{"id":1600,"date":"2010-06-19T15:09:17","date_gmt":"2010-06-19T20:09:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=1600"},"modified":"2010-06-20T07:02:20","modified_gmt":"2010-06-20T12:02:20","slug":"ps-buddhist-idolitry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=1600","title":{"rendered":"PS, Buddhist Idolitry"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my last post, I noted the destruction by lightening of ‘Touchdown Jesus’ down in fundamentalist Ohio, and commented on the tendency of Christianity in general (and evangelical Christianity, in particular) to favor grandiose images of its Savior despite the injunction against graven images from the religion actually practiced by Jesus (i.e., Judaism). I also made some positive references to the philosophies of the Buddhists in contrapoint. <\/p>\n

Since then, it has occurred to me that the Buddhists have never been shy about keeping statues of the Buddha, some incredibly large. Interestingly (and also distressingly), some very large and ancient Buddha statues carved into mountain cliffs in Afghanistan were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001<\/a>, blown to bits by dynamite and other weapons.<\/p>\n

Archeologists and historians were extremely upset by this; hopefully the Buddhists took it in stride. Huge statues intentionally placed in public view step over the line between spiritual power and world power, between teaching and politics. Buddhists have not been immune to politics, of course, and Buddhist war is not unheard of. But the founders of both Buddhism and Christianity were men of peace; they were teachers and not politicians. Their followers have certainly strayed into politics, often with bad results. Perhaps both Touchdown Jesus and the Buddhas of Bamiyan are good reminders of the wisdom behind the Second Commandment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my last post, I noted the destruction by lightening of ‘Touchdown Jesus’ down in fundamentalist Ohio, and commented on the tendency of Christianity in general (and evangelical Christianity, in particular) to favor grandiose images of its Savior despite the injunction against graven images from the religion actually practiced by Jesus (i.e., Judaism). I also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1600"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1600"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1611,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1600\/revisions\/1611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}