There's abuse and there's abuse and there's narratives

I had written a somewhat long post that I have refrained, so far, from publishing.  

And I'm going to publish this one instead, although I'd like to make a point or two in this post that will have been made in the other post, if I decide to publish that one. (That one's just a bit too incendiary perhaps.)

Let's stipulate that some women were harmed as a result of abuse by Sasaki Roshi - though I have absolutely positively no first hand knowledge of any events in the matter.  My interest is that of a lay practitioner in the Rinzai school, as well as a guy who's known his share of bad things flown his way and all related suffering to that.  Not to mention all the crap that I've inflicted on others as well.

But were all women who interacted with Sasaki Roshi harmed, and were they all harmed to the same degree?

Likely not.  This is not to minimize the suffering of all who were greatly harmed but it is to point out a fact that is sometimes lost, especially if one is too attached to a narrative.

Richard Dawkins, in his book The God Delusion mentioned that he was the recipient of highly inappropriate sexual advances on the part of some clergy member.  But Dawkins makes a very interesting point, one that I heartily endorse.   That point is that the abuse of children by attempting - and succeeding often - at convincing  them they are fundamentally damaged goods who will suffer the fires of hell for eternity can be far more damaging and widespread than the incidents of sexual abuse by Christian clergy. 

He's right. 

He's so right.

I was never sexually abused by clergy, but I sure as hell was the recipient of various forms of abuse predicated upon the above narrative. 

We should be careful about the narratives we are prescribing for the harm we see around us.

Stephen Hawking's and Leonard Mlodinow's Case Against a Possible Creator

The recent article by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow saying there is no case for a creator deity  is finally available on the 'net for now.  Rather than opine about it and take a swipe and "New Atheists" I would entreat all to actually read the article. Here's the key points:

It is possible to turn that last statement into a scientific principle: The fact of our being restricts the characteristics of the kind of environment in which we find ourselves. For example, if we did not know the distance from the Earth to the sun, the fact that beings like us exist would allow us to put bounds on how small or great the Earth-sun separation could be. We need liquid water to exist, and if the Earth were too close, it would all boil off; if it were too far, it would freeze. That principle is called the "weak" anthropic principle.

The weak anthropic principle is not very controversial. But there is a stronger form that is regarded with disdain among some physicists. The strong anthropic principle suggests that the fact that we exist imposes constraints, not just on our environment, but on the possible form and content of the laws of nature themselves...

If one assumes that a few hundred million years in stable orbit is necessary for planetary life to evolve, the number of space dimensions is also fixed by our existence. That is because, according to the laws of gravity, it is only in three dimensions that stable elliptical orbits are possible. In any but three dimensions even a small disturbance, such as that produced by the pull of the other planets, would send a planet off its circular orbit, and cause it to spiral either into or away from the sun.
The emergence of the complex structures capable of supporting intelligent observers seems to be very fragile. The laws of nature form a system that is extremely fine-tuned. What can we make of these coincidences? Luck in the precise form and nature of fundamental physical law is a different kind of luck from the luck we find in environmental factors. It raises the natural question of why it is that way.
Many people would like us to use these coincidences as evidence of the work of God. The idea that the universe was designed to accommodate mankind appears in theologies and mythologies dating from thousands of years ago. In Western culture the Old Testament contains the idea of providential design, but the traditional Christian viewpoint was also greatly influenced by Aristotle, who believed "in an intelligent natural world that functions according to some deliberate design."
That is not the answer of modern science. As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.
Our universe seems to be one of many, each with different laws. That multiverse idea is not a notion invented to account for the miracle of fine tuning. It is a consequence predicted by many theories in modern cosmology. If it is true it reduces the strong anthropic principle to the weak one, putting the fine tunings of physical law on the same footing as the environmental factors, for it means that our cosmic habitat—now the entire observable universe—is just one of many.
Each universe has many possible histories and many possible states. Only a very few would allow creatures like us to exist. Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the cosmos, this makes us in a sense the lords of creation. 

The universe, vast as it is, is as Grace Slick once sang..."Compared to your scream, the human dream doesn't mean sh!t to a tree."  The planets we've "seen" outside our solar system are even wilder than we had thought at first. If there were an anthropic principle, it's pretty well hidden amongst the strange variety of objects in the universe.  Sorry if that doesn't mean "religion and science are enemies,"  as far as scientific inquiry versus dogma are concerned but it seems to be the case.

When Hawking and Molodinow say, "the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing," I believe, based on what I know as an educated non-specialist, that it means that there is a probabilistic mechanism by which universe arise. That probabilistic structure means that it is fundamentally irrelevant whether or not a deity exists in regards to the universe coming into being.  It falls out of the math so to speak, just as it is irrelevant how the laws of physics effect a large numbers of rolls of two fair die.

In saying there's any kind of anthropic principle we're just thinking we're too damned important in the universe. I would say even Hawking and Mlodinow go in that direction, perhaps as a salve, for saying though we're puny, we're the "lords" of the universe.    There's too much variety in the universe we've already seen to make such a grandiose statement, in my view.

The vast variety of the universe and my limited knowledge of the intertwining of probability into its origin is a catalyst for this Buddhist's sense of wonder, awe, and humility.

By the way,Nathan at Dangerous Harvests had had a post on this earlier.  I would challenge all to actually consider what Hawking and Mlodinow are saying, not from a "Religion" versus "Science" perspective, but to hold that issue in brackets until you have a sufficient understanding of what they're saying as science.  They're not condemning religious people as enemies, they're condemning  dogma as the enemy of reasoning.   I  would make a similar metaphor of religious dogma being fundamentally opposed to the search for the resolution to the Great Matter.  And the search for the resolution to the Great Matter, as made into a parable in the famed ox herding pictures, will always - can only triumph over a dogmatic command to "Believe this because god told me so."

A "better way to believe in God?"

As a Buddhist, there is some overlap with what Jay Michaelson says on this post, and some Mahayana Buddhist notions.  But, - I'm reminded of a comment I made on Barbara's blog about religion and New atheists - I would say strongly that this god is not the god of monotheistic religions by any stretch of the imagination, and as somewhere in one of Kapleau's books said, it does a  nearly sacrilegious disservice to refer to Michaelson's idea of a deity as the same thing as the gods of these religions.

That's why, out of respect to them, and out of clarity I would say that this god is in no way the god of Christianity, Judaism or Islam.

A bit of back and forth with "New Atheists"

I do regularly visit P.Z. Myers' blog, as anyone who reads my blog regularly knows.  My thinking largely parallels Petteri's thinking on this.  Regarding the New Atheists, and with great thanks to Petteri for thinking about this in the first place, I  part company on with New Atheists on the following:

a)Whether Buddhism is a religion : I say it is.

b) Whether religion is a net negative: I do admit there's an awful lot of evidence against the big monotheistic ones, but for the same reasons I say Buddhism is a religion - it's a set of skills one hones and said skill honing - I'd have to vote in favor of a net positive

c) Whether people are fundamentally rational: I think it's quack science to suggest this; I don't think the neuroscience supports this.  Furthermore, anyone who's pondered their place in existence either has to accept the extreme singularity (and hence the apparent absurdity) of their predicament, or they choose to invent a religious narrative that wishes this away.  I'd include "people are fundamentally rational" in the latter category; though, and Buddhism in the former category. 

d) Whether religion is nothing more or less than a set of (flawed) propositions and behaviors accepted on faith: I would say this is to some extent true in Buddhism at first, but the honing of skills takes a bit of the scientific method as applied to one's self.

Petteri adds this one bit here, by the way:

The world ends at Wittgenstein 7. If something can't be defined or verified, it's as good as non-existent and therefore not worth talking about.

Now I do have to point out that Wittgenstein didn't actually say what Petteri says, but I think he is accurately characterizing much New Atheist thought.  Wittgenstein's "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" is as much an admission of the existence of the mystical as it is for the phenomenological.  I, myself, lean toward the phenomenological (sort of in this sense).  Whether or not, though there is something beyond in the realm of where one cannot speak, if we cannot speak of it for all intents and purposes, one can neither assert nor deny; the nonexistence of god is ultimately as relevant as its existence.  We Zen Buddhists go one step further (in both Rinzai and Soto traditions); we know there are some things whereof one cannot speak, and they do not necessarily fit into categories of "natural" and "metaphysical."   And furthermore, we seek to observe, express, and embody these things and natural things and all logical combinations thereof in a non-dualistic manner. 

Naturalists, it would seem to me, literally don't play much tennis or swimming, 'cause you can't do those activities and not be doing some kind of non-dualism.  And yeah, yeah, yeah, you don't need a "religion" to do those activities well.  But then again what we're talking about here is various deconstructions of the term "religion," and Southern Baptists have one preferred meaning, New Atheists have another, and this Buddhist ex-Catholic has sort of jury rigged his own, and freely admits your mileage may vary.

Anyway, that was a long but overdue digression.  Yesterday P.Z. Myers finally got around to a blog entry that went over that saccharine op-ed from the Dalai Lama.  I'd mentioned this article here. So anyway, I commented on Myers' blog:

I was wondering when you'd get to the Dalai Lama. Regular readers to my blog know that although I'm a Buddhist, I tend to be very critical of the Dalai Lama.
It tends to get me in trouble with certain other Buddhist bloggers.
I have differences with you folk in that you'd call my religion as I do it a philosophy, whereas I call it a religion because it has elements of the cultivation of skills (which most religions admittedly lack, but which pretty much all philosophies definitely lack).
But the Dalai Lama is problematic, as well as the holder of some quite large conflicts of interest.

Somebody replied, and I noted that it is the skill of using breath and mindfulness (and I could have  added actions, behavior, etc.) that makes Buddhism the religion that it is. Eventually that person wrote:

My objection is more along the lines that your use of the word "religion" strains against the common usage of the term in the English language and (at first blush) smacks of sophistry. It renders the term even more meaningless than it already is, and muddies up the water instead of making it clearer.

Note that the fact that it helps you to be mindful and breathe doesn't make it a religion. The cultivation of skills is, by your own admission, not a necessary condition of religion, and so it cannot possibly make the difference between Buddhism being a philosophy and a religion. That's the other element of my objection (and why I made the comment about logical consistency).

None of this should be read as a criticism of Buddhism in general or your particular flavor; the latter especially seems pretty reasonable to me.

I do think there is much common ground with everyone, and although we might quibble on what's a religion and what's not a religion, we should be able to live with each other, whether fundamentalist or New Atheist.   I think it's amazing how little interaction there is with  Western Buddhists in the blogosphere and other religions in general, or atheists, given the fact that we're a minority, and our practice is in the midst of these other belief/non-belief systems.

There IS common ground with Buddhists and New Atheists and Buddhists and Christians... BUT

An article by one John Thatamanil titled, "Beyond the Theism/Atheism Divide: A Plea for Humility"  was recently published in the Huffington Post.    Prof. Thatamanil works in  "areas of research [which] include comparative theology and theologies of religious pluralism. Specifically, he writes on Hindu-Christian Dialogue and Buddhist-Christian Dialogue."  He's Episcopalian, and while his heart is surely in the right place, his post on atheism/theism is a cautionary tale. 

I do not wish to channel P. Z. Myers in this post, though I find his brand of blog blasphemy somewhat entertaining from time to time, having been on the receiving end of the conservative form of Catholicism in the early years of my life.

I'd like to get a bit more serious.

But Prof. Thatamanil's article begins with...

Too many atheists display the same aggression and smug self-satisfaction that they detest in their fundamentalist rivals. The tragedy is that the crossfire between these groups prevents robust alliances between modest liberal religious communities and humble non-dogmatic atheists on matters of real urgency.

What binds many atheists together is an unshakable conviction that they know everything there is to know about religion, namely that it is irrational bondage to immutable doctrine. No amount of counterevidence can convince such atheists otherwise. What irony! But where do they come by this knowledge about religion? Their expertise seems to be derived by virtue of sheer sentience alone.

By contrast, if a theologian were to broadcast her convictions about molecular or evolutionary biology without some years of careful reading and study, she would be met with jeering laughter and summarily dismissed. Why then are uninformed atheists who have never read in theology exempt from similar derision? Sadly, every pedant believes himself entitled to his unearned convictions about religion.

 I can cite specific members of specific religions with whom I have disagreements.  I don't need to attack  the "many" members of specific groups.  I don't need to attack unnamed straw-men.

Let me put this another way.  If Thatamanil were writting, "Too many black people display the same aggression and smug self-satisfaction that they detest in their white neighbors," that might be bad enough, but he ends his analogous sentence with the word rivals.  Now while it is true that fundamentalist theocrats in the US and the rest of us are in some sort of conflict, specifically a theocratic conflict, that conflict is with fundamentalist theocrats and the rest of us. It is Thatamanil that transmutes this in to the false choice of "insulting, bad, bad atheists versus fundamentalists."

Finally, (that is, my final comments on the first 3 paragraphs of this) I have read Tillich, medieval mystics, Kierkegaard, Kung, Nagarjuna, as well as Sartre.  It's damned patronizing to postulate that someone, especially someone who is already as educationally pedigreed as I am (or any number of others) might somehow find these authors' works beyond them without "professional intervention."

It is, from a Buddhist perspective, hardly "right speech."

Thatamanil writes, "A Christian who compares liberation theology with caste in Hinduism is making an invidious comparison. A similar constraint should apply in conversations between atheists and the religious. Atheists who tar the whole of religion by contrasting the insight of Einstein with the fulminations of fundamentalists are engaged in egregious dialogical malpractice."

Yet, from my understanding of the meaning of invidious, is not Thatamanil living in a glass house? Let me explain: By remaining silent against his fundamentalist theocratic brothers and sisters, and by singling out "Atheists" who contrast naturalist reverence (when accused of having an outlook that is indifferent to the human condition! Oh! He forgot to mention that!) with fundamentalist theocrats foaming at the mouth, what kind of comparison is he making?

We Buddhists do have common ground with pretty much every religion, although I have to take issue with Thatamanil: "Ground of Being" can't really cut it for us, I'm afraid.  Nonduality you see,- mindful nonduality, would require eventually that those things  whose existence is for all intents and purposes  irrelevant should be taken as such in practical affairs.

"Ground of Being" won't cut it for an atheist like Dawkins or Myers for reasons I'm sure he can explain to you, and I have to admit, Ground of Being used to work for me.   But as I have more deeply studied and practiced Buddhism, the more I lean towards an understanding here that while it isn't Dawkins or Myers type of hyper-realism,  it is more towards a phenomenological view (I am kind of a probability guy, after all, not a biologist).  You don't need, after all the mental gymnastics (even the ones I do on this blog) to have much thought about nonduality; otherwise it, too becomes another form of duality.  The world behaves kind of a certain way, as though a mutual apatheism exists between the transcendant and the existent.  And, as the author of the Lankavatara might add...it doesn't always appear that way as well.  But most of the time when you flip the coin it's either heads or tails.  They rarely land on their edge, and still rarer does a bird fly by and swoop up the coin.

Buddha nature pervades the whole universe.  That can be seen without recourse to mumbo-jumbo.
There is "Endless Dimension Universal Life," as far as we can tell; though it may be a slight verbal hyperbole. But not much  And there is also no possibility that a Deity will intervene to save us.


But all of this is ultimately unimportant.  What is important is for us to try to alleviate each others' sufferings and for all of us to transcend ours.  Sorry for the waste of time.

The right tool for the job

Nathan at Dangerous Harvest does the "pox on both your houses" bit on atheism versus theism.  I disagree.  He says:

Talk of heaven and God-daddies in the sky always has felt like a screwy attempt to deal with human psychological dramas to me. There are terrible things occurring on Earth, so there must be a God waiting to punish us for our misdeeds, and "he" must be separate from us, otherwise "he'd" be tainted.

And frankly, talk of atheism can quickly stray into something screwy as well. Human reason is the highest power. Only that which is scientifically confirmed is real. There is nothing beyond the material...

Both ends of that spectrum dull the shit out of me, and are, as far as I'm concerned, completely lifeless - deader than the worn out logs currently floating down the flooded Mississippi. 

 There's nothing screwy at all about the proposition that that which is observed, measured, quantified, and probed in the meat world we inhabit pretty much stays there.  No ill-informed appeals to quantum physics metaphysics are needed.

Likewise, there's nothing really screwy about saying there's "nothing beyond the material," because that's the world we inhabit. 

Furthermore, from a viewpoint of non-duality, all three of these positions are not complete.

"Faith is the blunt instrument used to crush doubt."

So says P.Z. Myers, in his lambasting of the "On Faith"  folks at the Washington Post commenting on this report on "non-believing clergy."  As a Rinzai guy, let me add in my 2 cents...

One pastor in the report recounted:

“My first few years of doing this were wracked with, ‘God, should I be doing this? Is this ---? Am I being ---? Am I posing? Am I being less than authentic; less than honest?’ … And, I really wrestled with it and to some degree still. But not nearly as much.”
“I will be the first to admit that I see Christianity as a means to an end, not as an end unto itself. And the end is very basically, a kind of liberal, democratic values. So I will use Christianity sometimes against itself to try to lead people to that point. But there’s so much within the Christian tradition that itself influenced the development of those liberal values, you know. They didn’t arise through secular means. They came out of some religious stuff. …I could couch all that in very secular language. If we were in a college setting, I would. But we’re in a religious setting, so I use the religious language.”

Myers says about this report by Daniel C. Dennett:

Unfortunately, the WaPo couldn't just put up Dennett's bombshell on its own: they've surrounded it with a confusing cloud of commissioned articles to answer the question, "What should pastors do if they no longer hold the defining beliefs of their denomination?". Most of them are believers, except for Rebecca Goldstein and Tom Flynn and Herb Silverman, and most of them are making excuses. You just knew that someone would make the inane argument that "doubt is part of faith." No, it's not. Faith is the blunt instrument used to crush doubt.

 Of course the WaPo panelists present a "conventional" view of the faith/doubt issue

à la Larry King, and for "inclusive" purposes there's that guy Deepak Chopra...

Q:What should pastors do if they no longer hold the defining beliefs of their denomination? Do clergy have a moral obligation not to challenge the sincere faith of their parishioners? If this requires them to dissemble from the pulpit, doesn't this create systematic hypocrisy at the center of religion? What would you want your pastor to do with his or her personal doubts or loss of faith?

Religion poses many tests of conscience. This isn't a drawback. If anything, it's one of the reasons organized faith exists. But of course there are extremes of opinion about how acceptable it is to disagree with church doctrine. My insistence that religion must teach people how to think about God for themselves would be seen as extreme -- or even heretical -- by those at the opposite end of the spectrum. We've witnessed the tide of tolerance ebb and flow in the Catholic Church. We've seen gay Episcopal bishops advance in a liberal climate only to cause a schism among conservatives.

 Needless to say neither the WaPo panelists, especially Chopra, nor P.Z. Myers  reflect the views of Zen Buddhists, which is the point of this post. Great doubt and great faith must coexist for great enlightenment.  You have to doubt the faith, you have to have faith that the doubt will lead somewhere.  The question is key.

With this viewpoint, you simply cannot lose your faith, nor can you blindly believe. Dammit, that guy long ago said "Rely on yourself.  Do not rely on others.  Rely on the Dharma.  Do not rely on others."  Which of course leads to the questions: What is the Dharma? What am I? Am I different than the Dharma? Am I the same? Is this gibberish?

But, like all phenomena, Buddha nature is "stuck" to it - permeated through it like a dye on a fabric, as some teacher said.  Even if I accept Jesus as my personal Lord and what not, or even if I picket all religious institutions or lack thereof, or even if I just watch TV for weeks on end munching on potato chips, it's all there.  Now there's consequences, of course, to all behaviors, including behaviors of pretending to believe, which is recommended by certain folks ("Fake it 'til you make it" is a slogan in certain religious quarters).

But there is no escape.  The authentic "position" or "stance" in which one carriers out one's life, and the emptiness of all of it (including emptiness of emptiness) remains the same.  You cannot not be who you are, even if you are pretending to be something.  The "essence" of Sartre's waiter performing as a waiter did not annihilate the emptiness of the phenomena of the waiter-in-life.

So, basically, we practicing Zen Buddhists don't have the problem alluded to in the report or panel responses or Myer's response.  And when Chopra says

My insistence that religion must teach people how to think about God for themselves would be seen as extreme -- or even heretical -- by those at the opposite end of the spectrum.

 and when Myers says

Faith is the blunt instrument used to crush doubt.

I have to call them both out.  Great doubt and great faith must coexist, and nobody can tell you how to do that or not to do that, and all the rumination, pretense, or lack thereof simply cannot change the nature of our existence in this life.  Great doubt and great faith are natural functions and conditions of our existence, and to privilege one against the other is to "oppose our reality."

And that's my 2 cents.

Are "New Atheists" Fundamentalists?

A comment on my recent post on the religious right says that Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers and Sam Harris "do an awful lot to propel their brand of fundamentalism to new heights" implying that their "fundamentalism" is akin to a "different flavor" of the fundamentalism offered by religious textual literalists.

Is that true? Are these gentlemen fundamentalists? And if so, in what sense? And if they are in a certain sense, is that a bad thing?

Well, Dawkins at least has addressed this in his book The God Delusion, and I won't repeat what he says there in this post, nor will I repeat whatever other critics have said (a sampling can be found at links on Wikipedia).

I will however, quote a dictionary definition of fundamentalism:

1. religious beliefs based on a literal interpretation of the Bible, regarded as fundamental to Christian faith and morals
2. the 20th-cent. movement among some American Protestants, based on these beliefs
3. a strict adherence to or interpretation of a doctrine, set of principles, etc., as of a social, legal, political, or religious group or system

Now by the 3rd definition everyone who adheres to a strict adherence of a set of principles of a religious group might be called a fundamentalist. I would admit atheism as a religious group despite what some muddled conservatives might say (especially being ignorant of certain religions that do not admit the existence of deities).

But, as an example, let's take Dawkins. Dawkins is an avowed atheist, but what he means by that is that the evidence that we as humans can observe is so overwhelmingly against the possibility of a deity as to lead one to conclude that one does not exist. If, there were evidence revealed to the contrary, he would have changed his opinion. Ideologically he expresses kinship with Bertrand Russell, who, when asked what he would say when he died and a hypothetical deity asked why he did not profess belief would say, "Not enough evidence."

As a counter example, there are fundamentalist creationists aplenty who, when presented with the evidence of dinosaurs, distant galaxies, and what-not that clearly demonstrate the existence of an earth and universe billions of years old engage in all kinds of special pleading to try to wiggle out of the obvious evidence. This includes, but is not limited to:

• The dinosaurs were placed there by god to make us have faith or "test" our faith because it contradicts the bible!
• The laws of physics were different 5,000 years ago! (I believe I heard this one from a Catholic who should know better.)
• And the granddaddy of all special pleading apologetics arguments, Tertullian's "I believe because it is absurd." (Well then you believe, uh, pretty much everything absurd?)

Our lives are permeated by feeling, emotion, passion and the like, but if we are trying to talk about the Big Things, (Why are we here? What should I do? God? Death? Immortality? Ethics?) we should try to employ reason. As a Buddhist, I try to do this, and where any Buddhism contradicts what can be observed, measured, and logically discussed, we should be wary. True, logical systems come with limitations, and our choice of axioms dictates how our reasoning goes. But - I've got to appeal to my professional deformation here - we should choose our axioms based on their utility to achieve our ends, and as a general rule the fewer the better as long as they have sufficient utility.

Of course the diatribes against the "New Atheists" are by and large done as a defense against the beliefs of those who criticize them (although I think most reasonable people might say, on reflection that "New" is superfluous here and so that criticism should stand).

But stop the tu quoque arguments when you discuss these people. They aren't true.

Dispelling a Few Myths about Buddhism

An "I don't want to be associated with Rick Warren" comment on a post on P.Z. Myers' blog grew into something odd yesterday. I had wanted to post there to make a point: namely that I abhor, as a nontheist practitioner of a religion being lumped in with Rick Warren either by Rick Warren or nonreligionists. I don't think it's an accurate characterization, and given the information, it cannot be particularly truthful.

I'm not one to proselytize Buddhism, although proselytizing sanity seems like a good idea to me. But I was more than a little surprised to see the lack of knowledge on the part of some of the posters on that board. Hopefully wasn't considered troll-ish to them, because I generally do sympathize with much of what they say (although for me, completly denying the metaphysical rather than bracketing it is an absurd position).


All of that said, here's my response to some comments there which I couldn't seem to avoid getting directed towards me...plus &alpha, as they say in Japan...

[Y]ou'd get along famously with Karen Armstrong; you redefine Buddhism much as she does Christianity...

I have found Karen Armstrong's work to be milquetoast; deliberately mild and inoffensive. I found her treatment of the historical Buddha to leave too much of the myth in, and too little of the reality that it's not Siddhartha's journey that we're making, but it is ours...

Seriously, what is Rebirth if it isn't reincarnation?

Reincarnation would mean that my essence, memories, dreams, experiences, etc. get plunked into another fetus/baby at some point in/after gestation.

Buddhists, as I noted previously on that thread, do not have the notion of an essential "self," so reincarnation in this case cannot be, the Dalai Lama notwithstanding. Rebirth, on the other hand, can be considered as a continuance of cause and effect from one life to another, and as an instance of Karma qua dependent origination or interdependence of all existants, rebirth can be understood with out appeal to the supernatural.

Now that might not have been what the Buddha thought, but it somewhat tracks Nagarjuna, even if informed by Sartre.

MikeTheInfidel said my phrase, "I think it's inherently useful that we try to live life peacefully on earth, and try to be generous, compassionate, and free from ignorance, and I think it's inherently useful to do this in a disciplined way." is a fantastic description of Humanism.

Buddhism is a form of existentialism, (see William Barrett's treatment of Sartre as reflecting Nagarjuna), and Sartre himself made a very powerful point that existentialism is a humanism, so I'm not surprised.

John Morales wrote:

Gnosis is considered to be a valid form of knowledge by adherents (i.e. non-epistemological (intuitive) knowledge), oxymoronic as it might seem to us rationalists.

I must admit, I'm not completely a rationalist. All things, especially things that involve sensation, perception, awareness, volition and the like are not approachable purely by reason.

I cannot rationally, in words, convey to you the feelings and perceptions of playing tennis beyond the top of your game. I don't consider it gnosis, or awareness of a deity, but I think it's in the same category of things. It is, as William James might have noted, in the category of things meaningful to the one having the experience, but of little or no truth value to others.

Anyway, there's probably other myths about Buddhism as well, and I think on the whole it is good to have these kinds of discussions.

Book Review: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

In The Godless Delusion, Dawkins doesn't mention Buddhism much at all, except to say he thinks they're philosphies, not religions. This Buddhist disagrees on that point. Dawkins arguments against the existence of a monotheistic god are cogent, powerful, and above all, far more accessible than the tripe you get at infidels.org. Unfortunately, as a man trained in biology, every argument looks like it can be addressed with evolution. That said, one argument - the argument that says an "Intelligent" "Designer" would have to be hopelessly complex and hence far more unlikely than an evolved ecosystem built up by its own bootstraps a step at a time - is actually quite new to me.

Also unfortunately, he himself doesn't quite get probability theory, or to put it another way, he readily and humbly admits he's confused by quantum theory, but when he says "no no no there's no randmoness" in evolution, he protesteth too much. However, his wonderment shines through even here.

His basic arguments are spot on though.

Two points:

1. He doesn't quite mention theological positions of folks like mine - perhaps because there's so much kinship with his position, he doesn't see the difference. That is, he does not see that much of what he's saying is eventually irrelevant to folks like me, because the question's irrelevant, except perhaps as fodder for keeping busy in coach class.

2. He brings up what is likely some nonsensical controversial book about language and voices in one's head- the title escapes me at the moment and I am too comfortable frankly to get my copy of Dawkin's book to look it up. His point is that perhaps at one time the dialog in one's head was regarded as real. Perhaps it was, but as we have no model for how the ancients perceived consciousness until...yeah, Buddhists...OK, maybe some Hindu writings address such issues, I'm not familiar...but until Buddhists wrote about enlightenment, there wasn't a heckuva lot the ancients wrote about consciousness, though I'd suspect that at least among the lower classes, R.D. Laing's quote of Kierkegaard was probably right: the ancients probably did see angels and halos and all that what-not. Again, it doesn't matter because the dialog in your head is just that anyway; it's the picture of the cake...and that implies that we're likely miles apart from Quakers, despite the alleged similarities of practice.

All in all, very much worth reading. Go out and read it today, in fact, it's in paperback, and a bargain.