Chad Makaio Zichterman

No. **YOU** are arguing here as to what the "true word of [the] Divine" may be. **You** are continually raising specific doctrines of specific religions which are entirely irrelevant to the general question of whether or not something is religious. The point you are missing is that this kind of moralism is NOT what defines religion. It *may* (and likely does) define whether you or many other individuals might endorse a specific belief or practice, but it does not define what makes something religious. It is a textbook case of No True Scotsman. Once again: DIFFERENTLY religious (including differences YOU don't endorse) is STILL religious. And thanks, by the way, for confirming my prediction that you won't answer a direct Yes / No question.

This has nothing to do with "live and let live." It's a matter of basic intellectual honesty. Whether you -- or I -- or anyone endorses or opposes a specific act or practice is NOT the basis of whether that act or practice is identified as religious. You keep ignoring this point as if pretending it's not there will magically make it go away. It won't. Appealing to authority is also fallacious; an inaccurate claim made by well-known figures in a given field...is still inaccurate. I repeat my previous question: Do you acknowledge the fact that differently religious is still religious? (if no, then your position is a fundamentalist one) Prediction: non-responsive / dismissive reply which won't include a yes or no (though I'd be pleasantly surprised to be wrong)

What makes your position fundamentalist is obvious: you are asserting that there is One Right Definition, and (implicitly) also asserting that you, specifically, have it. It doesn't matter which religious affiliation you claim -- or even IF you claim religious affiliation at all -- for purposes of identifying fundamentalism. What marks your position as fundamentalist is the notion that you (and implicitly, you alone) Have The Right Answer. Multiple attempts have been made to get you to accurately acknowledge other posters' bases for identifying a practice or set of beliefs as religious vs. nonreligious, all to no avail. There is no engagement on your part, only out of hand dismissal and No True Scotsman (with an occasional ad hominem for good measure).

That you consider yourself to be the sole arbiter of meaning with regards to religion is abundantly clear. That doesn't make your post responsive. You're simply declaring yourself right and dismissing any and all contrary claims out of hand, with reference to (or even mere acknowledgement of) their substance. Welcome to fundamentalism. Your stance is exemplifying the very things you ostensibly regard as anathema. Also, your refusal to answer a straightforward yes/no question is duly noted. The specific minutiae of claims within Buddhist doctrine are completely irrelevant to the topic. Buddhism IS, as practiced by many millions of people, a religion. This DOES include those who claim Buddhism as their religious affiliation despite engaging in actions and making claims to which you, or I, or any of a host of other people -- might raise objection. So once again...yes or no... Do you acknowledge the fact that differently religious is still religious? (If not, your position is a form of fundamentalism)

Completely unresponsive. I'm guessing that's not likely to change any time soon.

Immortal - Do you understand, and acknowledge, the following fact: There exist religious people whose interpretation of their religion (or of yours, for that matter) conflicts with your own... ?? In other words, do you acknowledge that differently religious is still religious? (Note: if your answer is no, that would make your own position a fundamentalist one)

Progress in general science, as in so many other things, is bound heavily to political conditions. The currently dominant economic order of human society (global capitalism) artificially limits the actual performance of most people on earth for the sake of a tiny few. Ethical judgments about this aside, from a research standpoint this is -- to put it mildly -- an atrociously inefficient way to arrange things. This is common to any coercive system or entrenched hierarchy...the comfort and privilege of elites is placed as a higher priority than the massive general gains which could be had through reduction or elimination of arbitrary force. As things currently stand, just by raw numbers, we currently have more potential scientists (and potential advancements and breakthroughs) lying in wait for us but left unexamined NOT because those who might help find them are running up against bureaucratic obstacles (though that does occur), but because they never got so much as a high-school level education, or they have to spend 80% of their waking hours scraping up rent for a landlord, or they were born the "wrong" sex / "race" / raised into the wrong culture or religion for intellectual pursuits, etc. Most people alive today will live out most (maybe even all) their lives never having any substantive opportunity to really explore their own potential, and that's just at the individual scale. At the group and institutional level the obstacles to exploring our potentials are even more arbitrary and entrenched, as those who stand to benefit from preserving our current hierarchies have rigged the game to keep things as they are. We've barely scratched the surface of what we can do, and this will remain the case until and unless we manage to throw off the shackles of not just personal limitations, but major institutional ones as well.

There are tons of people who are philosophical Buddhists but not religious Buddhists, i.e. they endorse and see the benefits of principles derived from Buddhism (like detachment, attempts to minimize or eliminate suffering, etc.) but reject the explicit and implicit claims of supernatural cause and teleology (the mystical version of karma, rebirth, souls, demons attempting to lure the Buddha away from Enlightenment and Other Capitalized Abstractions, and so on..). Such people also reject, pay no heed to those attempting to establish an orthodoxy (they couldn't care less -- in terms of their own belief of what counts as "correct" Buddhism, what the Dalai Lama or any other famous teachers might advise, though they may take an interest in such teachings generally). Dragging things kicking and screaming back on topic, once again it remains the case that specific instances of arguing the "right" version of this or that religious doctrine doesn't change what constitutes a religion. Immortal's stance is plainly a case of No True Scotsman, and no amount of window-dressing will change that. YES, many (if not most) fundamentalists happen to be religious. Doing things we may regard as harmful, or as "incorrect" (in quotes because the notion that there is One Right Way to interpret a religious doctrine is itself fundamentalist, hence the hilarious irony of Immortal's stance)...IS NOT some magical disqualifier/exemptor from religious status. During the chattel slavery era in the United States, religious people debated and in some cases fought over slavery, yet the adherents behind both major positions towards slavery within such religious ranks (supporting and opposing) were still religious, because they all had something like the following: *a moral narrative implicitly or explicitly identifying norms (for adherents) regarding what is to be considered good and bad; *belief in some form of supernatural causality; *an orthodoxy for such belief, administered/moderated by some authority figure (priesthoods, preachers, etc.); It doesn't MATTER which -- if any of these factions -- got X doctrine "right" or wrong. They shared (and still share) in common certain general qualities of belief and practice which mark their (ever-feuding) systems as religions.

Fundamentalism is a separate question from whether or not someone or something is religious. All this side bickering over interpreting specific scriptures and/or adherence to specific doctrines of specific religions is irrelevant. Once you cut away that sideshow, we get back to the obvious: Whether X group of people are arguably "getting it wrong" (with respect to a given religion) has no bearing on whether or not they are religious. Religious and mistaken or misguided is still religious. When I was a kid, I was one of the ones you hear about who gets distracted and excited and accidentally scored a goal against my own team. I was, however, still playing the game (even though I was Doing It Wrong).

Any moralism (positive or negative) one may attempt to marshal in defining religion is a mistake. What makes something a religion is not whether or not you (or me, or anyone) agrees with the principle or actions involved, but certain general criteria, typically something along the lines of: Assertion of an authoritative moral code (a religion clearly has something to say about notions of right and wrong); Some form of arbiter(s) of the faith (a group of people institutionalized as authorities upon interpreting that religion's principles); A ritualized orthodoxy covering belief and action, typically (but not always) canonized in some kind of scripture or other record; (*Common, but not absolutely necessary) A belief in some form of supernatural or singular causality. By the above criteria, most conventionally recognized religions qualify. Note, however, that certain forms of highly doctrinaire adherence to political or economic ideologies may also (in limited instances) fit the bill as well. The entire sideshow over whether or not X case of claimant to religious identity is *really* or *truly* religious is a non-starter. We should also keep in mind that while many different practices and beliefs may share a broad name, it is the substance of one's beliefs and conduct which renders something religious or not. There are religious Buddhists and philosophical Buddhists, just to cite one example. Fundamentalism is an extra layer on top of all this. Fundamentalism is at its heart the sincere conviction in two claims: First, that there is such a thing as the One Right Way to live/act/do things; Second (usually implied) is that the fundamentalist is in possession of that One Right Way. While fundamentalism is more common among the religious, it is by no means confined to them.

Ethnicity is a matter of cultural participation, not genetics. It involves active connection to a people, whose culture -- in turn -- coevolved with a specific area (i.e. software engineers have a general culture but do not constitute an ethnicity). Because of the general trend in which most children are raised to participate in the practices of their parents -- and since most parents are the biological parents of their children, it's not hard to see how the false -- though popular -- conflation of ancestry and ethnicity came to be...but it is still false. The short answer to the question "What ethnicity am I?" would be "if you have to ask, then the answer is 'none.'" As people become more insulated from their local environment, from their ancestor's cultural practices, and from the common practical challenges met in different ways by different people (in favor of the direction towards a generalized cosmopolitan lifestyle common to many large cities around the world, to take one example), it becomes more and more common for people to participate minimally or even not at all in ethnic life. Even if one were to opt for a genetic test, this would -- at best and only in the context of a deeper body of background knowledge of the genetic samples taken of many populations throughout the world -- only give you some probabilistic sense of recent geographical ancestry.