Faith in the Future

QUESTION: I'm not sure one can have faith in the future without having faith in a conflicted world (in both senses). There may be a doctrinal point at issue here. mike

DHARMAVIDYA: Yes, there are all sorts of philosophical and theological issues. A lot hinges on whether you think that everything in the future has to come from the past. It can and has been argued that if the answer is yes, then there is no freedom. Tillich would say that in that case there is nothing truly worthy of the name history - merely development. From a Buddhist point of view, do we think that the doctrine of dependent origination is telling us that everything depends upon conditions and therefore that all of the future depends on the past and there is nothing else to the future than the past unfolded - that the future is simply the implicate order of the past, or do we think that it is telling us that all of that part of the future that depends on the past is already in the province of Mara and that there is something else to be found which is the real (true, eternal) Life of enlightenment etc.? If there is something else - in what is it grounded? These are fundamental questions that I am writing about in my next but one book.