To me, in order to take EBT seriously, it seems important to test whether they make sense. Isn’t it a sign of respect for a teaching, or a scientific theory, that you are testing whether it makes sense, rather than accepting it blindly? At least the monk Ajahn Brahm has argued that Buddhism should not be considered as a religion based on faith (he was arguing against faith, in this debate, where he compared Buddhism to science)
And if the sign of a good scientist is that she or he asks a lot of questions, and tests existing theories rather than blindly accepting them based on faith, shouldn’t this be all the more true in the case of EBT? (since unlike the natural sciences that just teach us about the external world, EBT are supposed to teach us about the meaning of our life.)
So asking questions and testing what I am told seems to me the right approach, and the truly respectful one (just like if you respect Einstein’s theories you don’t just bow to them and accept them on faith, but you verify their consistency, you build experiments to validate them - and if you are a really great scientist you even take them further). But perhaps my approach is the wrong one, in which case I would be grateful if you could explain to me why.