10.31.06
‘Eastern mysticism’ gets ID flu?
There is no such thing as an ‘Eastern mystic’, nor is there much hope that already confused New Agers will be helped much by the insidious confusions of the IDM.
Actually, speaking generally, monotheists couldn’t do anymore harm to ‘Eastern Mysticism’ than they have already done. India gave birth to a spiritual tradition that is not god obsessed nor a form of monotheism. And yet the ‘God fungus’ slowly but surely invaded these traditions, with the final mischief occurring after the Islamic onset (that is not an atheist statement).
The funniest example for our times is a version of the Yoga Sutras called ‘How to Know God’. How many know the famous sutra on god is an interpolation. Or that the Gita was originally a non-theistic document?
ID proponents have failed to grasp the mischief they accomplished and will continue to accomplish.
In Kantian terms, the design argument is admissible, but only in the context of the ‘dialectic of illusion’, or else in terms of issues of ‘natural teleology’, with the issue of constitutive and reflective judgments standing guard on the abuse of the question.
Instead we get the third-rate ID hype destined to add more shit to the already smelly case of New Age mental confusion.
That’s a good reason to explain why current scientists are so hysterical about ID. Just as with Indian yoga, so…who knows, but so maybe science will be corrupted slowly but surely by the monotheistic juggernaut.
In a way Darwinists have only themselves to blame for the positivistic swamp they wandered into.
Good metaphysical hygiene starts with a Kantian framework. The tools are there, why not use them?
I might have titled this post, “Eastern Mystics Join Western Fundamentalist Conspiracy,” except that there are those out there that would howl to the highest that I had finally admitted we are fundamentalists with a secret conspiracy. (First, I’m fundamentally not a fundamentalist, and the so-called “secret conspiracy” is neither secret nor a conspiracy.) Instead, I have a title that neatly sums up the point made in the Asian Tribune today, titled Is our evolving universe an intelligent design?, by essayist Vasantha Raja. It is an excellent article in which Raja shows that following the evidence where it leads isn’t a fundamentalist conspiracy to convert the world in whichever direction at all, it is rather what the scientific method should really be about.