Belief

I want to respond to three of your points Claus. First you are not talking only about the Greeks and the Romans because all the problems arising with respect to the phenomena of non-Western societies and culture are/were equally the problems in the frameworks of different varieties of culture. You not only talk about the Greeks and the Romans, you gave examples about the French and the English as …

(a) It appears to me that in these discussions, a very vital issue (if we want to talk about Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and their ‘problems’ with ‘Hinduism’, etc) is not being recognized. and that is this: religious ‘beliefs’ are not accorded their place, and are talked about as though they are merely a subset of the class of ‘beliefs’. (b) ‘Being a believer’ (I will confine myself to …

With some justifiable distortion, one can claim that the Indian Adhyatmic traditions revolve partially around some ‘philosophical’ questions: what is real and what is existence? Is there a distinction between the two and, if yes, how to draw that line? This is a distortion because the debate never took this form; it is justifiable nonetheless to present it this way because it gives us a handle to …

To take German language, let us look at how Heidegger talks about ‘being’: there is the ‘big Being’ (‘Sein’) and there is the ‘small being’ (‘Dasein’ meaning ’there-being’ or ‘so-being’). And then there is ‘Sein’ and ‘Seindes’. All these are translated by the word ‘being’. To jump back a couple of hundred years, and pick up another philosopher with the same alphabet and the same language, we have …

Can history-centrism cause some religion or the other to be belief-based? The notion of “history-centrism” is too vague to allow a serious answer. In so far as this refers to a “Grand narrative”, and this narrative is either an oral or a written account, it is a candidate for the status of ‘belief’. Consequently, your question takes the following form: Does “believing in” the truth of some or …

Some consider it to be a “superstitious practice”, the implication being that it is irrational to believe that dancing causes the rain to fall: no reasonable people on earth can buy the story that dancing actually causes rain to fall. I am not willing to buy it. However, it is a fact that in some cultures people do perform ‘rain dances’. However, to explain the ‘rain dance’ by attributing a …