Having read Batchelor's book, I find that critique unconvincing. The fact that something is "very old" does not mean in that it is inherently "tried and true." It only means that it is... very old. Even the fact that Buddhism, like the Catholic church, survives today points only to its value as a social institution; it doesn't indicate any intrinsic value in the teaching. I am not saying this to denigrate the Dhamma. Certainly I have investigated this teaching for myself and found it of great value. But to do this, I first had to ask why something from 2,500 years ago would still be relevant to me today. Without that questioning and without that level of skepticism, Buddhism would be no less culpable as an "opiate of the masses" than any number of spiritual traditions that people take simply on faith. One huge stumbling block for traditional Buddhism is its monastic focus. It's worth noting that the institution of monasticism in countries where Buddhism survives has typically cut off from the Dhamma from laypersons. Buddhism for the majority of the people in these countries amounts only to devotional practices and paranormal beliefs, with very little knowledge or application of the psychological and social insights of the Buddha of the Pali canon. Most people in the West cannot become and are not interested in becoming monks or nuns. How, then, do we reevaluate Buddhism for our modern-day lay lives? This is one of the questions Batchelor and his wife Martine are actually asking in their work. (For the record, I think Batchelor's newest book, Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist does a better job of pointing at an answer than Buddhism Without Beliefs.). I am grateful that Batchelor, and people like Richard Gombrich, are doing this very important work. In the critique, Punnadhammo claims that Batchelor doesn't question his Western humanistic biases with the same tenacity he questions traditional Buddhism. I think this is disingenuous. For one thing, we know the history of Western humanism. We know how it developed and who contributed to it and why we should see a need for things like "democracy", "secularism", "agnosticism" and "science." Batchelor does not ascribe to them "unexamined positive valuation" as Punnadhammo claims. Rather, these are hard-won values, that have resulted from hundreds of years of mishaps, evaluations, critical thought and (sometimes unwitting) social experimentation. In contrast to this, we don't really know the history of Buddhism. It almost seems that Punnadhammo is expecting Westerners to swallow Buddhism whole and assent to its value without going through an intermediary stage of weighing it against everything we know. This is unrealistic and possibly dangerous. As a person of Asian descent, I am sympathetic to Punnadhammo's qualms against Western arrogance. But I don't think Batchelor exhibits this sort of arrogance. In fact, I've been impressed by just how much sensitivity and respect Batchelor has towards the Indian milieu of Buddhism. Also, it should be noted that it's not just academics and skeptics: even people within the monastic community, like Thich Nhat Hanh, at points radically reinterpret and question the traditional canon. Buddhism's interaction with the West is relatively nascent. I see Batchelor as an intermediary stage of evolution. As for whether or not we are diverging from the teachings of the historical Buddha, we have no way of really knowing what he actually taught. If the Pali suttas are in any way representative of the actual Siddhartha Gautama's teaching, I actually think more people than ever are being exposed to what he might have meant. The advent of the internet has made vast amounts of the Pali canon (as well as the Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan scriptures) available to a wider audience than ever. Rather than depending on monastic communities scattered and isolated from (and, in some cases, in opposition to) one another, we now have the change to come into contact with the alleged words of the Buddha firsthand. This is unprecedented, especially for lay people. And I think it's not a bad place to be, actually.