is what i do

The text for our Dharma Study Group this coming Saturday is from the Anguttara Nikaya—the collection of the Buddha’s teachings that are arranged according to the number of topics covered in each. This one is from the Chapter on the Threes and concerns the three devaduta, the “messengers of the gods”.

This is how I’ve heard it. The Buddha was staying at the shelter provided by Anathapindika in Jeta’s grove near the village of Savatthi, and he told the monks this story…

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The New York Times reports that Cody Young, an evangelical Christian who attends a religious high school in Southern California, has filed a pre-emptive lawsuit against the University of California, charging that they practice “viewpoint discrimination” and that their admissions standards violate the free speech and religious rights of evangelical Christians because they refuse to certify some of the Christian school’s courses on literature, history, social studies and science.

The university system’s reasons for refusing to certify those particular courses is that the textbooks used in the courses and the curriculums themselves have a specifically Christian viewpoint. Here’s a sample:

What interests me most about the suit is an argument made by Robert Tyler, a lawyer for Calvary Chapel Christian School in Murrieta, CA, where Cody Young is a senior: “What really lights the fire here is when you look at courses the U.C. has approved from other schools. In the titles alone, you can see the discrimination against us.” And he pointed out that the university has approved courses on Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and gender and counterculture’s effects on literature.

I’m in favor of teaching courses on all those things, and on Christianity as well, at all levels. But I think that courses in religion must be taught in the same spirit of rationality and open inquiry as are courses in other subjects, like history, sociology, and science. Here’s an illuminating quote from John Dewey, probably the most profound thinker about education that this country has produced:

So let’s accept a course on Islam, as long as that course permits teacher and student to introduce viewpoints questioning the Prophet’s sanity or his womanizing; let the course on Christianity use materials from the Jesus Seminar, and require the students to read passages from Bertrand Russell (and from Dewey himself) that question the rationality, morality, and historical truth of Christian beliefs. Let the universities certifying those courses for their admissions policy focus, not on the subject matter, but on the pedagogy, and accept only those courses that exemplify what Dewey calls the “method of free inquiry” that must characterize all honest search for truth.

Ted Rall explains it: it’s just Stupid Design—

Jan Eliot takes a shot at correcting a 100-year old injustice; for more about Mileva, check out:

Giblets understands. Murtha, he explains, is nothing but a crybaby.

Fafblog has outdone itself. (Not an easy task.)

Hunter, in the Daily Kos, reports that Bush feels betrayed by his father, believing him to be behind Brent Scowcroft’s devastating interview in The New Yorker, and by Karl Rove, because he lied to the President about the Plamegate affair. Even in the best of times, this President is dangerously isolated from anyone who would tell him the truth about what’s going on in the world. Now these reports, coming on top of other recent reports about his resumed drinking and other erratic behavior, are really frightening. And Hunter points out that the new stories are coming from bedrock Republican sources, e.g. The Washington Times and Matt Drudge.

The Dalai Lama’s op-ed piece in this morning’s New York Times, “Our Faith in Science“, was truly remarkable: honest, clear-eyed, generous, and smart. It’s generated a lot of discussion.

In his blog Stranger Fruit, John M. Lynch remarks on the following quotation: “If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change.” And he asks,

A number of friends, knowing my affection for the Buddha, and for the Dalai Lama, have mentioned the piece to me through this day, and they have all, to my mind, taken a subtly mistaken message from it; all of them told me that they read the piece to mean that there need be no conflict between science and religion; several went on to give it their own spin: if science could just give a little, then it could exist quite peacefully with religion.

As I read it, however, the piece says no such thing. True, His Holiness challenges scientists to widen their vision to include more of the world than their narrow speciaties, and to give more consideration than they have to the ethical implications of the science that they practice. And he does express his hope that “people from both worlds can have an intelligent discussion, one that has the power ultimately to generate a deeper understanding of challenges we face together in our interconnected world.”

But he is clearly mindful of the fact that “certain religious concepts conflict with scientific facts and principles.” What he does not say explicitly, but what is nonetheless true, is that those particular religious concepts that conflict with science are the concepts having to do with the role of God in the history of the universe and the conduct of human affairs. And while Buddhism very sensibly recognizes such concepts as “unskillful”, i.e. not worth talking about because they are unresolvable, most theistical religions (e.g. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) hold such concepts very close to the heart, and, indeed, have been known to destroy those (scientists and others) who fail to give them proper reverence and assent. The fact is that a belief in a creator God really is in conflict with science, and there’s no getting around that.

The Dalai Lama takes the same path that the Buddha took when he was confronted with such metaphysical questions as the nature of the gods; he attempts to bring the discussion back to what he calls “secular ethics”, i.e. “the principles we share as human beings: compassion, tolerance, consideration of others, the responsible use of knowledge and power. These principles transcend the barriers between religious believers and non-believers; they belong not to one faith, but to all faiths.”

Ideally, those principles do belong to all faiths. But the current state of affairs in most corners of the world—from the boulevards of Paris to the cornfields of Kansas, from the West Bank of the Jordan River to the West Wing of the White House—provide pretty unambiguous evidence that compassion and tolerance aren’t holding their own against the temper tantrums of a jealous God.

I love the Dalai Lama; I am amazed and grateful to have been alive in a time of the world when I can hear his teaching. I am glad to see that teaching appear on the pages of the New York Times; I hope that some will be touched by this wisdom who have not hitherto even been aware of such a luminous soul in our midst. But it will not do to read this piece carelessly, or to look for easy ways out of a difficult dilemma, or to conflate the Dalai Lama, because he is presented as a “religious leader”, with others who share nothing of his humanity, his breadth of learning, or his profound humility.

Nobuo Masataka, a primate researcher at Kyoto University, has written a book which argues that proliferation of mobile phones has resulted in a population of young people in Japan who behave more like chimpanzees than humans. He calls this group “dearuki-zoku (out and about tribe)” and claims that their reliance on mobile phones and text messaging has caused them to lose the distinction between public and private space, to become more emotional, less able to express their feelings in words, and more likely to lash out in sudden, unprovoked attacks.

My tendency is to dismiss this sort of speculation as publicity-seeking behavior, with virtually no relationship to genuine science. And I distrust my own old-fart tendency to see the behavior of young people and other alien cultures as a tolling bell for the doom of civilization. Still, this one has resonance; there’s something going on among those young people who have such a symbiotic relationship with such an intimate and seductive gadget, and it doesn’t feel comfortable or even, as Professor Masataka points out, quite human. I think it may be something we’ll be hearing more about.

In his wonderful Buddhist blog, Wandering on the Way, Jeb has another excellent post, this one on “Why and How”. Jeb points out that these questions tend to get conflated: “Why is the sky blue?” is answered by an explanation involving the spectrum of sunlight and the differential absorbtion and refraction of light rays. But that is really an answer to a different question: “How is that the sky appears blue?”

Both science and religion are prone to such conflation, but religion does it more often, and to more disorienting effect. Jeff ends his essay by pointing out some differences between Christianity, which makes little distinction between “why” and “how”, and Buddhism, which pretty much ignores the former and focusses all its analytical attention on the “how” of experience.