Reply To: Religion acted as a hindrance to understand Buddha Dhamma

#51130
pathfinder
Participant

I reflected that as long as you have a believe system, you can typically reason out anything based on that believe system. 

I was reading a book on questions which non believers typically asked christians, it is written by a christian.

One of them was “why is there good and bad in the world where there is god?” And his answer is

  • we dont know for sure what is good and bad, his divine wisdom is greater than our wordly one
  • so the bad can actually be helping us in god’s view

So you can see that they are able to answer questions, somewhat logically, if you accept their world system. Same for the good and bad problem in buddhism, we explain using kamma. Likewise for science, they would explain it with physical means. Eg before i came across this site when people tell me about ghosts or paranormal things I would explain it with physical explanations, eg maybe he was hallucinating, not enough sleep, so happen that the lamp stop working etc. and that’s because my believe system is as such.

That’s why it is extremely difficult to see the other view as logical, once we believe in a system, we can be quite stuck because all our explanations are satisfactory as long as we believe in the system mechanics. eg for buddhism is kamma, paticca samuppada etc, in christianity it is god and christ. 

Would like to take this time to remind ourselves that we must not be complacent and believe that we have found the absolute truth! That is not to say i don’t believe in the Buddha, I do, but we must remind ourselves that we could well be in the trap of our believe systems just like anyone else and any religion! And even if we believe in the Buddha, we could well be wrong with the interpretations of his teachings.

Which is why we must keep an open mind, not reject opinions and try to see their side, and at the same time rigorously investigate our own.

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