Made a new friend at the Interfaith Dialogue last Friday... Mohammad from Damansara was one of the audience who made the final comment from the floor which I thought wrapped up nicely the whole night's enlightening discussioins.
He said our human hearts will never have peace or 'puas hati' unless we answer the fundamental questions in life ie
"Where do I come from?" (origin)
"Why am I here?" (purpose)
"Where am I going?" (destiny)
John Chung reminded us not to forget: "Who am I? (identity)"
The resounding note at the end was the call of evaluate *rationally* the various religious claims. Mr Tan, the Pali scholar, echoed it heartily while Bro Shah Kirit wrapped it up by saying "In the end, it's not what Buddhism says... what Islam says... what Christians say... We must discover what this one God says".
The underlying assumption is Truth is knowable and can be discovered, not constructed by religious traditions. Except for the Hindu speaker, who believes in an ineffable Oneness (supernatural force) which cannot be imagined or known, and all hindu images of God are man-made concepts, not 'real'. (We think he sounds like derrida)
Adding on to wat Jack said about the Buddhist presentation, he related the story of how Buddha was asked if he could prove God's existence.
He replied, "Could you disprove the existence of God?"
In essence, I think the Buddhist view is agnostic about God while homocentric (also atheistic) in practice. That means, I dunno if God exists (no way of proving either way) but I gotta rely on human effort for improvement anyway so it doesn't really matter...
The strength of it is its avoidance of abstract, metaphysical knots and try to be as practical as possible i.e. self effort, developing the mind (manussa)
A top question for Buddhism is "If no God, what is morality?"
the speaker anticipated this famous CS Lewis line... but didn't have time to go in detail. But I saw in the slides the words "I CHOOSE!"...
So morality is not something commanded or demanded by a Higher Lawgiver, but something you choose after you think about it and search your heart and test by experience and make it your own values.
But imho, that doesnt really answer the question: Morality is choosing what is good. It's not choosing what we want.
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