Thread: Is Buddhism atheistic?

Is it true that Buddhism is atheistic? In a debate with Greg Bahnsen, Gordon Stein said that Buddhism is atheistic.

Originally Posted by cih1355

Is it true that Buddhism is atheistic? In a debate with Greg Bahnsen, Gordon Stein said that Buddhism is atheistic.

In a sense it is. I first came on this board as a "gung-ho" Clarkian. Since then I have learned to also appreciate Bahnsen. But leaning back toward Clark I would ask Stein to "define Atheism." (One thing I will always appreciate about Clark is his insistence on definition for everything. It is a definite necessity in my opinion) The problem here is that the Buddhist and the Christian would have two different definitions of "God."

Although some Buddhist (yes, there are different types of Buddhists ) allow for the existence of "gods" this means something entirely different to them than what we mean as Christians. As a matter of fact, Buddhism is indifferent to all theories on the origin of the universe! The little bit of research that I have done in Buddhism has made my head swim! It almost seems to (unprofessional little) me to be Postmodernism before there was (officially) such a thing. It is a "religion" (if you can define that word) without a "god" (if, in the Buddhist sense, you can define that word).

To sum it all up ... in my very unprofessional opinion, as bad as I hate to agree with an Atheist (especially Gordon Stein )... yes, I believe that Buddhism is basically a "religion" without a God.

Kevin covered it pretty well, but just to add - I've heard several people (unbelievers among them) that Buddhism is more a philosophy than a religion.

What I learned in AP Human Geography class in school (although some of what my teacher taught us about religions was false, but this is from the textbook at least) is that Buddhism itself does not have a higher power, but that the religion is often combined with another (especially in Japan with Shintoism) to have higher powers.

Originally Posted by Montanablue

Kevin covered it pretty well, but just to add - I've heard several people (unbelievers among them) that Buddhism is more a philosophy than a religion.

Most of the other religions like Islam,Hinduism and even Judaism are more philosophical than theological. They don't do Theology, like we Calvinists do.

Buddhism considers the question of whether or not God exists to be irrelevant, so it could be described as agnostic.

If there's only one true God, and that true God is the God of Scripture, and folks don't believe in the only true God, then yes, in a very general sense, all other religions are atheistic.

Greg Bahnsen, in his seminary lectures, classified Buddhism as a religion of eminent moralism, meaning that it is based in the self work of the followers rather than the supernatural power of a god to produce and demand moralism.

One of Buddhism’s internal tensions is that the “way or path to end suffering” is found individualistically through meditation. The way of salvation is through an individual’s developed insight to moral handling of himself and others. And yet suffering is caused by an individualistic establishing of self and relationships. (Noble Truths #2 and #4)

Thus, Buddhism teaches that the way of salvation is the found to be self. An end to suffering comes through a self developed insight to moral handling of ourselves and others. Buddhism also teaches that self is the source of what a person needs to be saved from. The harder one tries to establish these insights to moral handling of self and relationships the more suffering occurs. Man is seen here as needing to redeem himself from himself by himself.

In the Analytic philosophy of religion it is a generally accepted maxim, by theistic and atheistic philosophers alike, that anyone who rejects the existence of the God of monotheism -- omnipotent (all-powerful), omniscient (all-knowing), and omnibenevolent (all-good) -- is by definition an atheist. In other words, if you are not a (believing) Christian, Jew, or Muslim, you are an atheist. You may believe in other 'gods' (as Hindus do) and you may believe that the Universe is 'God' (as Spinozist pantheists do), but these positions, because they entail a rejection of monotheism as traditionally understood (the 'omni' triad), are atheistic.

I would actually posit that a lot of 'open theists' are technically atheists, because of their substantial limitation of the divine omniscience (for instance, the view that God's knowledge of what human beings will do is contingent upon the free actions of human beings).

I'm currently reading a book by Kenneth R. Samples on testing worldviews including Pantheistic Monism, Islam, Naturalism, Postmodernism and Christian Theism. I would highly recommend it to any Christian who is comparing the philosophical roots of false faiths with Christianity.

A World of Difference: Putting Christian Truth-Claims to the Worldview Test: Kenneth Richard Samples: Amazon.co.uk: Books

He says this about Buddhism:-

Because the Triune God of the Bible is superpersonal (more than personal), religions that view God as impersonal (less than personal) - such as some versions of Buddhism, Hinduism, and the New Age movement - are ruled out. God's superpersonal existence also eliminates those rare forms of religion that tend to be atheistic in their core beliefs, such as Theravada Buddhism and Jainism.

Maybe it depends on how one defines atheism and religion. Atheists can be very "religious" in their commitment to such impersonal abstracts like atheism, naturalism, materialism, scientism, rationalism, empiricism, secularism and humanism.

I'm well acquainted with Buddhism and consider it atheistic in the sense that it does not teach that there is a higher power to whom we are morally responsible. There are a multitude of spirit beings, much of this taken from Hinduism, and the religious life consists in manipulating the spirit beings for one's own advantage.

When living in Thailand a very educated Thai Buddhist woman took me on an excursion into the countryside. I asked about the curlicues on the corners of the roofs. She replied, "When the lord Buddha was approaching death, the sacred serpent appeared to him. Buddha asked the serpent what he could do to show his appreciation for the revelations he had received. The serpent told Buddha, 'Put the image of my tail on every house top.'. So now we know where Buddhism REALLY came from.

During my studies with visiting Tibetan monks, I was taught that the Buddha was silent on the issue of God. He didn't say "yes, there are gods" or "no, there aren't" because this was not the central point of his teaching. He attempted to teach humankind how to avoid suffering. To him, a deity, or lack of, was irrelevant.

I know one accurate label we can hang on Buddhism, IDOLATRY.

On the moralistic side, it would have to be in the genus of humanism, as it bases its definition of reality upon human conception instead of God. Yet in another and far more fundamental sense, if a religion claims that everything is God, it is paramount to claiming that nothing is God: for making the former claim absolves the term "God" or "Deity" of all meaning (inasmuch as we regard the traditional definitions).

I returned from Thailand two weeks ago. I had the opportunity to talk with lots of Burmese and Karen Christians who were converts from Theravada Buddhism.
Theravada Buddhism is an oriental expression of a of a world life view that we would call transcendentialism.
My experience in Thailand in the mid 1970s and again a few weeks ago is that the Theravada expression of Buddhism is a thin veneer over an underlying Hindu understanding of the world.
I get the impression that in Burma, the popular religion of th masses is a kind of syncretism between Buddhism and and an older underlying Hinduism.

Mahayana Buddhism, especially as it is expessed in the Zen tradition, offers a path to enlightenment that would seem to be atheistic.

Isn't what makes a "Religion" a Religion, the fact that there's a Deity/Deties and an Afterlife of some kind?

Originally Posted by MikelKenn89

Isn't what makes a "Religion" a Religion, the fact that there's a Deity/Deties and an Afterlife of some kind?

Not really. I would suppose that religion requires faith. For example, Evolution has to be one of the most faith-requiring religions ever! People are religiously and blind-faithedly devoted to it, even though there's no deity (not deity but themselves, born from a primordial soup of stuff) and promising after life to follow! How dismal.

Originally Posted by davidsuggs

On the moralistic side, it would have to be in the genus of humanism, as it bases its definition of reality upon human conception instead of God.

Combine this with the fact that the God-question is irrelevant, and you've really got humanism.

I like seeing connections between secularism and Buddhism (assuming I am actually seeing a connection here).

Originally Posted by Joshua

Not really. I would suppose that religion requires faith.

Merely functioning as a social animal requires faith. There is no learning without believing what people communicate to us.