[PLUG-TALK] Religion is not bad...

[David Mandel]

On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 3:02 PM, Denis Heidtmann
<denis.heidtmann at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> What about Buddhists?  Human rights and ethics are central, but they
> are agnostic with respect to an external god.
>
I don't know much about Buddhism; but it seems to me that most Buddhists
are theists even if Buddhism doesn't say much about the nature of God.
Buddhism is an outgrowth of Hinduism and I suppose most Buddhists
get their God (or Gods) from Hinduism.

And a few Buddhists use the Christian God.
I was a Peace Corps Volunteer many years ago during which time I
taught mathematics at Unversiti Pertanian Malaysia.  I was also faculty
advisor to the Catholic Student Society on campus.  We had any number
of Buddhist Catholics among the Chinese students - that is students
who accepted and practiced both Buddhism and Catholicism and saw
no conflict between the two.  It was pretty cool!

I might add that Islam is the National Religion of Malaysia, so Unversiti
Pertanian Malaysia was officially a Muslim college and certainly the
majority of the faculty and students were Muslim; and they treated us
Catholics with a good deal of respect.

David