WESTERN
Atheism in Zan Buddhism
Keiji Nishitani: Religion and Nothingness
(University of California: Berkeley 1982)
All along we have been making allusions to God, despite the fact that one of the
questions of our times is whether or not there is a God at all. Not that
atheism did not exist in former times; but there are special qualities of
contemporary atheism that make it different from what it was before. We find
ourselves at a point where atheism has been elevated to the position of serving
as a substitute for theistic religion; where it seeks to serve as the
ultimate basis for our human existence and to assign the ultimate telos
of human life; and where it has come accordingly, to offer itself as the only
comprehensive, sufficient standpoint for modern man. These developments are
visible in Marxism and in atheistic existentialism.
30
The traditional standpoint of Christianity implies an estrangement from the
awakened subjectivity of modern man. Might it not be that these two mutually
exclusive positions --the freedom of man carried all the way through to a
subjective nothingness and a subjectivized atheism, and the religious freedom
appearing in traditional Christianity--require some sort of higher synthesis in
our times? Christianity cannot and must not, look on modern atheism merely as
something to be eliminated. It must instead accept atheism as a mediation to a
new development of Christianity itself. 36-7
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