A rational religion...?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Any other "religions" willing to step up to that plate?

I'm not sure that any religion stepped up to the plate, but I can tell you that individuals from all major religions would willingly step up to the plate and have a similar attitude toward science and their specific religion.

You'll get no argument from me there. Welcome to Ratz.

Thanks, FBM! Are you a fellow Pink Floyd fan?

We have several species of small furry Pink Floyd fans in that cave over there. They were hand-Pict.

[FBM]

Ummagumma!!

[Beatsong]

Still, buddhism derives from a hindu environment, and predicates improvement/degradation of your future rebirths depending on your deeds in life, just as hindu karma does, does it not?

Not really, no. The Buddha hijacked certain terms from his ideological environment and redefined them in ways that totally inverted and invalidated the original. Karma/kamma, for instance. The concept that the Buddha overturned was that one's effective soteriological actions were limited to the correct enactment of the religious rituals by individuals born to the brahmin class, regardless of one's character, intelligence or anything else. The Buddha turned this scheme on its head and redefined karma/kamma as 'volition.' That is, future phenomena depend on the skillfulness of the individual's moment-to-moment choices, not on class or rote repetition of sacrifices and chanting. And it is unrelated to class, as non-brahmins are just as capable as brahmins to develop this skill set.

Wrt future lives, the Buddha pointed out that an atman that might survive the breakup of this body is nowhere to be found. The individual becomes a passing perception of phenomena, rather than a discrete entity that abides intact through literal future lives. The Buddhist "future lives" are the arising of previously un-arisen phenomena, and what we take to be an individual human goes through countless such new arisings of phenomena in this very lifetime. That's what is meant by the Buddha's statement in the Rohitassa Sutta:

"I tell you, friend, that it is not possible by traveling to know or see or reach a far end of the cosmos where one does not take birth, age, die, pass away, or reappear. But at the same time, I tell you that there is no making an end of suffering & stress without reaching the end of the cosmos. Yet it is just within this fathom-long body, with its perception & intellect, that I declare that there is the cosmos, the origination of the cosmos, the cessation of the cosmos, and the path of practice leading to the cessation of the cosmos."

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka ... .than.html

"within this fathom-long body," not in some future body or future life as a literalist would mean it.

That's not to say that the Buddha never referred to future lives; he did. But some of that can be taken to be a sign of his pedagogical skill (meeting the student where s/he is and prompting them to examine further) or metaphorically, since the only Self in Buddhism is a conventional, metaphorical one.

There is a great mound of woo-based sayings attributed to the Buddha that exist nowhere in the Pali Canon, the vast body of literature that scholars consider to be the most reliable source of information about what the historical Buddha (assuming he existed) actually said and did. That's not a claim that the Pali literature is either factual or uncorrupted; it's just the best we have. I'd recommend to anyone to be skeptical about anything you read in popular literature that claims to be said or done by the Buddha. There is plenty of room for skepticism about the Pali Canon itself, and the further you get from that source, the more woo people tack on. With a few exceptions, such as Richard Gombrich, Mark Siderits and a few others.

I met Gombrich once at a Buddhist convention, back in the day when I was into that sort of thing. He gave a very erudite address which pissed off all the devout but much less knowledgable people there, by basically explaining that the Buddha's denial of the concept of self is not really what it's made out to be; that he accepted and used it in the normal everyday sense that everyone else does. Then he pissed them off even more because whenever someone challenged him, he brought out a whole screed of references from his gargantuan academic memory showing exactly why he was right.

Later, chatting with him over a cup of tea, I asked him, "so, are you a Buddhist?" To which he replied, "no, I can't be a Buddhist because I don't believe in rebirth". It took a while to fully sink in but I think that was the moment when I realised that I couldn't really be a Buddhist either, for the same reason.

The thing is, you can slice it and dice it, dress it up in whatever mystical, metaphorical or frankly evasive language you want, but ultimately there has to be some concept of something enduring beyond the boundary of individual death, which has some degree of integrity and identity. Without that, how can there be rebirth, because what is there to be reborn? (This is the bit I never really got).

Also, the entire Buddhist wy of understanding the world, and system of ethics for acting within the world, relies upon the presumption of rebirth. On the face of it, karma is a blatently stupid idea because we all see around us all the time examples of people whose individual destinies don't seem to match up to the good or evil that they have done. (Saw a t-shirt recently: "Hey, Karma - I have a list of the people you missed!"). The only way this can be made to make any sense is by the accumulation of karmic energy after death, carrying on into the life of another "birth". It's rebirth that allows Buddhists to feel that the world is basically a nice, harmonious and fair place despite the enormous weight of evidence to the contrary, and rebirth that allows them to see a point in living according to certain standards of ethics that don't actually get you anywhere in the real world.

You can dilute karma/rebirth a certain amount by viewing it in vaguely mystical terms about the accumulation of "energy" rather than individual identity; you can shrug your shoulders and insist that you accept the general idea even though you don't really understand why some people are born with HIV in starving African villages, or why noone has yet tortured GW Bush the way he deserves to be tortured. But then what you're left with is so trivial as to be pretty much meaningless: basically "what we do has some effect upon our lives in the future". Well, duh. Buddhism either says a lot more than that - in which case what is says is largely unfalsifiable woo - or it doesn't, in which case it's not really saying anything much at all.

Having said all that, I still think there's a valid point there in the OP. In my experience Buddhists are much more flexible about listening to and accomodating science and knowledge than the followers of most religions. They also - the zen-oriented ones anyway - make an explicit distinction between knowledge/beliefs and experience, allowing for the possibility of similar and equally valid experiences coming from apparently contradictory beliefs. The six blind men and the elephant and all that. In this sense Buddhism is almost like the antthesis of Islam, where beliefs are everything and it doesn't even seem to matter that much what kind of a person you are, as long as you repeat the right catchphrases. Which is probably why Buddhists are, on the whole, much less likely than muslims to kill people for not believing the same stuff. All of that's gotta be good, if you've gotta have some kind of religion.

[mistermack]

Thanks, FBM! Are you a fellow Pink Floyd fan?

Don't bother with him. He doesn't even know which one is Pink.
I've MET Pink !!
And gave him one of my cigars !

[FBM]

I met Gombrich once ...All of that's gotta be good, if you've gotta have some kind of religion.

Cool! I'd love to have a chance to pick that guy's brain.

As for rebirth, if you take the assertion that there is no Self in the 5 khandas that might be reborn, then you have to jettison the popular conceptualization of rebirth as some sort of attenuated reincarnation. Few Buddhists (I don't consider myself one, either) see what looks to me to be the logical necessity of this. In my experience, every Buddhist layperson and most Buddhist monks do believe in some sort of afterlife. When I was ordained in Thailand, I asked one of the fellow monks about it (he was also a law student and had studied in England). He said he didn't know, was sure that the Ajahn knew, promised to ask him about it and tell me what he said. Not only did he never tell me what the Ajahn said, he became more distant and less eager to talk to me after that. Since then I've been curious about what the Ajahn told him. The Ajahn (an obese Japanese guy in the most ascetic sect in Thailand. ) never demonstrated much fondness for me in the first place, and he ignored me even more pointedly after that. If being Buddhist means believing in the sort of rebirth that is just a watered-down reincarnation, then I've never been Buddhist. Mind you, if I wanted a place to meditate for a year or so, I'd pay lip service to whatever nonsense was required to keep my room and board until I was ready to move on. I've done a lot of that. I'm of the mind that the experience of self is reborn every time you make a volitional act, and in that sense one is reborn an uncountable number of times in what is conventionally called a single lifetime (as if there were a Self abiding in the body from birth to death).

Gombrich and others point out that the Buddha acknowledged a conventional self, but not an eternal Self. Not in body, experience, mind, consciousness, nothing. What is that which is conventionally called one's self, then? If you look carefully at paticca samuppada, you see that things as entities aren't posited. Instead, you see the arising of the various consciousnesses (eye consciousness, ear consciousness, etc.) I can't recall ever having read any sutta in which the Buddha made a declaration of a thing-in-itself behind those experiences. In Buddhist philosophy, being is experiencing, not an entity that abides unchanged, identical through time. Of course, if you read enough suttas, yes, you will find quite a few in which the Buddha is talking to someone as if rebirth were essentially indistinguishable from reincarnation. Future lives, etc etc. I don't have any idea how literally the Buddha himself took it (and don't really care), but there is plenty of evidence from the suttas that he was using pedagogical devices to put people on a path that would eventually lead them to a personal experience of no Self; self as only a fleeting bundle of phenomena. You have to take his audience into consideration. Most of his audience were either householders or Brahmins. Atman and reincarnation were rarely questioned except by wandering ascetics (sramanas) and a few others, if Gombrich et al are correct.

The role of rebirth in Buddhist ethics is, seen in this light, predictable, I think. It works well for people with limited understanding, people who haven't penetrated the philosophy very deeply. That's the vast majority of Buddhists, in my experience, whether lay or ordained. But if the Buddha had intended to teach it as some sort of Eternal, Cosmic Truth, then he wouldn't have said that his own dhamma is like a raft you use to cross a river; you leave it behind after you're across. I think once you put together the 4NT, anatta, anicca, and paticca samuppada, you no longer have any need of concepts like rebirth or, for that matter, ethics.

[pinkfld42]

Thanks, FBM! Are you a fellow Pink Floyd fan?

Don't bother with him. He doesn't even know which one is Pink.
I've MET Pink !!
And gave him one of my cigars !

I must admit that I even like the solo stuff from Waters and Gilmour. Pros and Cons of Hitchiking in particular, but I aslo like the guitar work from Jeff Beck in Amused to Death.

Nice that there are other Floyd fans here.

Peace out and I hope you all have a wonderful 2013,

pinkfld42

[FBM]

PinkFloydism would be a rational religion.

[mistermack]

Thanks, FBM! Are you a fellow Pink Floyd fan?

Don't bother with him. He doesn't even know which one is Pink.
I've MET Pink !!
And gave him one of my cigars !

I must admit that I even like the solo stuff from Waters and Gilmour. Pros and Cons of Hitchiking in particular, but I aslo like the guitar work from Jeff Beck in Amused to Death.

Nice that there are other Floyd fans here.

Peace out and I hope you all have a wonderful 2013,

pinkfld42

Thanks and the same to you.
I was a fan from the very first. Even stuff I thought was crap has grown on me.
And "one of these days" is almost engough to persuade me to get stoned again.

I've got so many favourites, but I don't like to wear them out, in my head, so I ration my listening.

Nice guys too. One of them, ( Gilmour I think ) was passing a house party that my sister and brother-in-law were at in South London. They are good musicians and were having a jam.
They just knocked the door, and asked to come in, and joined in the jamming.
Nice to know they aren't up their own asses.

My other guitar hero from that era is Wizz Jones. Check him out, if you like guitar playing.