On Wed, 25 Sep 2002, Dan Minette wrote:
>
> All the questions you raised are interesting, Marvin. But, I do disagree
> with your metaphor. I think the theist/atheist debate is over the
> existence Moby Dick. Theists can debate what's inside. :-)
I don't think it's that simple unless you assume that a) all "theisms" are
equivalent, which they're not IMO, or b) in order to discuss the nature of
religious belief or spirituality or the divine, one must be already
committed to a particular affirmative stance about the divine, which is
silly. (To believe in God, but not actually have any particular beliefs
about God, is nothing more than an emotionally reluctant non-theism or
agnosticism.)
No, the debate as I see it, in order to have any meaning, must first be
over the character of human experience and knowledge, beliefs about and
experiences of the divine - or allegedly divine - included. Your reading
of the metaphor only works if you can show that all theisms - beliefs
about the divine - are reducible to a single "volume" (Moby Dick), so to
speak. I don't think that's the case, which is a big part of any
common-sense argument against a Judeo-Christian God. Christianity,
Hinduism, Buddhism, the various animisms and polytheisms: they cannot, to
my knowledge, be reduced to a single common conception of the divine.
Christian "theism" != Buddhist "theism" != Confucian "theism" != Hindu
"theism" and so on. All talk about the divine and about good and bad, but
the nature of the Ultimate, and how one realizes it, differ, and many
Ultimate Truths have no room for a God along the Christian model.
If one must believe in God to open the book, then you've basically just
kicked Buddha out of the "theist" club. Shinto too, I think ("we have no
theology; we dance" according to a Shinto priest I read about somewhere).
Confucianism too, and probably many versions of Hinduism (about which I
hesitate to generalize because IIRC its practice takes so many forms).
My point is that to debate "theism: yes or no" may be to make an
unwarranted assumption about the necessary character of spirituality.
Which god the theist believes in; which god the atheist believes he is
denying: these are important questions. The western ecumenicalist theist
tends to assume almost everything can be reduced to Christianity one way
or another, which I think is false; the dogmatic forms of western atheism
tends to make the same assumption, denouncing all religion because
Christianity is disagreeable, thereby possibly cutting one off from a wide
variety of possible ways of being in the world.
Hence the "book cover" metaphor: it assumes there are only two opposite
choices, which may well be a false assumption about the nature of the
world and the nature of human experience. The problem with the assumption
that anything that isn't atheism is theism (as a belief in God) is that it
begs the question of *which* theism; which Ultimate; which concept of
being; and so on.
Also: what if opening the "book" and reading it correctly actually leads
one from theism (a "naive" belief in a creator/caretaker God) to an
atheism (or non-theism) in which nature itself is divine and amoral and
transcendent of all the categories posited by conventional religious
doctrines? That sounds a lot like what happened to Sakyamuni.
Marvin Long
Austin, Texas
"Two bits, four bits, six bits, a peso. If you're for Zorro,
stand up and say so!"
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