Buddhist writer Stephen Batchelor has just published a new book called Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist, which tries to pare away the theistic/religious trappings of contemporary Buddhism to get to the philosophical core of Buddhism, which has a lot of non-theistic elements to it. This book review in the Manchester Guardian by religion writer Mark Vernon explains the root of Batchelor’s observations. Batchelor writes that the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism resonate with non-theism: the focus on self-reliance and self-awareness, the derivation of meaning from real experience, and the acceptance of the world as it is without supernatural explanations or magical beliefs. The book has drawn praise from none less than Christopher Hitchens, and has also been embraced by Harvard humanist Greg Epstein, both of whom should be familiar to readers of this blog by now.
A lot of my own approach to an atheistic worldview is similarly informed by those parts of Buddhism, though I would never consider myself a Buddhist in any way. I’m not sure how I feel about the effort to attach that to the touchy-feely humanist movement, but I can see where using the sort of arguments Batchelor is making about demystifying religious cultures certainly can be applied. Looks like this book and it’s predecessor, Buddhism Without Beliefs, are worth a read.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT.
Since you cannot click a [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and [...]
