On Tue, Nov 26, 2002 at 10:59:10PM +0000, H. T. wrote: > According to the book "Our Religions" and the damn instructor who taught > the course that used that horrible book, both Buddhism and Taoism are > "atheistic" religions (did I spell it correctly? heh.). If you wander though an Asian art museum, this commonly repeated idea of Buddhism as an atheistic religion seems pretty implausible. They don't have a Creator like the monotheist religions, but so what? They've got Buddhas and boddhisattvas and demons and hells. And above all the soul; without reincarnation of the soul Buddhism makes no sense. It's a ground belief, like original sin/salvation for Christianity. As an AI researcher and general materialist I actually have less trouble with a Creator (universe could be someone's SimUniverse game) than with a soul (that's what we have brains for.) California Buddhism may be a fairly austere and supernatural-being-less religion, but I think Buddhism in its home ground is just as rich in beings as Catholicism with its saints or Greek religion with its various divine aspects and demigods. Taoism I know less about, but you've got the various Immortals... > Therefore, I suppose one can say, some Atheists have religion to the point > they have a name for what they believe in. (Is this a contradiction? Not Atheists have a name to distinguish themselves from the believers. The problem with calling atheism a religion is that atheists, outside of maybe American Atheists, don't live lives informed by atheism. They just get along in life; the atheism only comes out in contrast with a theist. It's just absence. Now if someone wanted to say materialism or Communism were religions, or at least life-defining belief systems, there'd at least be a case. I think a useful concept which got lost is one of "moral philosophy". Like Stoicism or Epicureanism. Which often included statements about the gods, but the gods weren't really important to the meat of the philosophy. Confucianism might be another example. -xx- Damien X-)