I just discovered the KtB site…It’s VERY interesting…
Killing the Buddha is a religion magazine for people made anxious by churches…
Here’s a quote from their “support” page (subtitled “god is a virus”):
Killing the Buddha makes no money. In fact we lose it, lots of it. Not because we’re victims of the dot com crash, but because from the beginning we’ve believed that the web can be more than just another way to turn a profit.
And this is a quote from their manifesto:
Killing the Buddha insists that if religion matters at all it matters enough to be taken to task. We believe it’s high time for a new canon to be created, and that the Web is just the place to collect it. We refuse to accept the internet as a world wide shopping mall. We know intuitively it can be a sort of Talmudic cathedral, a tool of transcendence made of words. We’re here to build it. If the end result looks more like Babel than the City of God, so be it. Babel, after all, came close.
AMEN!
I label myself as a “seeker” (check my colophon page), I guess I have to elaborate on this. It means that I, at least, believe in a higher purpose, that a common grounds exists in human culture, and that you, in the words of the master, “will find, if you seek”. So what is this “higher purpose”, is it God? Well in some periods of my life it was, but recently I began to have my doubts, you could say that I was shaken in my faith. Last week I met a great guy, and we really hit it off, I actually think that I made a lifelong friend, we had SO many things in common, and it was very easy to talk, even though we’d just met. We began discussing Christmas presents, I still had to buy a few, and I mentioned that I expected to get a piece of jewelry from my father, that he had handcrafted by himself, but from my “specification”. The jewelry is a “crown of Isis”, Isis the love of my life. I told him that I was looking for Isis, this actually angered him, the mere thought of the existence of God, a higher being or a creator made him physically sick.
He said that until now he’d considered me a sensible man, I hope you’re not one of those “new agers”.
Finding myself under attack, I told him that my belief is “agnostic”, when I’m asked by faithful people about my faith, I usually say that I’m a “Christian-Jewish-Buddhist-Islamic-Hindi”.
When it comes to religious scriptures, I believe that there are several levels. I consider the Christian and Islamic scriptures to be the “paint-by-numbers” books, I refuse to believe that the truth-the-whole-truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth can be written in a few thousand pages. The Vedic scriptures are an entire library, and I’m of the opinion that they’re meant for further studies. Studing the Old Testament can earn you a primary school graduation, studying the New Testament and Al-Quran can earn you a high-school diploma, studying the Talmud and the mystic scriptures of Judaism can earn you a college degree, and studying the Vedic scriptures can earn you a PhD (or several).
I think my new friend understood my point, but he was really allergic to religion, quoting Lenin and calling it the “opium of the masses”. I agree that a lot of killing has taken place in the name of God, but what religion teaches us, is that there is hope. The people that killed in the name of God, most likely never “graduated” primary school, or left school never getting past the “paint by numbers” art books of spirituality.