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secular buddhism
I read an article in the newest issue of Free Inquiry last night (a bi-monthly magazine put out by The Council for Secular Humanism), and found some interesting statements. The article is called Rational Mysticism and it's written by Sam Harris. The author is most known for a book called The End of Faith. The book is largely about the danger of irrational religious belief in the modern world. The article never even mentions Buddhism, but you may see some parallels in these quotes. In fact, what caught my attention is that the things he says here have a whole lot to do with why Buddhism appeals to me.
Later he says:
The observation in that last quote is a large part of why I've looked into Buddhism after rejecting faith-based religions myself.
I wish I could share the whole article, but I didn't find it on the internet. However, I did find a interview on Brian Flemming's Blog where he talks about meditation . . .
What are your thoughts on this?
As far a I could tell, he might as well have just used the word "mindfulness" there ('cept most of the readers of FI wouldn't have understood what was meant.)The final chapter of my book . . . is devoted to the subject of meditation. Meditation , in the sense that I use the term, is nothing more than a method of paying extraordinarily close attention to one's moment-to-moment experience of the world. There is nothing irrational about doing this . . . .
Later he says:
The problem [that secularists have with some insights gained though meditation], however, is that these insights are almost always sought and expressed in a religious context. One such insight is that the feeling we call "I"--the sense that there is a thinker giving rise to our thoughts, an experiencer distinct from the mere flow of experience--can disappear when looked for in a rigorous way. Our conventional sense of "self" is, in fact, nothing more than a cognitive illusion, and dispelling this illusion opens the mind to extraordinary experiences of happiness. This is not a proposition based on faith; it is an empirical observation . . .
The observation in that last quote is a large part of why I've looked into Buddhism after rejecting faith-based religions myself.
I wish I could share the whole article, but I didn't find it on the internet. However, I did find a interview on Brian Flemming's Blog where he talks about meditation . . .
What are your thoughts on this?
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Comments
Sam Harris
“Kill the Buddha,” says the old koan. “Kill Buddhism,” says Sam Harris, author ot The End of Faith, who argues that Buddhism’s philosophy, insight, and practices would benefit more people if they were not presented as a religion.
The ninth-century Buddhist master Lin Chi is supposed to have said, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” Like much of Zen teaching, this seems too cute by half, but it makes a valuable point: to turn the Buddha into a religious fetish is to miss the essence of what he taught. In considering what Buddhism can offer the world in the twenty-first century, I propose that we take Lin Chi’s admonishment rather seriously. As students of the Buddha, we should dispense with Buddhism.
This is not to say that Buddhism has nothing to offer the world. One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced. In a world that has long been terrorized by fratricidal Sky-God religions, the ascendance of Buddhism would surely be a welcome development. But this will not happen. There is no reason whatsoever to think that Buddhism can successfully compete with the relentless evangelizing of Christianity and Islam. Nor should it try to.
The wisdom of the Buddha is currently trapped within the religion of Buddhism. Even in the West, where scientists and Buddhist contemplatives now collaborate in studying the effects of meditation on the brain, Buddhism remains an utterly parochial concern. While it may be true enough to say (as many Buddhist practitioners allege) that “Buddhism is not a religion,” most Buddhists worldwide practice it as such, in many of the naive, petitionary, and superstitious ways in which all religions are practiced. Needless to say, all non-Buddhists believe Buddhism to be a religion—and, what is more, they are quite certain that it is the wrong religion.
To talk about “Buddhism,” therefore, inevitably imparts a false sense of the Buddha’s teaching to others. So insofar as we maintain a discourse as “Buddhists,” we ensure that the wisdom of the Buddha will do little to inform the development of civilization in the twenty-first century.
Worse still, the continued identification of Buddhists with Buddhism lends tacit support to the religious differences in our world. At this point in history, this is both morally and intellectually indefensible—especially among affluent, well-educated Westerners who bear the greatest responsibility for the spread of ideas. It does not seem much of an exaggeration to say that if you are reading this article, you are in a better position to influence the course of history than almost any person in history. Given the degree to which religion still inspires human conflict, and impedes genuine inquiry, I believe that merely being a self-described “Buddhist” is to be complicit in the world’s violence and ignorance to an unacceptable degree.
It is true that many exponents of Buddhism, most notably the Dalai Lama, have been remarkably willing to enrich (and even constrain) their view of the world through dialogue with modern science. But the fact that the Dalai Lama regularly meets with Western scientists to discuss the nature of the mind does not mean that Buddhism, or Tibetan Buddhism, or even the Dalai Lama’s own lineage, is uncontaminated by religious dogmatism. Indeed, there are ideas within Buddhism that are so incredible as to render the dogma of the virgin birth plausible by comparison. No one is served by a mode of discourse that treats such pre-literate notions as integral to our evolving discourse about the nature of the human mind. Among Western Buddhists, there are college-educated men and women who apparently believe that Guru Rinpoche was actually born from a lotus. This is not the spiritual breakthrough that civilization has been waiting for these many centuries.
For the fact is that a person can embrace the Buddha’s teaching, and even become a genuine Buddhist contemplative (and, one must presume, a buddha) without believing anything on insufficient evidence. The same cannot be said of the teachings for faith-based religion. In many respects, Buddhism is very much like science. One starts with the hypothesis that using attention in the prescribed way (meditation), and engaging in or avoiding certain behaviors (ethics), will bear the promised result (wisdom and psychological well-being). This spirit of empiricism animates Buddhism to a unique degree. For this reason, the methodology of Buddhism, if shorn of its religious encumbrances, could be one of our greatest resources as we struggle to develop our scientific understanding of human subjectivity.
The Problem of Religion
Incompatible religious doctrines have balkanized our world into separate moral communities, and these divisions have become a continuous source of bloodshed. Indeed, religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it has been at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews vs. Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians vs. Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians vs. Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants vs. Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims vs. Hindus), Sudan (Muslims vs. Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims vs. Christians), Ethiopia and Eritrea (Muslims vs. Christians), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhists vs. Tamil Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims vs. Timorese Christians), Iran and Iraq (Shiite vs. Sunni Muslims), and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians vs. Chechen Muslims; Muslim Azerbaijanis vs. Catholic and Orthodox Armenians) are merely a few cases in point. These are places where religion has been the explicit cause of literally millions of deaths in recent decades.
Why is religion such a potent source of violence? There is no other sphere of discourse in which human beings so fully articulate their differences from one another, or cast these differences in terms of everlasting rewards and punishments. Religion is the one endeavor in which us–them thinking achieves a transcendent significance. If you really believe that calling God by the right name can spell the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, then it becomes quite reasonable to treat heretics and unbelievers rather badly. The stakes of our religious differences are immeasurably higher than those born of mere tribalism, racism, or politics.
Religion is also the only area of our discourse in which people are systematically protected from the demand to give evidence in defense of their strongly held beliefs. And yet, these beliefs often determine what they live for, what they will die for, and—all too often—what they will kill for. This is a problem, because when the stakes are high, human beings have a simple choice between conversation and violence. At the level of societies, the choice is between conversation and war. There is nothing apart from a fundamental willingness to be reasonable—to have one’s beliefs about the world revised by new evidence and new arguments—that can guarantee we will keep talking to one another. Certainty without evidence is necessarily divisive and dehumanizing.
Therefore, one of the greatest challenges facing civilization in the twenty-first century is for human beings to learn to speak about their deepest personal concerns—about ethics, spiritual experience, and the inevitability of human suffering—in ways that are not flagrantly irrational. Nothing stands in the way of this project more than the respect we accord religious faith. While there is no guarantee that rational people will always agree, the irrational are certain to be divided by their dogmas.
It seems profoundly unlikely that we will heal the divisions in our world simply by multiplying the occasions for interfaith dialogue. The end game for civilization cannot be mutual tolerance of patent irrationality. All parties to ecumenical religious discourse have agreed to tread lightly over those points where their worldviews would otherwise collide, and yet these very points remain perpetual sources of bewilderment and intolerance for their coreligionists. Political correctness simply does not offer an enduring basis for human cooperation. If religious war is ever to become unthinkable for us, in the way that slavery and cannibalism seem poised to, it will be a matter of our having dispensed with the dogma of faith.
A Contemplative Science
What the world most needs at this moment is a means of convincing human beings to embrace the whole of the species as their moral community. For this we need to develop an utterly nonsectarian way of talking about the full spectrum of human experience and human aspiration. We need a discourse on ethics and spirituality that is every bit as unconstrained by dogma and cultural prejudice as the discourse of science is. What we need, in fact, is a contemplative science, a modern approach to exploring the furthest reaches of psychological well-being. It should go without saying that we will not develop such a science by attempting to spread “American Buddhism,” or “Western Buddhism,” or “Engaged Buddhism.”
If the methodology of Buddhism (ethical precepts and meditation) uncovers genuine truths about the mind and the phenomenal world—truths like emptiness, selflessness, and impermanence—these truths are not in the least “Buddhist.” No doubt, most serious practitioners of meditation realize this, but most Buddhists do not. Consequently, even if a person is aware of the timeless and noncontingent nature of the meditative insights described in the Buddhist literature, his identity as a Buddhist will tend to confuse the matter for others.
There is a reason that we don’t talk about “Christian physics” or “Muslim algebra,” though the Christians invented physics as we know it, and the Muslims invented algebra. Today, anyone who emphasizes the Christian roots of physics or the Muslim roots of algebra would stand convicted of not understanding these disciplines at all. In the same way, once we develop a scientific account of the contemplative path, it will utterly transcend its religious associations. Once such a conceptual revolution has taken place, speaking of “Buddhist” meditation will be synonymous with a failure to assimilate the changes that have occurred in our understanding of the human mind.
It is as yet undetermined what it means to be human, because every facet of our culture—and even our biology itself—remains open to innovation and insight. We do not know what we will be a thousand years from now—or indeed that we will be, given the lethal absurdity of many of our beliefs—but whatever changes await us, one thing seems unlikely to change: as long as experience endures, the difference between happiness and suffering will remain our paramount concern. We will therefore want to understand those processes—biochemical, behavioral, ethical, political, economic, and spiritual—that account for this difference. We do not yet have anything like a final understanding of such processes, but we know enough to rule out many false understandings. Indeed, we know enough at this moment to say that the God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.
There is much more to be discovered about the nature of the human mind. In particular, there is much more for us to understand about how the mind can transform itself from a mere reservoir of greed, hatred, and delusion into an instrument of wisdom and compassion. Students of the Buddha are very well placed to further our understanding on this front, but the religion of Buddhism currently stands in their way.
Killing The Buddha, by Sam Harris, Shambhala Sun, March 2006.
This is a much better article about the Harris' approach to "Buddhism." I couldn't agree more, as I tend to be of the "Buddhism Without Beliefs" school of thought. More by Harris-
http://www.samharris.org/site/articles/
For the purpose of objectivity, some excellent critiques of this worldview-
http://www.budsas.org/ebud/ebdha107.htm
http://westernbuddhistreview.com/vol2/buddhism_without_beliefs.html
Thanks for sharing it.
Adiana:usflag:
Of course, Lin Chi said this in the context of intensive Buddhist practice. The admonishment is meant for individuals to not get caught up in their more profound insights & states of mind. It is the attitude of relinquishment. Not abiding in any state, even Nirvana. Saying this is a simple statement against fundamentalism, is a superficial analysis & is by no means an argument that we should dispense with Buddhism.
So, he's saying that because formal Buddhism will not catch on in the same way or be more popular than Christianity or Islam, it should just give up 2500 years of transmitted teachings & practices. I understand that appeal to tradition is not a logically conclusive form of argumentation, but this does not require the rejection of the tradition, especially if it is still producing significant results. And since when is conformity to the whims of popular society admirable or desirable. Honestly, this is not a popularity context, but a specific path with a specific goal. If you want to use the vast array of Buddhist insights to better society, that's wonderful. But to throw away the entire point of Buddhism is quite far-fetched.
I really don't understand how this is a basis for his conclusions. There is absolutely nothing stopping individuals & groups integrating buddhist practices & philosophy in with the current societal norms & consciousness. I am all for this. It would have many great benefits on our society, imo. But it is in no way necessary to get rid of the buddhist tradition to achieve this end. I honestly feel that doing so would be quite counterproductive to his goals & the goal of Buddhism. And is he saying that Buddhism should disband itself because non-buddhists think it's wrong??
Of course we shouldn't identify with or cling too tightly to being a buddhist, but saying that 'Buddhists not getting rid of the institution of Buddhism as distinct tradition' is immoral is a crock. Sorry, but really this is quite a stretch & I don't see much support for such an argument. The presence of religious differnences in the world is not a proper argument for the elimination of formalized religion.
Also, while breaking down communication barriers between religions & secular groups is wonderful and admirable, to think that we need to rid the world of all spiritual distinctions is unnecessary and, arguably foolish. Also, I would love it if ideas such as emptiness, interconnectedness, etc were all accepted & understood by society at large, but not at the expense of Buddhism's integrity as a unique system geared towards liberation from Samsara based on the Buddha's teachings.
Really, it seems that this person doesn't actually know very much about Buddhism, and seems to want to reduce all religions down to secular humanism. Now, I respect secular humanism, but this article itself seems to indicate that this movement has its own manifestation of fundamentalism. Such an uncompromising view generally indicates that this is the case. Still there are some good points that should be acted upon. Buddhism should work towards dialogue and finding common ground with the scientific, philosophical, secular & religious communities. But I really think Mr. Harris goes too far in his proposed solution to his perceived problems with this religion.
Sorry for the rant. I respect agnostics who follow & respect the buddhist teachings a great deal. I just don't like this anti-traditionalism. It is requires so much compromise on the part of religions as to render them meaningless. Perhaps this is what they want.
_/\_
metta
To call Buddhism a religion is perhaps a turn-off for today's atheists who might just want the little spirituality in life - who have long associated the term with senseless teachings and demanding godheads, but the author seems to be aware that Buddhism carries none of this and is in fact, chicken soup for the atheist. But for practical purposes, to even hope that people would even take a look at Buddhism, it might be necessary to shed the label of religion off us - to dispel any negative notions and associations anyone might have of "religion" for them to approach it with an open mind and thereby understand what we teach intellectually really. :rockon:
A little background on Harris would probably help, I guess. In the vein of people like Richard Dawkins who consider one of the main problems in the world to be it's religious institutions-the warmongering, anti-intellectualism and certainty without proof is a danger to civilization. (Try to think of a war today that doesn't have clashing religious groups as it's root cause, I can't think of one either.)
Now, the fact that Harris singles out Buddhism as being somehow above and beyond this, well, I find this in no way offensive. You see, "Buddhism" is a big enough thing, the world over, that a lot of different, and even contradictory beliefs fall under it's aegis. There are self-proclaimed Buddhists who belive in 17 hells, miracles, immortal sages, appeasing wrathful deities, etcetera, etcetera. There are also Zen monks who consider washing the dishes the highest expression of the dharma. Sorry guys, it's a big concept, with room for all of us.
However, some of us do fear the mindless religiosity gets in the way of any meaningful realizations for a new buddhist, because a lot of them are simply following Catholicism under a different name. I seriously do not want to name names of the sects and institutions I am referring to, but I think most of you know of whence I speak. However, one tradition we share as "buddhists" is that we pay respect and honor the paths of other Buddhists we do not agree with. There are many historical examples of different sects sharing temples. So my posts are intended to raise discussion, not to offend my brothers and sisters.
Anyway, blah blah blah. Here's a recent Newsweek article about Harris, to help some of you put his furious path into a better context-
The New Naysayers
In the midst of religious revival, three scholars argue that atheism is smarter.
By Jerry Adler
Newsweek
Sept. 11, 2006 issue - Americans answered the atrocities of September 11, overwhelmingly, with faith. Attacked in the name of God, they turned to God for comfort; in the week after the attacks, nearly 70 percent said they were praying more than usual. Confronted by a hatred that seemed inexplicable, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson proclaimed that God was mad at America because it harbored feminists, gays and civil libertarians. Sam Harris, then a 34-year-old graduate student in neuroscience, had a different reaction. On Sept. 12, he began a book. If, he reasoned, young men were slaughtering people in the name of religion—something that had been going on since long before 2001, of course—then perhaps the problem was religion itself. The book would be called "The End of Faith," which to most Americans probably sounds like a lament. To Harris it is something to be encouraged.
This was not a message most Americans wanted to hear, before or after 9/11. Atheists "are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public," according to a study by Penny Edgell, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota. In a recent NEWSWEEK Poll, Americans said they believed in God by a margin of 92 to 6—only 2 percent answered "don't know"—and only 37 percent said they'd be willing to vote for an atheist for president. (That's down from 49 percent in a 1999 Gallup poll—which also found that more Americans would vote for a homosexual than an atheist.) "The End of Faith" struggled to find a publisher, and even after Norton agreed to bring it out in 2004, Harris says there were editors who refused to come to meetings with him. But after winning the PEN/Martha Albrand award for nonfiction, the book sold 270,000 copies. Harris's scathing "Letter to a Christian Nation" will be published this month with a press run of 150,000. Someone is listening, even if he is mostly preaching, one might say, to the unconverted.
This year also saw the publication in February of "Breaking the Spell," by the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, which asks how and why religions became ubiquitous in human society. The obvious answer—"Because they're true"—is foreclosed, Dennett says, by the fact that they are by and large mutually incompatible. Even to study "religion as a natural phenomenon," the subtitle of Dennett's book, is to deprive it of much of its mystery and power. And next month the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins ("The Selfish Gene") weighs in with "The God Delusion," a book that extends an argument he advanced in the days after 9/11. After hearing once too often that "[t]o blame the attacks on Islam is like blaming Christianity for the fighting in Northern Ireland," Dawkins responded: Precisely. "It's time to get angry," he wrote, "and not only with Islam."
Dawkins and Harris are not writing polite demurrals to the time-honored beliefs of billions; they are not issuing pleas for tolerance or moderation, but bone-rattling attacks on what they regard as a pernicious and outdated superstition. (In the spirit of scientific evenhandedness, both would call themselves agnostic, although as Dawkins says, he's agnostic about God the same way he's agnostic about the existence of fairies.) They ask: where do people get their idea of God? From the Bible or the Qur'an. "Tell a devout Christian ... that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible," Harris writes, "and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever." He asks: How can anyone believe in a benevolent and omnipotent God who permits a tsunami to swallow 180,000 innocent people in a few hours? How does it advance our understanding of the universe to suppose that it was created by a supernatural being who communicates only through the one-way process of revelation?
These are not brand-new arguments, of course, and believers have well-practiced replies to them, although in some cases, such as the persistence of evil and suffering (the "theodicy" problem), the responses are still mostly works in progress. Neither author claims much success in arguing anyone out of a belief in God, but they consider it sufficient reward when they hear from people who were encouraged by their books to give voice to their private doubts. All the same, this is highly inflammatory material. Dawkins acknowledges that many readers will expect, or hope, to see him burning in hell (citing Aquinas as authority for the belief that souls in heaven will get a view of hell for their enjoyment). Harris says he has turned down requests for the rights to translate "The End of Faith" into Arabic or Urdu. "I think it would be a death sentence for any translator," he says. Harris himself—who traveled the world for a dozen years studying Eastern religions and mysticism before returning to finish his undergraduate degree at Stanford—asks that the name of his current university not be publicized.
These authors have no geopolitical strategy to advance; they're interested in the metaphysics of belief, not the politics of the First Amendment. It's the idea of putting trust in God they object to, not the motto on the nickel. This sets them apart from America's best-known atheist activist, the late Madalyn Murray O'Hair, a controversial eccentric who won a landmark lawsuit against mandatory classroom prayers in 1963 and went on to found the group now called American Atheists. When a chaplain came to her hospital room once and asked what he could do for her, she notoriously replied, "Drop dead." Dawkins, an urbane Oxfordian, would regard that as appalling manners. "I have no problem with people wishing me a Happy Christmas," he says, expressing puzzlement over the passions provoked in America by the question of how store clerks greet customers.
But if the arguments of Dawkins and Harris are familiar, they also bring to bear new scientific evidence on the issue. Evolution isn't necessarily incompatible with faith, even with evangelical Christianity. Several new books—"Evolution and Christian Faith" by the Stanford biologist Joan Roughgarden and "The Language of God" by geneticist Francis Collins—uphold both. But to skeptics like Dawkins—and to Biblical literalists on the other side—Darwin appears to rob God of credit for his crowning achievement, which is us. In particular, evolutionary psychologists believe they are closing in on one of the remaining mysteries of life, the universal "moral law" that underlies our intuitive notions of good and evil. Why do we recognize that acts such as murder are wrong? To Collins, it's evidence of God's handiwork—the very perception that led him to become a Christian.
But Dawkins attempts to show how the highest of human impulses, such as empathy, charity and pity, could have evolved by the same mechanism of natural selection that created the thumb. Biologists understand that the driving force in evolution is the survival and propagation of our genes. They may impel us to instinctive acts of goodness, Dawkins writes, even when it seems counterproductive to our own interests—say, by risking our life to save someone else. Evolutionary psychology can explain how selfless behavior might have evolved. The recipient may be a blood relation who carries some of our own genes. Or our acts may earn us future gratitude, or a reputation for bravery that makes us more desirable as mates. Of course, the essence of the moral law is that it applies even to strangers. Missionaries who devote themselves to saving the lives of Third World peasants have no reasonable expectation of being repaid in this world. But, Dawkins goes on, the impulse for generosity must have evolved while humans lived in small bands in which almost everyone was related, so that goodness became the default human aspiration. This is a rebuke not merely to believers who insist that God must be the source of all goodness—but equally to the 19th-century atheism of Nietzsche, who assumed that the death of God meant the end of conventional morality.
But Dawkins, brilliant as he is, overlooks something any storefront Baptist preacher might have told him. "If there is no God, why be good?" he asks rhetorically, and responds: "Do you really mean the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward? That's not morality, that's just sucking up." That's clever. But millions of Christians and Muslims believe that it was precisely God who turned them away from a life of immorality. Dawkins, of course, thinks they are deluding themselves. He is correct that the social utility of religion doesn't prove anything about the existence of God. But for all his erudition, he seems not to have spent much time among ordinary Christians, who could have told him what God has meant to them.
It is not just extremists who earn the wrath of Dawkins and Harris. Their books are attacks on religious "moderates" as well—indeed, the very idea of moderation. The West is not at war with "terrorism," Harris asserts in "The End of Faith"; it is at war with Islam, a religion whose holy book, "on almost every page ... prepares the ground for religious conflict." Christian fundamentalists, he says, have a better handle on the problem than moderates: "They know what it's like to really believe that their holy book is the word of God, and there's a paradise you can get to if you die in the right circumstances. They're not left wondering what is the 'real' cause of terrorism." As for the Bible, Harris, like the fundamentalists, prefers a literal reading. He quotes at length the passages in the Old and New Testaments dealing with how to treat slaves. Why, he asks, would anyone take moral instruction from a book that calls for stoning your children to death for disrespect, or for heresy, or for violating the Sabbath? Obviously our culture no longer believes in that, he adds, so why not agree that science has made it equally unnecessary to invoke God to explain the Sun, or the weather, or your own existence?
Even agnostic moderates get raked over—like the late Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist who attempted to broker a truce between science and religion in his controversial 1999 book "Rocks of Ages." Gould proposed that science and religion retreat to separate realms, the former concerned with empirical questions about the way the universe works, while the latter pursues ultimate meaning and ethical precepts. But, Dawkins asks, unless the Bible is right in its historical and metaphysical claims, why should we grant it authority in the moral realm? And can science really abjure any interest in the claims of religion? Did Jesus come back from the dead, or didn't he? If so, how did God make it happen? Collins says he is satisfied with the answer that the Resurrection is a miracle, permanently beyond our understanding. That Collins can hold that belief, while simultaneously working at the very frontiers of science as the head of the Human Genome Project, is what amazes Harris.
Believers can take comfort in the fact that atheism barely amounts to a "movement." American Atheists, which fights in the courts and legislatures for the rights of nonbelievers, has about 2,500 members and a budget of less than $1 million. On the science Web site Edge.org, the astronomer Carolyn Porco offers the subversive suggestion that science itself should attempt to supplant God in Western culture, by providing the benefits and comforts people find in religion: community, ceremony and a sense of awe. "Imagine congregations raising their voices in tribute to gravity, the force that binds us all to the Earth, and the Earth to the Sun, and the Sun to the Milky Way," she writes. Porco, who is deeply involved in the Cassini mission to Saturn, finds spiritual fulfillment in exploring the cosmos. But will that work for the rest of the world—for "the people who want to know that they're going to live forever and meet Mom and Dad in heaven? We can't offer that." If Dawkins, Dennett and Harris are right, the five-century-long competition between science and religion is sharpening. People are choosing sides. And when that happens, people get hurt.
© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.
(I seriously don't know what this forum's attitude towards cut'n'pasting is, I cite my sources, but if it's still a no-no, I will refrain.)
It surprises and, in some cases horrifies, many fundamentalist Christians of a USian stripe that many of us believe the same thing about Christianity: it is diverse and big enough to contain all sorts of beliefs and positions. The exclusive, literalist, "I'm-saved-you're-damned" approach is anathema to many, many of us who have even a scintilla of hiustorical and contextual understanding.
Additionally, while I don't really care what anyone believes, it seems that many neuroscientists seem to just sort of gloss over the issue of conscious awareness & the very existence and nature of mental/subjective experiences. They seem to be asserting that the brain is the absolute cause of mentality, just because there are direct correlations between areas of the brain & mental/subjective states. This itself goes against the rational model as a fallacy of false-causation. Honestly, I don't see how matter can create mentality. Anyway, sorry. I don't mean to rail against atheism. I just don't like to see those who do not agree reduced to irrational, faerie believing hippies. I also don't like the aggressiveness of Mr. Harris' approach. It is very dualistic as well. For someone who explains away mental phenomena as a mere bi-product of evolution, he seems to not realize the non-substantiality of such a worldview (though perhaps I'm projecting due to limited exposure to his work).
Once again, sorry for the rant. I don't want to render atheism & Buddhism completely incompatible. There are many useful tools in Buddhism that can be used by anyone. And I think the world would be a better place if atheists & agnostics practiced their own form of Buddhism. I just don't think the whole of Buddhism must follow suit.
_/\_
metta
Palzang
Any so called religion being more than simply a label, is personal belief. People consider themself things for the whole reason that they wanna be something else, and they have no indentity.
In being a buddhist, you aren't a buddhist, if you follow me..
whether its a religion is soley based on how narrow our view of the world is.. and how poor our ability to see beyond labelling is... there is no religion, its a product of the mind, like saying "i own that block of wood" simply put no you don't..
you may believe you are a magic fairy with a tutu who has 5 eyes and has a wooden arm but you are simply you, and your perceptions and false views are from a biased and warped society.. at least here it is.