[Buddha-l] Views of morality, culture, and religion

[Malcolm Dean]

Vicente Gonzalez <vicen.bcn at gmail.com> writes:
VG>I think Buddhism finally is a Moral goal, and the behavior of
VG>Buddha teaching others after his Nirvana reveals that.
VG>Note that I talk of Moral as knowledge; a problem of the nature
VG>of knowledge.
VG>We have spend the last 200 years devoted to Reason and Intelligence.
VG>So, thinking in that moral purpose of any Religion, I wonder how one
VG>can avoid this problem of the nature of the knowledge to know when
VG>Religion exists or not.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
( http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/morality-definition/ )
"The term 'morality' can be used either
   1. descriptively to refer to a code of conduct put forward by a society or,
         1. some other group, such as a religion, or
         2. accepted by an individual for her own behavior or
   2. normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specified
conditions, would be put forward by all rational persons."

In practice, the first definition is more than descriptive, it is
proscriptive. It refers to boundaries of activity which occur in
groups of humans. For example, I cheered at Reuters report (August 23,
2006) that before losing their culture and accumulated wealth to
rapacious Conquistadors, the Aztecs performed a highly moral and
religious act when they "captured, ritually sacrificed and partially
ate several hundred people traveling with invading Spanish forces in
1520AD." At least they got their licks in.

The second definition is illuminated by a paper in today's issue of Science:

"Frames, Biases, and Rational Decision-Making in the Human Brain"
   Benedetto De Martino, Dharshan Kumaran, Ben Seymour, and Raymond J. Dolan
   Science 313(5787):684-687, 4 August 2006, DOI: 10.1126/science.1128356

which shows that emotional activity in the amygdala frames rational
activity in another brain region (the orbital and medial prefrontal
cortex (OMPFC)) that integrates information into so-called "rational"
decisions.

So there is no escaping the nature of knowledge, or more
fundamentally, the nature of Information. If you choose either
definition of morality, you are left with demonstrably imprecise and
fallible processes which will deviate from a lawful understanding of
the Universe.

In this way, calling Buddhism a "moral goal" is to diminish it.

Malcolm Dean
Los Angeles