duckfiasco wrote:I think many of your questions are similar to someone being incredulous that astronomers can tell the composition and age of stars with spectroscopy and other sciences. If you don't understand the foundations and layers that support the more advanced principles, they'll seem like nonsense or non sequiturs. Not to mention that kind of knowledge is useless to someone not really interested in astronomy.
When you consider that Buddhism is not merely a new way of quantifying the physical world (hence why asking for empirical proof of some things is a bit odd), but rather a worldview entirely different from our usual inside/outside, me/others, true/false set of dichotomies, it becomes even more difficult to fit it into our nice little system of logical compartments.
I really recommend a patient, step-by-step approach. Do what you find helps you and others. They're pretty much the same thing anyway. Then your horizons of investigation will expand.
I disagree. If Dharma is so transcendent and hard to discern, thus being almost outside "our nice little system of logical compartments", as you put it, then why are there whole forums like this devoted to it? Why all the texts and books and commentaries and lectures on something which we cannot grasp?
The fact is that no one would know about Buddhism, much less anything else, without the faculties of logic, reasoning, empirical investigation and critical thinking.
You said, "I think many of your questions are similar to someone being incredulous that astronomers can tell the composition and age of stars with spectroscopy and other sciences. If you don't understand the foundations and layers that support the more advanced principles, they'll seem like nonsense or non sequiturs. Not to mention that kind of knowledge is useless to someone not really interested in astronomy."
My problem with this statement is that even if someone IS incredulous about these complex methods astronomers employ that person can still waltz over to a library, take classes at a university or get online and read and learn everything they need to know about the use of spectroscopy, etc. in discerning the composition and age of stars. They can view, test and experience for themselves the evidence that these methods work consistently. They can do the math.
Buddhism, on the other hand, while a very advanced and practical philosophy, makes certain assertions which cannot be proven with empirical evidence. And yes, empirical evidence IS and should be the rational basis for any belief. I would really love to believe in rebirth, but hearing all these flowery stories of somebody remembering their past life as a butterfly strikes me just as odd and unlikely as Christians who see visions of Jesus. Yes, meditation works... and yes, karma makes sense since cause and effect are natural, observable phenomena... but to extrapolate something like cause and effect and state that is accounts for reincarnations and interdimensional Buddha-beings is a stretch.