Consider this: Almost everyone concurs that murder is immoral. Of course, there are disagreements about what constitutes murder, whether the death penalty is a good idea, whether such-and-such a war is justified, etc. But almost everyone agrees that you can’t just take someone’s life for no reason. The idea that murder is immoral is grounded in the assumption that human life is valuable. But you can’t prove that human life is objectively valuable. One way or another, the idea that human life is valuable must be taken on faith.

So opposition to murder is, at it’s heart, a faith-based concept. And yet we impose this belief on others by making laws to prohibit murder. Isn’t that a good thing? Isn’t it good that this faith-based concept is imposed on others?

But I agree with your observation regarding Buddhism that there are aspects that can be verified in our own experience and that some teachings are valuable that way. But who can truly verify that reincarnation is a “fact”. If that were possible, then most people and scientists would have long acknowledged it by now.

What I meant by my comment was that if someone tells me they have been reincarnated, I cannot prove them wrong (at least not on scientific grounds). However, I might be able to prove them right by seeing if they have a memory of a past life.

I do think that reincarnation, at least in theory, is verifiable, even if it isn’t falsifiable. I don’t actually believe in reincarnation, but there have been attempts at proving it, albeit feeble attempts. In fact, you mentioned such possible evidence in a quote from Carl Sagan on this post.

When I said I “think that the Buddhist framework for identifying the causes of suffering and removing those causes are realistic, tangible, practical, and meaningful” I was referring to the specific practices you can take in your own life to “calm the mind” or however you want to phrase it i.e. meditation practices and training. This is something tangible and falsifiable i.e you can put it to the test.

Compare this to wondering about rebirth and whatnot – there’s no way to test this or prove it one way or the other. It’s theological speculation. And in that sense, it doesn’t “really matter” to me because it’s neither here nor there.