At last:

“All religions, including Buddhism, stem from our narcissistic wish to believe that the universe was created for our benefit, as a stage for our spiritual quests. In contrast, science tells us that we are incidental, accidental. Far from being the raison d’être of the universe, we appeared through sheer happenstance, and we could vanish in the same way. This is not a comforting viewpoint, but science, unlike religion, seeks truth regardless of how it makes us feel. Buddhism raises radical questions about our inner and outer reality, but it is finally not radical enough to accommodate science’s disturbing perspective. The remaining question is whether any form of spirituality can.”

Brilliant piece on why Buddhism shouldn’t be awarded ‘special status’ by the skeptical community. Like all religions, it’s got its fair share of woo too.

+John Pappas raises some excellent points. I would add explicitly that the tendency to wrap certain kinds of rigid structures and types of mysticism around a philosophical system, should not be confused with the underlying philosophical system itself.

While John Horgan does make some interesting observations about tendencies in Western Buddhism specifically, I kept getting frustrated reading the article because the author seemed to be bringing in many of the same preconceptions about the way the world works which lead to some of tendencies he was describing. Including filtering this through the kind of oppositional dualistic worldview which is kinda incompatible with Buddhist philosophy. This includes the assumption that somehow science and everything that gets described as religion are inherently incompatible and ultimately irreconcilable.

If your philosophical system gets in the way of trying to understand the world around you–whatever the details may be–you’re doing it wrong.

Something I wrote about that general theme, from a different philosophical perspective, a while back–though most of the points apply equally well to Buddhist philosophy:
http://urocyon.wordpress.com/2011/08/24/philosophy-science-and-chaos-part-2-conflict-and-skepticism/

Illusions getting in the way? Hrm. I didn’t get the impression that he developed a very thorough understanding of the actual philosophy involved, before rejecting some of the outward trappings and, indeed, ways that philosophical concepts and the terms for them are commonly interpreted by people coming from Western systems–which may or may not say much about, say, anatta itself. (Which does not have much in common with Western nihilism, no.)

These days I identify more as Buddhism-inspired, myself, but seem to have put a lot more time and effort into trying to make sense of a philosophical system I might or might not more fully identify with.