Was Waking Up the one that starts with him describing why Islam is different from other religions in how evil it is and how it promotes terrorism? I forgot which book it was but it was the first chapter. I have tried giving him a fair chance -- but I don't have a lot of respect for his Islamaphobia. I wouldn't really call what he does philosophy either. It seems like his opinions come down to: science can answer all philosophical questions.
Waking Up was mostly calling out almost all religion as wooly but that a claim many of them promote - ego death and feeling a sense of unity with the universe - is an accountable phenomena that be studied and experienced beyond the domains of religion, where it often remains.
I think
maybe he had about a sentence or two about Islam, but the first chapter was focused more on calling out theology and new agey claims, and that there are some truths that can be exported from those poisons and be used by anyone. Meditation, for example, demands no dogma: it's merely a conditioning of the mind to be in the present. Of course, that can go much deeper regarding understanding one's own awareness, but that type of application seems to be left exclusively to Buddhists and Hindus, even if the claims of no self are a scientific fact.
I always find this discussion amusing. Some will argue quite vigorously that free will does not exist, which proves nothing (they "have to" do so, right), but it seems quite a perfect contradiction for sentient beings to devote effort to disprove their own sentience, much less to convince others of its non-existence.
What's even funnier is when people mix the two views together. It was actually here on GAF, IIRC, where I saw someone argue that criminals shouldn't be held accountable for their actions - specifically, that they shouldn't be imprisoned - because of lack of free will. This person didn't seem to realize the self-contradicting nature of this argument. If the criminals lack free will, then so do the jailers. How could they then decide not to enact their "destiny" of imprisoning the criminals?
Good stuff.
One can ask a question here: which is more flimsy evocation? That one is not a free agent, or that one should be punished under the assumption that one is? Free will doesn't exist, but that doesn't change the fact an individual can absorb incorrect ideas about things. Jailing people is not a destiny of free will, but conditioning of society and various individuals that free will exists, so that lens, however shoddy it may be, becomes the social canon. It's no different than an ascribed canon of creationism or flat earth.
The key is to offer information and understanding that one can absorb while being accountable to reality. Free will is absolutely something that needs to be shied away from for the dangers it makes if taken as reality, for it infers a principle of there being an outsider to the happenings of nature and people. If people are the results of happenings, the same applies to ideas. Look at our culture, for we literally run on the idea that paper
makes things happen. This is literally only an idea, but we are so collectively bamboozled about it we create depressions and recessions and actively let people suffer in them. Bad ideas need to be called out for their fiction and their poor roots in reality.
Of course, a very paradoxical problem here is that one may ask "how do you offer this to people with no free will?" in the sense you are typically speaking to one's false ego, which itself is the image aligned with free will. The oddity is it doesn't exist, yet we think, act, talk, and convey ideas in such a way that only feeds such a thing to be true, making the entire effort here very confusing for those who don't already get it. The same thing with nondualism: we think, act, and talk in ways that infer a cosmos of separated, cut off events, even if nothing is separated or cut off in the ways we make it. Even when we speak of the unity of forms and processes, we are
still doing it in a way that in it's description, these are seen as separated things. It's very messy.
Consider for a moment if I say "you do not think your thoughts." You will, by default, take this from the perception of the ego concept of yourself. You will be caught in an image that apparently thinks thoughts and tries to wrap that concept with the concept that it doesn't think thoughts. Conveying may not be enough, but experience to correlate the data might be, and perhaps why Eastern traditions often argue against intellect to understand the points I've raised. It's not that one needs to be dumb to get it, but one needs to see the futility of their ego or the nonsense of division in order to see them for the fictions they are. The data is quite clearly not enough for one to taste it.
One can very easily see free will as a falsehood when they see the image of themselves to be a fraud. The I identity has to be seen, firsthand, as a non-entity. No doer to deeds, but just the deed happening. No thinker of thought, but just the thought happening. To see what happens in and of itself with any principle of an outsider, both of the cosmos and of the mind. If one does not have an experience to see through the illusion, one will be caught up in it. For those who believe in free will, these are people still caught in the fiction by defining themselves as a separate self.
. I don't think it helps free will though.
