This is a little bit like confessing to kicking puppies, or thinking flowers stink, or hating rainbows. But I have to be me.
I don’t like the Dalai Lama.
Not one bit. I’ll go further: I find him repulsive and creepy. Sure, he smiles a lot, and he acts like a nice guy…but the same is true of all kinds of con men and used car salesmen and televangelists. They’ll smile and laugh while they pick your pocket and knife your grandmother; just playing the role of the apparent nice guy wins no points with me. What has he actually done?
The Dalai Lama is founder of the Mind & Life institute for research on science and Buddhism. A series of talks he gave at Stanford University led to the creation of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, which brings together scientists and religious scholars.
Not impressive at all. I looked them up: the Mind & Life Institute is full of babble about “the contemplative sciences”. They do things like fund retreats that “advance collaborative research among scientists based on dialogue and collaboration with contemplatives.” They hang out with guys going “ommmm”, in other words. It sounds extremely silly.
What really creeps me out, though, is that everywhere on that site they refer to this old guy as “His Holiness”. With capitalization. It’s very religious, and I don’t say that in a good way.
Then there’s the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research Education. I’m sorry, Stanford, you’ve been snookered; you’re promoting goofy dipsy-doodle New Age nonsense.
What makes it all particularly grating is that this mask of compassion and altruism and sweetness and light is draped over a smiling medieval theocrat, who believes he acquired his position by the magic of reincarnation, and who wants independence for Tibet (good so far), so that it can be re-saddled with patriarchal religious rule that condescends to women and treats homosexuality as an abomination. Ah, but he has great PR for yet another sex-hating celibate priest with delusions of grandeur.
And now he has won the Templeton Prize. They claim this wacky old priest promotes “serious scientific investigative reviews”. Bleh. No he doesn’t. He promotes himself and his bizarre religious views by pretending to be science-friendly.
Guess what? I don’t like the Templetons at all, either. It’s a perfect match of the odious with the devious.
How much worse could it be? The Discovery Institute thinks the Dalai Lama is just ducky, because his grasp of the fundamentals of evolution are about as pathetically bad as theirs. They quote a whole bunch of creationist gibberish from the Tibetan Twit approvingly.
Guess what? I also don’t like the Discovery Institute.
Cuttlefish and Ophelia have more.