Reason is what we need now

In this special moment in history, I don’t need to tell you that what we need now is reason, not blind faith. We have our POTUS opening advising using disinfectants as treatment for the Coronavirus. If this does not sound an alarm, I don’t know what will. Clearly, this is not the time for blind beliefs or anti-intellectualism.

The Buddha is about reason, not faith (i.e. belief without evidence). In this position, he went against tradition. The Buddha himself discouraged any appeal to authority, such as appeal to the authority of scripture, tradition or authoritative figures. Buddha even told his disciples that they should not blindly accept his words. In this sense, Buddha was a rebel and a freethinker early in 500 BCE. I recently posted something about this on Facebook. It shocked one of my religious friends. He shared a Twitter post from Foz Meadows. It reads:

The most dangerously emotional people in the world are men so obsessed with being rational that they constantly mistake their own feelings for objective logic, on the basis that believing in rationality makes their feelings guided by rationality and thus infallible.

I have never heard of this author. I went on Twitter and looked up how she described herself. Her self-description reads: “Author, fanwriter, trash bandit, queer geek feminist, dork. Jack of all pronouns, master of none. Yells…