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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Archived_member14" data-source="post: 129643" data-attributes="member: 586">Narayanjot ji,Quote:<<S: You must be having the impression more or less that I’m well read / educated in philosophy or something! N: Yes I did think you had formal training in philosophy. You seem to be holding your own in that regard.<end quote>Suk: It does come out this way doesn’t it? The truth is that I’d never have arrived at the statements I make without the exposure to the Buddha’s teachings, although I do end up proliferating with ignorance and craving and therefore can’t truly be said to be representing those teachings.  There is also that in a different situation such as when discussing with friends who know where I come from, I’d be expressing myself quite differently from how I do here. Besides, as I think you would have noted, I’d avoid certain issues and this invariably causes some things to be compromised, indeed often it feels unfair that I do not provide much needed background and the result more or less is of ideas being tossed around.------------------Your concluding note:Quote:What I am trying to piece together comes from my personal acquaintances with many scientists who are deeply religious and deeply spiritual, who have no problem with theism as a personal matter. There are more of them than this or that atheism thread at SPN would lead a person to believe. They are at ease with the contradictions between science and theism. Being at ease with contradiction IMHO is an indicator of a mind that admits its own limitations. Being honest about intellectual limitations is again IMHO the hallmark of good science. Arguing that nothing is true unless it can be explained by science is only one level of explanation - the level of material truths. Good science asserts that understanding material truths is always subject to revision. Good science does not confuse material truths with theoretical explanations, mathematical explanations, and logical explanations -- and good scientists humbly admit that they may be masters in one realm of truth but not others. Enough from me also.Suk: From one perspective it would be right to leave it at this. On the other hand since I am not sure about the general sentiment and where exactly you come from, I think it won’t hurt that I get to express perhaps, the last word.It is said that to know the degree of a person’s morality, one would have to live in close association with him or her for a long time and obviously, must oneself have good morals too. To know the extent of someone’s correct understanding, this is revealed through discussions and here again; one must oneself know what it is that wisdom understands. You Narayanjot ji, may know truly the extent of your friends morality and wisdom; this I accept. I also believe that generally people can be moral and kind in spite of their otherwise mistaken views. And it may be due to the way I have ended up expressing my views that it seems that I think otherwise.  I may have been quite vague occasionally due to the particular circumstance and due to a lack of wisdom and courage, unable to always stick to the truth regardless. But being vague is not something I’d ever want to encourage but rather increased precision of understanding and thought.  When I talk about views and morality, I mean this in terms of momentary arisings distinguishing good and bad causes. That someone would act kindly in spite of generally being unkind or act wisely, in spite of being generally foolish is beside the point. And it may be that someone does not believe in karma, yet be motivated often to good actions through body, speech and mind, of this I have no doubt. But good and bad causes are what they are and although momentary, these have consequence. Indeed by conditions particularly those accumulated from long past, so much good can manifest in a person in spite of his disbelief in any religion, that it could lead outside observers to conclude that religion is quite superfluous and unnecessary. So obviously, this is not the level of consideration I’d be interested to go into. As I said, I point to causes and conditions that are momentary and which I believe should not be overlooked. It is said that an arrow pointing in the wrong direction even if this is very slight, leads in the long run to be further and further away from the mark. And the mark is the only worthy goal to approach, everything else is just plain wrong. The way it works is that right understanding accumulates and develops and has the power to clear away any murkiness caused by accumulated wrong. Wrong on the other hand adds to the darkness and if one hasn’t had any right understanding any good accumulated gradually fizzles out (of course this would take many lifetimes) but if fuelled particularly by “wrong understanding”, the process is hastened. Take for example, someone who believes in annihilation. Such a person will not believe in karma or if he does, will have a wrong understanding about it. He will not be inclined to consider his present action through body, speech or mind as being cause which must bear fruit. If for some reason he does believe in the idea, because of the myopic vision, he’d make judgements about cause and effect based on conventional observations thus far, influenced by the idea that it all becomes null at the end of this life anyway. The kind of thinking may serve his purpose as long as he can keep talking himself into doing what he does, but surely he’d be quite deluded with regard to the truth and would in fact be accumulating the wrong causes. When reborn even if as a human in a following lifetime, because he’d have accumulated the tendency of the need to ‘talk himself’ into doing good, his situation is indeed so very fragile. He’d easily be influenced by all sorts of arguments regarding what is in fact right and what is wrong and very likely mistake one for the other, as in the case of a recruit Muslim for suicide bombing.  On the other hand, someone who has at least seen the value of studying the reality of the present moment, whose object is sometimes a material reality and sometimes a mental one,  he’d have seen the unreliability of ‘thinking oneself into’ taking this or that course of action. He’d know that good is developed by virtue of studying its characteristic, function and proximate cause and have increased faith in the path of development even when lead to conclude that it would likely takes a zillion years to fully understand.  In other words better one right small step than none at all, not to speak of wrong steps. True even if we have come upon the correct path, we’d still be stumbling and falling for a long, long time to come. Also I absolutely have no problem about the possibility of being a good scientist and developing right understanding at the same time. As you said, he would know theoretical explanations, etc. for what they are. What I can’t help coming away with however, is a sense of your having overlooked the importance of developing ‘right understanding’. Your remark about my belief in karma and rebirth as being just one of the many possible conclusions came across as belng of little consequence to you. And if I may be blunt, when you said, “Good science does not confuse material truths.......” and “good scientists humbly admit that they may be masters in one realm of truth....”, this according to me is reflection of a failure at understanding what truth / reality really are. Science according to my understanding does not touch even superficially, at any kind of material truth. They’d be involved with what I called in an earlier post, shadows of reality or in other words, conventional manifestations, and the conclusions they make will only ever be mere stories....Sorry for the length of the post, but I’ll end here. ;-)Sukinder</blockquote>

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