Can religion tell us more than science?

dhammanovice:

“…. In most religions - polytheism, Hinduism and Buddhism, Daoism and Shinto, many strands of Judaism and some Christian and Muslim traditions - belief has never been particularly important. Practice - ritual, meditation, a way of life - is what counts. What practitioners believe is secondary, if it matters at all…..

…. We’d all be better off if we stopped believing in belief. Not everyone needs a religion. But if you do, you shouldn’t be bothered about finding arguments for joining or practising one. Just go into the church, synagogue, mosque or temple and take it from there.

What we believe doesn’t in the end matter very much. What matters is how we live.”

(extracts from an article by John Gray here)

It is true that there are devout believers in nonviolence who find it difficult to believe in a personal God. But even these persons believe in the existence of some creative force that works for universal wholeness. Whether we call it an unconscious process, an impersonal Brahman, or a Personal Being of matchless power and infinite love, there is a creative force in this universe that works to bring the disconnected aspects of reality into a harmonious whole.
Martin Luther King Jr., “An Experiment in Love,” an excerpt from Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Circle (New York: Harper & Row, 1958).

Abraham Joshua Heschel on Depth Theology

The theme of theology is the content of believing; the theme of depth theology is the act of believing, its purpose being to explore the depth of faith, the substratum out of which belief arises. It deals with acts which precede articulation and defy definition.

Theology speaks for the people; depth theology speaks for the individual. Theology strives for communication, for universality; depth theology strives for insight, for uniqueness.

Theology is like sculpture, depth theology like music. Theology is in the books; depth theology is in the hearts. The former is doctrine, the latter an event. Theologies divide us; depth theology unites us.

Depth theology seeks to meet the person in moments in which the whole person is involved, in moments which are affected by all a person thinks, feels and acts. It draws upon that which happens to man in moments of confrontation with ultimate reality. It is in such moments that decisive insights are born.

Excerpted from The Insecurity of Freedom, via Heschel’s Theology: Organized Excerpts | The Shalom Center

Source: theshalomcenter.org

I feel myself to be a religious person, but I feel that to be more the case in terms of the sorts of questions that most deeply motivate me. What is this life, what is death? Rather than religious in the sense of adhering to a particular set of dogmas or doctrines or beliefs. In some ways this is a sense of religion that is quite close to the old Greek understanding of philosophia, of the love of wisdom, of philosophy. And at the same time we have to ask ourselves afresh: well what do we mean by this central term in Buddhist tradition, usually translated as ‘enlightenment’? Although I prefer to use the word ‘awakening’, which is more literally correct. And I would seek to understand this not as the gaining of a privileged, mystical intuition, some sort of special state of consciousness that we might arrive at at one point or another. But rather to think of awakening, which conveniently in the English gerundive form can also suggest a process, that awakening is about living one’s life in all aspects in a more wakeful, in a more alert and even a more enlightened way perhaps. So to think of the goal of Buddhist practice as not about a state of enlightenment, but rather as an ongoing enactment and embodiment of certain values and ideals that we seek to bring into our experience of the world we share with one another.

Stephen Batchelor, Stephen Batchelor and Don Cupitt — The Future of Religion: a Dialogue

(hmm, that sounds awfully familiar … in a good way)

Source: secularbuddhism.org

Those who believe that they believe in God, but without any passion in their heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God-Idea, not in God Himself.

Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

Los que sin pasión de ánimo, sin congoja, sin incertidumbre, sin duda, sin la desesperación en el consuelo, creen creer en Dios, no creen sino en la idea de Dios, mas no en Dios mismo.

Del sentimiento trágico de la vida