Ordinarily, I’d take time to express my disagreements with a piece like this, but last time I did, I got denounced by both Kevins (the one at IA and the one at BigHo). So I guess I’ll just keep my mouth shut this time.
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Kevin beat me, yet again, in replying… In my defense, I’ll note that I was typing, yet again, a long and self-absorbed post.
I’m a scientific skeptic, which is one of the things that attracts me to the more rarefied forms of Zen Buddhism (probably more a Western convention than an Asian reality). While I’m suspicious of the whole “Buddhism Without Beliefs” or spiritual-not-religious trend, I simply can’t cotton to the superstitious trappings in any religion or belief system. Like Sagan, I’m wary of pseudoscience and what he calls “bamboozlement.”
If I sounded condemnatory the last time I spoke out about the zodiac, etc., I apologize– for tone, if not content. Like Kevin, I do take a dim view of things I feel we as a species should move beyond, and like Sagan, I think the universe as it is already provides us with more than enough numinous wonder, without our having to manufacture stuff on our own.
the other Kevin
No need to apologize and/or offering explanations for gangbanging me last time I stepped into a debate such as this - that’s what makes the Blogosphere so fun. Anyway, there’s not much I can say on this except that even assuming that there is NO rational arguments behind such cultural practices, nevertheless, they have been performed for thousands of years and if nothing else, are emotionally comforting to those who perform them. That goes for ALL religious ceremony and imagery, whether it be Koreans corporate heads consulting Feng Shui experts or the American President invoking God on 9.11 - yes, it’s “stupid” from an uber-rationalist perspective, but then again, so is much of what we call “culture.”
You people don’t understand such important things as Feng Shui because your culture is so full of itself that it chooses to disregard the truth which you can’t possibly comprehend in this lifetime. This is the reason why so much of the World is trash. Only when the air if foul with the stench of toxic wastes and there are no longer plants on Earth that you will understand a small surface area of these practices. Can you back up what you said when you said there are “no rational arguments”? Of course there are rational arguments. Is there a rational argument for why you exist?