Other Religious Traditions You Value?

JackRT said:

When Mahatma Gandhi was a young man, working as a lawyer in South Africa, he read the entire Bible. He and several of his Indian friends went to visit a church one Sunday. They were ejected physically. In later life he commented, "I would have become a Christian but then I had the misfortune to meet one."

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I have met some very ugly professing Christians, some with the audacity to claim to be traditional and gloat over the suffering and persecution of others in the name of that same tradition.

How far gone we are from the faith if we think that is what the tradition stands for! How far from tradition we have strayed!

There is a core to our tradition.

Hear what our Lord Jesus Christ saith, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the prophets!

Whatever my neighbor's differences with me in whatever matter, and whatever their sins, it is not "traditional" to gloat over their suffering! To spit on our neighbors in the name of God is to spit on the face of Christ himself, who took upon him the sufferings of the world that we might all be saved unto the life everlasting.

Without charity our profession of faith is worthless.

2PhiloVoid said:

I've always thought Taoism was kind of cool. But "value"? I don't know how I'd answer this precisely, philosophically speaking.

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It would be better phrased, "Are there aspects of other traditions you recognize as valuable?"

One need not accept a tradition in full to value some aspect of it as good, insightful, useful, and so on.

I decided a long time ago that I have irreconcilable differences with Buddhist philosophies, and I am not even particularly drawn to their practices which I found unbeneficial for myself.

But there are practices and virtues held in Mahayana Buddhism for instance that I do respect, and some of those practices are easily adapted to a Christian context.

Take lovingkindness meditation for instance. While I do not engage with traditional Buddhist techniques to cultivate lovingkindness, I do cultivate kindness after my fashion in thought, word, and deed, and I do cultivate it as a general emotion in my heart.

The Quakers have a custom similar to lovingkindness meditation in which, as I understand it, they hold a person in loving concern in the light of God. I don't know exactly what that means. I'd have to ask a Quaker.

But what I understand it to entail is cultivating an awareness of God's presence while sitting with one's concerns for another, giving them over to God, and entrusting them to him. I would think this practice involves in itself a cultivation of loving concern for one's neighbor.

It is different from but nevertheless overlaps with some aspects of Buddhist lovingkindness meditation. There is a tendency in some ecumenical endeavors to whitewash differences in traditions.

I'm not on board with that at all. I find that to be hugely disrespectful to all involved. But this is not to say that we cannot recognize a goodness or common ground with others' practices in some regards, and we can better appreciate our differences and learn better what we believe ourselves if we examine how we are both different and similar.