The False Awakeners Quotes

“There are seven billion people on this planet. As many as six billion pray and meditate, and never look at a book on reason, logic and math. Imagine if, instead, these six billion people were literate in reason, logic and math. If that were the case, we would already be building starships and making Star Trek for real rather than as a TV show.”
― Mark Romel, The False Awakeners: Illusory Enlightenment

“Anyone who engages in Buddhist meditation is subscribing to the bizarre doctrine that they do not actually exist, that they have no soul, that they are not a Self. They are agreeing with the extraordinary proposition that Nature - inexplicably - deals in creating pointless illusions.”
― Mark Romel, The False Awakeners: Illusory Enlightenment

“Suffering is essential to us, essential to our spiritual growth. A person who does not suffer might as well be dead, which is what Buddhism aspires to ... suffering is an indispensable part of life, without which we could never have joy. Who would turn their back on joy except a hater of life itself?”
― Mark Romel, The False Awakeners: Illusory Enlightenment

“The Truth is not that which is individual to us (i.e. “everyone has their own truth”). Rather, it is that which is common to all of us, exactly as 1 + 1 = 2 is.”
― Mark Romel, The False Awakeners: Illusory Enlightenment

“Logically, there is nothing in Buddhism that possess free will. If all ingredients in Buddhism are non-Selves that participate in an elaborate system of karmic determinism, then, just as with scientific atoms and the scientific forces that act on these atoms, there is no agent that has free will, hence no agent that can break out of this system (i.e. to attain "enlightenment"). Just as it is absurd for a scientific materialist to claim that a bunch of atoms under the direction of atomic forces could ever become "enlightened" (what could such an assertion possibly mean in relation to atoms and atomic forces?), so it is surely every bit as absurd for Buddhists to claim that non-Self entities and processes under the karmic law of "cause and effect" ever become "enlightened.”
― Mark Romel, The False Awakeners: Illusory Enlightenment

“Buddhism is a "spiritual" version of atheistic scientific materialism, science with the concepts of rebirth, karma, nirvana and cosmic consciousness added to it.”
― Mark Romel, The False Awakeners: Illusory Enlightenment