Shamefaced Singaporean Pastor Apologizes For Ridiculing Buddhist Beliefs

[Xangsamhua]

The news report and video below reveal vividly the pitfalls of attachment to beliefs. The video is especially revealing. The pastor starts getting wound up around 5 minutes in.

Not a good example for his 12000 parishioners, but he has made a public apology. Hopefully Pastor Rony is genuinely apologetic for his lapse into conceitedness and it is a lesson for him.

http://www.ucanews.com/2010/02/15/chastene...lur-on-buddhism

Edited February 16, 2010 by Xangsamhua

[somluck]

Internal Security Act (Detention Without Trial) was being waved in his face. This moron has better wise up

[Xangsamhua]

Internal Security Act (Detention Without Trial) was being waved in his face. This moron has better wise up

Interesting. A bit more on the ISA below:

http://www.temasekreview.com/2010/02/09/is...comment-page-1/

[camerata]

Venerable Dhammika, however, was unimpressed with the inter-faith dialogues as conducted in Singapore. Writing on his personal blog “Dhamma Musings”, he shared his experience at such sessions:

“I doubt that inter-religious dialogue, at least as it is conducted in Singapore, really brings about a change in how the different religions feel about each other. I have often attended inter-religious gatherings and I have noticed that everyone is friendly, accommodating and open-minded. The participants are already respectful of other faiths. The ones who could do with a bit of tolerance – the bigots, zealots, fundamentalists and the evangelicals, won’t come. Here in Singapore several major denominations have pointedly refused to join the Inter-religious Organization which they see as fratranizing with Satan.”

http://www.temasekreview.com/2010/02/16/bu...comment-page-2/

[Xangsamhua]

Venerable Dhammika, however, was unimpressed with the inter-faith dialogues as conducted in Singapore. Writing on his personal blog “Dhamma Musings”, he shared his experience at such sessions:

“I doubt that inter-religious dialogue, at least as it is conducted in Singapore, really brings about a change in how the different religions feel about each other. I have often attended inter-religious gatherings and I have noticed that everyone is friendly, accommodating and open-minded. The participants are already respectful of other faiths. The ones who could do with a bit of tolerance – the bigots, zealots, fundamentalists and the evangelicals, won’t come. Here in Singapore several major denominations have pointedly refused to join the Inter-religious Organization which they see as fratranizing with Satan.”

http://www.temasekreview.com/2010/02/16/bu...comment-page-2/

Venerable Dhammika's experience of inter-faith dialogue sounds about right to me. Either dialogue simply looks for common ground and ends up with everyone just being comradely, or it "gets down to basics" and explores the cultural implications of different religious proclamations and practices in any community (the present pope's view).

Ramon Panikkar has written a lot about relationships between and among different religions. I quote from one of his admirers, Gerard Hall, SM, who speaks of diatopical hermeneutics as the basis for dialogical dialogue as a means of finding understanding of other religious views that do not assume the pre-understandings we bring to mono-cultural dialogue:

Hermeneutics, as the art or science of interpretation, has its origins in the reading of sacred texts. However, we may also apply hermeneutics to the reading and understanding of any texts, persons, cultures, religions or events. Taking Augustine's question--"what do I love when I love my God?"--, hermeneutics asks what do I know when I know another reality outside myself? It was Heidegger who suggested that we can only come to know something if we first have some degree of pre-understanding. This he called the hermeneutic circle. For the most part, western hermeneutical philosophy has focussed on mono-cultural understanding when some degree of pre-understanding can in fact be presumed. However, in an interreligious or intercultural context such pre-understanding that gives rise to the hermeneutic circle may well not exist. Hence, Panikkar's question: "how can we understand something that does not belong to our circle?" Classical hermeneutical theory is unable to answer this question.

This gives rise to the need for diatopical hermeneutics, literally, the art of coming to understanding "across places" (dia-topoi) or traditions which do not share common patterns of understanding and intelligibility.

Dialogical dialogue begins with the assumption that the other is also an original source of human understanding and that, at some level, persons who enter the dialogue have a capacity to communicate their unique experiences and understandings to each other. Dialogical dialogue is necessarily a risk or adventure in which participants seek to establish a common ground or circle of meaning in which this primordial sense of human relatedness will be a catalyst for intersubjective communication. It can proceed only on the basis of a certain trust in the "other qua other"--and even a kind of "cosmic confidence" in the unfolding of reality itself. But it should not--indeed cannot--assume a single vantage point or higher view outside the traditions themselves. The ground for understanding needs to be created in the space between the traditions through the praxis of dialogue.

http://dlibrary.acu.edu.au/research/theolo...ikkar.htm#_edn7

I doubt that committed believers are willing to engage in "risk" and "adventure" on the basis of "trust in the other" and "confidence in the unfolding of reality itself". True believers think they already know the reality. Their job as they see it is to keep the faith and defend it, not to open themselves up to a reality which is still unfolding. The essence of faith or religious belief is a refusal to accept things contrary to one's beliefs and fear that being open to other views may unsettle one's faith.

[fabianfred]

I doubt that committed believers are willing to engage in "risk" and "adventure" on the basis of "trust in the other" and "confidence in the unfolding of reality itself". True believers think they already know the reality. Their job as they see it is to keep the faith and defend it, not to open themselves up to a reality which is still unfolding. The essence of faith or religious belief is a refusal to accept things contrary to one's beliefs and fear that being open to other views may unsettle one's faith.

excellently put.......

[khaowong1]

I doubt that committed believers are willing to engage in "risk" and "adventure" on the basis of "trust in the other" and "confidence in the unfolding of reality itself". True believers think they already know the reality. Their job as they see it is to keep the faith and defend it, not to open themselves up to a reality which is still unfolding. The essence of faith or religious belief is a refusal to accept things contrary to one's beliefs and fear that being open to other views may unsettle one's faith.

excellently put.......

[Xangsamhua]

If I might extend this thread a little, I present these comments by Fr Andrew Hamilton SJ in his reflection on the upcoming Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne:

The wellsprings and justification for religious faith, and for other foundational views of life, are to be found in qualities of human experience that are not susceptible to large, knockdown and narrow arguments. Faith in God and in humanity, is rooted in experiences of wonder, questioning, desire and invitation that are delicate and not easily framed in simple argument.

Powerful arguments can and should be built for faith, but the experience on which they are built needs clarification, not codification; amplification, not reduction; ruminative conversation, not assertion.

In conversation we can tease out the subtleties of our intuitions, and the ways in which we account for the beauty and the complexities of our world. We can explore why people find religious faith persuasive, and also come to see how people put together their lives and their world without it.

This kind of conversation gives priority to personal reflection and to listening. It will be necessarily quiet and exploratory, no matter how strongly settled is the framework within which we live our lives. Like any conversation, it allows both partners to commend what they believe. But the commendation is done by allowing the truth to appear, and not by shouting it.

http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=19423

For Fr Hamilton, religious faith = theism, therefore in opposition to atheism. However, he says, both forms of "faith" are based on wonder and mystery and, therefore, there is much that each can learn from the other, as long as they choose to explore rather than contest. But where does a Buddhist stand in relation to all this. Not being a "theist", but nevertheless "religious" (if one has taken refuge in the Triple Gem and accepts the supernatural, or paranormal side of Buddhism), does the Buddhist stand aside from the dialogue between theists and non-theists? Do Buddhists have anything to learn from these discussions? Are they simply "atheists" a la Richard Dawkins et al or do they have a "religious faith" to offer either theists or non-theists?

Edited March 9, 2010 by Xangsamhua