Losing My Religion

[qatar]

I was recently asked why I stopped considering myself Buddhist. My response:

The first answer that popped into my mind was the last few lines of a poem by the iconoclastic Zen monk Ikkyu:
To harden into a Buddha is wrong;
All the more I think so
When I look at a stone Buddha.To answer the question more completely, I think I have to recount my

Comments

[anonymous]

I don't understand. There are several reality-based conclusions in the above writing. What exactly is backward for you? Surely not those.

*ecafkcuf*

[qatar]

lol, it's hard to imagine this in reverse without it being the story of a person who loses their self-confidence, stops engaging in ethical reasoning and then feels the weight of self-deception fall onto their shoulders. But I'm going to assume you just mean the atheist -> Buddhist -> Christian part. ;-) I'd be interested to hear your version in more detail sometime.

[qatar]

It kind of sounds like we both concluded that progressive Christianity's tendency to redefine the key terms of the faith to mean more sympathetic things was untenable... only we then ran in different directions. (Although, to be fair to progressive Christianity, Spong is kind of a jerk; there are better spokespeople

[anonymous]

"There's no empirical evidence for or against God, so therefore the question is irrelevant..." <-- Does this even mean anything? It sounds like gibberish.

*ecafkcuf*

[anonymous]

What kind of God are you talking about? One that does miracles and stuff, things which would actually qualify as empirical evidence? Or, one that kind of lingers in heaven or something and never actually does anything tangible?

[anonymous]

Forgot to sign.

*ecafkcuf*

[anonymous]

I don't care about relevance, just with what you're talking about. What kind of God are you talking about?

*ecafkcuf*

[anonymous]

If your question was fundamentally bogus, wasn't it absurd to draw /any/ conclusion from examining it?

Ho, hum, let me think up something really stupid. Oh, damn, this thing is really stupid. Well, I guess God exists. High five!

*ecafkcuf*

[qatar]

I am still confused about the relationship between the two ideas, which makes it hard for me to imagine what the internal contradiction you were wrestling with was. You said that the fact that the evidence is unclear means that the question is irrelevant, but that seems like an odd thing to say since I can imagine lots of questions whose possible answers lack clear evidence, but for which an answer surely exists and is very important -- for example, what happens to my consciousness when I die. So maybe I don't understand what you meant by "irrelevant."