I always felt like Buddhism was more a philosophy than a religion. It can be used as a religion, but it really boils down to “Life sucks, but you can be happy if you stop thinking about how much life sucks”.
There’s also Nirvana, so it’s more like “Life sucks. Rebirth sucks. If you follow the path of Buddha you might be able to break this cycle”.
Rebirth sucks.
I never understood that part. Maybe the next life does suck, but so what? I’m not going to be there to experience it, and the next guy won’t have any memory of me, so who cares? Reincarnation as a concept never made sense to me. You get a new body, your memories get erased… what is even left of you?
I have been to South East Asia and married a women from the Thervada tradition. If it isn’t a religion I don’t know what that word means.
Yes of course you can treat it like a philosophy. You can pretty much do whatever you want. I am pretty confident I can treat 3rd wave feminist thought as a metaphysics system if I put my mind to it, I am also confident that I could interpret a child’s drawing via a Marxist-Hegelian lens. Anything can be modeled as anything else. I can model the sun and the banana. Both appear yellow to me, both have dark spots, both make human life more enjoyable.
The issue is if that means anything, is it useful to us? So yes you can go thru their 25 centuries of writing spread over an area 3x of Europe, with 4x the population. Filter out everything you want and keep only what you want. Then slap a label on it called Secular Buddhism. You can do this, but don’t really expect us to all say what you are doing relates at all to what they are doing.
No offense but I don’t think you’ve read any of the texts or seen any Bhuddist practice if you think so. The corpus of texts that belong to the different traditions are massive and Bhuddists have everything from prayer to pilgrimage. It’s only not a religion if you ignore everything.
You could say the same about Christianity. “Life sucks, but you can be happy if you think about the fact that the suffering is temporary.”
Absolutely not. Christianity is “Life sucks and will always suck unless you submit to what we say and only what we say, otherwise you suffer forever”
Christianity is “Life sucks and will always suck unless you submit to what we say and only what we say, otherwise you suffer forever”
And Buddhism doesn’t say that? The only difference is that Christianity adds “in hell” at the end of that sentence, Buddhism adds “in the cycle of death and rebirth”.
It’s more of “life sucks because the all knowing, all powerful, all loving deity is not so secretly a sadist who is constantly testing you to see if you’re good enough”
True, but whether or nor the suffering is caused by a personal god or by impersonal cosmic forces doesn’t really make any practical difference. Both religions claim, without any basis in fact, that the suffering is eternal and that they are the only way out.
To be fair, I wouldn’t lump Buddhism in with other theistic religions. Of course it can be, but a lot of schools avoid any form of theism. Plus, it’s almostvdefinitely the least arbitrary and hypocritical of the Big 5-7
Eh, it’s still based on completely unfounded, unsupported, and nonsensical ideas. Whether or not there’s a personal god doesn’t make any real difference IMO.
Reincarnation is not part of that. That’s what I’m talking about, in case it’s not clear.
I mostly agree with you, but the act of using meditation to increase one’s mental well being, in particular, is not an unfounded or nonsensical idea. It may have been when it was first described, but we have scientific data now that shows that meditation can be pretty beneficial for people.
I remember asking my mother as a child how we knew we were right and her answer was “you have to have faith”. That was the beginning of the end for me. I started refusing to go to church when I was about 10 as I couldn’t fathom how we could just “believe” we were right. Plus how could god punish those who weren’t exposed to our church? It just didn’t make any logical sense to me at that age.
I increasingly find it bizarre when people committed to the idea of an intelligent designer for our universe ignore the fact that the ‘design’ has no absolute frame of reference and is relative, down to the recent trend in physics of recognizing relative facts vs stable facts.
Especially bizarre are the ones that do this while committed to the idea the intelligent designer is one of light (i.e. 1 John 1:5), given that fundamentally baked into the design is the fact that light when not able to be directly observed can be more than one thing at once.
But no, they manage to hold fast to the idea it was carefully designed while showing no interest in learning more of that supposed design outside of what they’ve been told to believe within their giant generational game of telephone back to the days when people peed on their hands to clean them and lamented that why it rained was outside the realm of possible human knowledge thus it was futile to try to understand God.
Poor Baha’i, they never get meme-mocked
