unus mundus

Is meditation a spiritual technology to leverage productivity and bolster corporate life?

Is it a way of life, a way of being in the world born of a rich cosmology and of Buddhist tradition and ritual?

It is not my habit to offer commentary on open debate, especially on issues that do not promote the good or bring about greater understanding in our world. But when such great efforts are made to promote a debate like the performances offered by Bill Nye and Ken Ham this week, I feel compelled to offer, in my small way, to the public discourse into which we are forced.

I want to be honest from the beginning. I am not a natural scientist. I am of the personal opinion that natural science has delivered a comprehensive and harrowingly dehumanizing darkness to our world and it is up to us as spiritual beings to shed light on the realities of life in face of this darkness. It is our responsibility as sentient beings of consciousness to strive for the redemption of human thinking, feeling, and willing. I am also acutely aware, that natural science has made possible the very media I am using to compose and publish this offering. I harbor no fantasies for the pastoralization of humanity.

I articulate this view because I want to be clear about the worldview that separates my thinking from both Bill Nye and Ken Ham. I want to be clear that the two men who shared that stage have more in common with each other than they do to the true mission of the human being on Earth. To the person caught in dogmatic thinking, this will undoubtedly be an outrage to read.

Bill Nye supposedly has quantifiable objective science on his side. Ken Ham supposedly has God on his side. These two views for the average thinker are irreconcilable. I would like to establish a more sane platform from which genuine thinking can arise from the muddled paralogistic reasoning presented by the two men.

What were not shared overtly with the viewers of this debate were the basic presuppositions of the presentations. The stream of discourse we were exposed to for the time of the debate was only a fragment of the full picture. The ground of both arguments, obstructed from view, was a fundamental materialism. Both men presented evolutionary models and though these models differ in form they spring up from the same ground.

I understand that one system uses the word science and the other uses the word creation and that these are diametrically opposed in our conventional wisdom. Deeper looking however suggests that while these two words each trigger specific mental processes that are seemingly dissonant, the spirit of what was posited in the debate was the same: our physical conditions make up the entirety of our being, our reality.

Bill Nye has faith that the methodology of modern natural science accurately describes the universe and therefore the universe is billions of years old. Ken Ham has faith that the indications of the monotheistic genesis account literally describe the universe and therefore the universe is thousands of years old. These talking points obfuscate that core value shared by both speakers. The point is both are arguing for the same epistemological view that human evolution is bound by physical laws and physical laws only.

Both men fail to comprehend the spiritual foundations of physical existence and dogmatically cleave to the same erroneous epistemological accounting for the universe, that of materialism. Please watch the introductory remarks by both men again with these insights in mind and you will quickly see the commonality between them. You will see that they are not speaking as representatives of humanity but rather peremptory representatives of dualistic and deluded thinking.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6kgvhG3AkI