Philosophy

In around 260 BC , King Ashoka of the Mauryan Empire invaded the Republic of Kalinga, now in modern day Orissa, engaging in a bloody battle that within a short period of time caused such massive destruction that it appalled the chronicles of time. It was the first and the only battle that Ashoka is said to have fought, following which he encountered a profound change of heart and gave up violence. The conquest did make Ashoka an absolute monarch over a great part of the Indian sub-continent ; the change of heart, however, stripped him of any desire for further military conquests. The massive loss of life and suffering caused by this war weighed heavily on the mind of the King and plunged him into deep remorse. On the 13th of his 14 Major Rock Edicts , he inscribes: On conquering Kalinga the Beloved of the Gods felt remorse, for, when an independent country is conquered, the slaughter, death and deportation of the people is extremely grievous to the Beloved of the Gods and weighs heav...

COURAGE ( andreia ) is one of the virtues extolled by Plato in his writings; the others are reverence or piety ( eusebeia ,  to hosion ), wisdom ( sophia ), temperance or sound-mindedness ( sophrosune ), and justice ( dikaiosune ). In both Laches and Protagoras , Plato investigates the meaning of courage. While in Protagoras , he concludes that courage is the knowledge of what is good and evil in the future, in Laches he expresses doubt over this conclusion. Certainly, courage must not be separated from wisdom. It would be foolish for someone who didn’t know how to swim to jump into a current trying to show courage there. One also doesn’t put his hand in fire claiming that he or she doesn’t fear anything. Courage must be combined with wisdom, specifically the knowledge of what must inspire fear and what must not – in other words, the knowledge of good and evil of the future. But, knowledge of good and evil cannot be divided into past, present, and future. The definition of good is ...

RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM AND SOCIAL ORDER A Philosophical Perspective Domenic Marbaniang, Ph.D. Paper presented at the National Seminar on Religious Fundamentalism and Social Order,  Andhra University , February 26-27, 2010. Forty four years after the publication of Harvey Cox ’s The Secular City that celebrated “the progressive secularization of the world as the logical outcome of Biblical religion” ( Newsweek ) [1] , we almost feel the bones of religious fundamentalism cracking under the pressure of secularization. At the same time, however, the Hegelian dialectic holds ground as both refuse to be crushed by either; and any compromising stance only begets another rival; to the effect, that it can be said that fundamentalism is never a phenomenon that may be extinguished. The term “fundamentalist” was first used by a Baptist journalist in 1920 as a badge of honor for those Christians who championed the cause of the Fundamentals , or set of beliefs such as the inerrancy of Scriptures...

In the Foreword of his book Jesus Rediscovered , Malcolm Muggeridge , referred to the French philosopher Simone Weil (1909– 1943) as "the most luminous intelligence of our time". Despite her brief life, much constrained by ill-health, she made important contributions to the field of philosophy and philosophical theology. One key concept of Weil's philosophy of God was "Absence". I quote from Wikipedia: Absence is the key image for her metaphysics , cosmology, cosmogeny, and theodicy . She believed that God created by an act of self-delimitation—in other words, because God is conceived as a kind of utter fullness, a perfect being, no creature could exist except where God was not. Thus creation occurred only when God withdrew in part. This is, for Weil, an original kenosis preceding the corrective kenosis of Christ's incarnation (cf. Athanasius). We are thus born in a sort of damned position not owing to original sin as such, but because to be created at ...

© Domenic Marbaniang, Explorations of Faith (2009 ), Chapter 1. Hebrews 11:1 - "Faith is...the evidence of things not seen." ------------------------------ The second part of this statement is parallel to the first. It modifies the first clause. Thus “substance” is “evidence” in the same manner that “things hoped for” are “unseen”. A significant truth of revelation here is that faith doesn’t need further evidence for its existence than its presence itself. Since it is the final ground of the things hoped for, it is also the evidence of the things hoped for. It is not based on anything else. It is the basis for everything that we know and experience. Attempts to base faith on rational or empirical proofs, i.e. on logic or experience, adds nothing to it. These may help to justify beliefs but cannot be the source of faith. One must not search for evidence for faith. Faith itself must be seen as the evidence for everything else. In fact, it is through the eyes of faith that meani...

© Domenic Marbaniang, December 19, 2007. “All men by nature desire to know,” said Aristotle in his Metaphysics . Curiosity is instinctive to man. Anxiety, boredom, frustration, and bewilderment often accompany one’s failure to know what one wants to know. If there are shocks that upset the mind, then there are also shocks that excite the mind. Unexpected pleasures are as shocking as unexpected pains, though with opposite results. Therefore, when the intuition senses flashes of insight amidst the confusion and obstruction of the mind, the pleasure is sublime. That is why religion is so personal to believers while absurdity and vexation torture the skeptics. But belief cannot be recklessly entertained, for beliefs match their consequences; and if beliefs are false, the consequences can be disastrous. However, one can’t avoid belief, since it is the ground of all knowledge . For instance, in order to reason logically one needs to first believe in reason and logic ; similarly, in order...

© Domenic Marbaniang, December 19, 2007. ‘The sense of the world must lie outside the world,’ said Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). [1] The human problem is seeking sense of the world within the world or within one’s own self. But can man go beyond himself by himself? Can someone lift himself up by pulling up his bootstraps? The epistemic predicament of man has been just that in several cases: when he started from himself or nature he returned to himself or nature, to the extent that ‘man is the measure of all things’ was reflected in all his cogitations on man, God , and the world. A glance at monism, polytheism, materialism, and pantheism [2] will demonstrate all that man can do to limit ultimate meaning to this-worldly-reality. This has also been true of Christian theology several times. The rational entanglements of scholastic theology in attempts to rationalize revelation, and the empirical obsessions of liberal, process, existential, and charismatic theologies reflect the s...