The atheism of Buddhism is not like that of American atheism. American atheism is a simple non-belief in anything besides the secular and immediately evident occasionally piled up with the whipped crème of historical and futurist extrapolation from the present. Buddhist atheism on the other hand is a kind of religion of belief in non-being. Buddhism’s has its own contradictions dissimilar from those of automobile driving consumerist atheist.
The 2nd century neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus wrote of 'The One'. The One is what we would call God. Eternal and omniscient, omnipotent and source of all things, everything that exists is an emanation from The One. Buddhists have a sort of reasoning from the apparent trancendingly through its temporal illusoriness back toward the one nirvana of non-being. Plotinus in his 54 tractates named 'The Enneads' explained that the One emanates another figure named 'The Intelligence' who creates all the things that exist in various forms-no excluding necessarily apparent evolution within a temporal universe.
Plotinus charts reality from The One downward through a realm of forms to this world with far too many broken forms. Buddhist reason from this realm of broken forms upward or downward through to one state of non-being. The initial motivation of the Buddha was to overcome suffering in this world. Influenced by the Hindu concept of Maya or temporal illusion the Buddha sought to see through temporality and disregard the phenomena of pain.
Because belief in God is the eight heresy of Buddhism they are left in theory with an eventual pervasive nothingness of cosmology as the final state. While human mind is phenomenal and dissolves with life or even before, the experience of life and the contents of thought are all that human beings seem to have-so one must make one's thoughts count as far as possible for the good.
Buddhism presently shares a cosmological paradox with theoretical physics and cosmology in explaining how being even if temporal illusion-how anything at all exists. Descartes' had a similar philosophical challenge. Even if existence is an illusion it is an illusion of something, somewhere. The Universe may have always existed as a derivative of The One or it may have appeared in being as a creation from someone.
Christians believe that The One, or God created all that is in some way, in some order. Buddhists stop at the point of investigation of the negation of temporality as permanence and point to non-being as the normative state, while American atheists believe in Darwin' gambit as the mechanical universe's agent for issuing life. Christians and Buddhists might each be able to stipulate that the apparent world and universe of solid-state matter-energy is probabilistically entangled from some substrata of quantum uncertainty with exceedingly paradoxical and different criteria of space and time.
Consumerism as a label was an opening label in the class war of the godless atheist corporate and socialist ethos of broadcast power. Consumers vs. producers was an us-them paradigm useful for making workers feel useless and the rich, glorious. American atheism is a new and troublesome political front generated by the robotic surveillance snake-bots of power and idiocy.
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