... and part of this burden of proof rests on the person who is demanding the proof.
It's just elementary rhetoric: If A hopes to persuade B to believe something that B finds unlikely and doubtful on its face, then A is going to have to put some effort into convincing B. It's unrealistic for A to assume that B is somehow obligated to believe whatever A tells him. Things don't work that way.
The
Buddha advised the Kalamas:
"So, as I said, Kalamas: 'Don't go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, "This contemplative is our teacher."
That challenges the idea that the non-theists among us are somehow obligated to credulously accept theistic tradition, its scriptures, its authorities, or the personal religious testimony of the Sciforums theists.
It might go a bit further than I would in challenging the value of philosophical reasoning. But that's in keeping with ancient Indian thinking, in which a visual metaphor for knowledge had a central place and where knowledge by inference was considered a lower attainment than knowledge by direct experience.
When you know for yourselves that, "These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness" — then you should enter & remain in them.'
Of course the Buddha's dhamma was kind of an empirical spiritual psychology. He was subtly redirecting religious emphasis away from transcendental metaphysics towards lived experience. The summum bonum in Buddhism is nibbana, which early Buddhism seems to have been defined in largely negative terms as the absence of suffering. So in effect, what the Buddha is saying here is that you won't know the end of suffering until you know the end of suffering. Hearing about it or talking about it isn't the same thing.
What he wasn't doing was directing his listeners to accept all kinds of cosmological and metaphysical beliefs. When he was questioned about those kind of matters, he seems to have tried to redirect his questioners' attention back to dukkha, the arising of dukkha, the subsiding of dukkha, and the path to the subsiding of dukkha, which he sometimes says is really all that he teaches. For an example of the Buddha doing that, see the famous Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta:
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.063.than.html
Since we're talking about Buddhism, I'll use it to make another point that's relevant to an issue that Dynyddyr made earlier and you opposed.
Christianity is basically an
orthodoxy, meaning that it emphasizes
right belief. Buddhism, in contrast, is an
orthopraxy. That translates to
right practice.
In Buddhism, it's entirely possible to set out on the Buddhist path without having formed any conclusions about the truth or falsity of Buddhist doctrines. What Buddhism offers its new practitioners are
things to do, whether they are moral precepts to follow (in the manner of rules of training) or contemplative techniques of mindfulness and meditation. These practices in turn lead (or perhaps not) to experiences. These probably won't fully corroborate all the doctrines, but at least they will suggest to the practitioner that there's something to the practice and motivate him/her to keep on with it. And that in turn will lead to new and more subtle experiences, and so on.
Christianity and religions like it emphase belief as opposed to practice. And that puts these religions into a much more difficult position: Religious experience supposedly verifies a person's belief. But the person won't enjoy the experience until he/she accepts the belief. So the whole thing threatens to contract down into a tight little circle. For those able to make such a strange inner movement, doubt would indeed seem to be well and truly banished.
Of course, such a self-justifying psychological move could probably be performed with any belief whatsoever. It appears to my eye to approach perilously close to madness.
As I have noted a few times already, I do not consider myself a theist, nor a proponent of a particular religious tradition.
I don't know you personally, so I can't say.
What I can say is that you often seem to defend what appears to be a traditional view of theism. A few other things have caught my attention as well. For example, your interest in virtue epistemology parallels a number of contemporary evangelical Christian philosophers. Your points in this thread (and your use of the Kalama Sutta) seem to parallel reformed epistemology and the kind of arguments that I've often seen educated evangelicals making on other boards.
That's perfectly fine with me. Not only is it often interesting, it's a lot more intelligent than most of what happens here on Sciforums. But it does make me wonder where you're coming from and what motivates you.
