Nihilism: Why America and the West are Committing Suicide

Renew America ^ | Feb.9, 2012 | Linda Kimball

[2001convSVT]

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For the faithful no evidence is needed, for the nonbeliever no evidence will suffice.

[spirited irish]

bttt

[x]

That "everything you disapprove of" refered to the author's lumping together of very different ideas which contradict and compete with each other and deserve to be examined independently as part of one big phenomenon opposed to her own "true" idea.

Her view (or yours) is one of many, and the others aren't simply negations of your own idea and they aren't going to go away.

If a "personal relationship with the living Spirit of God" is possible, it would be more complex and more awesome and harder to explain or describe than what this article represents.

A "personal relationship with the living Spirit of God" might perhaps make one more tolerant and less dismissive of other traditions.

[x]

I should have written: "which contradict and compete with each other and deserve to be examined independently rather than just as part of one big phenomenon opposed to her own "true" idea."

[spirited irish]

You began by accusing the author of being disapproving, that is, judgmental. Now at last you confess the truth: it is YOU who disapprove. It is you who are offended, not the other way around.

Now you claim that different ideas contradict and compete with each other. This is true. But your argument for examining them independently of each other is fallacious.

This is because light shines brightest in the dark just as good is seen against a backdrop of evil, sanity against insanity, order against disorder, truth against hypocrisy, and life, purpose, meaning, and hope against death, meaninglessness, purposelessness and hopelessness.

By unpacking and contrasting nihilism in its many historic forms against eternal verities, truth, purpose, meaning, hope and eternal life the author has shown that these two antithetical worldviews have been competing against one another since at least the time of Buddha.

It is truth and reality that offends you for you prefer the delusion.

And no, having a personal relationship with the Spirit of God is neither complex nor hard. His hand is open to all who seek Him.

[spirited irish]

ping to #25

[9YearLurker]

I hope she realizes that Christ and the Buddha didn’t actually talk with each other.

[9YearLurker]

“Animals do not have spirits, which are linked to intelligence, imagination, sensitivity, self-consciousness, reflection and the capacity for truth and moral goodness.”

This woman has no clue about animals.

[x]

Check out the comments on her own Renew America page:

For instance, the Buddha did not teach nihilism, and, in fact, he taught against it. It's true that he didn't believe in a creator god (because in Buddhism the view is that creation happens over and over, like a tide coming in and going out, eternally, and there is no original creation to require a creator) but that does not suggest that he taught that life is meaningless or without moral values. Quite to the contrary, he was very specific about life's moral values and purpose, which he believed was to live with compassion for each other and all other beings.

....

Not only are Vedantists not nihilists, they aren't even atheists. Members of the Vedanta Society believe in the existence of a creator god with whom one may have a personal relationship. That's simply a fact. In addition, Vivekananda had no intention or ambition to convert the West to Hinduism. He believed that all people of faith are united in their mutual desire to improve the world, and that in their essence all religions are broadcasting the same message.

...

We live in a world where Christianity is often misrepresented to its detractors, for instance in the Middle East and South Asia. If we want fair treatment from other religions, isn't it important to get our facts straight about theirs?

[spirited irish]

You selectively rejected the Christian comments in favor of an obvious monist.

Be that as it may, the professor of world religions admonished:

” Buddha did not teach nihilism, and, in fact, he taught against it. It’s true that he didn’t believe in a creator god (because in Buddhism the view is that creation happens over and over, like a tide coming in and going out, eternally, and there is no original creation to require a creator) but that does not suggest that he taught that life is meaningless or without moral values. Quite to the contrary, he was very specific about life’s moral values and purpose..”

Ideas have consequences, and as the professor’s understanding of how ideas work is extraordinarily shallow he cannot see the logical inconsistencies and nihilism lurking at the deepest level of Buddha’s ideas.

Did Buddha mean to teach nihilism? No. But like a man who does not foresee the consequences of drinking and driving Buddha neither saw the logical inconsistencies nor the nihilist consequences of his teachings. And the foolish professor has placed his faith in the claims made by an egoistic fallible man who could neither see nor envision the inconsistencies, hypocrisy and other failures of his own teachings.

According to the professor creation “just happens” meaning that ‘something’ came from ‘nothing’(creation ex nihilo) but unaided by a living Creator. The professor adds that this ‘something’ is like a tide coming in and going out.

By virtue of Buddha’s naturalist belief system (monism) both he and the professor are aspects of nature, mere grains of sand on a cosmic beach, making them fully determined and caused by natural forces acting upon the sand.

The beach is the monist ’whole-thing’ or one-substance (known as Chaos to the Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans) of which everything—including Buddha and the professor— is comprised. Buddha and the professor then are as grains of sand helpless against the forces of nature—wind, rain, tide and the things that sea gulls do on sand.

Logical consistency demands that neither the Buddha nor the professor be free to choose other than to be tossed to and fro, blown hither and yon or to resist being used for the building of sand castles by little children who are the spiritual image-bearers of the supernatural living Triune God.

Either the Buddha and the professor are aspects of nature, which has no source for life, consciousness, soul, spirit and free will or they are not.

But if the professor is an aspect of nature then there is no ‘him’ capable of freely choosing Buddha over the Son of God let alone choosing to angrily contend against Linda Kimball.

Do grains of sand argue? No. Do grains of sand seek Godless ‘moral systems’ as the professor claims? No.

The professor disproves his own claims by his use of personal pronouns and the fact of his free will, thereby demonstrating Vedanta monism’s utter lack of logical consistency.

Because Buddha built his house on shifting sands, so did the unthinking professor. And so have you.

[spirited irish]

“I hope she realizes that Christ and the Buddha didn’t actually talk with each other.”

Spirited: Conceit invariably makes a fool of its’ ‘owner,’ so doubtless you believe that you have said something quite grand and utterly illuminating. You have not. All you have done is spit. And as what goes up must come down, keep in mind where you are standing....in a ditch.

[9YearLurker]

WTF?

[betty boop]

No legitimate, modern physicist that I am aware of has postulated that everything began as nothing.

Nor can any one of them postulate what, if anything, preceded the Big Bang. The laws of physics do not yet exist in the Planck era — the earliest period of time in the history of the universe, from zero to approximately 10⁻⁴³ seconds immediately following the Big Bang. We can not only not "see" what the immediate aftermath (i.e., the Planck era) of the Big Bang "looks like"; but we have no scientific means that can tell us what preceded it (if anything).

And so please forgive this Christian if she simply believes that God did in fact create the universe exactly as He told us He did: ex nihilo. Though science can neither validate nor falsify this claim, I reason that it is true — because the Foundation of Truth cannot Lie and be consistent with Himself.

Ex nihilo means: no time, no space, no dimensions, no matter, no fundamental forces of nature, no physical laws, nothing at all pre-exists the Creation. All of these are God's creatures, too: They did not pre-exist; they too were first made in the Beginning. And whatever was loaded into God's Word of the Beginning (i.e., the "singularity" in scientific jargon) became manifest in cosmic evolution.

Or so it seems to me, FWIW.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, L,TOWM.

[spirited irish]

Darwinism is a God-less naturalist metaphysical program positing the pre-existence of self-generated primordial water. Where did the water come from? The void. Similarly, the Big Bang and quantum theory hold that things materialized out of a vacuum (void).

It is precisely because some naturalists desire a God-less source for life, consciousness, mind, and will that Teilhard held that ‘god’ had finally emerged out of brute matter that had spontaneously self-generated out of the void.

All of these positions ultimately implode in nihilism because the void is nothingness. It is not conscious. It cannot think, see, move or tell time.

Nothing is not life but death. From death came life by chance, thus back to death goes life. Death is the victor.

Jesus Christ the Physician said ‘freely choose’ life that you may live. Though naturalists go to great lengths to deny the reality of free will, they ultimately demonstrate its’ existence by choosing death (the void) rather than life.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you both so much for pinging me to your wonderful essay-posts on this thread!

Since the 1960s forward measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation consistently agree that the universe is expanding. This means that space and time do not pre-exist but are created as the universe expands. It also means there was a beginning of real space and real time.

That was the most theological statement to ever come out of modern science (Jastrow) – “In the beginning, God created …” (Gen 1:1)

There is no infinite past. Steady state cosmology is dead as a doornail.

So of course physical cosmologists went into high gear trying to obviate God the Creator evidently because methodological naturalism cannot allow for Creator God.

But none of the theories – cyclic, ekpyrotic, multi-verse, multi-world, imaginary time, etc. – can avoid the problem that space and time do not pre-exist.

In the absence of space, things cannot exist.

In the absence of time, events cannot occur.

Both are required for physical causation.

In other words, there can be no physical causation (energy momentum, wave fluctuation, etc.) without real space and real time.

Also, the singularity of big bang cosmology is not nothing:

Mathematically, the dimension of a space is the minimum number of coordinates (axes) necessary to identify a point within the space. A space of zero dimensions is a point; one dimension, a line, two dimensions, a plane; three, a cube, etc. That is the geometry of it. In zero dimensions, the mathematical point is indivisible.

It is not nothing. It is a spatial point. A singularity is not nothing.

In ex nihilo Creation (beginning of space/time) - the dimensions are not merely zero, they are null, dimensions do not exist at all. There is no space and no time. Period.

There is no mathematical point, no volume, no content, no scalar quantities. Ex nihilo doesn’t exist in relationship to anything else; there is no thing.

In an existing physical space, each point (e.g. particle) can be parameterized by a quantity such as mass. The parameter (e.g. a specific quantity within the range of possible quantities) is in effect another descriptor or quasi-dimension that uniquely identifies the point within the space.

Moreover, if the quantity of the parameter changes for a point, then a time dimension is invoked. For example, at one moment the point value is “0” and the next it is “1”.

Wave propagation (e.g. big bang, inflation) cannot occur in null dimensions nor can it occur in zero spatial dimensions, a mathematical point; a dimension of time is required for any fluctuation in a parameter value at a point.

Moreover, wave propagation must also have a spatial/temporal relation from cause point to effect point, i.e. physical causation.

For instance “0” at point n^t causes “1” at point n+1^t+1 which causes "0" at point n+1^t+2 etc..

Obviously, physical wave propagation (e.g. big bang/inflationary model) cannot precede space/time and physical causality.

The wise man asks: Why this instead of nothing at all?

And he realizes that only God, beyond space/time and physical causation, can be the uncaused cause of causation, the first cause, The Creator of the beginning.

Space, time and physical causation are not properties of God the Creator. They are properties of the Creation. Only God is uncaused.

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, [even] his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: - Romans 1:20

The origin of space, time and physical causation – although striking - are not the only open questions that vex scientists. There is also no explanation for the origin of information (Shannon, successful communication,) inertia, semiosis, autonomy and so on. And yet the universe is logical – if it were not, we could not understand it at all.

Order cannot arise from chaos in an unguided physical system. Period. There are always guides to the system whether one is using chaos theory, self-organizing complexity, cellular automata or whatever to analyze complexification, entropy and order.

Indeed, to me, the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics (Wigner) is God’s copyright notice on the cosmos.

Logos is the Greek word which is translated “Word” in the following passage. It is also the root for the word “Logic:”

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. – John 1:1-4

God’s Name is I AM.

[Sawdring]

At least Nazism is an ethos.

[Sherman Logan]

Excellent post.

Of course, from a purely scientific POV it is not possible to say the God of the Bible created the Universe out of nothing. Only that the Universe was not, and then it was, with time and space coming into existence together.

OTOH, belief in a Creator-God that caused the BB is entirely in agreement with present scientific thought.

I am constantly amazed by those atheists who think the BB Theory has disproved the existence of God. In fact, it is much more in agreement with the Bible than a Steady State universe would be.

[x]

Religions have nihilistic elements. When you look at suffering, death, the contrast between the massive universe or eternal God and the small, perishable individual, moments of despair are natural. Look at Job and Ecclesiastes. Christ's disciples had their own moments of despair as well, and I don't imagine Lamentations is all that cheery.

But Judaism and Christianity overcome that despondency with the kind of thinking you admire. Part of the richness of the religious tradition, though, is that it's not all just the system of triumphal ideas that you proclaim, but that it understands life's darker side. Having seen the worst makes the positive vision more substantial, than if it were just a system one was expected to follow to achieve a goal or a set of inspiring truths that had no contact with the less inspirational aspects of existence.

I'm no expert on Buddhism (or any other religion) -- I keep forgetting which is the "Greater Vehicle" and which the "Lesser Vehicle." But there are different schools in Buddhism. They don't all rest content with nothingness and chaos. The whole religion isn't what beats and hipsters took from it in the 1950s and 1960s. Bottom line: there is a moral law, there is right and wrong in Buddhism, so "nihilism" isn't the right term to describe the religion.

There's a case to be made that one religion goes further and answers more questions, is more satisfying and truer in some way, and also a case that many make for Western rational-empirical thinking over Eastern mysticism, but most people who are really interested in religion wouldn't be as dismissive of another tradition as you and Kimball appear to be.

Anyway, here is what's been said about Buddhism's concept of "emptiness":

This teaching does not connote nihilism. In the English language the word "emptiness" suggests the absence of spiritual meaning or a personal feeling of alienation, but in Buddhism the emptiness of phenomena, at a basic level, enables one to realize that the things which ultimately have no independent substance cannot be subject to any irreconcilable conflicts or antagonisms. Ultimately, true realisation of the doctrine can bring liberation from the limitations of the cycle of uncontrollably recurring rebirth.

I don't claim to fully understand that, but as I said above, Buddhism doesn't repudiate ethics, moral law, or ideas of right and wrong, so "nihilism" doesn't fit as a description.

[Alamo-Girl]

I am constantly amazed by those atheists who think the BB Theory has disproved the existence of God. In fact, it is much more in agreement with the Bible than a Steady State universe would be.

I very strongly agree!

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. - Genesis 1:1

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, [even] his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: - Romans 1:20

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. - John 1:1-3

Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear. - Hebrews 11:3

I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty. - Revelation 1:8

Thank you for your insights and encouragements, dear Sherman Logan!

[spirited irish]

x: There’s a case to be made that one religion goes further and answers more questions, is more satisfying and truer in some way, and also a case that many make for Western rational-empirical thinking over Eastern mysticism, but most people who are really interested in religion wouldn’t be as dismissive of another tradition as you and Kimball appear to be.”

Spirited: Though many men have turned Christianity into a religion it is in fact a personal relationship with the Holy Trinity, God the Spirit, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ, the living Word become Flesh came to heal the weary souls of men and to declare the Good News: the Way to Paradise is now open.

In that through this relationship with the Spirit of God mortal man can attain life eternal (paradise) then Christianity is “more satisfying and truer,” to use your own words. And this being the case all true Christians have a duty to point all of the unsaved to the Word of God.

Since your current interest lies with Buddhism, which you admit you do not understand, then what better guide for you than Vishal Mangalwadi, India’s foremost Christian scholar?

Called by leading Christian scholars a contemporary St. Augustine, Mangalwadi’s knowledge of Western and Eastern philosophy, Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity is intimate, penetrating, and vast.

Here is an introduction to his writing:

http://cdn.learnsocially.com/33a99540-2b00-012d-0b70-7efd4acfe485.pdf

Mangalwadi’s website:
http://www.revelationmovement.com/