Thoughts on Buddhism

[Angrboda]

You know, I was considering plowing forward and reading the several pages I haven't read, in spite of having a migraine. This thread combines a number of my favorite subjects, including religion and philosophy of mind. But along the way, I saw too many of Abra's posting of *rofl* smilies, and decided that a person with this little respect for the person they were talking to is not worth bothering over. I'll waste my words on somebody else.

The way I look at it, the sages in the east, and those in the Mediterranean were basically scientists using the best tools they had at their disposal, their brains. There's a yoga called raja that, I'm told, basically consists in stressing yourself until your mind cracks, and seeing what you can learn from it. Zen is similar. And they delivered some fascinating insights. I haven't fully absorbed the breadth of the Buddha's thinking, but if what I've read about his doctrine of anatman rings true, I can understand why he made the mistakes that he did make. That dovetails perfectly with some conjectural thoughts I've had about some recent ideas in computational neuroscience.

But at the end of the day, wrong is wrong, and it makes no sense to venerate ideas that have past their prime in order to venerate the man. We have institutionalized knowledge, research, medicine, fMRI and PET scans, study of the effects of brain trauma on consciousness and cognition and so on. The Buddha had a loin cloth and a Bodhi tree. Better tools yield better results. There is no contest.

Let's just pose Abs a parting question.

You wake up one morning and you're dizzy and seeing things and you have a massive headache. Who do you turn to first?

1. A doctor at a hospital.
2. Some guru smearing ashes on his face.