It might seem odd but I, a convinced atheist, have recently completed a 10-day fast based on the Hindu festival of Navratri, which is being celebrated this week. These days, if we limit what we eat, it is almost certainly because we are trying to lose weight, detox or realise some kind of health benefit. The idea that we might seek to forgo certain foods for moral improvement seems bizarrely anachronistic.
ReadThe suggestion is that we don’t need hope at all. All we need is a purpose for our action, a purpose that need not be conceived of as a hope. When people plan to, try to, aim to, work to, they are taking steps to achieve a desired goal. But when someone says they merely hope to, nine times out of ten what that tells you is that they have not yet set about doing what needs to be done to realise that hope.
ReadLooking for good, wise political leadership from the Dalai Lama, or any other religious leader, is like looking for the next Jimi Hendrix on Britain’s Got Talent: you might just succeed, but you’d be a fool to expect it.
ReadHerein contains what we might call the paradox of revelation. As its meaning makes clear, you can’t have a “revelation” that tells everyone what they already know. However, having established a religion on those revelations, the teachings revealed through them become non-negotiable, and the ecclesiastical authorities become the arbiters of their interpretation. And so that means no further revelation is admissible if it contradicts what is already believed. Revelation of radical new truths, if accepted as real, thus makes future revelation of radical new truths impossible. To put it another way, what was absolutely valid for the establishing of a religion becomes by necessity invalid once it already exists.
ReadRELIGION IN ENGLAND Here is a podcast of a fifteen minute presentation I gave on religion in ordinary life in[…]
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