Well 1 & 4 I think go together, and are able to be logically reached. It can be reasoned that the only reason you suffer is because you want something regarding your self that you don’t have. If you can eliminate that want and that sense of self that it revolves around, then any suffering as a result of it will also be eliminated. Honestly for me, almost all of the buddha’s teachings were logical for me. That’s why it was so attractive to me, it all makes total logical sense. The 3 marks of all conditioned phenomena, it was perfect, even dependent origination. Now 2 & 3, those I agree with you. For me, before I completely accepted the teachings, I did use my knowledge of psychology to see how it might be possible, but I’m not gonna lie it took me a while before I completely understood how that might work, and even though it does make logical sense, it still is a leap of faith that something like disenchantment, dispassion, and release is actually possible. It’s one thing for a theory to make sense, and quite another for it to actually work and be true. So yeah, 2 & 3 certainly do require some amount of faith, and in that regard, I do agree that secularists do have some amount of faith. Although, as the devil’s advocate of this discussion, I will admit that believing that 2 & 3 are possible is a bit easier than believing we are reborn in another body or realm after we die. Also there is a difference between believing 2 & 3 enough to at least try them out, and believing 2 & 3 without even a shadow of a doubt as well as rebirth. Secularists do seem to be better at that than we are, they are a little more flexible and not totally immovable in their beliefs when more information is presented, and I think the buddha did think that was important, how else would you be able to drop your previous belief system once you found the Dhamma. But, he clearly had a lot of confidence in his teachings seeing as though he did say there was nothing wrong with having complete faith in him, not only was there nothing wrong with it, but it can actually help you overcome fear, doubt, restlessness, and a lot of other things.
Whether one faith-based claim or another is more or less believable is a matter of taste. Each of us assigns our own weight to whatever evidence and paths of thinking that are relevant. For myself, they’re all equally believable to the extent of safeguarding the truth a la the Canki Sutta (MN 95).
I don’t think flexibility in view among Buddhists depends on whether one has a more secular or traditional bent. All things being equal, this quality is distributed pretty randomly.
I agree with all of that, except I didn’t mean being secular has anything to do with being more flexible, just that it seems secularists happen to be more flexible. I don’t think it’s the cause of flexibility, more of a correlation.
Dave, I do believe in devas, heavens, and I dont know enough about My Meru to say one way or the other. If that makes me an iron ager ( according to you) so be it!
Exactly. The fundamental and basic questions regarding suffering and inequality are just left unanswered. Or just hand-waved away.
If the Buddha just hallucinated a bunch of visions on the night of his Awakening, then all the ascetics in the Theragatha/Therigatha who declare attainment of the three knowledges (including recollection of past lives) are also a bunch of people who amount to mentally unbalanced wanderers.
I think I would go with the undiluted Dhamma of ancient sages who purified and developed their minds to such an extent that this iddhi became accessible.
How would a Non-Secular Buddhist support their worldview that beings birth circumstance is caused by kamma?
Hi Brad
thanks for your expression of appreciation
to me, it’s a big ‘if’ 
For me, the phrase you use that reeks of identity view is ‘continuation of existence’.
for me, re-birth means, the birth again of something that can be identified with the previous birth. This is too close to a soul theory for me. If nothing can be identified as the same person/individual, then, ‘re’ for me, is invalid.
For example, there are patterns of behaviour persisting in society. they are passed from the teachers to the learners, be they parents and children, teachers and students, peers, friends… the people involved are different individuals. I doubt the general Buddhist traditions would call that ‘rebirth’, maybe ‘social kamma/karma’.
it seems to me, it is due to these patterns being continued that there is repeated suffering in the world and it elicits compassion in me and I recall the Buddha’s use of ‘out of compassion for future generations’ when he spoke of reasons for certain behaviour.
Secondly, I follow what I think is a substantial body of evidence in the EBTs to show the Buddha used ‘birth (aging) and death’ to mean a psychological process in his teaching. I present such evidence here: (PDF) 20120701 The Noble Language - Thesis Extract.pdf | Joe Smith - Academia.edu.
This is how I think the idea you have tried to express would be expressed according to the letter and spirit of the Buddha’s teaching: ‘belief in many births does not require the idea of a soul’ and I am totally comfortable with that belief. To me, they are related: dependently arisen based on ignorance. The multiple births that I experience, in this very life (my past births), are based on my ignorance and are each different births of a different (but related) ego identity each time.
best wishes
According to the EBTs, the Buddha taught it repeatedly, e.g. very explicitly in MN 135. It also just makes sense from the perspective of dependent origination. If all phenomena arise from certain causes, why should the most determinant circumstances of how one’s life will play out (e.g. health, wealth, intelligence) be exempt from this? No one can deny that the circumstances human beings are born into range greatly. To give an example of two extremes on this spectrum: a healthy child born to wealthy, intelligent, and involved parents in a high income country vs. a malnourished child born with HIV to a single mother (also with HIV) in a low income country with substandard infrastructure and healthcare. That one is born into one or another set of circumstances is due to a cause, namely kamma.
That’s enough “support” for me. I put that word in parentheses because I’m not trying to prove anything or come up with some theory that I want people to accept.
My thought on this (in the limited 2 minutes I have to write this before running out the door) is that one’s birth circumstances are a combination of a number of causal factors, and that we can use the word kamma to describe this very complex and nuanced combination of factors (timing, DNA, accident, randomness, parental traits, health, etc). My thought is not t use kamma as a kind of predetermination, such as the way we use the word “fate.” We are born into the circumstances that we have due to a number of random factors, and there is no direct clear proximate causation at play here based on the behaviors of one’s immediate past life.
The above sensibility, to my mind, avoids the trap of believing that a person born into a slum in India is somehow deserving of that circumstance by virtue of their kamma. Kamma is so complex over lifetimes, so nuanced, so fragmented, that it is incorect, in my view, to fully attribute personal circumstances directly to past life kamma.
In cases where the past life kamma and circumstances are more pronounced, there seem, to me, to be interesting circumstances, such as a history of a violent death, or being part of a culture where kamma and rebirth are pervasive beliefs. In other words, I sense that one in this life, through practice and absorption into the cultivation of Right View and the Path might have a pronounced impact on the degree of strength of awareness of one’s past lives in future lives. This is not a process of “selfing” but an awareness that just as what we eat today has an impact on our DNA, which then impacts our progeny, how we live our lives may impact, to some tiny or great degree the future lives that are peeled from this undefinable wispy stream of consciousness that transmigrates through various lives.
I’m going to read later today what I just wrote speedily, and then curse myself for such rubbish, but as I run out the door, this is a quick thought on
How would a Non-Secular Buddhist support their worldview that beings birth circumstance is caused by kamma?
Why the need to add some “sensibility” while Kamma operates in a way that’s totally devoid of emotion? It doesn’t “favor” that healthy intelligent child who’s born to wealthy prestigious family, nor does it sadistically enjoys seeing another child going thru severe malnutrition and suffering horrible diseases in an untouchable family. It’s like the law of physics. If you touch a hot stove, you will get burned. You get burned because you touched it, not because the stove hates you or feels that you deserve it. If you throw a ball against the wall at a certain angle, it’ll bounce back and hit you in the face. It hits you because you created the right conditions for it to hit, not because the wall enjoys seeing you suffer or feels that you deserve it.
I think this is a very important thing to agree on terms first as I believe you would agree the bulk of the conflict between the ‘Religious’ Buddhism and Secular Buddhism is due to terminology bring unclear. What is secularism? Does it imply the absence of religious only or metaphysical view as well? Believing in the absence of afterlife has been part of quite a few religious traditions and a metaphysical view, so can one be a Secularist and not believe in afterlife or be a Secularist and believe in God? Is one a Secularist if they don’t believe in re-birth but are agnostic about whether we can find out the truth? Can one be a Secularist if one does believe in re-birth? In other words, does Secularism entail agnosticism about metaphysics or indifference to metaphysics or it doesn’t have to do anything with metaphysics, so a Secular Buddhist can be a re-birther?
Sorry for asking so many questions. Of course there’s no need to answer all of them. My point is rather that Secularism is just too vague a term and that Secular Buddhism is actually a pretty unfortunate umbrella term for all kinds of contemplative traditions. As a result, criticizing particular brands of Secular Buddhism (e.g. something that may be called Naturalistic Buddhism or No-Rebirth Buddhism) means that many Secular Buddhists not having to do anything with these particular opinions feel attacked. Why not call it Untraditional Contemplatives (I think it is better to avoid Secular, Non-Religious, or Non-Metaphysical since I can easily imagine a Secular Buddhist believing in rebirth, although in a different way than described by the Buddha) or something similar as you suggested? Why not spell out the differences of opinion outright, as we have already seen Secular Buddhism is not a uniform movement. You could call yourself a Non-Metaphysical Secular Buddhist or Eel-Wriggling Neo-Sramana (not meant as offense), Bachelor could call himself an Annihilationist Secular Buddhism, etc. I think there is a distinct lack of proper terminology to refer to these things, something that the old Indic tradition managed to do way better. Maybe the Secular Buddhist community could work out something, it woulf makr constructive criticism on both sides much easier 
Because people generate kamma. There is no cosmic ledger in which the trajectory of a person’s life is worked out.
I think we might also bear in mind that we are supposed to have compassion for beings who are going through difficult circumstances - we aren’t supposed to just sneer at them and say “thats your fault. thats your karma.” That attitude is based on a very shallow understanding of karma indeed - unfortunately, it is probably not all that uncommon.
It is said that understanding the precise workings of kamma is impossible for all but a fully enlightened Buddha. And we should consider - when we see someone going through something (or we ourselves are going through something)- this is what is happening now, but it is impermanent. There may be some extremely fortunate karma that is going to ripen next! who knows?
In my mind there is a somewhat subtle point here, which is that the Buddha found samsara unsatisfactory in every sense - this includes the way kamma functions - The Buddha was not celebrating kamma (although clearly he encouraged abandoning unwholesomeness and cultivating merit). If there were only good, favorable results from intentional actions then it seems to me that samsara would not really be that bad (though still incomparable to Nibbana)…but given the fact that sooner or later all of us are bound for a downturn, we must conclude that this samsara is no good, and it never will be! Every being stuck in this mess has a situation on their hands warranting serious compassion…
Why do you keep dragging emotions like sneering, enjoying seeing others suffering, and all that stuff into this? Didn’t you read my previous post about the zero-emotion nature of kamma?
Yes I read your previous post. The emotions obviously don’t come from the kamma itself, but from human beings. I’m talking about how human beings think about karma, not how karma actually functions.
Be well.
Actually try walking up to an unfortunate man and tell him that all his suffering are simply tough luck, that, sh… happens, as opposed to telling him about kamma, and then see how he’d react? I don’t know about you but if I was told its’ just sheer tough luck that bad things only happen to me and me only for no reason, I’d felt 100x worse than hearing the latter.
I don’t disagree with you. I believe in kamma - but I don’t think it is at all a simplistic thing, and I think there are other forces that condition experience.
Nobody said it’s simple. Only the enlightened ones would be able to see how it works. My point is simple, whether it’s pleasant to hear or not, kamma, like the law of physics, is emotion-less. You throw the ball at a certain angle against the wall, it’ll bounce back and hit you in the face, regardless of how much you want to sugarcoat it. With that said, it’s obvious that as good Buddhist, you cannot just stand there “sneering”, or “enjoy” seeing someone suffering. You will do what you can to help that person.