The new science of meditation

It seems you have a fairly narrow view of what constitutes a religion. Christian fundamentalism is particularly dogmatic and is one negative manifestation of religion which happens to be present in the West.

From the book "God is Not One" by Stephen Prothero:

"Philosopher of religion Ninian Smart has referred to these [shared religious] tendencies as the seven “dimensions” of religion: the ritual, narrative, experiential, institutional, ethical, doctrinal, and material dimensions.

These family resemblances are just tendencies, however. Just as there are tall people in short families (none of the men in Michael Jordan’s family was over six feet tall), there are religions that deny the existence of God and religions that get along just fine without creeds. Something is a religion when it shares enough of this DNA to belong to the family of religions. What makes the members of this family different (and themselves) is how they mix and match these dimensions. Experience is central in Daoism and Buddhism. Hinduism and Judaism emphasize the narrative dimension. The ethical dimension is crucial in Confucianism. The Islamic and Yoruba traditions are to a great extent about ritual. And doctrine is particularly important to Christians.

The world’s religious rivals are clearly related, but they are more like second cousins than identical twins. They do not teach the same doctrines. They do not perform the same rituals. And they do not share the same goals."

Oh, I did, because I assumed there surely had to be more to your critique than just this list of filenames.

I only scanned a few posts, but it appears to be an old anonymous blog with disjointed musings about why the author finds mindfulness "annoying". I didn't see anything to convince me that this is worth digging into further, like for example: a really cogent argument, or some research, or any kind of background in anything remotely related, etc. So I'm still unclear on what made you conclude from this random blog that Kabat-Zinn is just peddling pseudoscience.

It honestly sounds like you're just anti-mindfulness, which isn't inherently a bad thing. I don't think we should have sacred cows, and there may be valid anti-mindfulness arguments from serious people out there. But drawing conclusions based on this particular blog makes it seem like you're not interested in figuring out what's true (ie, science) as much as finding justification to support your pre-existing position, regardless of the evidence (ie, pseudoscience).

Thanks for the perspective here as well. I do agree that people behave “religiously” more broadly, but I tend to think of this more as an overarching phenomena of meaning-making, with capital r “Religion” making up one major category of thought, and non-religious paths are distinct in that they don’t bring the baggage of beliefs in deities/spirits/etc.

So while I understand the philosophical framing of religion in broader terms, In the context of meditation, I tend to avoid the religious connotation entirely because it’s overloaded and a lot of people immediately conflate the two.

To draw a crude comparison, people go to the gym religiously. But people aren’t likely to misinterpret that comment as meaning going to the gym is “Religious” in the sense that people understand religion in the cultural zeitgeist.

> Hadn't heard this one before - huh. I think there are a lot of reasons we burn coal but IMO the fact that we're religious isn't one of the main ones. To me, religion is a great path toward loving others and the world such that we'd want to conserve them and it.

Alan Watts explores this idea and I think it’s worth considering. Most people in the west - especially anyone raised around Judeo-Christian beliefs - are taught that they are born into this world, that they’re separate from it, that they’re here to have dominion over it, and that the real game is what comes after we die.

Even though I left the Christian belief system behind, I had deep unexamined beliefs that everything would be fine, because how could it not be? If all of this was created, and I was made, it implies that something bigger is in control. This is at the heart of climate denialism in all of the circles I grew up in.

The eastern framing is that we grow out of this world. We’re intrinsically part of it, an expression of it, and not separate. This brings a much different set of implications, and at least for me personally and based on what others have shared about their own experience, cultivating this view drastically altered my engagement with environmental issues, how I think about food, decisions I make about how I spend my time, etc.

The point isn’t that we burn coal because of religion, but that many popular religions instill a mindset that makes burning coal not a problem.

> To me, religion is a great path toward loving others and the world such that we'd want to conserve them and it.

I love that this is your view, and I wish that more people held it. Unfortunately I’ve been exposed to the toxic alternative almost exclusively, spread across about a dozen churches throughout my youth.

Moving beyond the message of love for a moment, I think religious organizations need to carefully examine the 2nd/3rd order effects of certain core beliefs.

“Don’t look up” seems like an example of the ultimate failure mode of instilling a sense of “God will take care of things” into the generation that has to contend with the fact that this is not true.

I should add that I say all of this while somewhat lamenting what has been lost in the breakdown of the church. A sense of community and belonging connected to a notion of something greater than oneself is sorely missing in modern society. I hope that better options emerge, or that major religious organizations can rehabilitate their image and mission effectively.

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There's also a lot of studies showing that meditation can cause harm.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-021-01503-2