American Buddhist Net

Graeme MacQueen
January 11, 2008

Abstract

On September 11, 2001 there were numerous advance warnings of World Trade Center 7's collapse, and many people have argued that these warnings are evidence that the building was subjected to controlled demolition. But other researchers feel the warnings are compatible with the hypothesis of natural collapse from damage that the building sustained throughout the day. In this article I examine the arguments of one researcher, Ryan Mackey, who argues, using the oral histories of the New York Fire Department, that the collapse was natural and the warnings rational and based on direct perception. Although I agree with Mackey that the damage to Seven was serious and must be acknowledged as such, I argue that a close reading of the FDNY oral histories does not support his claims and does not remove the cloud of suspicion that hangs over the collapse warnings. The majority of FDNY members did not rationally conclude, on the basis of direct perception of damage to the building, that it was in danger of collapse; they accepted that it would collapse on the basis of what they were told.

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Nicely written essay. ABN
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Austin Dacey

We often hear that some new scientific discovery has confirmed ancient religious teaching. It now appears that this hearkening back has gone full circle, and modern religion is coming around to ancient secular wisdom.

At the recent "Seeds of Compassion" event in Seattle, the Dalai Lama spoke of three paths to compassion and moral development in children: the theistic path of the Abrahamic faiths, the non-theistic religious path of Buddhism, and the "secular, scientific" approach. Surrounded by brain researchers and empirical psychologists, he recommended this secular way as the most promising. For some time he has held that if any tenet of Buddhism contradicts contemporary science, science must trump.

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“The mind is everything. What you think you become.” -The Buddha
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Book Review of "The Secret History of the World", by Jonathan Black
June 24th, 2008
John Evans

...The simplest way to explain his subject is to state that science has become a militant materialist philosophy that believes matter precedes mind. Some scientists have even called consciousness “a disease of matter,” as if it were an interloper in a senseless universe.

This view is the complete opposite of what a majority of the greatest minds throughout history have believed — or better, known.

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Well-worth reading. ABN
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By Chris Anderson

"All models are wrong, but some are useful."

So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don't have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don't have to settle for models at all.

Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.

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The first country in the world that requires a test--similar but more involved than a driver's license test--as a prerequisite for voting will surge ahead of nations that continue to allow any citizen to vote, or even force them to do so. Following that, the first country in the world that vastly expands its legislative processes by using networks of WELL-INFORMED citizens to write and vote directly on legislation will surge forward even more. It's basic information management, and nations that do it best will be the most fit. Voting tests and expanded networks of citizens qualified to vote directly on legislation can easily be made as fair as the system we now have, and I for one am convinced that everyone will be better represented under a system like that. I doubt the US will be first in this, but a small country may find a way. Rather than have millions pin their hopes on a bunch corrupt "leaders" who do not represent them, why not empower the most informed of those millions through computer networks to legislate instead? Forget the past when voter tests were used as racist exclusionary devices. Think new. ABN
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By Bret Schulte
Posted June 3, 2008

The long Iraq war. The bungled Hurricane Katrina response. The credit crunch. A quick look at the newspapers will give many voters reason to doubt the wisdom of America's political leaders. Unfortunately, Americans are doing little to educate themselves about their leaders and their policies, says bestselling author and George Mason University historian Rick Shenkman in his new book Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter. Shenkman cites some damning facts to make his case that Americans are ill-prepared to guide the world's most powerful democracy. Only 2 of 5 voters can name the three branches of the federal government. And 49 percent of Americans think the president has the authority to suspend the Constitution.

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Saturday, June 21 2008 @ 07:29 pm BST

Tibet: The Lost Frontier
By Claude Arpi
Lancer Publishers, New Delhi, 2008
Pages 338, Price Not Specified

French born writer, Claude Arpi, is a zealous student of the history of Tibet, China, India, and their status in international politics. He has been living in Auroville, India, where he is married to an Indian. Today, he is well known for writing authoritative books and articles about geopolitics, environment and Indo-French relations. Tibet: The Lost Frontier unfolds the history of the Roof of the World and her political contacts with two giant neighbors, India and China. Arpi notes that history of these three nations demonstrate that Tibet and China constantly had a relation on the basis of force and power while Tibet and India had more of a cultural and religious relationship based on shared spiritual values. From the emergence of Buddhism during the reign of king Lha Thothori Nyatsen in the fifth century (AD) to border issues over Arunachal Pradesh between India and China in the 21st century, this book elaborates the importance of the Tibetan plateau, which not only holds the key to the well-being of Asia, but it also has a huge impact on the relationship between India and China.

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Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Different cultures view humility in widely differing ways. Traditional and usually very religious societies tend to value humility as a desirable trait. More 21st societies see humility as a wholly undesirable character. The issue is even more complex as there are contrasts even within segments of given societies…

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Click here for a video of the Hartford hit-and-run to which the author refers in this essay. Robyn
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June 18, 2008
A. Gaffar Peang-Meth

Gautama Buddha preaches, "Teach this triple truth to all: A generous heart, kind speech, and a life of service and compassion are the things which renew humanity." Tibet's spiritual leader the Dalai Lama advises, "Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive."

Earlier this month, The Associated Press reported, a streetlight surveillance camera captured the scene of 78-year-old Angel Torres being "tossed like a rag doll by a hit-and-run driver" on a busy street in Hartford, Conn. "Torres ... was not only left for dead by the perpetrator, but left unattended by dozens of passers-by."

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06/17/2008
Hoppy Kercheval

Rights that are not understood or valued can be too easily taken away. That’s why the results of a poll by Rasmussen Reports are troubling.

Rasmussen’s survey found one in four Americans (28 percent) believes it would be a good idea to ban hate speech. Rasmussen loosely defined hate speech as “comments intended to put down or incite violence against people on the basis of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation and other legally protected categories.”

...Barring incitement, speech has broad protections, and those protections represent an essential freedom in this country. “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” Holmes wrote, “and that truth is the only ground which their wishes safely can be carried out.”

In other words, free and protected speech allows for ideas to rise and fall based on their merit, not some arbitrary bureaucratic decision.

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This is cool! For those of you who, like me, are not familiar with gaming jargon, I think MMOG stands for "Massively Multiplayer Online Game". Robyn
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By Promarcus

I was explaining to my Dad how death works in MMOGs when he brought up the idea of using Mahayana Buddhist cosmology to create a new death system.

In almost all MMOGs the player dies and respawns. MMOGs have differentiated themselves based upon how the player respawns and the consequences of dying. In some cases they are one in the same. This has lead to the creation of corpse running, resurrection sickness, and loss of experience points to name a few. It seems the only significant alternative is the controversial system of permanent death.

In Christianity when you die you end up in heaven or hell, sometimes purgatory. If you’re good you get to go to heaven for eternity. If you’re bad you go to hell for eternity. According to Mahayana Buddhist cosmology there are six realms of existence or paths of rebirth. The six realms are Deva, Asura, Human, Animal, Preta, and Naraka. When you die your karma determines in which of the six realms you are reborn. However, unlike Christianity, there are no final destinations. Once you use up all of your karma in one realm you'll move onto the next and thus continue the cycle of reincarnation.

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Interview With Author Father Thomas Williams

By Karna Swanson

ROME, JUNE 16, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Much of what atheists pass off as fact in their charges against God and religion is really based on myth, says Legionary of Christ Father Thomas D. Williams.

Father Williams is author of "Greater Than You Think: A Theologian Answers the Atheists About God."

“Though the atheists claim to represent the side of reason,” he asserts in his book, “their arguments more often than not are ideological rather than rational.”

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June 12, 2008

...David Bainbridge's description of consciousness (26 January, p 40), including, for example, the fact that we do not know where in the brain consciousness happens, was evocative. Scott McCloud, in his book Understanding Comics, describes a comic's story as whatever is happening in the blank spaces between the panels.

What if our minds function like a comic: they snap pictures, and our consciousness is simply the story the mind constructs around those pictures? - Saskia Latendresse, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

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June 13, 2008
By Brandon Keim

"We made our mistake with Galileo. We're not going to make that mistake again," said Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno.

I talked with Consolmagno this week for a story on the theological implications of extraterrestrial life. Unfortunately this sterling quote, along with a wealth of material from other theologians and astrobiologists, didn't quite fit in the final draft.

But one aspect of Wired.com's innovative approach to blogging is the use of blogs as an extension of standard journalistic procedure. Side pieces are generated during reporting, like "The Surprising Spirituality of SETI," that don't quite fit a typical story model but deserve to be published. Our blogs also gives writers a chance to open up their notebooks and shake out the outtakes.

In that spirit, here's more on God, aliens and us:

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By Barbara O'Brien

Evil is a word many people use without thinking deeply about what it signifies. I'd like to compare common ideas about evil with Buddhist teachings on evil, if for no other reason than to facilitate deeper thinking about evil.

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Former Air Force fighter pilot Russ Wittenberg, who flew over 100 combat missions in Vietnam, sat in the cockpit for Pan Am and United for over 30 years, and previously flew two of the actual airplanes that were allegedly hijacked on 9/11 (United Airlines Flight 175 & 93), does not believe the government's official 9/11 conspiracy theory... RUSS WITTENBERG: "I flew the two actual aircraft which were involved in 9/11... Fight number 175 and Flight 93, the 757 that allegedly went down in Shanksville and Flight 175 is the aircraft that's alleged to have hit the South Tower. I don't believe it's possible for... a so-called terrorist to train on a 172, then jump in a cockpit of a 757-767 class cockpit, and vertical navigate the aircraft, lateral navigate the aircraft, and fly the airplane at speeds exceeding it's design limit speed by well over 100 knots, make high-speed high-banked turns,.. pulling probably 5, 6, 7 G's... I couldn't do it and I'm absolutely positive they couldn't do it."

Much truth in this thesis, but most people have never been deep thinkers or readers of books. For people who do read and think, the internet is a wonderful tool for both research and communication. How it will develop from here is another story. ABN
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June 9, 2008

... The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition...The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It's becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is recreated in the Net's image. It injects the medium's content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we're glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper's site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

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How to complain, feel better ... and get your own way

By Paul Dalgarno

WE ARE born complaining. Wrinkled and restless, we kick our legs and scream at the world that comes to meet us. Anything less would seem absurd (and medically suspect).When we're dying we might complain in words, if we are able, or with an anxious tug of the catheter if not. Between starting and ending we carp, bitch, moan, whine, backstab and protest. We bellyache and argue; we bruise and we bond. We overthrow governments or smash cups against walls, according to our means and frustrations. Complaint is with us all the way, but is it good for us or bad?

Julian Baggini, philosopher, thinks the former, but with reservations. Essentially it depends what our gripe is, how we complain, and to whom. Get it wrong and no-one will like you. Get it right and you go from mediocre meathead to noble savage.

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In "Voices of Faith," religious leaders answer readers' questions.

Sat, Jun. 07, 2008

Lama Chuck Stanford, Rime Buddhist Center & Monastery, Kansas City, Mo.: Satan, demons and/or evil forces are not separate from our own mind. Therefore it is important that we accept responsibility for our actions and ourselves. It is too easy to blame others for our unvirtuous activities.

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By Brandon Keim EmailMay 31, 2008

When contemplating the world's environmental problems, it's sometimes hard not to feel like humanity is screwed. But then you attend an event like Future Cities, a panel of sustainability experts held last night at the World Science Festival, and it seems like we might just figure out how to thrive on this planet after all.

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Interesting idea, well-worth reading. ABN
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Is this a unified theory of the brain?

May 29, 2008
New Scientist magazine
Gregory T. Huang

...a group from University College London (UCL) may have broken the deadlock. Neuroscientist Karl Friston and his colleagues have proposed a mathematical law that some are claiming is the nearest thing yet to a grand unified theory of the brain. From this single law, Friston’s group claims to be able to explain almost everything about our grey matter.

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May 29, 2008
by Rama Lingam

At his age when people hate living and suffer from senility, 96 year old Randall Butising has not only mastered the intricacies of the internet but also began his own blog which describes him as one of the world’s oldest bloggers and shows him as a man of varied interests and a multifarious personality.

The grandson of indentured workers who were taken to Guyana to work on sugar plantations, Butisingh has watched the world transform many times in the past nine decades and has adjusted himself to the changes.

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Claire Hoffman interviews Jon Thurber, obituary editor at the Los Angeles Times

May 29, 2008

...ME: How do you apply your sense of your religion or your faith or your lack thereof to the work you do?

JON: While I don’t really adhere to any of the major religions, I’m also more interested in religion than ever before. I find myself reading more about Buddhism than anything else and I’m curious about what people believe and why they believe it.

Religion or ethics or morality comes up in some subtle ways in our work. For instance, many readers take the “speak no ill of the dead” route and criticize us if our obituaries read like anything less than a eulogy one might hear in a church. I’m continually reminding folks who call or e-mail to complain that we are not in the business of eulogizing the dead. We are in the business of writing accurate news stories on the death of someone who made news in some substantial way during their lifetime.

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If clairvoyants must have warning signs, why not faith healers and others places of worship?

May 29, 2008

I am driven to my wits' end by my fellow humans' feeble grasp of principled reasoning. Take this week's announcement of new government proposals. Anyone caught with drawings (or computer-generated images) of child sexual abuse will face up to three years in prison. This will close what ministers are now calling a “loophole”.

That was not yesterday's argument. When the existing ban on photographic images was enacted, the argument in principle was that real children are exploited and harmed to make these images, which is true. That entire philosophical plank on which the legislation rested has now been kicked casually away. If you, alone in your room, put pencil to paper and draw - for your eyes only - an obscene doodle involving a child, you will invite a prison term of up to three years. There is real scope for vindictive citizens to ransack desks or bins and call the police.

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19 May 2008
Laura Spinney

Vestigial organs are parts of the body that once had a function but are now more-or-less useless. Probably the most famous example is the appendix, though it is now an open question whether the appendix is really vestigial. The idea that we are carrying around useless relics of our evolutionary past has long fascinated scientists and laypeople alike.

This week we tackle vestigial organs in a feature article that looks at how the idea has changed over the years, and how it has come under attack from creationists anxious to deny that vestigial organs (and hence evolution) exist at all. To accompany the article, here is our list of the five organs and functions most likely to be truly vestigial.

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