... Continuing
Ven. Gunananda
He started by expressing disappointment in the quality of his opponents' arguments, and continued by noting that Ecclesiastes 3:19 (NIV: Man's fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath man has no advantage over the animal. Everything is meaningless.) is what de Silva charges that Buddhism teaches. He challenged de Silva to find similar statements in the Buddhist scriptures.
LP: Gunananda was not making very clear the sentience-nonsentience distinction; he could point out that physically, we are essentially another animal species, and that the author of Ecclesiastes is right about that, while mentally we are very different.
After going into some arcane Buddhist doctrines, and explaining further what gets reincarnated if there is no soul, he pointed out a contradiction:
1 Corinthians 15:22-28 (NIV: For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. ...) -- implying that everybody who believes in Christ will go to Heaven.
Matthew 25:41-46 (NIV: Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. ... [those who do wicked things] ... "Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.") -- implying that one can believe in Christ yet be sent to Hell.
He then asked why take the Bible seriously when it contains gross contradictions like that. Which of these parts is right, if any at all? They can't both be right.
Turning to Sirimanne's speech, he commented that he had never heard anything so unscholarly or aimlessly meandering, and that he will skip over irrelevant parts like the curing of a fever patient. Many of his opponents responses he found beside the point, like how haughty the Pharaoh was. About Judah and the iron chariots, he asked that if Judah did not have enough faith in God, then why was God with him at all?
In connection with the baby-boy massacre, Sirimanne charged that Buddha's mother had died seven days after giving birth to him. Gunananda's response was that she had been fated to die on that date, implying that giving birth to the Buddha had had nothing to do with it.
LP: this is so laughable that I am almost at a loss for words. Does this mean that the Buddha's mother would have mysteriously dropped dead on the appropriate date if she had never given birth to her famous child? And given that many women have died of giving birth, one quickly suspects cause-and-effect here.
He reiterated that the baby-boy massacre was nevertheless a bad omen, and that sinful omens imply that one will be a friend of sin. And asked if there was any record of anyone having been injured by the "lion-like" roaring of the baby Buddha.
As to the transmission of the Buddhist scriptures, he claimed that they had been recorded in the Buddha's lifetime on gold-leaf pages.
LP: but whatever happened to those gold-leaf books? Have they, by any chance, gone the way of the gold-plate originals of the Book of Mormon?
And while the recorders of the Buddhist scriptures had supposedly reached a state of great enlightenment, the same cannot be said of the writers of the Bible; he pointed out that Moses had committed some murders. He even claimed that the Bible was once completely burnt and then written down again.
LP: I have no idea where he got that idea from. The closest thing I can think of is Moses breaking the tablets of the Law when he saw his people commit idolatry. God obligingly prepared some new tablets for him, and the Bible tells us the wording of both sets(!).
And as to Moses performing miracles in Egypt, his Egyptian-sorcerer opponents had performed similar miracles (turning sticks into snakes), he commented that either Moses was also a sorcerer or else God Almighty was helping his Egyptian sorcerers also.
LP: this seems rather weak.
He continued into discussing the abandonment of wives and children by those seeking Buddhahood; he pointed that it was necessary to conquer passions and attachments, like to one's wives and children.
LP: that is not very reassuring; why not find new husbands for his wives? Or not marry at all?
About Sirimanne's remarks about how long Christ spent in his tomb, Gunananda mainly commented novasanavan ("miserable"), and reiterated his view that "three days and three nights" is a miscount. He claimed that he'd be providing more demonstration of the falsehood of Christianity in his final statement.
Rev. de Silva
After claiming that "opponent" is not objectionable, he then took on Eccl. 3:19, claiming that Eccl. 3:21 implies that humanity has a soul, unlike animals.
LP: NIV: Who knows if the spirit of man rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth? -- which implies that both have souls.
After commenting that human souls would be human souls in Heaven, though being glorious immortal beings there, he continued to the contradiction that Gunananda had pointed out between 1 Corinthans and Matthew, claiming that "being made alive" and "being saved" were two different things.
LP: however, when "eternal life" is used for salvation and "eternal death" is used for damnation, it is not clear that there is any real difference.
As to when the Buddhist scriptures were written down, he quoted those scriptures themselves as stating that they had been written down 450 years after the Buddha died.
As to Moses killing someone, he claimed that Moses had only killed some Egyptian who had been trying to kill some fellow Israelite.
LP: however, Exodus 2:11 says only that that Egyptian had "attacked" or "beat" that Israelite, with no hint on how deadly that attack was.
He continued into how some very enlightened people (Arahants/Arhats) had once been robbers and murderers.
LP: and these guys tend to be proud of their alleged sordid pasts; they make a hero out of Paul, who had been a persecutor of their sect before that famous side-changing on the road to Damascus.
After mentioning some more such scandals, like someone who gambled with a king and seduced and ran off with his wife, he turned to the subject of a legendary world-axis mountain, Mt. Meru (Mahameru), which according to Buddhist scriptures has a length, a width, a depth below the sea, and a height of 84000 yojanas (1 yojana ~ 16 mi / 26 km). Quoting some more Buddhist scriptures, he noted this sequence of world-destruction events:
* The rain would stop and all the plants would die.
* A second sun would appear and the small rivers and lakes would dry up.
* A third sun would appear and the large rivers would dry up.
* A fourth sun would appear and the large lakes would dry up.
* A fifth sun would appear and the oceans would dry up.
* A sixth sun would appear and Mt. Meru, everything else on Earth, and the Earth itself would be destroyed.
LP: Some Buddhist might claim that this is a prediction that the Sun will someday become a Red Giant, baking the Earth dry and then possibly destroying it.
De Silva then showed a globe and asked where was Mt. Meru. It is mentioned in several places in the Buddhist scriptures, and it would be difficult for it to escape explorers' attentions; where was it?
LP: this comment reminds me of Yuri Gagarin's comment "I don't see any god up here" during his spaceflight; likewise, no mountain climber has found any gods living on top of Mt. Olympus in Greece.
Also, this argument can be turned against the Bible, which clearly supports flat-earthism, as shown in The Flat-Earth Bible (
http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/febible.htm). A counterpart to Mt. Meru in it may be the mountain from which the Devil showed Christ "all the kingdoms of the world".
On top of Mt. Meru is a stack of heavenly worlds, on top of those is a stack of Brahma worlds, and on top of those is a stack of Arupa worlds. Without Mt. Meru, they would have no support, and thus could not exist. De Silva asked why act virtuously and perform good deeds if one has no chance of being reborn in one of these worlds?
He continued by noting that some Buddhist monks have interpreted their mandated celibacy in strange ways; one of them had sex with his mother, another with his sister, and another with a female monkey. And when some monks committed what de Silva described as "the foulest sin, the particulars of which cannot be given", the Buddha treated those acts as minor offenses.
LP: from what he was willing to list, I'm guessing that these were homosexual acts.
About the Buddha's death, he pointed out that the Buddha had died in an entirely normal fashion, of food poisoning from some pork and rice he had eaten, with none of the miracles or divine assistance of the rest of his career.
LP: the same could be said of Christ's crucifixion.
He ended by saying that believing in Christ was the only way to Heaven, and he claimed that all the objections to Christianity had been answered, while none of the objections to Buddhism had been.
Ven. Gunananda
He reiterated Eccl. 3:19 on how humanity is fundamentally like the (nonsentient) animals, and rebutted the Revs' claim that some Buddhist doctrine represents a mixed-up view of causality. He went on to explain that if there is any mixed-up causality, it's in the Christian Trinity with the Virgin Mary. Is God her father? Her sort-of husband? Her son?
LP: the Trinity was likely invented to tie up a lot of the theological loose ends of the New Testament; Gunananda is not alone in finding it confusing.
He continued by reiterating his claim that the Bible had once been burnt and re-recorded, and he asked if some of those alleged criminals who achieved enlightement had really been criminals, and claimed that if they had, then they had received appropriate punishments before achieving enlightenment. By comparison, Moses was an unrepentant murderer.
He then claimed that there was nothing in the Buddhist scriptures about the Buddha giving away his wife, and that sins in previous reincarnations should not be held against the Buddha.
About Mt. Meru, he claimed that de Silva was referring to Isaac Newton's theory that night is caused by the Sun being hidden behind the bulk of the Earth instead of behind Mt. Meru.
LP: this was understood long before Isaac Newton, at least as far back as Ptolemy and Aristotle.
He claimed that Newtonianism was not completely accepted, noting the work of a certain R.J. Morrison, and also noting that the Bible, like some Buddhist books, states that the Earth is stationary. (Eccl. 1:5, NIV: The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.)
LP: R.J. Morrison's theories were likely crackpottery, making that gentleman one of the numerous anti-Newton crackpots in the 19th century. However, Gunananda was correct about the Bible stating that the Earth is stationary in some cosmic sense.
He noted that compass needles point northward and not in any other direction, meaning that Mt. Meru must be at the North Pole, and that it must be magnetic. He also claimed that the exact size of a yojana was controversial, meaning that that mountain could be smaller than de Silva thought it is.
LP: it was subsequently discovered that there is no trace of such a mountain at the North Pole. In fact, the Earth's magnetic field is generated in its liquid outer core, whose convection generates electric currents, which in turn, generate those magnetic fields.
And by symmetry, this argument might also "demonstrate" that Mt. Meru is at the South Pole.
After arguing that the misbehavior of some Buddhist monks did not necessarily discredit Buddhism, he pointed out that some Christian clergymen have also been known to misbehave. He continued with mentioning that the Bible has numerous immoralities, like Lot and his daughters' incest and the incest committed by Adam and Eve's children.
He claimed that the pork and rice were not responsible for the Buddha's death, since he was fated to have dropped dead at the date and time he did.
LP: That hooey again? First the Buddha's mother and now the Buddha himself?
At any rate, he claimed, pork was no fundamentally worse than the grasshoppers eaten by John the Baptist.
LP: I think he was right about that.
As to the Buddha being dead, he claimed that part of the Buddha was still "alive" -- his relics -- and that 2500 years from now, they will be gathered at the Bo tree where he achieved enlightenment, where they will assume the form of a living Buddha, preach for a while, and then disappear. And that the Buddha will completely achieve Nirvana when that happens.
LP: I am at a loss for words.
About the Buddha's alleged omniscience, he claimed that it was not the sort of omniscience that the Christian God has, of knowing everything whether he wants to or not, but the ability to know whatever he wants to know. Which thus shields him from all the superabundance of pain and misery and sin and filth in the world.
He asked why Christians attach so much emphasis to the death of Christ, someone who advised his followers to acquire swords, and someone who had been charged with posing as the king of the Jews.
LP: the implication is that he had provoked his execution by trying to start an armed revolt.
As to the resurrection, the first witness, according to Mark 16:9, was Mary Magdalene, who had seven devils driven out of her. Could she be counted on to be completely sane and reliable?
He seemed to believe in a form of spontaneous generation, in which air, heat, and water produces living things -- whether they be called Brahma, Vishnu, and Iswara, or God, Son, or Holy Ghost. "The spirit of God moved across the waters" he cited as evidence that the Bible agrees with him.
Turning to the Adam and Eve story, and how women were sentenced to give birth painfully as a result of eating that forbidden fruit, he asked why is it that some animals sometimes give birth painfully. Had their ancestors eaten some forbidden fruit also?
LP: Some theologians would claim that that was also due to Adam and Eve eating that fruit; many theologians have claimed that there was no such thing as death before that event, with all animals being vegetarians.
In a final statement, he claimed that the most eminent in all ages had spoken in support of Buddhism, including eminent doctors, astrologers, and the like, and he stated that Buddhism "inculcated the purest morality and urged the necessity of self-denial, self-sacrifice, and charity. It encouraged peace. It tolerated all religions in its midst. It had nothing to fear. It pleaded of men to follow the example of Holy Buddha, and pointed the sick and the sorrowing to the blissful state of Nirvana." After stating that he had proved the truth of Buddhism and the falsehood of Christianity, he urged his listeners to take refuge in Holy Buddha.
His listeners shouted "Sadhu! Sadhu! Sadhu!", but only stopped when he told them to.
The End
Sumber: Panadura Debate / Panadura Vaadaya -
http://www..org/t65469/#ixzz1ScQZR7rr
Hak Cipta: www..org