Tag: religion

“You are light as air & heavy as clouds”

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These lines are from my poem atheist become.

For me, a metaphor is what creates the illusion of something like God. They are concepts and nothing more. So they can be as light or as heavy as you can imagine. In the same way we can imagine that when we die we go to some place better. But do we? Is there some place to go? I ended the poem with but nothing will free you / from death and / to nowhere will you go to suggest perhaps the reason why we do imagine a heaven is precisely because the idea of nowhere to go is rather lonely. Atheists must overcome loneliness as they do not have something to comfort them as Christians do. It reminds of the line from Kafka’s novel, The Trial:

“It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.”

God/Word/Saussure

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In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (St John, Ch. 1, v. 1)

Perhaps this is the genius of the writer of these words. God is language. End of story.

But if we take Saussure to his word then words are just a system of difference. We can conclude that God is what everything else it is not. The word God must be empty, must be a container holding meaning only inasmuch as it is a concept, never to fully have presence, eternally is God marked with absence.

Why I am an atheist but not against religion

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As a person who looks at language for a living and have come to believe all of what we know and believe comes from a combination of experience, thought and language. 

Not matter where we look cultures have religion. We, as human being, like to make religion, as much as we like to make language or literature. We are different to other animals in our ability to do so in such a way. 

So I cannot be “against” religion, or language or literature. It is inherent in us to make religion, language, literature and the such. 

What I do have believe, though, is that we also have the same capacity to “see through” the need for religion, language, literature, etc. For whatever reason we have religion, language, literature, etc, we have to learn to deal with it as reasoned but critical beings in a physical universe. 

I have no direct knowledge of God

Warren Tang2 Comments

It took me a while to figure this out.

I cannot say that I have ever had direct knowledge of God. I have had notions of God pitched to me for as long as I can remember, but I have never had direct contact from him (if it is a him).

Christians may say I am not “chosen”. But I would rather think of it as maybe there isn’t God.

Buddhism has gods and whatnot in their “pantheon”, but they are imports from other religions and systems such as Hinduism, Taoism and Esoteric Buddhism. I, for the most part, ignore them but accept somehow gods were created to represent the teaching, as manifestations of these ideas, and that the concepts and ideas (the teachings) are more important than the gods. To me, this seems to be the healthier attitude to have than to believe (more often than not, blindly) in God or gods.

Is The Buddha a god?

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The Buddha was born a prince. His mother died soon after giving birth to him. So there is no claim of divinity of any kind. He was an ordinary man with ordinary problems just like you and me. And therefore he is not a god. Nor should he be worshipped as such.

Buddhist iconography was something which arose after his death. And temples are not places of worship. Both of these are created to help us understand his teaching, the dharma, which is we alone can liberate ourselves from unhappiness through attention to the nature of one’s body and mind.

This then means that Buddhism is not about faith but practice. The practice espoused was to look after the mind as much as we look after our body. This Buddhists do through meditation. Meditation does not have any special powers as such but only allows one to focus the mind to see clearly what the mind and body are. Some kind of basic understanding is necessary of course, but essentially it is that everything is impermanent, without self and suffering. Nothing including Buddhism lasts forever. That includes the self which many people cling on to. The self is an illusion. And that is perhaps the greatest of all roots of our suffering. Understand that this is what existence is then we can proceed to find the happiness which does not diminish.

How to host a world religion congress and become known to the world

Warren Tang1 Comment

I really love the BBC. They may have their scandals and problems but they are still world leaders in news reportage.

So Kazakhstan hosted a conference for world religions this week. Religious leaders from around the world gathered in this small former-Soviet country to talk about harmony and tolerance. Yet the BBC is nice enough to remind us that the host country has neither.

Undemocratic elections, strictly controlled state media and religious intolerance are some of the problems the host country is currently facing. Yet it chooses to host an event like this in the face of criticism. This is nothing new of course. Countries around the world play host these kinds of events all the time in the hope that their country will come out in the better light.

That is why we have postmodern theory – to expose these fraudsters. And I really do not know how these people face themselves in the mirror everyday. Just what do they see in themselves? Perhaps a nice clean “well-suited” image of themselves but not the ugly heart beneath the sleep’s clothes.

In the end it was nice to have the conferences of this type but sometimes I just wish we do them in places with more integrity. Or may be this was a message for revolution in a small country with its own problems? The door swings both ways I guess.