thread: 2007-01-10 : Some questions about worship
On 2007-01-12, wundergeek wrote:
Woohoo! I get to be controversial!
Here's my verdict:
Prayer: Yes
Blasphemy: No
Worship: Yes
Now before I explain my reasoning, I'm going to add the caveat that as someone who was raised Catholic my first impulse is to say "wow, that's really weird". But then, I think that's because Catholics tend to view anything that's even vaguely mystical with suspicion.
So here's why I think it's not blasphemy but is also worship. It seems to me that this prayer you say at dinner shares a lot with Buddhist philosophy. And according to the doctrine of the Anonymous Christian postulated by Karl Rahner, other religions that don't view Christ as the Savior can still be a path to salvation as long as those religions promote virtue and don't deny the existence of the infinite nature of god.
So my take is this, if Buddhism can be recognized as a religion with virtue and a virtuous Buddhist can be said to be an anonymous Christian, then there's no reason why I should view your prayer as blasphemy. It's not a viewpoint that would be called correct within a Christian framework, but it could be correct according to a Buddhist(ish?) tradition.
By the same token, I would count this prayer as worship. It's not a worship that makes a lot of sense to Catholic-leaning Christians like myself, but if we can say that Buddhist practice counts as worship then it seems that this would count too.
(And here I'm picking on Buddhism because it seems to share some philisophical elements and is something radically outside of the sphere of Christianity. My actual knowledge of Buddhism is very small, so forgive me if I get all kinds of things wrong here. This is just my two cents.)
