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[ironic] You mean that if he felt offended, it was really his genes taking offence? [/ironic]

I think it's time Dawkins was asked if 150 years has been enough to come up with the paleontological evidence for his theories - or whether he maintains as a matter of faith that some day someone will actually dig it up. Where "it" really means lots of it - a humongous, statistically significant amount of it.

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>I wonder what Professor Dawkins thinks of Burma's democratic protests >being led by Buddhist monks.
>Nick Campion
>Bristol


the perplexing thing about this quote is that dawkins has never had anything bad to say about Buddhism has he?

regards
mike c
[/quote]

5
Hi Mike,

It's true that Dawkins' attacks are usually directed at theistic religions. And in The God Delusion he says:
I shall not be concerned at all with other religions such as Buddhism or Confucianism. Indeed, there is something to be said for treating these not as religions at all but as ethical systems or philosophies of life. (p.37-8 )
In Buddhism however you have the idea of an ultimate ground of being, nirvana, which is beyond conceptual thought in just the same way as God is considered to be in the apophatic thought you find in mystics of many theistic traditions. So I think the theism/non-theism thing is actually unimportant when you get to the heart of a spiritual way.

Perhaps the bottom line is this - Dawkins once wrote:
The universe we observe had precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference. (River Out of Eden, p.133)
And this is the complete opposite of what a Buddhist would say. So I tend to think that the reason Dawkins hasn't had much bad to say about Buddhism is just that he hasn't found the time yet!

Garry

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>So I tend to think that the reason Dawkins hasn't had much bad to say >about Buddhism is just that he hasn't found the time yet!

hi I'm not really a Dawkins expert or a Buddhist scholar but in many ways isn't the raw contemplation of the wonders of a cosmos stripped clean of the encumbrance of theistic belief pretty darn similar to Buddhist contemplation in the sense of the doctrine of "Emptiness" etc???

apologies if that is jumbled thinking
regards mike c

7
Hi Mike,

It certainly isn't jumbled thinking, and I think there are some people who would say pretty much that. For instance Stephen Batchelor, a Buddhist whose project is to strip Buddhism of all elements of belief; or Susan Blackmore, who is pretty much aligned with Dawkins and who practises Zen meditation.

There is a lot that could be said here, and since this is an astrology forum I'm trying to keep it brief.

I think the nub of the matter is that 'raw contemplation' - free from preconceptions and without interpretation - just isn't possible for most of us without some kind of training and preparation. We inevitably interpret the world, with the root of the problem being that we interpret things in terms of self and other, in other words we see a world of separate things, and the point of any decent spiritual path is to bring one to the point of seeing that, at an ultimate level, this separation is illusory.

In order to get to that point, a path of one sort or another seems to be needed, even if at the end of the path it's realised that one was already where one wanted to be. And that path involves all kinds of non-Dawkins-friendly elements, such as a belief in karma and resultant, rebirth, and that I am not identified with the material body. (Or with any thing at all, but that's another story.)

Well you did ask!
Garry

Atheists

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Another well-known atheist,philosopher A.C.Grayling was on Radio 4 Desert Island Discs this morning. Talking of fatherhood he recalls his daughter asking " Daddy, Am I allowed to believe in fairies?" Funny or Sad?

Matt