The end of theism.

[marylandblue]

192. I think I didn't make myself clear

I do have some knowledge of Buddhism, but clearly not as much as you do. My point was that in the West, we equate religion with theism, and commonly there is a sharp distinction between God and creation. But As you pointed out, Buddhism has images that are symbols, not gods. Nonetheless, they have the trappings of gods, which creates confusion in Western minds. Westerners are also confused about things like animism and shamanism, where there may be various sorts of spirits that may or may not be gods.

This thread, and others like it, suffer from this equation of theism with religion and makes too sharp a boundary between religion and other types of practices. But really, if we have an inborn tendency, it's towards certain forms of religions behavior - rituals, symbolism, story telling etc.

Think of what happens at a graduation ceremony. We put on symbolic robes, a crazy square hat with a tassel, and put the tassel on one side of the hat. Then we go through a ritual, people give graduation speeches (which sound like sermons), we receive a fancy document and move the tassel to the other side. Thus we have graduated and we celebrate. If you didn't come to the graduation ceremony at all, you still would have graduated, but most of us go to the ceremony anyway because we, or our families perhaps, would feel like we missed something.

This has nothing to do with belief, but is, in effect, a religious-type behavior and in my view, comes from the same basic psychological processes as religious ceremonies do. I think this is inborn because we tend to find meaning in such ceremonies, even atheists.

Is that more clear? I hope so.