Dharma has a few meanings. It means: the Truth, the Way. It means the search for Truth as long as it is ethical and brings about healing, for example, laboratory testing on animals is not the dharma because it violates animals. Also, each person has their own dharma, it is what you like to do and are good at and what your purpose is, if it is in alignment with ethics, etc. You cannot follow someone else's dharma, that is against the dharma. You have to find your own dharma. Someone's dharma might be to surf, another person might follow their dharma by bringing awareness to an important issue, someone else's dharma might be to be a bus driver. It is kind of like fate, but you can shoose to follow your dharma or not. It is more like Aleister Crowley's idea of following your will. "Do what thou will shall be the whol of the law." Crowley didn't mean that you can do whatever the hell you want, but to follow your higher will, and not to follow your higher will is a sin, according to Crowley. So, when they translate dharma as "religious practice" that is a small meaning of it, but the real meaning is to follow your heart and do what you know is right and to live the truth as best as you can, not to defend your ignorance, not in a dogmatic way as "this is what you have to do to be right." In fact, the Buddha said "Do not believe anything anybody says to you, not even if I say it, or if it is written in scriptures, or if everybody seems to believe it, or if it is written in fancy books, but only if you investigate it for yourself and it agrees with your reason and common sense. As far as Buddhism goes, the things that are not to do are not to harm any sentient being, either directly or indirectly, not to steal/take only that which is freely given, not to slander or speak untruth, no sexual misconduct, not to get drunk or cloud your mind with drugs, not to overeat. It is because it is considered against the dharma to cause suffering to yourself or others beings.
However, there is a story about a past life of the Buddha before he was a Buddha where he was a captain of a ship in search of some treasure. HE found out that there was a man on board who was planning to murder the whole crew and claim the treasure for himself. The Buddha (he wasn't the Buddha yet) decided that he must kill this man in order to save the man from all the bad karma he would get from murdering a bunch of people. In this way, even though the Buddha murdered a man, it was not against the dharma, because it wasn't motivated by any selfish gain, but out of compassion for the would-be mass murderer.
So, science is also the dharma, as long as it is not motivated out of greed or to make a technology that will cause suffering. Especially if the science is used to ease suffering, it is dharma. So yes, any search for truth is the dharma. In the speeches the subject of this thread gives, he speaks about how religions now have a false dharma, i.e. not true. He says not to cause suffering, not to kill, etc. He is not saying that you have to be Buddhist, or join a religion, even though it was kind of translated that way.
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