[Buddha-l] Religious violence, Buddhist violence

[JKirkpatrick]

JK
> When it comes to Aum Shinrikyo, I'd etically critique its goals, 
> practices and values without feeling any necessity to allude to its 
> self-description as Buddhism.

Erik:
Peter Whinch wrote a little book called 'The idea of a social science', where he argues that social sciences are typically different from physics etc. The idea is that you cannot understand the terms of a subject of a social science like buddhology without reference to what they mean for them and for you. Peace f.i. is not a kind of objective behaviour, it is something people do towards each other and understand as such. The same with lying, meditation, nirvāṇa, etc. So essential for the research in Buddhism are judgements about the hermeneutics of the teaching and about ethics of behaviour. If you would like to be impartial you would have to describe the mass murder in terms like 'they released some gases in the tube station and lifeforms present there stopped functioning', which is not a very adequate description.

JK:
Agreed; and eloquently put, Erik.
I'd like to add this, if I may: 
“The unexamined life is not worth living,” as Socrates said at his trial for heresy. 
Most social science scholars, if not religion scholars perhaps, take this view of their lives and work. Examining "life" includes examining social institutions and evaluating them. 
People may differ about the criteria for such examinations (a.k.a. developing the critique of culture), but examine we must. Writing op eds and journalism doesn't cut it for scholarship. Being politically correct, to avoid censure from believers or extreme relativists, doesn't cut it, either.