quick end when it does occur. In Nietzsche’s writing we find claims that suffering has instrumental value and intrinsic value, or at least it will to the higher types of human beings who have the appropriate will. Here I want to consider the claim that suffering has instrumental value and what that means…
The cessation of suffering is Buddhism’s end goal. The Buddha has discovered how to do it, according to Buddhism and Buddhists who have achieved the goal. A supposedly central requirement for achieving the goal is to realize the truth of no-self: there is no substantial self that endures over time. Leaving aside what exactly this means, an important question regards why one should accept the doctrine of no-self. The Buddha gave arguments for the view and later Buddhists gave still…
In reading Siderits’s excellent Buddhism as Philosophy I have come to realize the following problem. If a religion has its base in philosophy, if its central tenets are supposed to follow from the use of reason and argument, then none of its conclusions can ever be firm enough to ground religious practice. There will always be difficult objections and questions that cannot be answered in a way sufficient to allow one to say, “I know this is true and I…
Enlightened? No! Buddhist master? No. Buddhist? Working on it. But Buddhist or no, I have been practicing a form of Buddhist meditation, again, for the past month and four days. This is something I’ve been doing (mostly) off and on for the past fifteen years or so. I’m pretty terrible at it. In fact, I composed the gist of this essay while “meditating” this morning. I’ve got a nice spot in an upstairs room in the house I’m renting in…
In a recent essay, I made a distinction between what I called epistemic reasons and purely causal reasons. The former are potentially truth preserving (capable of providing epistemic justification) the latter are not even potentially truth preserving (and thus are incapable of providing epistemic justification). In this essay, I’m going to appeal to the same basic distinction regarding reasons that do and do not provide epistemic justification, but I’m going to refer to them simply as epistemic reasons (ERs) and…
I find Christianity (and Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, etc.) perplexing. I suppose Kierkegaard would want me to embrace this feeling (as regards Christianity). I admit my perplexity because I do not want to come across as angry or hostile in these essays. I really want to understand religion and humankind’s possible relationship with the divine better. One of the things that troubles me with Christianity is the claim that it is only through Christ that one can achieve salvation, which I…
Much of what I have to say is critical, but I do not mean any disrespect to my family and friends, or any one else of a particular faith. The purpose of this short essay is to further my project of trying to understand religious belief and to cultivate a certain kind of humility that I find lacking in many religious people. The latter may seem condescending, though I certainly do not intend it to be. When asking for the…
In a recent article, “Exceptionally Articulate: Obama’s eloquence fails to quiet charges that he does not believe in God or America,” a key issue is the relevance of Obama’s faith to his being worthy of being president. The consensus seems to be that most voters would not be happy if he were not a man of faith. I assume that this is because voters think they can judge a lot about a person from his or her beliefs about god….
What follows is that outline considering possible reasons for endorsing some kind of theism. Importantly, it is just an outline; so its details need to be filled in. Were that filling in to occur, I’m sure that certain points might get modified, added, or rejected. Further, a lot of it is based on things I have written about more extensively in my notebooks and as such a number of things will be presented that might not make sense or for…