I watched more than half of this last night. It is quite interesting for the first one-third or so, especially if Green’s ideas are new to you. Around the halfway point it declines into a spat over the existence of God. I stopped five minutes into that; may watch more of it later because the topic is interesting. Better to stage this kind of thing as a discussion rather than a debate. ABN
Since Canada legalized euthanasia in 2016, there has been a strange balancing act at the heart of its medical system. There is a national suicide prevention hotline you can call 24/7, where sympathetic operators will try to talk you out of killing yourself. But today there are also euthanasia hotlines, where operators will give you the resources you need to carry out your wish. Doctors and nurse practitioners are now in the business of saving the lives of some patients while providing death to others.
Canada calls it Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAID. The term encompasses both assisted suicide, which is when providers give patients the means to end their own lives, and euthanasia, which is when a medical practitioner directly administers a patient’s lethal injection. But virtually all such deaths — over 99 percent — are euthanasia.
Supporters insist that this is not state-sanctioned suicide. Rather, it’s a dignified solution for those who no longer wish to suffer from terminal or chronic illness. MAID allows “for compassionate action, while also protecting those who are particularly vulnerable,” claimed David Lametti, the attorney general and minister of justice, in 2021.
…Important people — prominent politicians, physicians, and judges — promised Canadians that their rights to autonomy would be expanded. But the picture that emerges is not a new flowering of autonomy but the hum of an efficient engine of death.
Once you make anything explicit, it changes it. Once you make something legal, it changes it. The moral compass moves all over due to complex factors that overwhelm the vastly simpler act of making something explicit or legal. As with all health care, providers are as much patients as the patients. ABN
UPDATE: I originally had a video on mindfulness in this spot but decided to take it down because it is not very good. ABN
The biggest mindfulness bang for the buck you can get is FIML practice because FIML shows you through your own effort how to listen and speak realistically and accurately with your partner. When you do FIML, both you and your partner will discover many mistakes in how you speak and how you hear. This will provide many insights into how both of you use your minds and how your minds work. At the same time it will greatly improve your relationship and give you many insights into it. FIML practice will also greatly inform and improve your other relationships.
All Buddhist practice can be placed at least in one of three categories. These are: 1) morality or ethics; 2) concentration, mindfulness, or meditation; and 3) wisdom or insight. FIML practice is extremely valuable for Buddhist practice because it prevents solipsistic understanding, unrealistic idealism, ungrounded thoughts and behaviors. FIML practice provides each partner with an accuracy check on what they hear, say, and think. It provides a kind of intellectual or spiritual parallax that helps us locate ourselves much more accurately in reality — however you conceive of that — than when we do mindfulness practice without this kind of input.
FIML practice is an excellent model for all mindfulness. It may even be the best model possible. The reason for this is when you do FIML you are working with your closest friend, your best friend, the person who trusts you the most in all the world and whom you trust the most in all the world. This is the best person in all the world to help you become more mindful, more ethical, more insightful and wise. I might add that in the Buddha’s day, monks traveled together in pairs for most of each year. FIML can be fully explained by using the Buddha’s Five Skandha explanation of how the mind works. See the note at the end of that link for how to apply it to FIML. ABN
While the trend toward atheism and agnosticism in Europe has been a slow but steady decline, Bullivant said, the increase in Christians dropping the faith didn’t really take off in the U.S. until the early 2000s, and the decline since then has been steep and quick.
For people who study such trends, there was kind of this feeling in the ’90s that if a rise in secularism hadn’t happened yet in America, there was no reason to think it would. “Even the most dramatic historical examples of religious growth or decline tend to occur over many generations,” said Bullivant. “But then it was as if in the early 2000s, something was released.”
And it’s important to note, said Bullivant, that it wasn’t about an influx of secular immigrants or nones raising throngs of nonreligious babies. It was about Americans deciding they were not tied to any religion. Interestingly, while a third of Americans that identify as nones say they are atheist or agnostic, Bullivant notes in his book, the rest have varying degrees of belief in God — Christian or otherwise.
Those who want to save or reconstruct Western civilization must not ignore to the rapid decline of Christianity. Western civilization is much more than one religion. Civilizationally, a religion is an agreed upon moral, intellectual, and linguistic standard. It provides a backbone or reference point for laws, behaviors, and societal goals. Buddhism could fill that role very well. Buddhism is closer to ancient Greek and Roman philosophies than Christianity. Buddhism is rational, ethical, and teaches spiritual wisdom above all else. Buddhism has zero problem accepting science or evidence-based reason. It also has zero problem accepting other religious traditions. Christians can be Buddhists and no Buddhist will ever have a problem with that. Same for all other religions if they have an ethical basis, are able to change as new truths are discovered, and respect the ineffable primacy of the unnamable, which you are free to name in your own way. ABN
I watched about one-half of this and stopped. I will watch at least one more in this long series. For now, I just want to say that for meaning or meaning of life or meaning in life, there is nothing better than FIML practice which is designed to secure solid, agreed upon meaning between you and your partner. This ensures that your most important relationship is grounded solidly on objective shared meaning with nothing left out. FIML is not abstract. It has almost no content. It does not tell you what to think or believe. It is entirely a technique that will massively help you discover how you and your partner’s minds work, what is in them, where it came from, what it means. FIML is a dynamic method for finding objective data within real-world, real-time experience. It provides a living existential basis for all other forms of meaning. ABN
The greatest foreign policy mistake in world history is the failure of Europe/USA to form a peaceful, lasting alliance with Russia following the fall of the Soviet Union. ABN
Meyer’s arguments for intelligent design fit well with the Buddhist idea that the cosmos is intelligent and conscious and that our own consciousness is a particular and unique perception of that consciousness. I like the following quote from the video:
‘Science has had extraordinary success in tracing the chain of cause and effect backward in time. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.’ ~ Robert Jastrow
Like scientists, Buddhists should accept new evidence and compelling argumentation. The emptiness of the individual self is not a negation of consciousness but a recognition (or realization) of its vastness. ABN
[I posed this query to ChatGPT after asking a basic question about mimesis. The reply below was returned almost instantly and has not been edited in any way. We learn almost everything we know through mimesis. Language and culture are built on it and by it, but mimesis can also trap us in gloomy enclaves of inescapable conformity, such as the pseudoscience of covid or a communist dictatorship or celebrity worship. It can also trap us inside our own personality constructs, leaving almost no way to escape. FIML practice works with real time mimesis during interpersonal communication. In this context, FIML can be understood as a way to fully understand our own idiosyncratic mimesis as well as our partner’s. And then to lead us away from what is harmful in mimesis toward what is good. Mimesis is a key to delusion and enlightenment both. It is very good for Buddhists and others to pay attention to it, to be fully mindful of its processes. ABN]
Mimesis can also be understood as a psychological and linguistic phenomenon, in which people imitate or mimic the words, actions, and behaviors of others in order to understand and communicate with them. This kind of mimesis is often referred to as “mirroring” or “echoing,” and it is a natural and important part of human social interaction.
In the early stages of language acquisition, children learn to imitate the sounds and words of their caregivers in order to communicate with them. This process of imitation is essential for language learning and development, as it allows children to learn the conventions and rules of their language.
Mimesis also plays a role in the way that people interact with one another in social settings. For example, people may mimic the body language, tone of voice, and facial expressions of their conversation partner in order to show agreement, empathy, or solidarity. This kind of mimicry can facilitate communication and social bonding, as it helps to establish a sense of connection and understanding between people.
Mimesis can also be observed in the way that people use language to convey meaning. For example, people may use figurative language or rhetorical devices such as metaphors, similes, and rhetorical questions in order to create a more vivid or persuasive image or argument. These forms of language use rely on the reader or listener’s ability to understand and imitate the speaker’s intended meaning in order to fully appreciate the message being conveyed.
Overall, mimesis is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon that plays a central role in human communication and social interaction. It is an important aspect of language learning and use, and it helps people to understand and connect with one another in a meaningful way.
All religions with an ethical basis and some grasp of higher meaning, including ethically practiced science, are good religions. And all religions with an ethical basis, including nihilism and oblivionism, are valuable and worthy of respect. In an obviously polyglot world it cannot be right to declare that only one religion is true. It’s fine to say you like yours best for any number of reasons.
It’s a mistake to believe in scripture which can never change, to believe your religion and only yours knows the will of God. It is a mistake to deny other humans and animals a religious path, or other beings on other planets or in other dimensions, or any part of all existence.
Prayer is good but too much reliance on higher powers makes you weak and irresponsible. All good religions teach how to be a better person and are able to evolve as our understanding of what that means evolves. Ethics and morality are the deeply felt universal core of all religious thought and behavior.
There can be disagreements about ethics but most of the time most of us can sense the right direction. Most people most of the time listen to their consciences. But the conscience must be examined. Unwise love or compassion are harmful. For this reason, religious wisdom is the highest religious virtue.
There is evil in this world. It can be defined somewhat abstractly as turning away from God or the Tathagata. It can also be seen in reality as demonic forces, temptations to arrogance, cruelty, greed. It is hard for the innocently religious to understand evil, that there are many on earth who will deceive them. A good religion teaches how to deal with evil and does not encourage it.
Beware of those who peddle lists of fallacies. Such philosophers have never really done anything in their life. The purpose of misrepresentation is to cultivate ignorance – not irrationality. Mere failures in logic can be detected and resolved, but ignorance is harder to self-sense and much more difficult to dispel than either wrongness or Paulian ‘not-even-wrong’-ness. Hence ignorance is much more useful to agency.
The following is The Ethical Skeptic’s list, helpful in spotting not simply formal and informal logical fallacies, but also crooked arguing, skilled lying, coercion, irrelevance, smoke & mirrors, inference tricks, narrative manipulation, and styles of club/agency thinking on the part of those who seek a pervasive cultivated ignorance – the fertile soil of their awesome insistence.
The TOKO is categorized by employment groupings so that it can function as a context appropriate resource in a critical review of an essay, imperious diatribe or publication by a thought-enforcing organization or entity.
This is a good resource for Buddhists, whose highest virtue is wisdom. These obfuscations of knowledge (or wisdom) provided by TES can be understood as a cartography of delusion, the cause of all suffering. Humans not only do this to each other but also to ourselves. Mindful self-examination coupled with ethical behavior gradually (sometimes suddenly) removes all ignorance—the ultimate source of all delusion—from the mind. This is the ultimate goal of all Buddhist practice. ABN
Start from a small number of statements that make up the Net Zero commitment.
The Earth must actually be warming.
The warming must pose a genuine and serious threat to life on Earth.
The warming must be man-made. Specifically, it must be caused by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere arising from human activity.
The U.K.’s [or anyone’s] NZC policy must bring about a meaningful global reduction of atmospheric carbon. That is, it must either make a significant reduction in its own right, or it must set an example that persuades other countries to reduce their own carbon emissions, to a degree sufficient to stop the warming.
For UK [or anywhere else] NZC to be effective, statements 1-4 must all be correct. If any one of them is false, the policy will fail, either because it doesn’t lead to sufficient carbon reduction, or because the policy wasn’t necessary in the first place.
American Buddhist Net 