Karma Sungrap Ngedon Tenpa Gyaltsen (stage name: “Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche“) asks “Is Buddhism a religion?” and answers that “the path the Buddha taught . . . is spiritual, not religious.”
A few years ago, Free Inquiry had an article about how secular humanists and atheists should avoid words like “spiritual” because they invoke supernaturalist ideas. They even had a whole list of replacement words, which just seemed to replace the forbidden idea with cumbersome language. I don’t remember any of them, and I am not sorry for not trying. It was a weird idea for people who claim to promote “free thought.”
“Spiritual” might be a fine word if people hadn’t mucked it up by making “spirit” into a synonym for “ghost.” It just comes from the word that means “breath,” and would perhaps be nicely suited to something like Zen Buddhism, where zazen often begins with simply recognizing one’s own breath. Except the “ghost” idea took over and people started using “spiritual” to mean a view that ours is something like a demon-haunted world. Even so, letting “breath” represent some essential quality of being would still be a discardable metaphor like any other if it impedes the path to truth by preventing the consideration of other news or ideas.
And speaking of the path to truth, there are better ideas on the road to that “spiritual, not religious” answer in the essay by Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche. For example:
[Siddhartha] was a great explorer of mind and its limits. He was open-minded, seeking truth, with no preconceived agenda. He thought, “Okay, I’ll do these religious practices and see if I can find the truth that way.” He did the practices, he didn’t find the truth, and so he left the religion. Like Siddhartha, if we really want spiritual enlightenment we have to go beyond religiosity. We have to let go of clinging to preconceived religious forms and ideas and practices.
Religion, if we don’t relate to it skillfully, can trap us in another set of rules. On top of all the ordinary rules we are already stuck with in this world, we pile on a second set of religious rules. I’m not saying there is anything bad about religion or rules, but you should be clear about what you’re seeking. Do you want religion and a set of rules to follow, or do you want truth? Truth has no religion, no culture, no language, no head or tail. As Gandhi said, “God has no religion.” The truth is just the truth.
Which reminds me of something I said to many people during the time when I was leaving religion: “If what you believe is true, then it can withstand any questions and any criticism.” But I found that those people, like most “religious” people I have encountered since, wanted their practice and worship to be a place made comfortable by a set of rules that seems almost wholly intended to do nothing but limit questions and prevent criticism, to provide a “preconceived agenda” that would shelter them from a search for truth instead of assisting them on one.
Maybe there are religious people who “relate to it skillfully,” so that they can value the practice and still seek the truth, but I have not met any of them. I see people who turn to the various flavors of Christianity, to Islam, to Judaism, and so on, because they want “answers”—which is to say they want the search for truth to end, to have truth handed to them, or to have it readily available in a codified format, so they can say, “Ah, now I can stop worrying about that.” And that would be fine, I guess, as long as they don’t turn around and say things like this:
U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker’s ruling [on the unconstitutionality of Proposition 8] desecrates and defiles every Christian marriage ceremony performed in this country for the past 250 years. The Constitution was created by Christian men, including a number of Presbyterian pastors.
The ruling desecrates our marriage that began in purity and continues in fidelity for 60-plus years. No gay or lesbian union will ever begin with these qualities, but a union upheld by immoral persons will be greeted with open arms by Satan himself.
But people obviously do turn around and say things like that, where, having received what they believed to be completed truth, they are no longer susceptible to new—and especially opposing—ideas, to the possibility of change. It is one thing to state an opinion forcefully, to say This is what I think and why, and to remain open to challenges on the why, but something altogether different to say This is what is and I will not be moved, because it is definitive. It destroys the possibility of learning from newness and difference and punishes people for curiosity. What help is that? When you have so locked yourself into the “truth” you claim to have received that you believe a federal court ruling “desecrates [y]our marriage,” how have you done anything but made a new and unnecessary problem for yourself? And when the same closure motivates political action to limit others, the straightjacket is needlessly forced onto them, too.
If Buddhism or religion or whatever else helps you along the path to truth, then go right ahead. And if you want to call it “spirituality,” fine. You can even impede your capacity for curiosity or your receptivity to new or opposing ideas if you want. But don’t use the political process to take others down with you. The truth is not “out there,” in some platonic ideal form, to be plucked, put in a box, and deployed by the people who caught it. But the search for truth will never end; everything is provisional.
“–Which reminds me of something I said to many people during the time when I was leaving religion: “If what you believe is true, then it can withstand any questions and any criticism.”–”
Couple questions on this:
1. Why?
2. More importantly, what exactly do you believe that can “withstand” this cross-examination?
A red herring at first glance; but bear with me. If you answer “naturalism” it would follow that “believe” is inappropriate. As it requires, logically, no effort or recognition on your part. If you answer “empiricism” or “various logical frameworks” than you have stacks of literature and critiques speaking to your nihilism, racism, sexism and my favorite; anthropocentrism.
“–. . . by a set of rules that seems almost wholly intended to do nothing but limit questions and prevent criticism, to provide a “preconceived agenda” that would shelter them from a search for truth instead of assisting them on one.—”
And you are free of this? You are the one individual that has no constructs (culture, education, “genetic lottery” and so forth) that impact your perception of the world? Any experience I have had is applied, wholly, to the set of standards you have prescribed to your experience. My belief and experience cannot be read on a ring in a cracker-jack box, please don’t reduce it as such.
I do agree with your assessment of the LTE. But I don’t think the blame can be assigned to the whole (F-Division).
“–And if you want to call it “spirituality,” fine. You can even impede your capacity for curiosity or your receptivity to new or opposing ideas if you want–”
OK, you can lock yourself into a “philosopher king” nihilistic arrogance and ignore the rest of us peasant know-nothings. But that is not a fair statement, because I believe your intentions rest in a progress (ill-defined and unclear), but a progress nonetheless. Be angry at people, but classifying them as true of the part(s) does not free you from “withstanding” anything.
I run across the angry novice atheist and they dump their ‘epistemology’ on me. Fresh out of the “I hate my fundy parents” with the “your Jesus was a copycat of Mithra” I ask the Persian Mithra or the Mithra Christos? And when they never know the answer, or any research within the last 20 years, does that make suggest they are bound to a set of constructs that are comfortable and solves all of their problems? Should I dismiss the smart ones that, “relate to it skillfully?”
Peter, once again I enjoy this and the challenge. You are unique in this wasteland. Keep it up.
Re: “If what you believe is true, then it can withstand any questions and any criticism.”
You have missed the context and the point. In context, it was addressed to specific people, who had beliefs that I questioned and criticized. Their response was that questions and criticism were ill-advised at best or wholly inappropriate at worst, and generally avoided them. The point was that their refusal to confront questions and criticism was the problem. The beliefs go wrong when an individual, like my earlier self, wants to examine them more closely and their guardians refuse to permit it; they also go wrong when those guardians deploy those beliefs as weapons, even as they shield them from criticism.
So your question—”what exactly do you believe that can ‘withstand’ this cross-examination?”—is misplaced. The “withstanding” is not the fundamental truth of the beliefs; as should have been clear from the end of the post, I don’t think people are capable of knowing truth that is not susceptible to doubt, questions, or criticism—but the failure to “withstand” suggests untruth, so that beliefs and practices that fail to allow doubt at their core do not recommend themselves. But while I have encountered plenty of religious people who are vested in preventing doubt at their fundaments, I have never encountered a naturalist or an empiricist with the same approach to naturalism or empiricism: there doubt about the fundaments is almost unavoidable.
Re: “preconceived agendas” and “constructs that impact your perception of the world”
First, those are not identical. A preconceived agenda can be taken up, examined, and discarded relatively easily; constructs impacting your perception run much more deeply, as the examples you give reveal. Culture, education, and genetics are the structures within which preconceived agendas can be formed, but they run far deeper, are harder to perceive, and include things that are impossible or nearly impossible to discard. Moreover, I would disagree that culture, education, and genetics even belong in the same category of “construct.” I would agree that culture and education belong in the realm of constructs because they are actually constructed. Genetics, however, is more like a pre-construct.
Second, no one is free of constructs (and pre-constructs), but we can try to free ourselves from preconceived agendas by doubting what we are able to doubt.
Perhaps you think my argument, both here and elsewhere, is that I have some other, competing truth that religious people should take up. But that would put it backwards; my argument is that what is claimed for “truth” is not truth. Everything we know lies on a continuum of provisionality, and everything we know is limited by our modes of interacting with the world. But knowing those limitations does not entitle us to imagine anything we want into reality and insist that it is unassailable simply because we have imagined it beyond the range of our knowing.
Re: “‘philosopher king’ nihilistic arrogance”
No one can force anyone else not to impede their capacity for for curiosity or their receptivity to new or opposing ideas. Do you deny that some people do close themselves? If not, then what would you do about them? All I say is leave them be so long as they are not oppressing others, in which case the others cannot be blamed for fighting back.
And if you think you are a “peasant know-nothing,” I doubt the accuracy your assessment. You are not the one operating by closure and do not appear to be condemning people to the arms of Satan from behind such closure.
Re: “angry novice atheists”
I don’t know what you should do with them. That’s your decision. I treat them like everybody else: commend what is commendable and challenge what is challengeable. I have never thought that “your Jesus was a copycat of Mithra” was particularly damning argument.
Fair enough. My concern with your blog/writings has always been that I felt that you want a world in which I don’t exist (due to a belief that immediately disqualifies me as a participant).
Great answer BTW.
Why would I want a world in which you don’t exist? And how would you be immediately disqualified as a participant? I find your remarks on those points baffling.
Let me clarify. The “world” I speak of is epistemology and decision making. And rhetorically, you suggest that “world” would be a better place absent the faithy types?
First, I don’t know who counts as a “faithy type.” Second, even if I did know, the problem is not that there are people whose ideas or decisions are of questionable epistemic provenance; that seems unavoidable. The problem is social organization: How do we manage a society where there is no agreement on epistemology? I favor a pragmatic approach, such as something akin to “overlapping consensus.” That doesn’t mean I think anybody, whether “faithy type” or not, should be disregarded; rather, I think people need to make a far better effort to discover what we can agree on. When people get up and say “America is a Christian Nation,” or act all disgusted that official endorsement of Christianity is against the rules, or demand that Muslims not be able to build a facility in Manhattan simply because they are Muslims, it demonstrates their disregard for even trying to find consensus. In light of the problem of social organization, those tendencies are dangerous and highly objectionable.