What is religion?

I am not going to give you a Webster’s definition, nor a Latin etymology-based one. Instead, based on my own academic experience and insight, I am going to offer one of my own, which will also illustrate why, in contradistinction from many of its adherents, I consider Buddhism a religion.

First, I believe religion arises from the juncture of philosophy, psychology and sociology. Most people could readily see the first two, but sociology? Yes, even for a hermitic monk. Even that monk’s idea of religious expression and devotion were originally developed in a communal setting and out of guidelines developed by a religious community.

Second, looking at the main branches of philosophy, I see religion as being concerned with metaphysics, ethics, epistemology and ontology. Even Buddhism falls into the first area, on a couple of grounds. Karma, as a law, is not a law about material substances, but the metaphysical idea of reincarnation. And, even if Buddhists reject the idea of an individual soul or the collective atman, something metaphysical, that is, something beyond the material world, is believed to be reincarnated. Not that I agree with Paul Tillich’s use of words, but if we want to talk about “ultimate grounds of being,” Buddhism has one, as I see it.

Ethics is obvious. By that, I am not saying that it is the primary, let alone sole, preserve of religions, just that every religion has some ethical focus. It may be minor in some, great in others, but it’s there.

Epistemology? Yes. Every religion is teleological in some way, and its mythos is in part, to riff on Aristotle, an attempt to explain either an efficient or a final cause of things.

Ontology connects with metaphysics as to the nature of what that cause might be, the nature of metaphysical objects, and the nature of anything, be it individual soul or individualized soul or not, the nature of humanity.

And, there is where psychology enters. Psychology in religion is about more than faith in the religious sense of “hope in things unseen.” Rather, it’s about how one orients toward the ultimate object of one’s concern, whether a personal God with a salvific-based resurrection, or moving beyond karma and its rounds of reincarnation to a depersonalized nirvana. As part of that, I can’t think of a major religion that doesn’t have prayer or something roughly analogous to it.

More proof the Buddha was no Buddha

It’s likely that Siddhartha Gautama’s most famous phrase is:

“Life is suffering.”

If you’re a good Buddhist, life CAN’T be suffering, because you’re supposed to be in a state of satori. Rather, if the Buddha himself had actually obtained Buddhahood, he would have said, “Life appears to be suffering.”

Update, July 11: For some reason, Blogger's comment window isn't working for me today at work, either under my identity, or as an anonymous commenter. So, I'm posting here:

I don't think it's "sterile" nor do I think it's a matter of "dueling sound bites," the difference between "life is suffering" and "life appears to be suffering."

This hinges in part on other issues of Buddhism; I've already mentioned maya, which I know Theravada accepts, and I don't believe Mahayana rejects, at least. If life is an illusion, then the idea of suffering is ultimately an illusion.

It also hinges on the Buddhist rejection of atman, in another way. Arguably, can a good Buddhist even talk about "life" in this way if there is no reincarnation of an individual soul? I say not. In other words, what I see as implied invitation in the statement "life is suffering," for the listeners to agree that, "boy, yes, my life sure is suffering," or similar, can't logically follow if Siddhartha is enlightened enough to believe there is no "I" to be suffering.

Of course, I have other disagreements with the idea of karma, which I've blogged elsewhere on this blog. Frankly, I find it, more so in its Buddhist than its Hindu form (since Hinduism allows for an individual "soul"/life force which theoretically, at least, could remember the misdeeds of a past life which brought on an [apparentely] poor incarnation in this life), as appalling as fundamentalist monotheist ideas of hell.

Now, the people who have been posting here may see this as "village idiot anti-Buddhism" akin to "village idiot atheism." I don't. The original post and my comments to other commenters aren't snarky potshots but real issues. I made similar comments about Sam Harris' "End of Faith" on my Amazon review.

I find Buddhism to be a an interesting and enlightening psychological philosophy, but where it ventures into metaphysical issues as a religion, find it no more enlightening than any "Western monotheism."

Sam Brownback: Creationist schwaffler and spinmeister

Let’s just deconstruct his New York Times creationism column while seeing how many logical errors and fallacies we can find.

He begins by talking about “belief” in evolution:

In our sound-bite political culture, it is unrealistic to expect that every complicated issue will be addressed with the nuance or subtlety it deserves. So I suppose I should not have been surprised earlier this month when, during the first Republican presidential debate, the candidates on stage were asked to raise their hands if they did not “believe” in evolution. As one of those who raised his hand, I think it would be helpful to discuss the issue in a bit more detail and with the seriousness it demands.

The premise behind the question seems to be that if one does not unhesitatingly assert belief in evolution, then one must necessarily believe that God created the world and everything in it in six 24-hour days.

This is one of the most disingenuous ploys of creationists. Frankly, you do not “believe” in evolution like you do in creationism.

Did Galileo “believe” in a heliocentric solar system theory? Did Newton “believe” in his theory of gravitation? Of course not.

Next, there’s this illogical false dilemma:

The question of evolution goes to the heart of this issue. If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I believe it to be true. If, on the other hand, it means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.

Actually, of course, many people, including professional theologians, believe in some sort of theistic evolution that has plenty of room for macroevolution without considering it to rule out a divinity, etc. Note carefully the word “exclusively,” used (and I’m sure quite deliberately) to set up this false dilemma.

And, of course, “materialistic” is a four-letter word in this scenario.

Beyond that, we see the old false dichotomy between microevolution and macroevolution. The only thing missing is the word “kinds.”

Then, going beyond evolution to cosmology, Brownback talks about "facts," without talking about the actual facts, to avoid either huge lies or huge pants-crapping about the Big Bang and the date of the universe.

Ultimately, on the question of the origins of the universe, I am happy to let the facts speak for themselves.

And, he stops there and never mentions a single cosmological fact.

He then concludes with a diktat of faith thrown out as supposedly having empirical support, but again without listing any facts.

While no stone should be left unturned in seeking to discover the nature of man’s origins, we can say with conviction that we know with certainty at least part of the outcome. Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order.

What if man's likeness IS unique? So is that of a giant squid, or a planarium. As for the “likeness and image” of Genesis, theologians still have no consensus on what that even means.

Let the faith healing begin?

You’ll never believe what I got in the mail today

It’s a genuine faith-healing prayer handkerchief. I’m supposed to place it underneath my bed tonight, along with a sealed Bible prophecy, after writing all my needs on the second page of a letter that was also in the mailing, and …

Voila! My needs will be met!

Being a good empiricist, I’ll of course give it a test.

Atheism is NOT reductionism, be it scientific or philosophical

And speaking of “scientific or philosophical,” I think the two leading representatives of those schools as public speakers on issues atheistic, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, need to remember this, be reminded of this, called out on this, or whatever.

On issues both philosophical and mathematical (and extending toward evolutionary biology), Douglas Hofstadter presents the case for a holistic naturalism well in “Gödel, Escher, Bach.”

And, though evolutionary psychology, let alone Evolutionary Psychology, wasn’t riding high on the radar screen at the time of GEB, Hofstadter’s writing puts paid to the capital-EP philosophy vs. the small-ep science.

In fact, beyond its metaphysical bent, I believe that’s one of the main problems with Ev Psych. Per Dennett’s comments in some of his books about warranted vs. unwarranted reductionism, I believe Ev Psych engages in unwarranted reductionism.

Back to this post’s title.

So do many of the varieties of atheism plied today by intellectual leaders. No, we don’t know everything yet about evolutionary biology, let alone evolutionary psychology. The same is true of cognitive science. Too strong a degree of reductionism is unwarranted on lack of epistemological grounds alone.

Given that Hofstadter and others (chaos and complexity theories, Malcolm Gladwell’s pondering in this areas, etc.), the Dawkins/Dennett degree of reductionism is also unwarranted as a logical inference.

Why I am who I am

Shakespeare reference aside, it’s true about the sun’s influence.

Professor Jayanti Chotai, a consultant psychiatrist and senior lecturer at Umea University in Sweden … found that men born from October to January have low dopamine levels and are most likely to be gentle and reflective types.

My birthday? Dec. 26, right in the middle of this cycle.

How would Freud and Jung interpret my bit of bad driving?

I recently hit a curb with my right front wheel, on the way to a counselor’s appointment, and bent its rim, though not too badly.

Since I was going to a counselor, I wondered what Freud and Jung would have said about this.

Freud would have seen the round wheel, with its opening in the center, as vaginal. And the curb, hard and out-thrust, is obviously then penile. So, I have anger at women by bending the edge of a vagina. Since I was on the way to see a counselor, this was obviously arising in my mind at that moment.

Jung would see the wheel in its roundness as symbolic of reincarnation, eternal recurrence, or perhaps the Buddhist wheel of fate. The curb? The legal restrictions of the father-god. So, in this case, I’m still angry at the father-god, partially as represented by my minister father, and still “wreck” my spiritual enlightenment on the shoals of this anger.