Richard Blumberg's blog

"Why should I?", you might ask. Well, Sam is preparing a new neurological study of what happens in the brains of believers and non-believers as they ponder certain questions or experience various stimuli, and he and his group of researchers are trying to design the study to be as fair and unbiased as possible. They'd like to get responses from both Christians and non-believers to a series of surveys; those responses will help with the study design. They are particularly interested in getting survey responses from Christians, so I'm posting this link here, because my experience has been that the Faith Commons attracts a variety of different sorts of people, most of whom consider themselves Christian. 

continue reading "Help Sam Harris"

I'm not sure how I got to the Great Story website, but I thought you guys might find it interesting. The story they relate, and relate to, is a familiar one:

“[It] is a way of telling the history of everyone and everything that honors and embraces all religious traditions and creation stories. It is the sacred narrative of an evolving Universe of emergent complexity and breathtaking creativity and cooperation — a story that offers each of us the opportunity to find meaning and purpose in our lives and our time in history.”

continue reading "The Great Story"

Note: the following is cross-posted, in a somewhat different form, to my blog.

In response to a flippant comment I made last week to his post, What If There Were No Church?, Bill challenged me to offer "a quick list of parallels" between Buddhism and Christianity. Touché. But, never one to ignore a challenge, here we go.

Unfortunately, Bill, there's nothing quick about Buddhism. And, while there are certainly some parallels between the teachings of Jesus and those of Siddhartha Gautama [see note below], the Buddha, there are very few similarities between Buddhism and Christianity. I'm going to take a stab at offering an overview of the similarities and differences (always with the understanding that this is as I see it, and I would hesitate to call myself a Buddhist; rather, I am one who finds the teachings of the Buddha more complete and truer than those of any other sage I know.)

There are three things, I think, that most clearly distinguish the Buddhist teachings from the Christian scriptures: the authenticity and coherence of the scriptural documents, the differing natures of Jesus and the Buddha, and the vast differences in the core doctrines. I'll take these one at a time.

continue reading "Buddhism and Christianity"

In his recent post, Bill asks the question, "Can the Message of Jesus be Multi-Religious?"

I'd like to tackle that question from a perspective that's almost certainly different from that shared by most members of the Commons. From that perspective—rationalist, scientific, historical, anti-monotheist, heavily influenced by the Buddha's teaching and by Taoism—I see several problems with presenting Bill's "Good News" to other cultures as a message that they can accept without significant alteration in their cultural world view.

continue reading "A multi-religious Jesus: an answer to Bill"