[extropy-chat] Atheism in Decline: meme map

[Damien Broderick]

At 01:14 PM 3/7/2005 -0800, Adrian wrote:

>More than one Eastern religion, such as Buddism, seems compatible with both
>advanced science and advanced tech.

A strong countervailing current is spiritual monism: the claim that All is 
Consciousness, or rather Consciousness is Primordial, sometimes these days 
based in interpretations of QT. While I find this suggestion preposterous, 
and almost certainly due to the conceptual pratfall of category mistake, 
it's worth looking at, for example:

http://www.swcp.com/~hswift/swc/vol06no2/bkrev62.htm

That review, typically, includes such unpleasant absurdities as: 
"Confronted with the genocidal horrors of our century, reason has nothing 
to say." This denies the tentative answers offered by, say, evolutionary 
and cognitive psychology without even attempting to refute them.

Still, Goswami and others like him (I don't include such dubious QT hawkers 
as Deepak Chopra or Fred Allan Wolf) might be worth a few days' attention, 
if only to counter their stance from an informed position, rather than a 
priori dismissal.

Damien Broderick