Is Buddhism Atheist?

Was the Buddha an atheist? Does one need to believe in God or gods to follow his system? This is a question with an interesting answer I think we can all learn from.

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I Suffer

Article originally posted on Medium – I Suffer by Dan Hanly I feel like I’ve always been a spiritual person. I use the word spiritual here, and not religious — in-fact, I’ve had a vehement dislike of religious trappings for as long as I can remember. I am and have always been an atheist — averse to the belief…

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Thinking and Feeling, Critically

We are deep into the political season. Looking at the Trump phenomenon, an article by Phil Torres in Salon bemoans the “anti-intellectualism that runs through the roots of American culture.” Torres notes that, “[T]he most dangerous consequence of Fox News is that it discourages that most important form of rigorous curiosity called critical thinking.” Critical thinking,…

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Skepticism, Atheism, and the Good Life

Where do we find the good life? The ancient Greeks, our earliest philosophical forebears in the West, thought the highest aim of reason was to answer just this kind of question. Nowadays we often think of reason as allied to the twin aims of (1) scientific skepticism, that is, following the results of consensus science as…

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About that Label …

As many of you know, there’s a “Religious Views” label on the Facebook “About” page. When I signed up for Facebook several years ago, I was pretty deeply into the New Atheist movement, spending much of my time griping about traditional religion and writing skeptical material on various pseudoscientific agricultural practices with some friends of mine.…

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Episode 115 :: Sean Faircloth :: Attack of the Theocrats

Sean Faircloth Sean Faircloth returns to speak with us about his new book, Attack of the Theocrats, and his new role with the Richard Dawkins Foundation. Question: what does secular Buddhism have to do with politics? Or, maybe more accurately, what does politics have to do with secular Buddhism? The answer is quite alot, at…

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Religion and Dukkha

When atheists speak up about the harmful effects of religion, we’re often asked, in effect, what our problem is. How are we so sure we’re right? What about our own dogmatic beliefs? Isn’t it enough for us to reject religion, without actively opposing it? Why are we, as even Stephen Batchelor says, so “humorless’? These charges are even more pointed for those of us who are secular dharma practitioners. When we inveigh against the religious trappings of Buddhist traditions, we are accused of disrespecting the tradition and its teachers, indeed even of threatening the survival of the dharma in the West (see the interview with Tim Olmsted in the Fall 2010 Tricycle for a good example of this). Why don’t we just relinquish this fixed view and be more open-minded?

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