I don’t belong to any religion myself, although respect the aesthetics, family values, traditions of most religions.. EXCEPT when it separates people’s rights to be a union, creates wars & misunderstandings. There should be no exception to killing even 1 innocent life. We all have a right to Live Free.
Buddhism:
The beauty of the Buddhist Tradition is that it is not so much a religion, in the sense that there is no Deity. It is said that when Siddhartha Gautama, the first known Enlightened Buddha was asked whether or not he believe in a God, he remained silent.. leading to the defined term of “Non-Theism”. Buddhism is a Philosophy, a Way of Life, that leads the individual to Nirvana, the state of being free from both suffering and the cycle of rebirth.
Non-Theism:
According to Caporale & Grumelli (1971), is the absence of belief in both the existence and non-existence of a deity (or deities, or other numinous phenomena)..
Relationship to Agnosticism:
Used in the strict sense, as by those who self-identify as non-theists or non-theistics, the term describes worldviews for which the question of divinity is regarded as irrelevant and meaningless. When used in this sense, non-theism is often confused with agnosticism, although there is a distinct difference. An agnostic, by definition, views the question of God’s existence to be necessarily unanswered, but not necessarily irrelevant. A non-theist, by definition, views the question to be necessarily irrelevant, and also may or may not find it necessarily unanswerable. Thus, it is possible that an agnostic could consider the nature of God to be an issue of tremendous importance. It is also possible that he could consider the question unimportant. Provided that he remains convinced that the existence of God is unknowable, he remains an agnostic. Likewise, a nontheist may or may not believe the existence of God to be inherently unknowable; this has no bearing on his status as a nontheist. It is possible that one individual could be both an agnostic and a nontheist; indeed, most nontheists are agnostics, and vice versa.
Nevertheless, the concepts are distinct, and it is entirely possible that one could be exclusively a non-theist, or exclusively an agnostic. Many early agnostics were not non-theists, in that they considered religious questions to be worthwhile and important. The French Proto-Fascist Charles Maurras, for instance, was an avowed agnostic. However, he was also a staunch clericalist, viewing the Catholic religion as a necessary part of society, and the question of divinity as an integral part of the (typical) human psyche. Maurras could be said to be an agnostic, but not a non-theist.
Many modern-day atheists could be described as agnostic non-theists, in that they regard the existence of God as both meaningless and unknown. However, an exclusive non-theist avoids the question of God’s existence entirely because the question is irrelevant.
Non-Theistic Worldview:
When faced with the question of whether gods exist, a non-theist would respond that the question itself is unimportant, that it concerns information that is unfalsifiable, meaningless, superfluous, etc. To a non-theist, the issue of God’s existence is no different than, for example, the existence of invisible, intangible elephants. This conviction is generally based on skepticism and empiricism, although it may also be motivated by the pragmatic desire to rid oneself of an inconvenient and irresolvable dilemma.
Additional pragmatic motivations arise from considering the various functions that the concept of a deity serves, and finding those functions either unimportant or unresolved by the concept of a deity. For instance, if one entertains the existence of a deity in order to face concerns over the end of life, then the loss of a concern over the end of life diminishes the need to consider the existence of a deity. Likewise if the concept of a deity provides a resolution to ontological questions such as “how did the universe begin?” then the need for the concept will be lessened to the extent that one no longer finds troubling his or her ignorance about the possible ontology of the universe. In short, if the concept of deity has no functional value for a person, that person is likely to be comfortable as a non-theist.”
[Source: http://buddhism.2be.net/Nontheistic]
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