A Partial Diary of the Collective Buddha

Artur Ferreira da Silva artsilva at mail.eunet.pt
Tue May 7 11:45:29 PDT 2002


At 08:29 07-05-2002 -0800, Julie Smith wrote:

>I don't know what "non-manicheist Christian" means.  I guess I have
>something new to learn today.

In Manicheanism the world is divided in good and bad or even in good and
evil - god and evil persons, good and evil peoples, good and evil nations,
etc. The ones that don't think like me or don't practice my faith
are...evil. The other characteristic is that the "goods" are good in
everything (even when they do evil things, like bombing the others
countries) and the "bads" are bad in everything (even when they do or say
good things).

In "manicheist Christianity" the other (evil) can be, depending on the
moment, people from Islam,  the atheists, the Judaists, the communists, etc.

The French epistemologist Bachelard wrote many years ago that science
needed to be "psycanalyzed", in the sense that many scientific concepts
(like work, power, etc) were still anthropomorphic and pre-scientific. (no,
Bachelard was NOT a marxist, neither a freudian - that would make him evil
to many manic heists...).

Similarly I think that the acts of many "people of faith" should be
"psycanalysed" in the same sense - we would discover that a lot of evil is
normally covert by "faith" and "love" (and I have not wrote "men of faith"
to avoid that you could think that I was referring only to American
Catholic priests and bishops...).

In your answer, dear Julie, there was something that confused me - your
endorsement of the phrase "Divine Operating Plan". Believe me: only in
capitalist America could such phrase have been invented...

(Maybe the problem of the world, assuming that a God exists or ever existed
- which I doubt - is that the "Divine Strategic Plan" (which was good) has
been transformed in a bad "Tactic Plan" and in a worst "Operating Plan" by
Himself or by man and women that honestly thought (and still think) they
are following His plan.

Being a convicted atheist, that once had a strong Christian education,
there is something I would like to say to politics everywhere and to many
other people, including in this list - please, when you want to talk about
Him, please consider thoroughly if you are not using His name in vain.

That's why I prefer to ear about the Taoist tradition or even the Buddhist
tradition - no God is present in the words that may or not be present in
the actions. After all, Sharon and Bush are men of faith, aren't they?
Aren't they?

Abracos

Artur

PS: it's interesting that your adress is @mosquitonet. Do you know waht is
a "mosquito" in Portuguese?

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