Homestar Runner Wiki Forum

Noted and retracted.

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catholic...uh roman catholic. i go to an italian church.

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its friday night and im home all night (all night)
and saturday night doesnt look much better (oooahhoo)
and nobody likes me coz im a loser (hey! you're a loser)
and everything is going to go my way someday, someday
everything is gonna go my way someday

the dorkness speaks.

IJ:

My story had nothing to do with proofs (or lack thereof) for the existence of God, but about the impractical nature of scholastic philosophy (from whence comes Occam's Razor). Maybe I should have been a little more specific in my post.

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Hm, okay, fair enough. But it did give me the kick I needed to be able to accurately describe what I will from now on call the Which-Horse Dilemma.

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I'm never going to get to post in this thread, am I? It seems like every opinion I have has already been posted by Jones. I guess that's why they call him Interruptor.

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I'm a Methodist. That's all I'm going to say.

Hey, Kef, I have a question for you.

Pardon my ignorance, but does a Buddhist actually worship Buddha, or just follow his teachings?

I mean...as a Christian, I consider myself a friend of God and Christ...is it the same way with Buddhism?

"Buddha" means simply "enlightened one"; anybody can be a buddha, including you and me. The Buddha refers to Siddhartha Gautama (who, contrary to what some people think, is not the jolly fat guy: that would be Hotei). He was not the first to attain enlightenment, but he was the first to teach about it -- or, at least, he was the first whose teachings were preserved. This, combined with the effectiveness of his teaching, is why we hold the Buddha in such high regard: without him, far fewer of us would understand the Way. To answer your question: no, we do not worship the Buddha.

Of course it's difficult for one person to speak for an entire religion, but I think in any case, more Hindus would worship the Buddha than Buddhists. Surprising, huh? I didn't know that either, until I did a web search for "worship buddha" one day just to see how many people think we do worship the Buddha. Once again we can sing the praises of search engines...

- Kef

Buddhism leaves your options open, so you can disseminate your worship elsewhere. Like Keira Knightley. Or the severe hottie I share an office with.

Thank god it's not Monday anymore, yesterday sucked. Er, wait. Thank Keira.

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I remember once I was gambling (I was rash and stupid then, using the Martingale system at a blackjack table...never, ever, ever, ever, ever do this), I was deeply in the hole, and finally I won a hand and said, "Praise the Lord!......and I'm an atheist!..."

Heh, I do say things like "Thank God", "Oh God", etc. all the time, though. It's just a habit.

- Kef

So, it's not so much a personal relationship, or a "one on one" religion with a deity, than it is a way of thinking or a philosophy?

Exactly! Although many would say it's still spiritual -- it's just spiritual in a different way. Instead of connecting with God, many Buddhists feel they connect with everyone and everything.

- Kef

Yep.

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Pardon all my questions. But I gots more.

So, your motivation is enlightenment. I think I understand that.

What is enlightenment? When I think of it, I think of an advanced state of apathy, where you need nothing, and really don't care.

I'm not throwing stones, I'm just tryin' to understand.

I understand that you're not "throwing stones", but this seems like an exceedlingly negative point of view.

Anyway, the Wikipeda answered this question pretty well for me. It mentions the "supreme Buddha" mode of enlightenment , which seems to be the antithesis of your analysis.



(Emphasis mine.)

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I could try and tell you what enlightenment is, but words cannot express it. What I can tell you, however, is that you and I have both experienced it unknowingly. Enlightenment is all around us, within us, without us, in every moment. However, experiencing it all the time is no easy task. Enlightenment, at its most basic, is mindfulness, starting with constant awareness of everything. From there, in my (imperfect and fallible) understanding, the rest falls into place.

(EDIT: And yeah, Interruptor Jones' quote is, from what I know, pretty accurate.)

- Kef

I see...next question...what is "dhamma"

And what is "Samsāra"

Thanks for being so patient with me. I'm just trying to see another perspective

Kef might be able to tell you, but everything I could tell you would come from Wikipedia and Google, you might as well cut out the middleman and do the search yourself.

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I thought about doing the same, but I prefer to hear a personal explanation than an encyclopedic definition. I'll probably check it out anyway.

J.

Dhamma and samsāra? They are Indian words.

But if you'd like a non-Zen response (though a real Zen master would likely hit me for trying to be Zen), "dhamma", or in Sanskrit, "dharma", is impossible to precisely define. Dharma can refer to anything from the "right" way of life to the metaphorical "mind seal" that is "transferred" when one attains enlightenment. (By this, I mean, if I had instructed you, and thus you attained enlightenment from my teachings, I would "transmit" the "mind seal" to you, and thus you would "receive the dharma". Though in truth the mind seal is trasmitted all the time by all things; our mind just has to be conditioned to "catch" it.) To put it succinctly, though, the dharma is the Way.

I don't really know anything about samsāra, because it is not a part of Zen. It seems to refer to, as Wikipedia puts it, "Indian philosophical traditions", specifically reincarnation, which I do not really believe in (in the same way I "don't believe" in God; I'm still willing to allow the possibility, but find it silly to speculate in any case).

- Kef

This is pretty deep stuff. I used to get into a kind of "Christian meditation" in my younger days, but it really was a little different than what Zen meditation would be, I think.

hm. I wonder if there are any LDS people here who are mature enough in their faith to answer some questions for me...

What "Zen meditation" is depends a bit on what sect of Zen you practice -- though you needn't necessarily choose only one sect's practices. Soto Zen is the most popular sect, and meditation (which I must admit I don't do often enough) is simply sitting facing towards a wall in the lotus position: left foot on the right thigh, and vice versa. (If you can't manage it, one uses the half-lotus or Burmese. I've always had flexible legs and can maintain the full lotus comfortably enough.) It is technically proper to rest the buttocks on a cusion called a zafu, which sits on a special mat called a zabuton, upon which the legs also rest; I just use the floor, though, having no zafu, and pillows make a very poor approximation.

But that's pretty much it. Shunyru Suzuki writes in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, "These forms are not a means of obtaining the right state of mind. To take the posture itself [...] is the right state of mind [...]" Indeed, focusing on anything, on obtaining any state of mind, or attaining any particular objective, or anything else, is contrary to proper practice. You must blank your mind and yet you must not concentrate on doing so. It's simple, but it's very hard! It will happen if you relax and wait long enough, but it is not so easy at first. It certainly isn't for me.

- Kef

I can try (not to be mature, but to answer the questions)

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Actually, I am going to be taking off for the evening. I will however, check back in the morning (9:00am mountain time), and see what has been posted. Sorry about that. (I forgot I was going to a play tonight, and need to be leaving shortly)

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I can also try to answer some questions too. I'm LDS as well.

I just watched a show on the Science channel about the moon. They said that the moon is gradually going farther and farther away from earth, eventually leaving earth entirely. They then showed how earth would react without the stabalizing affect of the moon. The result: climates changing every month. In this program they also said that if there was never a moon, there wouldn't be humans. If you had gone back in time before earth was formed and moved one dust particle the distance of less than half of the widh of a human hair, It would, millions of years later, affect earth in some way (in this case, no moon). There was, the show said, andother planet that barely collided into earth and formed a moon. now, since you moved that dust speck, it could cause the other planet to miss earth entirely, crashing into mercury instead. What I am getting at: Either there was (and still is) some force at work or we're really,really lucky. Also, the world will end, eventually, and not neccicarily(sp?) by the sun running out of fuel and implloding.

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I think the above post is more speculation than science...

Sure it is, but don't all scientific theories begin as speculation?

Not that I agree with the theory - I'm no scientist! But I do believe in God. Think about this: I once had a biology professor who said that the reason scientists will probably never be able to bring people back to life is because science cannot recreate that spark, or soul, if you will, that makes us human (ie; you can restart people's hearts, if they haven't been dead for too long, but they won't be "themselves" without brain activity). IMHO, this is as good an arguement for God as any - where does that spark of life come from? Now, I know my oponents will say that perhaps we haven't discovered that part of science yet, and perhaps we haven't; maybe there is a scientific explanation for it that we have yet to find.

We can't be afraid to acknowledge both sides of an argument - that's how you lose an argument!

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Kupo, what does that have to do with this discussion?



Who are your "opponents"? This is a discussion, not a competition. I don't feel as though anybody is anybody else's "opponent" here.

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