--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Hugo" <richardhughes103@> wrote: > > > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Bhairitu <noozguru@> wrote: > > > > > > I guess if you're going to look at "God" as a "personal" > > > deity then your blog makes some sense. But you're > > > forgetting that MMY and the Shankara tradition taught > > > "God" as the impersonal. > > > > If you accept that "laws of nature" is a secular term > > for God, then you must accept that MMY was preaching a > > personal God because the terms "nature support" and > > "Maharishi effect" are implying intervention at a > > fundamental level. > > That's the issue. Personal, schmersonal...that is > irrelevant. The relevant issue is the belief being > sold that there is a sentient basis to creation > that has the ability to 1) have a "will" or a desire > for how it "should" be working, and 2) has the pos- > sibility of "intervening" to affect creation, and > that thus can be "appealed to" via butt-bouncing > or yagyas.
I'm not sure where we're getting the idea of "intervention" here. That may be how some people think of it, but it's by no means the *only* way to think of it; it's certainly not how I've ever thought of it. <snip> > Not that long ago, the "laws of nature" that most > human beings in the Western world would agree were > sacrosanct and inviolable involved the sun orbiting > the earth. That this turned out not to be true did > not invalidate the concept that there may be some > rules that shape the nature of the universe, it > just revealed the poverty of human imagination in > trying to get a handle on what those rules are. Heh. Funny, that's just what I was going to say about the "intervention" idea--it represents a poverty of imagination, in this case the inability to go beyond anthropomorphism in thinking about divinity. (On the other hand, the notion that the sun went around the earth was a *gigantic* leap of the imagination from previous notions of the sun's relationship to the earth. And it didn't take that long to correct the error in the basic idea once the concept of two huge bodies revolving around each other in space had emerged.)
