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13 May 2008 12:30 pm
Neural Buddhists
Another excellent column by David Brooks this morning, even though his effortless list of neuroscience reading made me feel as if I should crawl back into my hole of ignorance. But this view of faith in modernity is a powerful one:
Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of
elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with
love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences
at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.
My italics. The question embedded here is the momentous one, it seems to me. Why should God be love? As someone never able to shake off belief in God, I find it much more challenging to believe that God is benign. Why should God not be evil? That, to my mind, is the greatest revelation of Jesus - and it has to be revelation. Deus Caritas Est. Buddhists intuit this, which is why the overlaps between Buddhism and Christianity have been so compelling to many in recent years.
I could go on, but I obviously have some reading to do ... Derb's two farthings are here.
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Science and Mysticism
Excerpt: David Brooks drew some attention with an op-ed arguing that sciences biggest challenge to religion will not be atheism but instead what he calls neural Buddhism. If you survey the literature (and Id recommend books by Newberg, Daniel J. Siegel,
Weblog: Greg Sanders
Tracked: May 14, 2008 12:57:28 PM
