![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Not too long ago, possibly because I hadn't thought about the issue nearly enough, but possibly because I wanted for a particular set of people to like me, I said that I agreed with the statement that people from other religions didn't "have it", that Christianity is the Only Way To Truth. It's probably more of the latter, actually. Somebody wanted me to say some very specific things about what I "believed", thinking that there was only one right answer -- and I think they were ready to not accept me if I didn't say what they wanted, or at least agree with what they were asserting.
Crapful crapful crapful. A billion (Taoists/Buddhists/Hindus/Muslims/Sikhs/Hare Krishnas ...) can't have nothing important to say. Today my suspicion is that the divine speaks in many tongues. It might come across, sometimes, that I think [your] ritualized religion is silly -- and it definitely has that potential -- but at least in the abstract, in theory, I think that your personal way of doing and thinking about things is only silly in as far as you believe that it's Objectively Right.
So apparently in Hinduism, we have (among other classifications and subclassifications) the Bhakti Yoga and the Jnana Yoga, the latter of which is for people who tend to think in more abstract terms and like the idea of thinking of God/Brahman as "not this, nor this, nor ..." -- more of an ambiguously personal creative force with which one is ultimately trying to identify, because Brahman is underlyingly the same as Atman, your innermost self -- you're made in His image, but it's more of an == relationship instead of a dot-equals. The former goes in for the personalization, which is much closer to the traditional Christian viewpoint -- you're made in God's image, but he's at root Not You -- so He can be the object of love and devotion, because you like to think about People instead of abstract principles.
This is a really interesting distinction... and Hinduism apparently doesn't say that one of them is More Right (I suppose they're equally... layers of abstraction that people need because they Think Differently... so they're Equally Wrong, or more positively, Equally Right) -- you need both, and a bunch of other Yogas, because not everything works equally for different people. More Christians should drink down this idea -- because everybody comes from a different culture, and then within cultures, everybody learns to think differently.
The idea of Jnana Yoga is super-appealing to me, personally... but a lot of people are more... people-oriented, I suppose. At one point, a preacher I heard was saying that God's not some sort of impersonal, Star Wars-esque "Force" without personality... but, at the same time, He's supposed to be all ineffable and mysterious. So how are you supposed to think about God, then? Is He a particle, or is She a wave? Which has a more exalted meaning? What if, to me, people are less important than ideas, and I can't wrap my mind around a personality being the most important thing in the universe, and...
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Hrm... maybe we do have that idea...
Brown family? I retract my earlier statement: the Buddhists Have It too.
Crapful crapful crapful. A billion (Taoists/Buddhists/Hindus/Muslims/Sikhs/Hare Krishnas ...) can't have nothing important to say. Today my suspicion is that the divine speaks in many tongues. It might come across, sometimes, that I think [your] ritualized religion is silly -- and it definitely has that potential -- but at least in the abstract, in theory, I think that your personal way of doing and thinking about things is only silly in as far as you believe that it's Objectively Right.
So apparently in Hinduism, we have (among other classifications and subclassifications) the Bhakti Yoga and the Jnana Yoga, the latter of which is for people who tend to think in more abstract terms and like the idea of thinking of God/Brahman as "not this, nor this, nor ..." -- more of an ambiguously personal creative force with which one is ultimately trying to identify, because Brahman is underlyingly the same as Atman, your innermost self -- you're made in His image, but it's more of an == relationship instead of a dot-equals. The former goes in for the personalization, which is much closer to the traditional Christian viewpoint -- you're made in God's image, but he's at root Not You -- so He can be the object of love and devotion, because you like to think about People instead of abstract principles.
This is a really interesting distinction... and Hinduism apparently doesn't say that one of them is More Right (I suppose they're equally... layers of abstraction that people need because they Think Differently... so they're Equally Wrong, or more positively, Equally Right) -- you need both, and a bunch of other Yogas, because not everything works equally for different people. More Christians should drink down this idea -- because everybody comes from a different culture, and then within cultures, everybody learns to think differently.
The idea of Jnana Yoga is super-appealing to me, personally... but a lot of people are more... people-oriented, I suppose. At one point, a preacher I heard was saying that God's not some sort of impersonal, Star Wars-esque "Force" without personality... but, at the same time, He's supposed to be all ineffable and mysterious. So how are you supposed to think about God, then? Is He a particle, or is She a wave? Which has a more exalted meaning? What if, to me, people are less important than ideas, and I can't wrap my mind around a personality being the most important thing in the universe, and...
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Hrm... maybe we do have that idea...
Brown family? I retract my earlier statement: the Buddhists Have It too.
