Atheism

[m8son666]

Perhaps. Why is this instinct better than an alternative though?

Is it because it is 'natural' that you feel it shouldn't be altered? Because in this day and age that is a ridiculous argument. Or is it for another reason?

What if your natural instincts in life lead you to suffer horrible anxiety, surely then it would be advantageous to devoid yourself of your 'normal' emotional reactions?

I just think that it is ridiculous to criticise Buddhism because it alters 'normal' emotional reactions. Especially because 'normal', when it comes to our cognitions, is a ridiculous concept.

I presume you are also against CBT and other forms of therapy?

[bennyfroobs]

ye that plus imo it fux with ppls heads by teaching them to become devoid of certain normal human emotional reactions to things

What's a normal human emotional reaction?

No such thing in my opinion, people from different cultures around the world will react differently to different things.

Are you giving a preference to these 'normal emotional reactions' over not normal ones just because you consider them normal? What other advantage do they serve over the alternatives?

yeah...what hubb said.....



a pretty obvious one thats universal to all cultures

loved ones die: you have intense feelings of grief


Buddhist version

loved ones die: oh well never mind hopefully they dont come back as a plant. no grieving allowed

the natural instinctive reaction to death of someone u love is never "oh well it is what it is"

[bennyfroobs]

its negative because it removes compassion and empathy mason

[m8son666]

Surely eliminating intense feelings of grief is a good thing? So there is no real reason why it is a bad thing just that you feel people should have a universal way of feeling when someone dies.

What? The Buddhists i have met have been incredibly compassionate and empathetic.

[hubb]

Instinctual means it's another part of the brain ( primordial amphibian part ) and I believe you can only condition the instinctive via trauma and in that sence it is just as bad as cutting off limbs basicly. But that's probably not what either of you mean.

Imo you can finetune instincts but not condition them, atleast not to a pleasurable result or even preplan the result. But that doesn't mean that conditioning emotional responses won't have a really bad effect and in that sence I agree with Froobs although there isn't any normative truth or really as you put it mason, a sort of standard.

.

[m8son666]

Instinctual means it's another part of the brain ( primordial amphibian part ) and I believe you can only condition the instinctive via trauma and in that sence it is just as bad as cutting off limbs basicly. But that's probably not what either of you mean.

ah ok so that can barely be used as a criticism of buddhism then.

[hubb]

Surely eliminating intense feelings of grief is a good thing?

No. Relieving them might be, but cognitively how thorroughly it is done and how the timing is, is important in every case.

[Kochari]

a pretty obvious one thats universal to all cultures

loved ones die: you have intense feelings of grief


Buddhist version

loved ones die: oh well never mind hopefully they dont come back as a plant. no grieving allowed

the natural instinctive reaction to death of someone u love is never "oh well it is what it is"

Kind of, but not quite. Of course we are going to have feelings of grief when someone you love dies - you are a human being. But (ideally), Buddhism will help us overcome that, and see it for what it is, and not get attached to it. We will be sad, but we won;t be defined by our sadness. I'm not sure how much Buddhist philosophy you're familiar with, but to put it really (really) basically, there is nothing for the sadness to attach to, because there's nothing to grieve. Buddhists don't believe that there is a lasting or real 'self', so the person that dies is just a combination of things and events that has been reconfigured.

Buddhism isn't about transcending humanity. It's about being really, truly human, truly alive. We shouldn't give in to or deny our emotions, but instead try to understand them; where they come from and why they are happening. I think you're right, it would be suppressing our true nature to ignore grief. But it would also be suppressing our true nature to grieve without knowing the real reason why.

There is the story of the Zen Master whose son died unexpectedly. When one of the Master's students found him weeping, the student said one word, "Attachment." The Master answered, saying, "No, not attached. But still sad."

Besides, like m8son says, I'm not too sure intense feelings of grief are all that great or desirable to be honest. When I die I don't want anyone to be sad - I want them to be happy that I've (hopefully) lived a decent sort of life that's come to a logical conclusion. Of course I sometimes miss my friends and relatives who are gone, but this is because I was attached to them, I had not come to terms with the impermanent nature of existence and I wanted their presence to last forever. This is a foolish thing to wish for, because it's just not possible. Everything dies. We need to accept that, and once we do we will be able to function better as humans.

It's not just Buddhists who think like this by the way - Heidegger for example famously said we should aim to make ourselves 'Beings-towards-death', so that we can become fully realised humans and live authentically in the world. But he was also a izan.

[bennyfroobs]

Instinctual means it's another part of the brain ( primordial amphibian part ) and I believe you can only condition the instinctive via trauma and in that sence it is just as bad as cutting off limbs basicly. But that's probably not what either of you mean.

Imo you can finetune instincts but not condition them, atleast not to a pleasurable or preplan the result. But that doesn't mean that conditioning emotional responses won't have a really bad effect and in that sence I agree with Froobs although there isn't any normative truth or really as you put it mason, a sort of standard.

.

bolded:

thats partially what i mean

[hubb]

Instinctual means it's another part of the brain ( primordial amphibian part ) and I believe you can only condition the instinctive via trauma and in that sence it is just as bad as cutting off limbs basicly. But that's probably not what either of you mean.

ah ok so that can barely be used as a criticism of buddhism then.

No it can. And the fact there isn't a normative standard doesn't mean that the principle in itself isn't destructive or causes a form of submission on the subjects part, which in another sence just shows how buddishm doesn't understand what it is doing, doesn't like to give the explaination because it shows it being dictatorial.
It's like sweeping something under the rug and not knowing what to do with the rug.
But ofcourse that principle can also be applied in a useful sence and was probably a good thing back in the days, mostly.

[Muncey]

This is an atheism thread you hippies.

But seriously, Buddhism seems like the least harmful of the major religions.. is it something that all people, atheist or not, could gain from reading about? It comes across to me as being heavily on working on yourself, as apposed to just saying everything happens for a reason.. its Gods will ect. If it is like that it sounds like something I might be interested in.

Mason have you got any links to what you meant by schopenhauer view on buddism?

[wilson]

Buddhism is kind of a way to circumvent the primal/survivalist urges of this brain which evolution has provided us with.

[rickyarbino]

Is it because it is 'natural' that you feel it shouldn't be altered? Because in this day and age that is a ridiculous argument. Or is it for another reason?

Why is that the case in this day and age more than the past? Shouldn't it be consistently ridiculous?

[rickyarbino]

Buddhism is kind of a way to circumvent the primal/survivalist urges of this brain which evolution has provided us with.

What? When you reach Nirvana?

[rickyarbino]

Surely eliminating intense feelings of grief is a good thing? So there is no real reason why it is a bad thing just that you feel people should have a universal way of feeling when someone dies.

What? The Buddhists i have met have been incredibly compassionate and empathetic.

Why would it be good? I don't mean to say that it's bad, but I certainly don't see why it's good. I can't see it being any more useful than otherwise.

[_ronzlo_]

This is an atheism thread you hippies.

But seriously, Buddhism seems like the least harmful of the major religions.. is it something that all people, atheist or not, could gain from reading about? It comes across to me as being heavily on working on yourself, as apposed to just saying everything happens for a reason.. its Gods will ect. If it is like that it sounds like something I might be interested in.

Mason have you got any links to what you meant by schopenhauer view on buddism?

Buddhism is atheist, at least in its original Therevadan orientation. Gautama explicitly rejected the idea of a creator deity.

"In Buddhist literature, the belief in a creator god (issara-nimmana-vada) is frequently mentioned and rejected, along with other causes wrongly adduced to explain the origin of the world; as, for instance, world-soul, time, nature, etc. God-belief, however, is placed in the same category as those morally destructive wrong views which deny the kammic results of action, assume a fortuitous origin of man and nature, or teach absolute determinism. These views are said to be altogether pernicious, having definite bad results due to their effect on ethical conduct."

Yes, Buddhism has something good for all. In some ways it's an early form of psychotherapy IMO. Alan Watts thought so too.

[lovelydivot]

This thread has me thinking about the "Church of the Garden"
and how some of the most complex moral dilemmas
have been presented to me while I'm crouched in the flowerbed
trying to keep the thing looking nice….

Most recently…

I was pulling weeds and thinking…
Who am I to be determining which plant deserves to be living or not…
Especially considering the increasing health of the weeds I'm pulling…

Then I have the cats weaving through…
and they constantly get pissed at me pulling weeds
and start attacking…

Just 2 days ago I was doing it…
and one of the cats was smelling the roots of a weed I had just pulled…
and he smacked me like an angry teacher.

- as if the plant had sent him an olfactory command
to beat the shit out of me…

These are the same animals that I have caught….
chewing the heads off baby birds.


I'm just trying to keep the thing from looking ratty….
- and I get a bunch of shit from cats and existential crisis...

[_ronzlo_]

Good read.

Science Vs. Religion: Beyond The Western Traditions

In the United States, the debate between science and religion seems to be powered by a perpetual motion machine. The claims that Neil deGrasse Tyson's inspired Cosmos series was anti-religious stands as the latest salvo in a long battle that generates lots heat but very little light. Having been in many of these debates, both formally and informally, I'm often struck by how narrow the discussion remains. That's because often people don't want to talk about science and religion; they really want to talk about science and their religion. It's exactly in that first step that the conversation goes down hill for all sides.

When surveying the progress of world history from the end of last age onward, historian Ian Morris identified two principal geographic cores out which civilization would emerge. The first was in the fertile crescent of the Mideast and led to cultures we like to think of as "The West." The second was located in China and would serve as the nexus for the civilizations of "The East." Of course, Morris would acknowledge that things are far more complicated than this simple binary division. But it's a perspective that yields an important point for us.

With more than one civilization, there is more than one tradition of religious or spiritual thinking. That multiplicity has dramatic consequences for thinking about how we think about science and religion.

In a recent New York Times interview, Jay Garfield, a philosopher with an interest in Buddhism, tried to articulate how different the perspective of a non-western spiritual lineage could be:

"What gets called 'philosophy of religion' ... is really the philosophy of Abrahamic religion: basically, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Most of the questions addressed in those discussions are simply irrelevant to most of the world's other religious traditions. Philosophers look at other religious traditions with the presumption that they are more or less the same, at least in outline, as the Abrahamic religions, and even fight about whether other traditions count as religions at all based upon their sharing certain features of the Abrahamic religions. That is a serious ethnocentrism that can really blind us to important phenomena."

Now, you might think avoiding such ethnocentrism is only an issue to academics. But the focus of the science vs. religion debate centers on the nature of reality and the nature of our access to that reality. That means missing non-western perspectives in the discussion shutters entirely different kinds of perspectives that are neither marginal nor insignificant. As Garfield frames it:

"First, since Buddhism is an atheistic religion, it doesn't raise questions about the existence of God that so dominate the philosophy of Abrahamic religions, let alone questions about the attributes of the deity."

So without a deity, what are the Buddhist's questions? Garfield offers a partial list:

"Buddhists also worry about the relation between ordinary reality, or conventional truth, and ultimate reality. Are they the same or different? Is the world fundamentally illusory, or is it real? ... They ask about the nature of the person, and its relationship to more fundamental psychophysical processes. Stuff like that. The philosophy of religion looks different if these are taken to be some of its fundamental questions."

Hinduism also asks a different set of questions and frames those questions in a different perspective. V.V. Raman, a physicist with a long-running interest in questions of science and religion, explicitly takes this on in his essay "Science and the Spiritual Vision: The Hindu Perspective." Using the Vedantic System to describe Hindu thought, Raman says:

"What makes the Vedantic System unique is that, unlike doctrines in some other religious systems, Vedanta is not simply based on the sacredness of this book or that. The Vedantic vision is not a theology or philosophy or even metaphysics. Rather, it is a formulation of a worldview arising from a unique mode of exploration."

So why does any of this matter?

On the ground-floor level, it's something of a counter to the in-your-face folks who want to argue against evolution because religion must trump science. OK. But one might ask: "Which religion?" What about the perspectives of the 1 billion Hindus or hundreds of millions of Buddhists? Don't their perspectives count? Or are we all just waiting for them to convert? Or course, this kind of argument won't do much against any kind of fundamentalism. But it highlights how a question of cosmic import, with ties to the whole of global history, can be mistakenly reduced to one single interpretation of one single religious tradition (whichever that may be).

Taking a pluralist view of religion means both sides are forced to think about religion in its full human context: the way it evolved in response to specific cultural and historic needs and the way those needs served the "spiritual longing" of individuals within those cultures. Even if you want to reject all religious or spiritual perspectives on reality, you need to understand the breadth of those perspectives.

Note that none of this implies that one perspective has to be superior to the others in discussions of science and religion. While there is a tendency to see Buddhism, in particular, as sympathetic to modern science, Buddhist scholar Donald S. Lopez Jr. has argued in The Scientific Buddha that this is only a very modern view of that religion.

Also, since philosophy and religion were so intimately tied together in the long march of Western history, they both served as the conceptual background for the development of Western science (which is now just "science"). The emphasis on the Platonic doctrine of ideals — with its timeless domain of perfect forms — is just one example of a tap-root idea that ran from western philosophy to religious thinking and on into science (at least in my field of theoretical physics). Understanding the emphasis that other cultures brought to their philosophical/religious thinking about ultimate ideas can only serve to make the whole discussion more interesting and enlightening.

So, the next time someone wants to argue about science and religion with you, stop and make them look at the this pie chart. Tell them they'll have to randomly pick one of the world's religious traditions to argue for (or against, depending on their disposition). That ought to make the party interesting.

You can keep up with more of what Adam is thinking on Facebook and Twitter: @adamfrank4

[Kochari]

Haven't read the article yet but just to say that I referenced Lopez Jr & Garfield about 32864396532 times in my degree, have a lot of time for them

[ezza]

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyat ... adictions/