What Is The Difference Between Opinion And Religion?

By Author: samantha kirk
Total Articles: 62
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How religion or science is neither right nor wrong in the self-less perspective, when the self-less, soul-less perspective is itself a denial of the core theological principles dearly held by many religious believers?
In Buddhism, the self-less perspective is called "suchness" or "thusness" - that is, the idea that things are exactly as they are, no more and no less. No more & no less, because there are no conceptual overlays to add or subtract from it, just what is there.
We don't need, and indeed can't, know just what is there, as we can only understand it by overlaying our conceptual framework onto it - we can however learn how to observe things without applying that framework, but then we can't actually describe what we observe to anyone else, because there is no way to describe it without using conceptual language. (We find however we can talk in such a way that other people who have learnt some of how to bypass the conceptual stage can identify with our words and know what we are talking about. This is what it means in Buddhism where it talks about things like "a transmission without words". Imagine, for ...
... instance, someone said to you, "I saw the Grand Canyon today and ...WOW!” If you'd never seen it you wouldn't really appreciate what they meant, but if you had, WOW would carry the totality of your own experience within it).
So, within our human sentience commonplace perspective, our individual conceptual overlays, informed by our past experience, education, feelings, what we watch on our Cable TV, etc., apply discrimination to concepts like science and religion. We give them weighting factors depending on how we view them, we call them right or wrong, better or worse, black or white. But if we drop discrimination and just observe, we see only what is, not how we judge it to be.
I stick with the idea that science and religion are only as right or as wrong as we individual sentience prefer them to be, and that the very concepts "science" and "religion" have no meaning in the "thusness", reality-exactly-how-it-is. In thusness, there are no people to be believers or unbelievers.
It can only be described in those terms, more to the point, and only to other sentience. All the truth values derive from our common sentience. Thusness itself doesn't have a description , it's nothing more or less than exactly what it is - how could it be otherwise, thusness is not conceptual, it's just what is there being what it is. There are no atoms, there are things that are there - that are why we call them atoms, so that we can discriminate these things that are there from those things that are there. There are no trees, but there are things that we call trees so that we can distinguish them from other things that we don't call trees. Because we call an atom an atom doesn't mean that it's an atom. It means that it's the thing we call an atom. Us calling it an atom doesn't change anything in thusness, other than that thusness then contains things that equate to sentience that call other things atoms.
I don't know if this makes sense to you or if it makes anything better or worse. All I'm trying to get across is the idea that perhaps theism and atheism are stuck at the level of evaluating opposing conceptual frameworks, whereas naturalistic views go way beyond this to see that there is no person there to evaluate concepts, only the magically generated self-aware sentience that maintains the concept of a person doing evaluation. There is certainly theist and atheist sentience, but not a single actual person who exists outside of this mechanistic universe that generates us. To me that implies we're all in the same boat, all trying to find our way to come to terms with the thought that we're nothing but a bubble on a stream or a passing cloud, and that to fight over who has the most right concept seems a waste of precious resources to me.

Samantha Kirk is a freelance writer and an active blogger. She is also a movie buff and watches a lot of movies on her CableTV.