Theos-Talk Archives (June 2008 Message tt00013)

--- In theos-talk@yahoogroups.com, "prmoliveira" <prmoliveira@...> wrote:
>
> --- In theos-talk@yahoogroups.com, "Anand" <AnandGholap@> wrote:
> 
> 
> > I want to add one more point. In the Theosophical Society it is always
> > mentioned that one should not blindly believe, every one should use
> > his own judgement and intuition in order to decide whether to accept
> > certain idea or reject it. 
> > Now comes interesting point. We can assume that people use to some
> > extent intuition and reason while following certain religion or
> > rejecting it. Now, if most of the humanity's intuition tells them that
> > God exists and so they follow religions with God as central idea, 
> > and if very few people's intuition tells them to believe Buddhist
> > philosophy of no-God, then it can be assumed that Buddhist no-God idea
> > is wrong. 
> 
> 
> As I see it, the only problem with your assumed statistical supremacy 
> of the 'God' religions over Buddhism is this: children who were born in 
> Hindu, Jewish, Christian and Muslim families did nor really have a 
> choice. They became members of the religions they parents were members 
> of. They did not "intuit" which one is better. This is simply a case of 
> social, cultural and historical conditioning, not intuition.

This advantage of conditioning was available to Buddhist religion,
just as it was available to other religion. That compensates.
Buddhist religion got 2500 years to spread. Christianity got only 2000
years to spread and Islam just 1200 years. So you can see despite long
period available for Buddhist religion to spread, number of people who
believe in Buddhist philosophy are very less. That proves that 
Buddhist no-God philosophy failed to convince intuition and reason of
humanity.

It appears that at very basic level Buddhist no-God philosophy has
problems. Nature of man is given in The Catechism of the Catholic
Church in very interesting way, and it appears that Catholic Church is
right here. Below are the passages from the book.

"The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is
created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to
himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never
stops searching for:

The dignity of man rests above all on the fact that he is called to
communion with God. This invitation to converse with God is addressed
to man as soon as he comes into being. For if man exists it is because
God has created him through love, and through love continues to hold
him in existence. He cannot live fully according to truth unless he
freely acknowledges that love and entrusts himself to his creator."

http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P9.HTM

Anand Gholap