Posted by
Andrews on Monday, July 20, 2009 10:45:34 AM
No, despite the title this is not about media bias, or the way Democrats treat Obama's policies, or about anything explicitly political. This is more of a cultural, specifically a religious double standard.
Earlier today I was talking to my wife about my condition and my recent difficulties finding a doctor willing to manage my pain medication without insisting I undergo more interventional procedures. She jokingly mentioned that she had read an article about a Buddhist nun curing leprosy using a specific meditation.
Which brought up a question in my mind. As a people, why are we in the US so willing to at least consider that yogis, Buddhist monks, and other eastern mystics can accomplish utterly fantastic feats, while we dismiss the claims of saints to levitate, bilocate, heal others, cure disease, read minds, predict the future and accomplish other similar feats? Even more interesting, why do we accept mystics who claim to be able to heal themselves or others when they come from eastern religions, but look down upon faith healers and Christian Scientists?
I suppose this is a similar question to the one I asked in "
A Question", "
A Multicultural Question" and "
Materialist Arrogance", and I then answered in "
Rousseau's Foolish Legacy", ""
Deceiving Themselves?and "
A Western Evil?". It is all what is familiar. We are too intimate with Christianity, we know it too well, so we dismiss its claims, while eastern religions seem alien enough that they "might be true"*. Still it does seem a strange double standard to hold. Either the world allows mystics to accomplish miracles, or it doesn't. For those who hold to no particular religious faith, it seems odd for them to "play favorites" among the various faiths claiming miraculous feats.
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* For some there is also an anti-Western aspect. The West is seen as devoid of spirituality and enlightenment, so anything non-Western is assumed to be more spiritual and enlightened. That is certainly not true of all, but it is of some who share this viewpoint, elevating non-Western mystics above Western ones.
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POSTSCRIPT
By the way, I am not making any claims one way or the other here. I am skeptical by nature, and so I tend to find most such claims suspect. That does not mean I dismiss the possibility, just that I have yet to find any convincing evidence of such claims. In fact, I am not even contradicting my statement in "
Atheism's Circular Reasoning" in favor of first hand evidence, as most such claims rely not on first hand evidence, but on "Friend of a Friend" claims, which increase my skepticism. Still, I admit there is much in the universe I do not know or understand, so I am open to the possibility of miraculous events, even of humans accomplishing seemingly impossible things. What I don't claim is that they are limited to residents of the Asian continent.