@Allamanda “The point is prayer and rituals have a biological basis for focusing thoughts which alters probable actions and feelings. No mystic explanations necessary.”

That seems plain to me, and it’s stated in a simple, elegant way much better than my summary.

@Allamanda I am totally confused. What premise are you talking about?

@Allamanda Maybe he means that chanting, meditating, etc. give measurably positive results and that the eastern traditions required no belief and are not about belief. Therefore the eastern religions were more “scientific”, even though they were formulated before the advent of science as we know it.

Another factor here is that the school of Hindu thought, Advaita Vedanta was not set forth as a religion, but as philosophy, psychology and metaphysics, addressing the deepest and most profound enigmas of existence. While not science per se as we know it, it represents the highest form of human thought at the time IMO, and in some ways it has not been surpassed.

The Bible, in comparison, is not scientific in the least and does not address the deep mystery of conscious awareness, personal identity, and ultimate reality. To require belief in such an assortment of unbelievable mythology reveals the shallow perspective and lack of awareness of early church leaders and the simplicity of their followers.

What the hell DID you mean Jeff?

I will tell you right off that calling it "woo" is very ignorant and myopic.

@JeffMesser We could, if it made any sense at all, have a butt-kicking contest about who has the more accurate or nuanced view of eastern religion, but all I meant to refer to with that term was the parts of eastern religion that speak to their supernatural / fanciful cosmologies, not their legitimate insights into human nature, which are in my view generally better and more positively actionable ones than the more negative conclusions of western religions with their concept of original sin and utter depravity and so forth.

Maybe despite my using your forbidden trigger word, you could address the points I actually made, though?

@mordant as a secular buddhist I found the se asian buddhists just as close-minded as the southern baptists were of my youth. This became especially true when I started demystifying some of their concepts by describing them in normal terms. Take karma - it's not some mystical arbiter sitting in the heavens judging your actions as moral or immoral. It's nothing more than cosmic momentum of the many factors that follow making the decisions and taking the actions taken. Now, that does leave the moralistic decisions of the community as an avenue of ill, but overall it makes karma more purely cause and effect without the whole "moral retribution" avenue.

As for further ties I still contend that the double slit experiment shows awareness as a key component with neither mass not form for breaking the EPR paradox. If we consider each particle at opposite ends of the universe being entangled then the only way to explain the instantaneous action in violation of Einstein's relativity (faster than the speed of light) is that they are connected. It would have to be a connection by a media shared by both and all things. That is space. All of space is connected. Nothing is actually solid. If we consider a potential open by awareness and met by a response from a particle elsewhere you could have instantaneous spooky action at a distance despite a universe apart. The medium, according to the Mundakya upanishad, is awareness. Thats certainly an accommodation to modern science, unlike the Abrahamic religions and mormonism/scientology, and is more than woo. It amazes me when people label something in some derogatory fashion like "woo" with no idea what actually sits behind it.

@JeffMesser Thank you.

The only thing involved in entanglement is the internal quantum state of the particles. Since no external information is transmitted, counterintuitively, relativity is not violated.

The Dali Lama has, uniquely among religious leaders to my knowledge, said that if science contradicts religion, it is religion which must accommodate science, not the inverse. I agree with him, since stating, for example, that "awareness" or consciousness is a medium that connects all matter is sheer speculation (or, if stated as truth, unsubstantiated assertion). I am not saying that might not be true, but I am not aware that Buddhism explains the mechanism or evidences its conclusions; it simply states it as fact or dogma. It also does not explain how it is not a category error, since noting that the universe contains conscious entities does not make it valid to suggest that the universe is therefore conscious. It also does not follow that consciousness can be discarnate.

Such teachings still use the failed epistemology of religious faith. I durst not call it the w-word, as apparently I owe respect to those who promulgate such things, which they haven't actually earned. So call it something benign like mysticism if you like; the point, in my view, still holds.

By the way, my view does not demand that I hate on Buddhism specifically or religion generally. I have a lot of respect for Buddhist philosophy and borrow from it. Seen as the original self-help philosophy, and separated from its cosmology and supernatural assertions, it has things to teach us.

@mordant The Buddha also made the same point when he said we shouldnt be too attached to even our understanding. As for the entanglement issue ... we don't know how that works so your conjecture is no more valid than my own.