+- Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum (https://www.scivillage.com)
+-- Forum: Culture (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-49.html)
+--- Forum: Religions & Spirituality (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-124.html)
+--- Thread: How Amazon, Google & neuroscience threaten Buddhism + FBI undercounted antisemitism (/thread-13406.html)
How Amazon, Google & neuroscience threaten Buddhism + FBI undercounted antisemitism - C C - Dec 28, 2022
Why did the FBI undercount antisemitic hate crimes?
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/fairness-justice/why-did-the-fbi-undercount-antisemitic-hate-crimes
EXCERPTS: In a typical year, the numbers are the story: Jews are about 2% of Americans but have topped the FBI’s religiously motivated hate crime category “since 1991, often registering between 9-13% of overall hate [crime] totals.” This year, though, the story is why the FBI’s data so undercounted antisemitic hate crimes that Congress wants revised statistics.
[...] Several organizations that track hate crimes believe the FBI’s 2021 number is an undercount. And the FBI, which did not respond to requests for comment, seemingly agrees; last month, FBI Director Christopher Wray said a “full 63% of religious hate crimes are motivated by antisemitism.”
According to Secure Community Network National Director and CEO Michael Masters, “37% of law enforcement agencies, representing approximately a third of the U.S. population, did not report into the FBI’s system for 2021.” The absence of New York City, Miami, and Los Angeles, home to many Jews, skews the data, as does the fact that “ 35 major U.S. cities [including Chicago, with its sizable Jewish population] simply reported zero hate crimes.”
It’s an issue that “approximately 4,000 agencies have not yet made the transition” to the FBI’s new reporting system. However, the limited reporting could have other explanations too... (MORE - missing details)
Don't Worry, Be Happy: How Amazon, Google & Neuroscience Threaten American Buddhism
https://religiondispatches.org/dont-worry-be-happy-how-amazon-google-neuroscience-threaten-american-buddhism/
EXCERPTS: Contemporary American Buddhism has a problem [...] Buddhism’s problem is with our state-within-the-state, corporate capitalism—especially high-tech companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google. The situation is basically this: Buddhism has been removed from its traditional ethical and spiritual context, grounded in the hard sciences, mainly neuroscience, and then made useful to a predatory techno-capitalist economy.
[...] All of this proceeds under the cover of science and reason, dismissing the transcendental qualities of what Paul Tillich called “infinite passion” as that most contemptible thing: metaphysics.
This view receives primetime support from writers like the cognitive scientist and New Atheist celebrity Steven Pinker who writes in his book Enlightenment Now, “A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened one.”
Never mind that a quantitative mindset—based in quantity rather than quality—can offer no reasons for why we should be kind rather than callous. In other words, it has no answer to pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty’s famous question, “Why not be cruel?” The best this mindset can offer is a utilitarian ethic, like the business world’s cost/benefit analysis—and that’s only self-interest posing as enlightenment.
The moral confusion that Pinker gleefully celebrates reminds me of the Jacobins after the French Revolution. They kicked the priests out of Notre Dame, erected a statue to the Goddess of Reason, and then welcomed Robespierre’s notion of enlightenment: “virtue and terror.”
Terror may be a hyperbolic way of describing what’s happening to American Buddhism, but the message it receives from science and capital are threatening enough. Corporate rationalism says to Buddhism, “If you want to exist and thrive in this culture, you will need our money and you will need to acknowledge our scientific worldview.”
And how the Science Buddha has grown, thanks in large part to [...] the multitude of businesses who’ve adopted Amazon’s WorkingWell strategy to use yoga, meditation, and mindfulness to enhance the corporate brand and improve productivity. ... all accomplished through what William Davies calls “the happiness industry.”...
[...] Putting aside the metaphysical question of what in the world we mean by the word “happiness,” there’s the anterior fact that Buddhism isn’t about becoming happy. Happiness and unhappiness are what the Buddha called “Worldly Winds,” like success and failure, gain and loss. Buddhism’s interest is in the Middle Way, between happiness and unhappiness...
[...] What we’re left with isn’t the Buddha but a Buddha “simulacrum,” in Jean Baudrillard’s term; a thing without an origin. Buddhism becomes just another aspect of “workforce preparation” puzzled together by neuroscientists. Eventually, we forget that it ever even had its own meaning... (MORE - missing details)