dhw,
> ...epistemological framework (a thread which died a sudden death, but which I hope to come back to eventually). -I will double check... I remember posting there a couple weeks back but I never got a response email. I never meant to let it falter, but I will catch back up.-I've been working hard at school and work so my time has been necessarily limited.->...that your priorities are equally subjective... I think they are also misleading, because all discussions depend on contexts, and in your everyday life the balance between how and why may easily be reversed. ... Motivation (= why) would therefore seem to be a "much more important" factor than finding out HOW, e.g. how meditation affects those little grey cells. ...life is all about WHY we are here? (Raising your kids properly and being a good teacher might be an answer.)
> -You raise an excellent point, and the short answer is of course that the "how and why" are predicated on the particular question. Some questions we DO know the 'why' on. (Why the sky is light during the day, why is the sky blue.) -But especially for the case you point out above, the object (me) is motivated. This isn't the same thing as asking "Why are we here?" This is a completely different question! I'll get to that in a moment...-To me, your suggestion as to "Why I am here," that isn't an answer I would accept... even though I'm still probably a year or two at most from my first child, I simply don't look at the question as pertinent to my life. Taking a deep breath and being aware of it, or putting my hand into a river to think about time is enough for me. Hell, waking up is enough. -> On a religious level, if how we got here leads to the conclusion of an impersonal chance origin (atheism), of course we can forget about 'why'. There obviously isn't a 'why' outside our personal scale of values. But if the conclusion is design, 'why' is an inevitable question, ... but in either case you can hardly argue that the 'why' doesn't move people forward. It doesn't move YOU forward. Nor, I should add, does it move me, because I share your preference for making my own way.... But the effect of this 'why' on conventional believers is hardly any different from that of meditation on you. ...-For your observation in green, I'm... fairly certain that in the context of my words I was specifying myself. "I've never understood the seduction of why questions," or something like that. In my view (which happened to coincide with Buddhist philosophy, and from here on I will discuss the Buddhist perspective) a why question that tries to point to a concrete origin of some kind is really a psychological attachment to the world. Asking "why am I here" is the kind of question that suggests that you are uncertain about yourself, or your place in the world. It is an undermining question. Buddhism is called "The Middle Way" because it saw the extremes of spiritualism espoused by Hinduism, and the opposite extreme of atheistic materialism (yes, they dealt with this 2000 years before our Enlightenment) and sought to find a different way. -It's pretty clear when you get to the bottom of it, Buddhist philosophy deals with the "why am I here" question as unimportant because the answer is so distant from us. At the time of Siddharta Gautama, this question was already an ancient one. The Buddha looks at that question as clinging for the hope of a world beyond this one, but for both our beginning and an afterlife, the only evidence was the fact that we exist. He's kinda like the guy that looks at two arguing siblings and asks, "Does your battle really matter?" As humans, we can only account for the period of time that we mentally "awaken" until the time we die. Everything else is tertiary.-Moving to my personal thoughts, the biggest questions of all are typically why questions. IN the case of life, contrary to what David asserts, I maintain that we've only just begun to understand the how. The fact that we only cracked the human genome a few short years ago underlines only how far we still have to go before we've even found an answer. I haven't said it to him personally ( I will soon enough ) but I thank him for writing the book that he did for the purpose that he did... Even though I've barely cracked the third chapter, the goal of informing theists of scientific arguments can only do good things in the long run, and could only have come from a theist. We need more scientists like Francis Collins, or science will die a highly polarized death in the United States as eventually we'll get a president/congress combination that will simply stop funding it. (Bush was dangerously close...)-[EDIT] I struggle a bit with the comparison of meditation to say, going to church or believing in God. There's a big difference in my head in regards to worshiping a deity and simply watching your mind. I suppose, if we say the goal of religion is to make each of us fit more harmoniously with each other (the ethical part of Buddhism) I can certainly agree with that... but Zen can be practiced without any of the trappings of Buddhism, irrespective of a deity or not. You can't really say that for worshiping a God...

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"