nameandnature

Buddhism Is More ‘Western’ Than You Think – NYTimes.com

Argues that incomprehensible gnomic sayings are a Western stereotype of what Eastern philosophy is.
(tags: meditation buddhism philosophy paradox)

Inspiring Philosophy and the Laws of Logic: Part 1 – UseOfReason

What could apologists be talking about when they speak of “the laws of logic”? (This is usually part of an argument that God is needed for there to be such laws). Discusses various different logics, what Godel really proved, and a bunch of other stuff.
(tags: philosophy mathematics logic presuppositionalism apologetics godel)

Thin Pinstriped Line: The business of Remembering

Veteran and civil servant “Sir Humphrey” on poppies: “I have grown increasingly concerned at the manner in which manufactured outrage focuses on any organisation or individual that challenges the Poppy status quo, by not wearing one. If you are wearing one only because everyone else is wearing one, then perhaps it is time to ask whether the Poppy has become a victim of its own success.

As we move into the world where we are over a century on from the events of WW1, perhaps the time has come to ask if it is time to evolve the service of Remembrance, and perhaps do it differently. I do feel that the need to remember is always appropriate, but that the means by which a simple silence has become a business and outrage outlet to sell papers is increasingly distasteful. “
(tags: war remembrance poppy politics media)

---

Originally posted at Name and Nature. You can comment there. There are currently comments.

Mattghg and Hemant Mehta, the Friendly Atheist, both linked to Matthew Parris's article As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God.

Parris is an atheist who writes admiringly not just of the work done by Christians in Africa, but of the changes conversion brings about in people, supplanting a tribal mindset he regards as unhealthy.

Matt also links to (but rightly criticises) a response to Parris by Stephen Noll, who writes for something called Anglican Mainstream. Noll's article makes a couple of good points and then veers off into a parody of the Daily Mail, telling Parris that he should reflect on how atheism has lead Britain into darkness, and rounding off with the threat of the UK being over-run by Islam. I've not really been keeping up with who's been anathemising whom in Anglicanism lately, because it's all a bit tedious, but I'm assuming that something called "Anglican Mainstream" is actually a fundy schismatic organisation, much like a "People's Republic" is always a communist dictatorship.

It's odd that Noll thinks Theodore Dalrymple supports his claims about Britain, because in the article Noll links to, Dr Dalrymple doesn't prescribe a dose of God: he says Brits were civilised and are now being un-civilised by intellectual activity and legislation (presumably they believed in God throughout the civilisation phase), and speaks fondly of a time when Brits regarded religious enthusiasm (a term which once referred to evangelicalism) as bad form.

Strangely enough, I've already quoted Dalrymple in a statement which will probably get my Dawkins Club membership card confiscated, namely, that faith groups in prisons are OK if they introduce prisoners to a culture which is less broken than the one they belong to already. This pragmatism is a reflection of my devotion to the ideas of Neal Stephenson, I suppose. (Of course, the faith groups needn't be theistic: Buddhism can do the job, too).

It's an annoying fact that religions are better at spreading than rationality is, as Andrew Brown points out. Christianity, or at least the right sort of Christianity, certainly isn't the worst belief system out there. If a dose of God will displace tribalism or nihilism (which, pace Noll, isn't equivalent to atheism), it seems like the lesser of two evils, to me.

Is it inconsistent for me to say this and also write stuff about how Christianity is wrong? I don't think so: I'd always want to help someone to become a rationalist, which is the goal of the stuff I write. But I'm trying to be realistic about the prospect of that happening to someone who's starting from less than zero. Evangelical Christianity is infectious and can create in some people a tremendous valuing of truth per se. We can use that :-)

Bhikkhu Nanamoli's The Life of the Buddha is a telling of the Buddha's life using excerpts from the Pali canon.

In the Pali canon, the world is an abundantly supernatural one, a cosmos with many worlds and many deities. The Buddha's birth is foretold to sages by deities, and he himself converses with various supernatural beings. He also does miracles, like reading minds, turning people invisible, vanishing into one of the many heavens, and so on. You get the impression that the miracles aren't unique to him: it seems there were lots of ascetics and teachers around at the time, each with their own disciples, and this sort of stuff is par for the course. The Buddha describes Devadatta, the villain of the piece, as "stopping halfway with ... the mere earthly distinction of supernormal powers", and seems to see them as tricks that are well known.

In the book, there's little mention of the Buddha's early life, although some passages about living in a palace are quoted. After his birth, we're straight into his quest for enlightenment. He tries asceticism for a while but decides it's not helping, and disgusts the small number of followers he's acquired by taking food and drink. He goes off and thinks about stuff, and has a series of insights about how one thing leads to another thing, Star Wars style (a process known as dependent arising), and with that, realises how to stop it. He thinks about keeping the knowledge to himself, as most people won't be able to get it, but a brahma persuades him not to. He begins to teach people the dharma.

The book then follows the growth of the sangha, the community of monks. The community grows, and sometimes finds favour with merchants and royalty, who give the monks land. It seems they live by receiving alms from the lay people, to who receive talks on the dharma in return. We don't see much of the lay people in the book, as it mostly concerns the teachings given to the monks. We do see the community undergo growth, dissension and outright mutiny (Devadatta again).

The chapter on the dharma itself was pretty hard going. The translation could probably have helped there, but Nanamoli writes in the preface that he's attempting to provide as true a translation as possible, without interpreting too much. I found contemporary paraphrases easier to understand. If one can sum up a large body of teaching in a few sentences, the Buddha thinks that dukkha (usually translated as "suffering") is real; suffering is caused by our inability to get what we want or keep it, or prevent what we don't want; suffering can be prevented by giving up the desire for these things, which can be achieved by following the mental and ethical teachings summarised as the Noble Eightfold Path.

The scriptures bear the signs of being passed on orally: there's a lot of repetition (one of Nanamoli's few concessions to the reader is that he elides some of this), speech is often stylised, and teachings often use numbered groups of things (four noble truths, noble eightfold path). According to Wikipedia, there are a number of schools of thought about how much of the canon represents the Buddha's words. Manuscript evidence isn't helpful, as the earliest ones are apparently 8th century.

There's a sense in which this doesn't matter as much as it does to, say, Christianity, because the point seems to be the teaching, which is said to be something people can experience for themselves. In orthodox Christianity, at least, the scriptures recording important miraculous events which are to be believed in, so that the evidence for them is important, and the teaching of Jesus rest on his personal authority. I don't think one can eliminate questions of authority from any religion, though: there are so many religions that ask you to "try it and see" that there's not enough time to try them all.

More problematic to me was the way much of the Buddha's teachings are phrased as ways to avoid rebirth, since (a) it's not clear what rebirth means when one of your other doctrines is that there's no fixed self, and (b) it's not clear how anything of us survives after death, such the the results of our actions (known as karma), in a way which could be passed on to another person.

It also wasn't clear from the book how detachment was meant to be practiced by people who weren't monks. The monks need the lay people, or they'll starve, but the householder's life seems second class when it comes to attaining enlightenment. Apparently there are Buddhist scriptures which do address the lay people, so it'd be interesting to read those.

In summary, the book was interesting, but hard to get into. I got bogged down in places and ended up skipping bits. A more dynamic translation might have been easier to read, even if such a translation did end up reflecting the biases of the translator more than Nanamoli's did.