For me, giving up religious addiction isn't done "cold turkey," all at once. It's a gradual process. I discarded the most ridiculous notions early on, but afterwards I find myself letting go of faith-based beliefs bit by bit.
Buddhism and Taoism are examples of this.
I've given away quite a few of my books in these genres that I couldn't bear to read any more. Even Zen books. Just because spirituality comes in an "Eastern" guise doesn't mean it is free of the dogmatism and supernaturalism that infects Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
So now I'm only able to enjoy Buddhist and Taoist writings that make scientific sense. Or at least aren't opposed to a rational, experiential understanding of everyday reality.
Which explains why I've started reading "Buddhist Biology: Ancient Eastern Wisdom meets Modern Western Science." I read a review of David Barash's book in New Scientist.
(In case the review disappears from the New Scientist web site, I'll include it as a continuation to this post.)
Here's some excerpts from the first chapter that I resonate with.
Full disclosure: I have been a practicing biologist for more than four decades and an aspiring Buddhist (or "Buddhist sympathizer") for about as long, but I am definitely more the former than the latter. I have no religious "faith," if faith is taken to mean belief without evidence.
Indeed, I have a powerful distrust of organized religion and a deep aversion to anything — anything — that smacks of the supernatural. Give me the natural, the real, the material, every time.
…I am a Buddhist atheist, a phrase that may seem contradictory but that has legitimacy not only in my case, but as a description of many others, of whom the former Buddhist monk and current scholar and author Stephen Bachelor is best-known.
…By contrast, it is hard to imagine a Muslim or Christian atheist, since the terms are oxymoronic: they contradict each other.
…a "Christian" who doesn't believe in the divinity of Jesus would seem not only a poor Christian but no Christian at all. Interestingly, Jewish atheists are comparatively abundant, probably because unlike Islam and Christianity, whose followers are defined as those who espouse the tenets of their religion, Jews are defined as much by their ethnicity as their religious beliefs. There are also many "Jew-Boos," people who identify both as Jewish and as Buddhist.
…High on the list of Buddhist absurdities are the phenomenon of iddhi, supernatural events that are supposed to be generated by extremely skillful and committed meditation. They appear often in Buddhist texts and I don't believe a word of them.
…The traditional Buddhist cosmology is, however, very specific, and more than a little weird, with the world composed of thirty-one levels.
…A final example in which I (and many other Buddhist sympathizers) part company with traditional Buddhist beliefs concerns the doctrine of reincarnation…. For those of us interested in reconciling Buddhism with science in general and biology in particular, traditional reincarnation remains a pronounced and irreconcilable outlier.
…the present book will likely trouble those otherwise gentle Buddhist souls who so revere Tenzin Gyatso that they append to his name the honorific "HH," His Holiness. "The Dalai Lama" is okay with me, since that is how this particular gentleman is widely known, but even though I greatly admire him for his kindness as well as his wisdom, I cannot swallow the notion that he is any holier than thou, or me, or Charles Darwin, or anyone else. Either we are all holy (whatever that means), or no one is.
…I hold to the position that Buddhism in its most useful, user-friendly, and indeed meaningful form is not in fact a religion in the standard Western sense of the term. Rather, it is a perspective, a philosophical tradition of inquiry and wisdom, a way of looking at the world that is often perverted into a kind of "sky-god" faith complete with other nonsensical rigamarole, but, in its more genuine form, is anything but that.
Here's the New Scientist review:
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