Wow that was dumb. There's nothing in Christianity that says praying to a personal God is good. That's about the same as praying to an idol, and that shit don't fly. Science and religion are mutually exclusive. These guys aren't experimenting with stem cells during the week and going to chapel on Sunday. That's bananas!
I think if you were to ask Galileo he wouldn't say that religion and science have peacefully coexisted "forever".
Buddhism isn't a religion, it's a philosophical platform that stemmed from Hindu. And examples from antiquity are meh. To quote the other Jeffrey Lebowski, "New shit has come to light, man."
The only incompatibility between science and religeon, is that science disprooves religeon. It also tends to render the manipulations useless. If it weren't for that simple thing, they'd coexist in perfect harmoney.
If I was the one getting shooed away, I would have been like FUCK YOU! (ooooo OOOOO OOOOOO). I beg to differ... Buddhism is no different than Christianity, Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Taoism, etc, etc. Buddhism teaches a way of life and sets rules for living through the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path (much like the 10 commandments). We have places of worship, we have spiritual leaders (Lama's - Not the animal), and we have religious texts: the Mahayana Sutras, and the Påli Tipitaka. Our goal in life is to achieve nirvana (basically heaven on earth but to attain, one must separate them selves from all earthly possessions and currency), and we believe in a cycle of death and rebirth (Reincarnation). We even had a being that walked the earth to teach the religion, the Buddha (someone who achieves nirvana and discovers dhamma without the guidance of the teacher) is believed to return every 30,000 years when the teachings of the last Buddha have all but disappeared. It is believed the last Buddha appeared between the 6th and 5th century BCE. Now you tell me, do you see that as a religion, or as a philosophical platform?
Nope, I've studied theology and philosophy in school and I have a pretty good grasp on things. Buddhism has its "divine", but they're not omnipotent or anything like the Christian god. Octane basically summed up exactly why it's a philosophy and not a religion. Buddah is not God.
Amida Buddha (Buddha of Light) in Japan is very heavily Christian influenced it seems... but I would agree that Buddhism is not a religion.
Buddhism is a religion, as is Hinduism. (and I laugh at you for arguing with a practitioner, over it's nature ) The fact that they are polytheistic and will include any and all gods (including the Christian one) doesn't detract from the religious, as opposed to philosophical nature of Buddhism. What Philosophy Buddhism has, is a RELIGIOUS philosophy of Karma and the cycle of death and rebirth, to which even the gods are bound. Also, both Buddhism and Hinduism are descendants of Vedic Brahmanism so Buddhism isn't actually descended from Hinduism. The fact that christian practitioners declare Buddhism to be just a philosophy, is basically just a sophistry they use to get around Christianity's edict to "have no other gods before me, sayeth the Lord"
On the original topic, I think you guys are confusing fundamentalism and religion. You can very loosely fit the definition of Christian (God created/designed everything, do good unto other, etc. Very basic tenants) and have no major conflict with science. Its when you start thinking that the earth is 6000 years old or whatever that shit gets confusing. There was an article (seemingly legit, I think it was a univ study,) we had to read in high school (which was catholic) that said that the religiousity (real word?) was more concentrated on the opposite ends of the educational spectrum. The completely uneducated and PhDs/professors had a high amount of religion then the middle ground. I definately see that around me, I work with a ton of (engineering/science) PhDs and most of them are christians, big church life, etc. Not sure if correlation equals cause in this case, but its an interesting observation I was going to make a snarky comment about your first sentence, but I will just post the very first sentence from the link that you gave:
I studied Tibetan Buddhism http://wordpress.ktcdallas.org/ and it is a religion. Go there and see for yourself. Also talk to former Buddhist from Southeast Asia and Japan and ask them if Buddhism is a religion or not.
I think forms of spiritualism and religeon are confused most of the time. To me the whole concept of religeon is nothing more than a rigid adherance to the ideas of another person. Spiritualism whowever, is more of an individual journey that can change with new data.
Religion is what happens to spiritualism when it organizes! I actually think this is a good definition of it. Someone call the Karma Police! We have a violator here! Yep. When most folks say "Religion" in Western cultures, they are talking about Judeo-christian religion, and in the US, they mostly refer to the "Biblical-Literalist" crowd of conservative evangelicals, who believe in "Evangelization through Legislation", and confuse power and freedom, so that not letting them force us to follow their beliefs is somehow "restricting their freedom to worship"...
Neil deGrasse Tyson is an awesome speaker and I always end up listening to whatever audio/videos I come across of his. He just has a way with words that makes things interesting. These are some of the best ones I've seen. This one explains the limitations we'd have in actually coming in contact with UFO's. It makes so much sense. [video=youtube;w-uZZ7RdL5E]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-uZZ7RdL5E[/video][/QUOTE]
fuck yea, this thread turned out to be productive and insightful. "everything went better than expected" im glad we got someone like him, michio kaku, and brian cox to spark some interest in the common people about science/space/technology/and personal growth. there are those highly intelligent scientists and researchers that do alot of good work behind the scenes that cant communicate to us less feeble minded people without confusing us with big words and boring talk.. people like neil bring everything together in a more entertaining, understandable, and intriguing way for us lower common denominator peoples.
