Religion Dispatches
…can’t refer to a permanent soul inside someone”) but emphasizes that “when Buddhism says there is no self, they are talking on an ultimate level…. There’s no fear of referring to individuals.” Individual safety, she says, is a need no religion could eliminate. In large part, they agree with Badri Pandey, father of Jyoti, who in January told the news media, “My daughter didn’t do anything wrong. She died while protecting herself.” But what the Bud…
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…details. When we survey the opposing armies, what do we see? The forces of science: Those who start from the standpoint of science fall into three main groups: the New Atheists, who argue that the mere existence of religion is a threat to science and weakens it; the “privately religious” scientists, who argue that their private faith supplements their science, but who spend rather less time talking about how this actually works; and the True Separ…
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…ith ID.” In 1987, the US Supreme Court ruled that the teaching of creation science in science classes in public schools was unconstitutional. Since then, creation science adapted and evolved into intelligent design, which was declared unconstitutional in Dover. As with each constitutional defeat, the movement further dilutes its scientific assertions with vague terms and misleading language. As a board member for nine years, McLeroy, along with th…
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…different things are for our Muslim neighbors. In the popular imagination, Buddhism is a religion of peace and Islam is one of war. We may wonder how a Buddhist could commit such an atrocity—despite Buddhism’s history of violence in places like Burma, Japan, Tibet and Sri Lanka [see: Monks With Guns: Discovering Buddhist Violence, by Michael Jerryson in RD]. However, when the perpetrator is a Muslim we assume, as a matter of course, that religion…
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…being a practicing Buddhist as opposed to someone who was fascinated with Buddhism and maybe hung around with Buddhists, because you know, it is a very defined philosophy, and being someone who has a violent tendencies and appetites does not square with the philosophy involved there. Misunderstanding Buddhists and Buddhism What seemed to propel the confusion saturating the media’s initial coverage of Aaron Alexis was the role of religion and, mor…
Read More…ns report the science to the public, who then go around telling each other about the science on Twitter, and at the dinner table, and at the gym, and who knows where else. Somewhere in this Chain of Fact, things can go wrong. As a recent spate of incidents—involving falsified data and deceived journalists—should remind us, the route from the laboratory to public knowledge is not a perfect conduit of abstract truth, much as we modern humans often i…
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…. This money has helped to foster a strenuous mood in spiritually-inclined science. Studies and conferences now proliferate about the health benefits of religion, the biological bases of the Golden Rule, and the physics of immortality. Even the Vatican has gotten on board. At a Templeton-funded conference on evolution at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome this year, leading evolutionary biologists took center stage; a representative from…
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…guy who makes meditation seem almost reasonable. There is something quaint about this. Atlas had never heard of “engaged Buddhism”—the approach to Buddhist practice that joins contemplative work with political action—and mistakenly identifies Jack Kerouac as an expositor of it. He reads a couple of books on Buddhism, and is pleasantly surprised to find them pragmatic. He scare-quotes the phrase “loving kindness,” as if the Pali term metta (“loving…
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…tronomers believe. In his experience, those who imagine a conflict between science and religion usually take a reductive view of both. “They think religion is a book full of things, and science is a book full of things,” he told RD. “And what happens if the things in one contradict the things in the other?” The trouble, he suggests, is that many people stop paying attention to science or religion lessons after age 10. A more sophisticated version,…
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…erson or Miller or anyone else tries, they will never be able to reconcile science and religion, because science and religion are irreconcilable. Coyne does an admirable job of demonstrating this, point by (now tiresome) point. First, there’s the usual collection of statistics illustrating Americans’ stupidity (74% of us believe in angels, and most of us in miracles, etc.); so, clearly, we need help, and the implication is that science will provid…
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