NEWS: Edgeplay With God

Boot to the head!

Are you saying you write this crap for free?

Yeah, right. None of that going on here...

While I think the treatment of Atheists is a bit unfair (to the same extent that making fun of people who believe in God is unfair), I do think the article made an interesting comparison between "edge-play" and Zen Buddhism. But I think people should also keep in mind, that part of the point is that God does exist (according to Brad), and therein lies the relationship he draws with the Atheist. Respect, however, is always appreciated.

Whatever, man. You have a great job.

So does that mean that agnostics believe that they can never be absolutely sure that they're full of shit?

oh, i just meant it would be fun to write yoga philosophy for the site. i could do that and still keep my day job.

Thanks for correcting my false impression that Buddhist were in some way fundamentally less gaga than other religious folks.

What Leg Would Buddha Sweep?

-TM

Seriously, can I buy some pot from you?

-TM

Well when you prescribe to any particular religion or lack thereof you are essentially calling bullshit on any other religion. Religions tend to be exclusive like that. Or at least in the typical western mindset. So its pretty fucking stupid to get pissy if you're an atheist and someone calls shit on you. Because essentially your belief system's core value calls bullshit on every religion.

As a Buddhist with a public voice he has an agenda whether he or anyone else wants to admit it. He is essentially writing in the hopes of pushing all of us pinup pornfreakers into a more Buddhist mindset. And he certainly isn't saying that you or anyone else shouldn't be discussing the existence of God. But if all your "spirituality" amounts to is whether or not a god exists, then I'd say that you definitely could use some self-examining. (not saying that your spirituality is like that, simply making a point)

This article is meant to rattle your cage and to fuck with you, in order to get you to better examine yourself. Its practically a Zen tradition. So if you think that you've found the end-all be-all of what you are and what this is, then just ignore the crazy Buddhist rant.

He said it wasn't his business to judge, not that he never did it anyways.

Idiots.

If it's true that when something bothers you about someone, you are recognising an attitude that is actually within you, I have some work to do..

Let's see, where to start?

That's putting it pretty black-and-white, isn't it? Most other people @least have some semblance of respect and religious tolerance. When someone says something like...

...I don't terribly feel the need to show that person any more respect than I would the Westboro Baptist Church (which is none).

Again, tolerance and discussion are a far cry from being told to fuck off. I thought Buddha was supposed to be jolly.

Umm, then what's this then?

From the portion of this very article I quoted above:

The funny thing is there's that little First Amendment bit. While Mr. Warner certainly has his right to give his opinion, I, in turn, have the right to retort and basically call him out on his own douchebaggery.

My, aren't we pretentious? Remember that "tolerance and respect" bit I talked about? I'd say I'm not the one who needs "self-examining."

Yeah, well, I liked it better when it was called FearTheReaper.

-TM

If it were less verbose and about 5 paragraphs shorter, I'd have thought it was the unmistakeable writing of Tim Buckley.

while i heartily agree with the other points you make, and this writer's high-horsery nearly always bugs me, i'm not so sure that this statement is really accurate...

"The atheists got all bent out of shape a few weeks ago when I suggested they were full of shit. What do you know about atheism? You sit there, stock still without even a dominatrix to torment you and thus distract you from what's real. You spend a few years right there, nose to nose with yourself. Then you can come back and talk to me about whether God exists or not. "

I'll admit, I'm an atheist. Even if I understood your point, I'm sure I'd have a difficult time understanding your angle. You just felt like making a jab at atheists out of some random corner of side-though that had nothing to do with your article?

I don't have any knowledge of your previous articles, you have a compelling writing style; whatever the hell that paragraph was supposed to be, however, was the last paragraph by you I'll ever read.

I hear upsetting people is a good way to up your ratings. That won't work on me, I hope it doesn't work on anyone else.

Best of luck.

I'm so confused.

Exactly! I think Mr. Warner did a great job with this article. Admittingly not one of his best, but still done very well. However it appears, unfortunately, so many people have a negative knee-jerk reaction and seemingly are unaware of what they are actually pissed off at.

Actually the funny little thing is that I don't think you understand the First Amendment - else you wouldn't be citing it in this matter. Essentially it is only between the government and citizens, not amongst people communicating with each other. There is not a "right" to give an opinion to another, have it heard, or to call somebody out as a douche-bag. Unless, of course, it's against the government.

I don't think these words mean what you think they mean.
It seems rather pretentious that you don't think you need to evaluate yourself beyond the argument of God/no-God. I don't think it is intolerant to hold the opinion that people should do some introspection at some point or another. In fact it's quite disturbing that somebody would have a problem with this idea. Also it's clever how you removed the part of the original quote where 'SuperCrunch' cited he was making an example and not necessarily pointing anybody out. Pretentious to assume that people must be referring to you. . .

Obviously you must not be a Buddhist practitioner else you would have never thought this. Which, in a way, I believe is Brad's point. It seems that the typical Western new-agey point of view of Buddhism is some lovely, jolly, everything-goes, it's-all-cool type dogma; this isn't quite so true.
Buddhism has a history of trying to be a sort of "in your face' albeit throughout time the words used have differed. Popular quotes such as "If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha" and "Buddha is shit on a stick" are often used to sort of shock the person into reality. Brad is doing nothing different in this aspect, and in fact one could argue is just carrying on the tradition of, as SuperCrunch mentioned, saying something to " rattle your cage and to fuck with you."

You surely meant "assuming the pose of rattling your cage and fucking with you".

Basically, he just told us how Zen-Buddhists, particularly himself, are the toughest fuckers on the planet, spiritually speaking. But sadly, he failed to present any evidence of that.

What irritates me is that this article is apparently supposed to make me, as an atheist, want to self-examine and rethink things. This is actually one of my favorite ways to spend my free time, and I love being presented with new ideas and philosophies to mull over.

The problem is, I don't feel like I'm actually being presented with anything of substance, and instead am just being criticized for my way of thinking. I'm honestly not sure if I feel this way because the author failed to present me with new and interesting ideas, or if it's just because I tuned out all but the personal attacks. Therein, I think, lies the problem.

The patriarch of Zen Buddhism supposedly stared at a wall in meditation for years and cut off his eyelids when he fell asleep and then only accepted his first disciple after he cut off his own arm to show how badly he needed the Dharma. So I don't know where people keep getting the idea that Zen is about being a jolly fat dude.

I'm also curious as to when the SG News Wire has been about tolerance and respect, particularly on the subject of religion and politics. I mean isn't this site supposed to be "punk". Seriously, grow a nutsack. Insults and all sorts of offensive shit is spewed over it on a regular basis. It just seems that no one gives a fuck until its directed at a major demographic.

I also don't understand why people seem to think that our hardcore Buddhist punk has to be a happy simpleton pouring cotton candy fluff into your heads. Tthat is the
infuriating thing about Buddhism. No one can spoon-feed it to you and if they do then they are full of shit. Its very much a personal journey and even when someone manages to get some aspect of Buddhism across to you it can take years before any actual realization is made.

I think essentially one of the reasons this article was so inflammatory is because there was a lot of assertion that Buddhists are atheists and he wanted to get the point across very clearly that the two are not in fact the same. One might could find them similar seeing as Buddhism never asserts the existence of a god, or at least not in the sense that most people think.

Also, atheism is essentially a religion. Its based solely on the opinion of the existence of a God and in itself requires a leap of faith. Do you honestly believe that we understand the physical world around us enough to be accurately making any assumptions about the world we live in? In a world where quantum physics directly contradicts everything we know about the physical world where the light that bounces off of objects and onto our retinas is not only outdated information, but the simple act of perceiving that information changes what is present. Your senses are flawed and everything you perceive is wrong, based simply on the fact that you have perceived it. Trying to make massive generalizations about the universe is ultimately foolish. Get your head out of your ass and realize that we're all just a bunch of hyper-evolved monkeys living on a rock trying to figure something out that is ultimately beyond our comprehension.

Logic, science and religion are all the same fucking illusion.

Well, I'm both a buddhist and an atheist, and I dislike what I feel is BW's misrepresentation of buddhism. I find myself writing apologies for his column in the atheists' group on behalf of the atheist zone of buddhist thought.

It may be true that BW is trying to rattle our cages and make us self examine, but I think he's taking an exceedingly irritating and wrongheaded tack. It is commendable to want to make people look inward, but he's doing it on the basis of a simple, and elementary but important mistake, in that while he is quite accomplished as a buddhist practitioner, he fell into the snare of putting a name to the unnameable, "God", as a way of dealing with a sort of cognitive impasse where the mind has trouble dealing with the unnameable. How do you deal with what's beyond the reach of thought? BW is showing us one wrong way of doing so, and perhaps we should thank him for that and move on.

I am disposed to regard the labelling of atheists as being a religion is really just a defense mechanism that makes people who practice godthink feel like they're really fucking clever. The way I look at it, buddhism was in origin a philosophy, and remains that, but after 25 centuries and gazillions of people interpreting it, it has in a way become a spectrum of religions and philosophies.

But as I see it, religions are institutionalized frameworks of doctrine that provide answers to people who are not up to the task of dealing with difficult and important questions. Philosophy is the realm of contemplation, for people for whom the plastic jesus on the dashboard isn't enough to answer the questions that nag at them, whatever they happen to be for a given individual. Atheists have a broad range of dispositions toward getting wrapped up in big questions, but they do differ from the average religious person in that they tend to dislike credulity and naivete; they do not consider faith to be a solid basis for belief in anthropomorphised cosmologies, and they have a much stronger tendency to question authority.

In buddhism there are schools like Pure Land buddhism, where the adherents have faith in and believe in the founder of that school, and believe that when they die they will reincarnate in a pure land where conditions are conducive to attaining enlightenment. This is an example of buddhism having become a religion.

On the other hand, there is a saying among zen teachers that they cannot give their students even a drop of rain. When, for example, you are assigned a Koan like One hand clapping, what its purpose is, is to make you completely and utterly fail at understanding it on the basis of your ususal patterns of thought. You mind is a house of cards, and when it falls away you're in an open space where you can see a bunch of stuff that's always been there right in front of your nose, that you coldn't see because you were so obsessively trying to hold up your house of cards. This runs directly against what religion is about. It is about ultimately seeing for yourself.

To regard religion, logic and science as all being the same illusion, is in a way similar to believing in god on the basis of faith, you can argue the point until you're dead, and people will take up the standard for you for centuries thereafter, but it's probably not a good idea to accept that at face value given the available perspectives that strongly indicate just how wrongheaded it is. Unless you don't want to think about it.