Comment 237 by irate_atheist

@Marcus - Why do you, an intelligent decent caring thoughtful individual, have anything whatsoever to do with this utter tosh?

First I take it that you are not taking issue with my analysis which the best of my knowledge is not tosh. It’s a very good question, to answer, I will begin with a story, not mine Thomas Merton’s. In the months before his untimely, accidental death, Merton, a Trappist monk, paid a visit to the Buddhist shrine at Polonnaruwa in Sri Lanka. Here, huge figures of the Buddha have been carved out of the rock-face. Merton later wrote in his diary:

Looking at these figures I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious. The thing about all this is that there is no puzzle, no problem, and really no ‘mystery.’ All problems are resolved and everything is clear, simply because what matters is clear. The rock, all matter, all life, is charged with dharmakaya (the essence of all beings). . . everything is emptiness and everything is compassion. I don’t know when in my life I have ever had such a sense of beauty and spiritual validity running together in one aesthetic illumination. I know and have seen what I was obscurely looking for. I don’t know what else remains but I have now seen and have pierced through the surface and have got beyond the shadow and the disguise.

I recognise the experience, not so profound, and his subjective experience is something I can only glimpse through his writing, but similar things have happened to me. It is enough to convince me, for the time being at least, that this circle I inhabit is not entirely vicious.

I think that we are in a very non dogmatic religious era, religious institutions don't like that, but they powerless, thank goodness, to do anything about it.

This of course may well be tosh.