It's all in the mind, and the mind is curious thing that is increasingly being understood.
David Brooks has published a brief article in the New York Times (here) called The Neural Bhuddists. He suggests that religious people are going to have to face a revolution of thought if they take modern cognotive science seriously.
If you survey the literature (and I’d recommend books by Newberg, Daniel J. Siegel, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Jonathan Haidt, Antonio Damasio and Marc D. Hauser if you want to get up to speed), you can see that certain beliefs will spread into the wider discussion.Emphasis added. All here.
First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships.
Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions.
Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love.
Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.
In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.
In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me. I’m just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.
Well a church group this evening was discussing radical theology and non-realism this evening with general approval of its place in church life and varying degrees of agreement. One point about the radical position unlike the liberal one, I suggested, was that the signifier to signified never rests, that every position was a metaphor that moved on, whereas the liberal position is about something that was objective somewhere. The Trinity might just be a metaphor of God, God might be a metaphor for Being and at some point the liberal position rests. For the other position there might be either a conservative staked out position, non-objective anywhere else, and indeed as a faith path for a nihilist, you end up just doing it - and it is like a Christian Buddhism, a dharma of just doing.
ReplyDeleteIn Buddhism the beliefs make themselves from the practice, and this is suggested here.