alt Hacker NewsThanks for illustrating my point.
You didn't actually point to anything substantial; you kind of hand-waved at what you presumed "eastern religions" posit, but there are literally hundreds of eastern religions and philosophies that do in fact have very different attitudes towards the divine and basic metaphysics. The very first sutta of the Dīgha Nikāya--the Brahmajāla Sutta--has a section where the Buddha directly enumerates and engages with 62 of them present just in his neck of the world. Sectarianism, too, is as prevalent in the East as it is in the West. None of these things are monoliths. The world is large.
I honestly don't think you have the wisdom, the charity, or breadth of experience to understand or appreciate anything that I've written. And that's okay. You have a very real and meaningful investment in dismissing a priori the claims that I'm making, which is entirely understandable, especially for a Catholic who takes their faith seriously, as it would be for anyone else whose beliefs are jeopardized by implication. That's exactly the firewall that I'm talking about.
I don't expect the firewall to fail, in any case, so don't worry there. Catholicism is lindy. And if that firewall ever does fall and any of what I've written is integrated into the Standard Narrative, I'm sure Catholicism will also adjust to it, just like they've done every other time it has happened.
You seem to be responding to something I didn't say. I have no doubt that "there are literally hundreds of eastern religions and philosophies", or that the Buddha is reported as engaging with them.
In your previous post, you claimed something different:
>>> [T]here is almost 2,000 years of culture and the metaphysical beliefs of well-more than half of the human population predicated upon their beliefs being entirely unique and an off-shoot of Judaism and not a fundamentally different syncretic import from the east.
This is a different claim entirely.
Christianity is not 'a syncretic import from the east'. One way we know this is by looking at its differences with eastern ideas. What would first-century Christianity make of the denial of diachronic identity (the self is an illusion), or the denial of the idea that God is personal? You accuse me of 'hand waving'. I'm not sure where I do this. Am I wrong to claim that the ideas I listed are associated with the east? Does the undoubted fact that there are hundreds of eastern religions and philosophies undermine the claim?
Do you agree with my point that Christianity "was persecuted for three centuries precisely because it refused to be syncretic -- the Romans were happy to tolerate additions to their pantheon but couldn't abide Christianity's claims to exclusivity"?
There's quite a bit of mind-reading (in the CBT sense of the word) in your post that I don't really want to respond to because it doesn't advance the argument.