Livre d&#39;Or

I liked the "I'm going into hospital, but only Christians can pray for me because the rest of you don't count" article. I don't think that even at my most evangelical I ever managed to think that. I'd have a go at using my evangelical Bible-foo to "prove" him wrong if I had the time.

While I think that sort of Christianity is quite mad, there's a strange sort of honesty about it, I suppose.

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coalescent.livejournal.com

Someone else wrote a response (http://burntelectrons.org/?itemid=33) for you. :)

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liv

only Christians can pray for me because the rest of you don't count
It's funny, but I'm actually more comfortable with that than with Christians asking me to pray for them or offering to pray for me. It seems to me quite true that Christians have a different understanding of God from mine (as far as it's possible to have an understanding of God at all, obviously). And there's a whole load of just basic ignorance. I don't know how prayer works in Christianity, and I do know that the Judaism I'm familiar with has very little tradition of spontaneous prayer and I'm not happy with praying for someone when they request it, except in a defined formal context.

Of course, a big problem is that it's very hard to say 'no' in this sort of situation. Whereas Gerv at least knows he's being rude and is ready for people to argue with him about their prayers not counting. It's when he starts justifying exactly why he thinks non-Christians' prayers don't count that he starts to alienate me.

'd have a go at using my evangelical Bible-foo to "prove" him wrong if I had the time
I hope you'll be kind to him. I would feel really guilty if this post led to people attacking Gerv, who is a good friend and a good person.

While I think that sort of Christianity is quite mad, there's a strange sort of honesty about it, I suppose.
Gerv is very honest, not at all stupid, and I think a lot of his views do follow logically if you accept his initial premises. Liberal fluffy religion is a lot harder to justify philosophically, I think. (And that category includes the principles that I myself follow, mind you.)

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I don't know how prayer works in Christianity

If you pray for something and it happens, God answered your prayer. If it doesn't happen, it wasn't God's Will. :-)

Coming out of an evangelical tradition, I'd not considered people from traditions which don't much go in for private prayer. I'm sure there are Christians who don't do the private, spontaneous prayer as much as evangelicals do. Evangelicals would cite the preamble to a certain famous prayer for reasons why private prayer was good (the "pagans" in the NIV's translation are the Gentiles, amusingly). One can go on at length about Protestantism's Enlightenment individualism, "personal relationship with Jesus" and "Christians are all priests" theology, but I won't do that just now.

When I were an evangelical, I thought that Christians, Jews and Muslims were reaching for the same God, although I of course thought that that Jews and Muslims had got some things wrong. Hence my surprise at Gerv's posting. I have heard Christians say similar things before, but rarely, and I can see where he might get his argument from (oddly enough, from the evangelical understanding of what the Temple sacrificial system was about), but it it sort of seems to go against the spirit of something like Acts 11:Cornelius is a God-fearer, that is, sympathetic to monotheism but not a convert to Judaism, and God hears him, after all.

If I do get round to posting, I wouldn't be rude. After all, I'm not at all convinced there is a God, so whose prayers are heard is something of a "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" debate.

Liberal fluffy religion is a lot harder to justify philosophically, I think.

Yes: that's partly why I didn't end up there, I think: a lot of the liberal Christians I encountered were annoyingly woolly.

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pseudomonas.livejournal.com

Evangelicals would cite the preamble to a certain famous prayer for reasons why private prayer was good

But that's private as in non-communal, and not private as in non-liturgical - on the contrary, the text of the prayer is prescribed.

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Hmm... it's not clear whether the words themselves are intend to be prescribed here, or if it's not a rule, more of a guideline. The church has traditionally adopted the words themselves as liturgy, but also used it as a starting place for other prayers.

Some of the early Gentile Christians are keen on things like praying in tongues. This seems to mean praying in a language they don't understand, and which is seen as a spiritual gift, althogh I've never been very clear whether what the modern Charismatic movement calls speaking in tongues is the same thing as what was going on in the 1st century. In any case, tongues strikes me as the ultimate in extemporeaneous prayer. Paul has to tell them to moderate themselves when doing so in meetings, although he doesn't seem to completely disapprove of the practice. I'm not sure what Jesus would have thought about this: it does sound a bit like the Gentile babbling he refers to in the Matthew passage (if you're an evangelical, of course, there can be no disagreement between Jesus and Paul so there's no problem).

I found an interesting page on the history of the prayer and the variant versions found in Matthew and Luke's gospels.

From: (Anonymous)

Interesting point about Cornelius, actually...

Exactly how one reconciles God's predestination with the need to seek Him is one of Those Difficult Questions; but if one argues that God does hear the prayers of those seeking Him only as least as far as he then reveals himself to them, what happened to Cornelius could fall into that basket.

My point in the original blog posting wasn't really addressing such edge cases; it was more that prayers to Vishnu, Allah, The Earth Mother and general fuzzy warm feelings were all equally unlikely to have any effect on my condition.

Gerv

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liv

I think the question is when the watershed was, to an extent. In Jesus' lifetime, it was presumably acceptable to be Jewish or to be a monotheist. One could not be expected to believe that Jesus had died for one's sins before this event had actually happened!

Immediately after the Passion seems to be a more borderline case, and this is clearly the time of Acts. There were still at this time an awful lot of people, Cornelius included, who had never heard the Gospel, since the disciples were only just starting to spread Christianity. I believe that even in modern times there's a difference in attitude towards people who have never heard of Christianity, versus those who have heard of it but deliberately rejected Jesus. The people posting on Gerv's blog clearly come into the latter category.

So the question is, if you assume accepting Jesus as Lord and Saviour is necessary for salvation, when did it become necessary? The Cornelius story seems to teach that being a well-intentioned Jew or being a well-intentioned gentile are morally equivalent, at least at the time of Acts. At that time, both groups had a status somewhere below actual believing Christians, but they were likely to turn into believing Christians once they encountered the Gospel, it's assumed. In modern times Jews and gentiles are still morally equivalent: they are both damned because they have rejected Jesus. Of course, they could change their fate at any time by converting. But it seems like the onus of presumption has shifted since the time of Acts.

God does hear the prayers of those seeking Him only as least as far as he then reveals himself to them
So, theoretically, someone who was sincerely praying to God for you to recover from your operation might receive, by Grace, inspiration to understand that only by praying as a Christian could their prayers have any effect? This would seem to argue against telling people not to pray for you, IMO. Though perhaps you would argue that if they are praying to a false god, they are by definition not praying sincerely?

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liv

If you pray for something and it happens, God answered your prayer. If it doesn't happen, it wasn't God's Will. :-)
But is there any supposed merit in trying to pray for things that are God's Will? Like, is it a problem if you pray for so-and-so to suffer horribly because he annoyed you? Are you encouraged to pray for material or trivial stuff?

I thought that Christians, Jews and Muslims were reaching for the same God
I think that's actually a very tricky one. I am reasonably happy that Jews and Muslims are talking about the same God. The two traditions are so clearly have common roots, and so much of the same language is used.

Whether the Christian God is the same seems to me a much more fraught question. Although there is the same common tradition, I'm fairly certain that Jesus is not the God that Jews worship, because God, in my tradition, is emphatically not a human being or any corporeal entity. Obviously part of the point of Christianity is believing that Jesus is God, so if Jesus is God to the Christians, then then the Christians can't mean the same thing that I mean when they use the word God. So I can really see where Gerv is coming from on that one.

I don't think you can get out of this by arguing that God-the-Father is the same God that Jews worship, even though He is explicitly described as such in the NT. Because if God-the-Father is God and Jesus is not God, then God and Jesus must be two separate individuals, which doesn't lead you to orthodox Christianity in any way.

That doesn't mean I think Christianity is wrong, though. But then I'm a fluffy liberal and I don't go in for telling other people their beliefs are wrong.

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But is there any supposed merit in trying to pray for things that are God's Will?

Well, Jesus does include that "thy will be done" bit in the Lord's Prayer, so it's clearly something Christians are supposed to do.

Like, is it a problem if you pray for so-and-so to suffer horribly because he annoyed you? Are you encouraged to pray for material or trivial stuff?

Praying for someone to suffer horribly would seem to go against the whole "but I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" thing. My reading of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew chapters 5 to 7) is that Jesus thinks people shouldn't worry about material things ("consider the lillies of the field" and all that), but contemporary Christians certainly don't see it as a problem to pray about them.

Same goes for trivial things. There's a strand of thought in Christianity which says that Christians have what I guess is a shockingly familiar relationship to the deity. Jesus calls God Abba (familiar form, something like "Dad", but you probably know this because the Hebrew is the same, ISTR), and that made enough of an impression on early Christianity that Paul quotes the Aramiac word to his Greek-speaking Gentile readers in Galatians 4. If you're a Christian, God is your Dad and you can tell him when you've had a bad day. :-)

I've never been too clear about the Trinity myself. It seems impossible to say anything about it without falling into some heresy or other. There were lots of competing Christologies in the early church. The final formalisation of it seems to have come about because Constantine told the church to sort their lives out and Arius lost out. To me, Arius's scheme sounds a bit more acceptable to Muslims and Jews, since in it Jesus is God's agent, and certain divine attributes belong to him, but he's not the same substance as God. For the sake of world peace and all that, it's a shame Arius didn't win, I suppose. There are sects of Christianity which do not believe Jesus was God, even ones like the Christadelphians who believe the Bible is inerrant. It's fun to wheel Christadelphians out for evangelicals...

I'm not sure that according to the NT, the God in OT = God-the-Father identification is actually made, since some NT authors believe Jesus was around at the creation or very shortly afterwards (John, famously, but also whoever wrote the unsigned Letter to the Hebrews, and also Paul (or whoever wrote Colossians)). Rather, what I suppose makes it easy for Christians to think that they come from a similar tradition to Jews is that Christians can believe that Jesus was around from the start but that there are only hints of this in the Jewish scriptures until Jesus actually shows up, whereas from a Jewish perspective this is appropriating God and bolting on something new and contrary to what God is like.

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Because if God-the-Father is God and Jesus is not God, then God and Jesus must be two separate individuals.

Ah, there is no God but God, and Jesus is His Prophet!
;-)

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liv

Cornelius is a God-fearer, that is, sympathetic to monotheism but not a convert to Judaism, and God hears him, after all.
That's a very interesting story, thanks for pointing to it! I think that the concept of a God-fearing gentile (in more modern language, an ethical monotheist) works a lot better in Judaism than it does in Christianity. Because we explicitly don't have the Unique Salvation issue.

It seems like part of what that story is doing is making a point to those Jews who think that gentiles may be righteous and holy and acceptable to God, but they're kind of smelly all the same, and we'd rather not associate with them. Which unfortunately is not an attitude that died out in the first century.

There's also the whole issue of defining Christianity as something separate from Judaism, something that is open to non-Jews as long as they accept Jesus. That's pretty much a non-issue nowadays, since it is fairly generally agreed by now that Christianity is not a branch of Judaism.

So I'm not sure how your Cornelius example can be applied in a contemporary context.

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The position of Gentile Christians was a really contentious issue for the early church. Peter seems happy with the idea in that passage in Acts, but later Paul records a stand up row with Peter, who had come under the influence of the Jerusalem church run by James (whose own Epistle in the NT famously says people are saved by deeds and not by faith alone). The whole of Galatians is a fuming flame from Paul against the idea that Gentile converts to Christianity should be circumcised, and against the Jewish Christians who'd told the Galatians this (who, Paul says, should just go the whole way and emasculate themselves). Paul is something of an enigma to me: scholarship seems divided between those who think Greek influences had caused him to abandon his Jewishness, and those (like Tom Wright) who think that he was engaged in a "critique from within", a radical re-interpretation of what God's plan for Israel was. I wonder what would have become of Christianity without Paul.

Anyway. I suppose my application was that Cornelius was neither a Jew nor a Christian but was asking God for something as best he knew how. I suppose that it's harder to apply that to moderns who probably have heard about Christianity than to people at that time who hadn't, since it's pretty clear that such people are supposed to recognise Christianity and convert when given the opportunity. Still, by "the spirit" of the story, I mean the idea that it is risky to limit your ideas of who is and is not acceptable, since you may be in for a surprise.

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liv

If I do get round to posting, I wouldn't be rude
I didn't imagine you would, really! I was just a bit worried that I didn't want my link to Gerv's blog to be interpreted as an open invitation for all my friends list to go and tell him, however politely, exactly why they have problems with his beliefs!

After all, I'm not at all convinced there is a God, so whose prayers are heard is something of a "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" debate.
I can see that, but I do think that the question of whether Christians are worshipping the same God as other monotheists, or people of entirely different religions, is still an interesting one. It might be that they're all wrong and they're all worshipping a completely imaginary construct, but is it the same imaginary construct?

a lot of the liberal Christians I encountered were annoyingly woolly.
A lot of liberals of any stripe are annoyingly woolly; they tend to annoy me slightly less than intellectually lazy fundamentalists, but I'm not entirely unbiased. I have met a fair number of liberal Christians who are far from woolly, though. I think the sort of average stance for Jews is probably a bit more liberal than for Christians, because of the non-proselytizing thing, but the same applies within Judaism; some people are liberal because they have vaguely fluffy feelings and want to be nice to eachother, and some are liberal because they've really thought it through and reconciled the philosophical issues with liberalism to their own satisfaction.

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I can see that, but I do think that the question of whether Christians are worshipping the same God as other monotheists, or people of entirely different religions, is still an interesting one. It might be that they're all wrong and they're all worshipping a completely imaginary construct, but is it the same imaginary construct?
It would seem to me that the majority of Christians don't think that they're worshipping the same God (for reasons given elsewhere).

I don't know what to believe to be honest so I'm probably best classified as a weak atheist (http://www.wikipedia.com/atheist). I used to be a 'foaming at the mouth evangelical' (I jest ;0) but at some point I forgot why I believed what I did and decided to leave the shaky foundations I was on and wander into the mists of agnosticism. Since then I've found much that seems disasteful (http://www.livejournal.com/users/robhu/18301.html) about my former beliefs.

I don't think I'd have a particular interest in religion at this point in my life if it weren't for my background in evangelicalism. My previous beliefs mean that I sometimes go to sleep thinking that the firey furnaces of hell are lying in wait for me. I'd like to at least know whether Christianity is true, if only to aid in my sleep.

A lot of liberals of any stripe are annoyingly woolly...
I wish I were able to enjoy such a viewpoint. Religion is something that is quite interesting, and I have found that the more liberal types tend to be very friendly. I cannot afford such a luxury as just thinking about Christianity results in a kind of fear that the most unspeakable things imaginable may one day occur to me just because I didn't know what to believe anymore.

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is it the same imaginary construct?

Hmm... I'm not sure any two people's imaginary constructs can be the same. If God is imaginary, then everyone's equally right, or equally wrong, depending on how you think about it. I suppose what I was doing was addressing the question using the evangelical Christian model which I still have in my head (although it's not running all the time, as it were, these days). That model looks at Judaism and Islam and says that Jews are zealous for the Lord, but their zeal is not from knowledge (the chapter before Paul's "all Israel will be saved" statement, which you should memorise to ward off evangelicals :-), and, although the Bible doesn't address it specifically for obvious reasons, I think it's reasonable to extend that to Muslims. But it doesn't work the other way round, because religions tend not to like being told they've been superceded (I remember getting into extended arguments with a Bahai on uk.religion.christian for that reason, since they believe they have superceded Islam and Christianity: I remember finding him completlely infuriating).

Some people are liberal because they have vaguely fluffy feelings and want to be nice to eachother, and some are liberal because they've really thought it through and reconciled the philosophical issues with liberalism to their own satisfaction.

I was probably being a little unfair to liberal Christians. People like

cathedral_life are certianly not woolly (although I'm not sure if she identifies as liberal, either: labels are always tricky). As I say at the end of the recently completed "losing my religion" essay, what keeps me from liberal Christianity is that it seems to be an uphill struggle to maintain any sort of faith at all, and I'm not convinced it's worth it. (That's not what kept me from it originally, which was first a desire just to get the hell out of any sort of religion for a bit, and later twitter and bistedness about the consequences of that decision).

From: (Anonymous)

A friend pointed me to this post, and I'm having a lot of fun reading the comments. The question of what prayer is and how it works -- within Judaism, in particular -- interests me a lot. I blogged about the question of whether or not prayer "works" (http://velveteenrabbi.blogs.com/blog/2004/08/but_does_it_wor.html) a few weeks ago.

the Judaism I'm familiar with has very little tradition of spontaneous prayer

This is something that bums me out a little, actually. I love the variety of Jewish liturgical traditions, but from what I can tell, it looks like there used to be a tradition of spontaneous prayer -- the Amidah was once a time for improvised prayer on a set of particular themes, and over time the improvised/personal prayers were replaced by a set of established prayers on those same themes. I get that having a structured liturgy is useful, but I'm curious to see what it would be like if there were a little more spontaneity in Jewish worship...

- Rachel

From: (Anonymous)

Yes, I have started keeping a blog despite former protests, which Rachel is annoyingly accurate in remembering :-) I used to think it was all a bit "Secret Diary of Adrian Mole"; even now, I try hard to post things of general interest, and try and avoid posts about how my toothbrush is wearing out and how pretty the geraniums in my windowbox are, or similar fluff.

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liv

former protests, which Rachel is annoyingly accurate in remembering :-)
Sorry. I just obviously remembered the conversation cos I was hoping you'd join in the whole blogging thing, which I'm finding a much more convenient way of communicating than email. So I was disappointed when you were so vehemently against it, that's all.

I try hard to post things of general interest, and try and avoid posts about [...] fluff
Good for you! My posts are mostly fluff, I'm afraid. The advantage of this is that it means when there are people I'm not in touch with as regularly as I'd like, when we do interact, we don't have to waste time having the 'so what's going on in your life, then?' conversation. But I'm most impressed that you are keeping an interesting and thinky blog!

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A quick thought on prayer: I think, there are and have been different kinds of prayer. Over history, between different sects, and between individuals, there have been differences in both the form and purpose of prayer. Some prayer is to praise ("Oh, God, you're really great, how do I worship thee? Let me count the ways.") Some prayer is requesting succour in times of need ("Oh, God, my dog's gone missing, please will you keep him safe and return him to me in the not-too-far-distant future?", or "Oh, God, please don't send that awful bubonic plague our way. We've only just got over the smallpox/TB/infestation of flies/rivers of blood.")
I see nothing wrong with either kind of prayer, butbeing the fluffy sucker for personal fath that I am, I see prayer as a kind of a chat. You don't have to pray to ask for anything, you can just call in and say Hi. Does God answer any such kind of prayer? It doesn't really need an answer. Does a God you can pray to in such a way serve a useful function? Yes, if you're asking me.

Do Muslims, Jews, and various sects of Christian workshop the same God? Ha, if only it were that simple!

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Does God answer any such kind of prayer? It doesn't really need an answer. Does a God you can pray to in such a way serve a useful function? Yes, if you're asking me.
Surely though if God doesn't exist it would be better to know, and from that knowledge derive something more meaningful to do? Or do you think that it would be better not to know (and therefore remove the pray option from the equation)?

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Surely though if God doesn't exist...

Sez you. It does depend what you mean by "exist", but clearly enough exists to chat to. Otherwise, that'd just be bonkers.
Equation for what?

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Sez you.
I'm not claiming that God does or doesn't exist, I don't know.

It does depend what you mean by "exist", but clearly enough exists to chat to. Otherwise, that'd just be bonkers.
One might say the fairies at the bottom of my garden 'exist enough to talk to', but you would reinvent the meaning of 'exist' quite a bit for that sentence to make any sense.

The equation thing was just a turn of phrase. What I was asking though is whether you think its worthwhile to pray even if God doesnt (or perhaps if you know/believe God doesnt exist.

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"Surely if God doesn't exist" seems to me to make a certain claim. If that's your position and you're comfortable with it, I have no problem with you or your position. But it's not mine.

I have no fairies at the bottom of my garden. I checked, but they weren't there.

Does a God you can pray to in such a way serve a useful function? Yes, if you're asking me. outlines my position on whether it's worthwhile praying. Although "worthwhile" sounds like such a utilitarian word. "Nice, good, comforting" are probably thew words I'd use.

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"Surely if God doesn't exist" seems to me to make a certain claim.
I apologise, that was not how I meant it.

I have no fairies at the bottom of my garden. I checked, but they weren't there.
Have you checked if God exists?

Although "worthwhile" sounds like such a utilitarian word. "Nice, good, comforting" are probably thew words I'd use.
Interesting, I've heard other people say something similar. Some people say that the idea of their being no God is so horrifying its better not to look into it in case you find out that its true. Sticking your head in the sand may be a better option than finding out the truth.

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Have you checked if God exists?

This is still the same problem as it was two posts back! If you mean by "exist" "something that is real", you're going to have to define oyur version of reality, and that's no easy feat. Myself, I go in for pure idealism when it suits me. No substance, all perception, and I perceive a thing called God. Not a thing from books or rituals or mantras, but a thing that sits in my version of reality. He may not sit in yours. (The fairies, as I have explained, are not there).

Sticking your head in the sand may be a better option than finding out the truth.

You're making an awful lot of assumptions - chiefly about truth (existence of it, proof of it, what in no-one's name to do with it). You also seem to be assuming faith is mere opiate. Some people like opiates, that's a personal choice; again, it's not mine. I need no consolation as such. But I appreciate a bonus comforting dimension to my life.

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This is still the same problem as it was two posts back!
There was no problem at all!

If you mean by "exist" "something that is real", you're going to have to define your version of reality, and that's no easy feat.
I think reality is objective and outside ourselves. I wish that I could define reality, but sadly I can't - if I could it wouldn't look much like this.

If however you believe that you can define what reality is like then there is little point in arguing with me, just choose to change reality so that I agree with you! See how far that gets you.

You're making an awful lot of assumptions
As everyone has to.

You also seem to be assuming faith is mere opiate. Some people like opiates, that's a personal choice; again, it's not mine. I need no consolation as such. But I appreciate a bonus comforting dimension to my life.
I was trying to see if you think that using religion as some kind of opiate was palatable to you. I don't assume that faith is a mere opiate at all.

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I think reality is objective and outside ourselves. I wish that I could define reality, but sadly I can't - if I could it wouldn't look much like this.

In that case, there is no common ground on which we can agree. I'll add that I think reality is a concept that can be plaed with. Hindus call this play Lila, which also makes a nice girl's name.

As everyone has to.
There's assumptions that are necessary to make sense of the world and stay sane, and there are assumptions that go beyond that necessity. I think yours overstep the former and move into the latter.

For me, I would like to say that I see distinction between faith (personal faith, devotion, bhakti), beliefs (ways of seeing the world and ideas about organising those ways), and religious practice (rituals, scritpures, and also social practice). The three are not to me equivalent, and I think they are often conflated - sometimes by practitioners of a certain faith, sometimes by outsiders. One's ideas about the world are not the same as one's respose to those ideas. One's faith is not one's practice.

I'd also like to add, that in other posts you have described yourself as a "weak atheist" - someone without substance or evidence for un-belief. Yet you attack others for lack of evidence. This to me seems inconcsistent. You also describe yourself as one who in the past was a "foaming at the mouth evanglical". By this I understand that you mean you were dogmatic, aggressive (I note you used the word "agrressive" yourself when describing talking to Safi). You seem to have exchanged your belief for unbelief, but not your behaviour.

Mere opiates are palatable only to junkies. But they like 'em.

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I'd also like to add, that in other posts you have described yourself as a "weak atheist" - someone without substance or evidence for un-belief. Yet you attack others for lack of evidence. This to me seems inconcsistent.
The weak atheist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_atheism) term is poorly thought out - I am in a state now where I don't know what to believe - but so far the evidence (or rather lack of it) leads me in the direction of atheism. I'd like to believe that a God exists though.

You also describe yourself as one who in the past was a "foaming at the mouth evanglical". By this I understand that you mean you were dogmatic, aggressive (I note you used the word "agrressive" yourself when describing talking to Safi).
The term "foaming at the mouth evangelical" is meant in a comical way - I was certainly dogmatic but not aggressive; using the word aggressive was a poor choice, I was tired and couldn't think of the right words... I've never been aggressive towards Safi in all the time I've known her.

You seem to have exchanged your belief for unbelief, but not your behaviour.
That I think is rather unfair, all I did was question what you believe and you've thrown your defenses up.

I'm sorry if my questions upset or offend you - I'd like to understand your position, I don't mean to anger you. I would honestly like to understand what you believe and why. To me beliving that one can change reality is quite absurd, but I have learnt that usually that is because there is something that the other person knows that I do not. I would appreciate it if you would share that knowledge with me.

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You misunderstand me; I am not defending anything, because as far as I'm concerned, there is nothing to defend. As i said, if you're happy in your position, then I have no issue with that.

Wrt reality, it may not change, but one's realtionship with it and understanding of it certainly can. A good read on the matter is Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty's "Dreams, Reality and Other Illusions". I think the title says it all ;-)

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Does your view point have a name? Is it a particular philosphy or is it something Buddhist? I'd like to know so I can read more about it.

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;-) Buddhism, in its core expression, is a philosophy rather tan a religion - it does not have a God, and essentially is a route to self-soteriology. I wouldn't call myself Buddhist, but it's a way of thinking I have a lot of appreciation for. I've never met an unhappy Buddhist. Some books you could read are:

Gombrich, R. Theravada Buddhism: a social history from ancient Benares to modern Colombo. (London: Routledge, 1988)

Hinnells, J R. (ed.): A handbook of living religions. Harmondsworth: (Viking, 1984)

Saddhatissa, H. Buddhist ethics: essence of Buddhism. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1970)

Williams, P. Mahayana Buddhism: the doctrinal foundations. (London: Routledge, 1989)

The medieval philosophies of Kabir and Nanak (later Guru Nanak, the first Sikh Guru) which arose in response to mainstream Brahmanical Hinduism also interest me greatly - you can read these, alongside some more bhakti oriented writers, in the collection Songs of the Saints of India, ed. John S. Hawley and Mark Juergensmeyer (Oxford University Press, 1988).

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Thankyou.

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