Timeline for Do Buddhism and Atheism contradict each other?
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14 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jul 20, 2015 at 13:09 | comment | added | user698 | Hah! Very well. I do encourage you to read some of the Abhidhamma. The Dhammasangani specifically would be of some use to you in unraveling the Buddhist view of dharmas and how these elements aggregate to form what we would conventionally call a "person". It's interesting stuff, quite frankly. | |
| Jul 20, 2015 at 8:23 | comment | added | Davor | @nemo - I think that is the biggest word salad I've ever seen. Elemental part of aggregated self? Are you trolling? :D | |
| Jul 17, 2015 at 19:21 | comment | added | user698 | @Davor - there is no "besides the physical body" in Buddhist thought. The mind/body duality is a Western construct. Any quality, be it mental, karmic, or what Westerners would call "physical" fall under the category of dharmas or constituent elements. A moment of happiness is an elemental part of the aggregated self just as much as a carbon atom in your big toe. If you want to say that only certain dharmas can be observed, quantified, and described by our current scientific understanding, that's fine. The model you are using, however, is extremely problematic in Buddhist terms. | |
| Jul 17, 2015 at 13:40 | comment | added | Davor | @nemo - which part of the "besides the physical body" you don't understand? | |
| Jul 17, 2015 at 13:37 | comment | added | ChrisW♦ | @Davor "Does anything continue your existence?" Assuming there is a "me" and a "my existence", then yes and I think that (immaterial) "thing" is called "karma". I was wondering what the difference is between "karma" and "soul": part of the difference is that karma itself isn't unchanging: it's not a permanent "me" with unchanging characteristics. Wikipedia's Soul -- Buddhism has more details. | |
| Jul 14, 2015 at 19:53 | comment | added | user698 | I don't see ChrisW as nitpicking here. What he lays out is fundamental to understanding the Buddhist conception of consciousness, enlightenment, rebirth - basically everything having to do with Buddhist thought. The notion of a soul smacks of a Cartesian, Eurocentric bias and betrays belief in a lasting, personal identity. That's something the Buddha argued [at length!] against. | |
| Jul 14, 2015 at 19:41 | comment | added | user698 | Well, my body continues after my existence albeit in a decomposing form. Does that make it a soul? Hair persists for a long time, but it won't collect my pension check. The dust of my bones doesn't get my social security number. In the same way, my karmic continuum doesn't keep my name, my family wouldn't recognize my volition, and my skandas wouldn't be very good at my job. All of them would be useless without my consciousness or body. Where's there a soul in all of that? | |
| Jul 14, 2015 at 12:23 | comment | added | user5463 | Well, you can call buddhism a religion, I can see it as some psychological practice. | |
| Jul 14, 2015 at 9:38 | comment | added | Davor | @ChrisW - those are biological functions of the body. Aaaaaand again, you're nitpicking the wording, instead of focusing on what matters. Is there anything left of you after you die besides the dead decomposing body? Does anything continue your existence? That would be a soul. | |
| Jul 14, 2015 at 9:36 | comment | added | ChrisW♦ | @Davor Yes, there are things to a human besides the physical body, e.g. there are sense-impressions, consciousness, etc., but that's not a soul. | |
| Jul 14, 2015 at 9:32 | comment | added | Davor | @ChrisW - it's just semantics. Is there anything to a human besides the physical body? If yes, that is a soul. | |
| Jul 14, 2015 at 7:22 | comment | added | ChrisW♦ |
Welcome to the site. Although you wrote that Buddhism makes unjustifed claims (Existence of a soul, reincarnation of those souls, etc) and so is not compatible with freethought, the statement, that "Buddhism claims existence of a soul", is contradicted by the articles on this page, Egolessness (Anatta), as well as elsewhere in the canon. Though it may be a long page, with several articles, a search of it will highlight places where it mentions the word "soul".
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| Jul 13, 2015 at 23:53 | review | First posts | |||
| Jul 15, 2015 at 4:53 | |||||
| Jul 13, 2015 at 23:52 | history | answered | smithkm | CC BY-SA 3.0 |