[Buddha-l] flat earth?

[curt]

Richard Hayes wrote:
>
> Whenever a claim written by an intelligent author strikes you as 
> ridiculous, try reading it with a little more charity. Batchelor 
> rarely writes anything carelessly and without a good basis in 
> research. If one reads his statement in context and with an ounce of 
> charity, rather than literally and out of context, it pretty clearly 
> means that no religious system before modern science was in a position 
> to know very much at all about the geography of the planet earth or 
> the place of the planet in the solar system. 

This is far from true. Greek, Egyptian, Indian and Chinese scientists 
were quite knowledgeable about the planet earth and much of the solar 
system (as anyone familiar with the non-fiction writings of Isaac Asimov 
would know) quite a long time ago. Batchelor sees his "Secular Buddhism" 
as the crowning achievement of some kind of evolutionary process in 
human thought that apparently began with the Buddha and ends with 
Stephen Batchelor. The fact that he is pretty shaky on some rather 
important aspects of what "fills in" those missing 2500 years (and is 
blissfully unaware of his ignorance) doesn't inspire charity in me. It 
isn't just a question of the flatness or roundness of the earth and who 
"believed in" what. Batchelor has in the past named Protagoras as a 
representative of the school of "Skeptical" philosophy. There were of 
course two different schools of Skeptics - and Protagoras had no 
connection to either one. In fact nothing is known directly about 
Protagoras' philosophy - we have only the words of people who disagreed 
strenuously with him (like Plato). That is the kind of thing that 
someone who wishes to speak authoritatively in the name of Agnosticism 
should know.
>
> I know it means a great deal to you to mock Stephen Batchelor, but you 
> will have to work a bit harder to find a mockery that sticks.
>
I only mock Batchelor because it is easy and because he begs for it. 
Batchelor claims to have discovered the exact words (in English!) with 
which the Buddha taught his "first discourse" (which is a made up story 
to begin with) - and he asserts that the vast majority of the world's 
Buddhists have for 2500 years only "believed in" the four noble truths 
but not acted on them (due to the evil influences of that arch-fiend 
"The Buddhist Religion"). He propounds a (quite literally) 
fundamentalist approach to Buddhism - as in getting back to the pure, 
original, true teachings of Buddha which have somehow been revealed to 
him. And like a good fundamentalist he calmly asserts that almost no one 
else has ever understood even the most basic teachings of Buddhism - and 
he does all this in the name of "Agnosticism"! Is there a Scottish word 
for chutzpah?

- Curt