[Buddha-l] What Batchelor actually said

[Richard Hayes]

On Friday 18 May 2007 12:11, curt wrote:

> I would be very interested to know what Richard thinks the significance
> of the context is in this case. It would seem to me that Batchelor just
> drops this little chestnut down in order to help prop up the overall
> view that Religion is the Arch-enemy of Reason.

I see very little evidence for that reading of Batchelor. In his book as a 
whole he explicitly advocates pluralism and keeping an open mind on questions 
that have not been definitively answered. He does see science as a way that 
questions can be approached, but, like the Jungian he was trained in Zurich 
to be, he also advocates the arts and other aesthetic approaches that enrich 
and nourish the human spirit. (This is not simply something he advocates. he 
also practices it. He takes and publishes stunningly beautiful photographs.)

Rather than being someone who has fallen into a mind-numbing scientism or 
positivism or rationalism or empiricism, Batchelor strikes me as having a 
highly developed sense of curiosity about a very wide range of topics in 
science, psychology, the social sciences, the humanities and in comparative 
religions. He is nowhere nearly as narrow as his detractors seem to like to 
portray him.

> And just for the record, please note that I quoted Batchelor's exact
> words in my first post - and provided the page number of the book that
> the quote was taken from. Richard's subject heading is therefore
> intentionally misleading.

Yes, you did quote part of a sentence verbatim. No one disputed that. What I 
was trying to do was to show more fully what Batchelor's argument is and to 
provide a context for those few words you quoted. I don't believe anything I 
wrote was in fact misleading, and I am certain it was not my intention to 
mislead. So you guessed wrong about my intentions.

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes