[Buddha-l] there he goes again (sam harris)

[Richard Hayes]

On Friday 27 October 2006 17:42, curt wrote:

> Tangling is in the eye of the entangled. The whole idea that there is
> some kind of "problem" with Buddhism that only only secularist humanists
> are able to fix is completely subjective.

Do you know of anyone who has said that? I know of plenty of people who have 
said that there should be no reason why a secular humanist cannot practice 
Buddhism, but I have never read (or heard) anyone say that only secular 
humanists can get Buddhism right. 

> From where I stand Toni Packer 
> is just another Zen teacher who refuses to use the word Zen - there's
> hardly anything new about that. 

There is much less to Toni Packer than that. She long ago did away with Buddha 
statues, chanting, prostrations, bowing, koan practice and teacher-disciple 
hierarchy. That is doing away with much more than the label "Zen"; it is 
doing away with almost everything the label signifies, in our times at least.

> Harris called his first book "The End of Faith" - Batchelor titled his
> book "Buddhism Beyond Belief". Please point out my error - but it
> appears to me that both fellows are saying what I said they are saying -
> that there is a thing called "belief" or "faith" - and that this thing
> poses some kind of a problem. 

Your error consists in making unwarranted assumptions about books you 
obviously have not read---or have read inattentively or with the same degree 
of carelessness we have come to expect of you from your tour-de-farce 
performances on buddha-l. If you had read beyond the title page of 
Batchelor's work, you would know that his concern is not with belief as such 
but with unwarranted belief. His preference is to suspend judgment on matters 
for which there is no compelling evidence. His target (like Harris's) is 
blind faith and gullibility, not belief as such. Batchelor and Harris seem to 
agree that there are Buddhists whose faith in some things is based more on 
uncritical acceptance of personal and textual authority than on empirical 
evidence and careful reasoning.

> Then proceed to argue how one can overcome 
> this problem by getting rid of that "thing."

Batchelor shows a bit more than that one can do Buddhist practice without 
blind faith and unwarranted beliefs. He also shows that numerous Buddhists, 
and arguably the Buddha himself, saw unwarranted belief as part of the 
problem rather than part of the solution.

> But where is there anything modern or western
> or "scientific" in that claim? 

As I said, Batchelor argues that being wary of unwarranted convictions has 
been a feature of Buddhism since the Buddha himself. He makes no claim of 
being especially modern and western. Indeed, he claims to have cultivated 
these insights while practicing Korean Son as a monk in Korea. The only 
claims he makes for scientific method is that it is another rather good tool 
to use in the project of divesting oneself of unnecessary convictions. 

> Who in the history of claiming things has 
> ever claimed anything other than this? 

Aside from quite a large number of fundamentalists, fanatics and fools, few 
people have disagreed strongly with what Batchelor and Harris argue. That is 
exactly my point. So you see, we agree on the value of Batchelor and Harris. 
The only difference between us is that I have no problem acknowledging that 
thoughtful people sometimes write excellent books that are worth reading and 
thinking about, whereas you prefer to huff and puff and belittle and make 
fatuously cynical remarks. Pray for rebirth, Curt; I think your chances of 
becoming emotionally mature in this life are somewhere between slim and nil.

> It was of course Socrates who 
> said that it really all boils down to this. We only err out of ignorance
> - and ignorance is just the absence of knowledge.

So your point is what? That because Socrates already said that, no one else is 
allowed to make the same points in their own ways and in their  own contexts?

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico