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this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2023
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I wish you ppl would stop with your fetishization for any religion outside of the Abrahamic ones. Sikhs are just like any group of ppl and have committed fucked shit in the name of their ideology. Imperial (let's invade and massacre Asia) Japan was Buddhist who used it as justification for nationalism, violence, and persecution. Which sounds pretty damn similar to what Jews, Muslims, and Christians do/did. And let's not forget Hindu nationalism and their problematic caste system
And no this isn't a bashing of religion as a whole because I personally find the argument that religion is the root of all evil as childish. I have no issues with anyone believing anything they want. It only becomes a problem when you feel the need to impose your belief on others. EVERY group including religion, race, class, ethnicity, sex, political party, etc is guilty of that
The non-Abrahamic religions stick with thr peace and love parts in the US because they are not the dominant religion. Any religion ends up being cooped into being used to justify violence when it is on top even when the core tenets are supposed to be peaceful and accepting.
This also tends to be true of most human organizational structures, but religion adds a layer that make it easier for members to accept extreme behavior by the people in their group.
There were Roman Christians who made passionate arguments for freedom of religion, before they took over. Not so much after.
People will fetishize anything and use anything to justify violence.
Buddhist practitioners can be as dogmatic as Christians, but having been brought up as one and studied the other extensively, Buddhism is not a religion in the Western sense of the word.
In fact there's many teachings on avoiding dogmatic views in both ancient and modern Buddhism. Because dogmatism brings about the exact suffering we're talking about.
Yes, Buddhists are as failable as anyone else. But the heart of the dharma begins with right view, which essentially means, don't be dogmatic!
Which is the exact opposite of how I was brought up in a Christian family.
Every religion claims that. Christians will tell you it is a lifestyle and a relationship. Jews will tell you it is a religion and culture. Buddhists will claim to be a philosophy and a mindset. No one wants to admit that they are just another way of doing X.
Of the three you listed only one doesn't follow commandments given by an invisible supernatural entity.
And this exact false equivalence is why Buddhism isn't a religion the way the West uses the word.
Cool we are just going to ignore all the Buddhists gods, like the seven headed snake (commonly depicted as the Buddha of Wednesday afternoon) and Maru. As well as the gods they borrowed along the way like Genash and about a million dead monks. We are also going to ignore all the passages in the Pali where the Siddathrata talks about his past incarnations and how he decided to decided to come to earth one more time to save humanity.
Hey remind me again, in the heart sutra what is the reason Siddathrata gives for the importance of giving gold to monks? I forget. Maybe I forget because he refers to it as a secret mystery.
Go ahead and continue. I want you to tell me more about what half remembered YouTube video from a fourlong secular Buddhist you saw once. I am just going to sit here and sort thru the hundreds of photos I have of me in South East Asia.
I'm only replying to your top paragraph because I sense a lot of hostility in your post and don't have the patience at the moment to wade through it carefully.
Buddhism doesn't extinguish other beliefs when it interacts with them. Nagas (the seven headed snake, who is not a God but more like a spirit, is a naga) already existed in southeast Asia prior to Buddhism. Likewise Genesh is a Hindu diety that already existed in India.
Some Zen Buddhist traditions even go so far as to draw parallels with Christian beliefs in the Kingdom of God and the ultimate dimension (a Buddhist concept for how everything is connected and interdependent).
Finally, I didn't argue that Buddhism doesn't incorporate the idea of spiritual beings (Gods, Demons, they can all be found in most Buddhist traditions). But they're not beings to worship or revere simply on account of their spiritual status. Or to listen too without question like in authoritarian belief systems. So, it's likely your post is a straw man but also possible you misunderstood my position and I didn't communicate clearly enough. Either way, what you're arguing against wasn't my position. (See italics right above and below if you need clarification).
The Buddha said don't take my word. See for yourself. And Buddhism is being incorporated under other names in all sorts of modern psychology practices. Because the shit works and is based on science (investigation of mental phenomenon with an open and unbiased mind) not dogma.
I hope someday you understand the difference. But I can tell by your tone that nothing I can say today will change your mind.
So this post isn't for you. But the silent witnesses on the fence.
Take care.
You are picking and choosing. You choose the few verses where Siddharth told you to verify what he said but you are ignoring the other parts where he instructed a brain breaking meditation practice that if followed would make you believe you grasp it. Nothing new or original. It is basic cult programming. For a man who supposedly demanded that people check his work not a single one of his followers has bothered to critique it in 25 centuries. Or if they did they were buried in a shallow grave somewhere.
Every religion does this. Enough chanting, singing, group activities, repetitions, shaming of heretical thought and eventually you will believe that you have the key to the universe and lo it is exactly the doctrine you were taught! What are the odds that the perfect way to exist just happens to be the way you happened to study?
The greatest extreme is of course in Zen strain. Concentration for endless hours on a paradox, not at all like meditation on the Trinity, right?
Way to deflect btw. As if I don't know what Samsura is. Noticed you didn't answer my question about the Heart Sutra. We both know why.
Basically you can't accept that there really is not much of a difference between the two religions. The Buddha was never just a man, he was a cosmic being that came to earth according to the stories. You are following India's Jesus. Just the Pali itself is twice the length of the KJV Bible and of all those hundreds of pages you pick out a few choice sentences making this celestial being sound a bit sciencey. You ignore all the stuff he got wrong, like his cosmology and geography, and expert shop to find the stuff he got right. You completely brush away the religion itself is practiced and I am firmly convinced that if you went to say Cambodia you would try to correct a monk with an "umm actually".
Buddhism was probably 10% the justification for nationalism that Shinto was in Japan, so that's a pretty bad example.
Also, using Buddhism to encourage nationalism ≠ Buddhisms fault
Every arguments you made can be used for Christianity
I would make the same argument, and say that radicalized religion is the issue, not religion itself.
Most every religion becomes radicalized over time, but that doesnt define the inital religious teachings.
So yeah, Christian nationalism ≠ Christianity's fault.
Moralists with authoritarian leanings are the problem.
Plenty of those around nowadays who, instead of a religions, latch on to some well meaning cause and then proceed to try and shove other people around under the cover of said cause, bringing along the more tribalist (hence unthinking and easilly manipulated with the right words) members of the cause, all the way to pretty much pogroms and purges (though, fortunatelly, not normally involving killing people).
Whilst the vehicle (religion, some ideologies, politics, any "cause" supposedly beyond questioning including nationalism), being something that most people follow in a mindless way is ideal for such subvertion and abuse as an easy source of supporting usefull idiots for people indulging their lust for power over others) the reall problem is, IMHO, a certain type of individual who will seek social situations they can abuse to be powerful (all the way down to the school social bully who uses connection rather than physicallity to have power over others), so it's really such people we should be weary of and alert for rather than their chosen vehicles.
Yeah absolutely, and the problem is they'll always find an excuse - someone on here recently argued to me that since we punch Nazis we should also punch people who use words like 'unalive' because it's an attack on our culture - he was being entirely serious too.
You can see people rubbing their hands in glee at every climate change story too and it's scary, I've been involved with a lot of green groups and eco-positive movements which are full of wonderful people who really care about making a better world - then there are overly online lunatics who never lifted a finger to help native species or anything like that but have decided it's a wonderful excuse to live out their most destructive and hateful fantasies.
Religion is a way of harnessing that awful impulse in people and using it for the benefit of a small theocratic aristocracy, it's a way of saying 'you can get away with being the awfull person you want to be if you do it in the name of our gang and to our enemies'
Buddhism has a talent for conversion by syncretism. Tibetian Buddhism is Buddhism meeting Tibetian Shamanism, Chan/Zen is Buddhism meeting Taoism (which already was very close), both Therevada and Mayayana are rather more Hindu, and what we're seeing in the west is Humanist/Christian, depending on the practitioner. A good dividing line might be belief in reincarnation: Legit Atheists don't care, hell-conditioned folks find relief, whereas originally the whole thing was Hindu and Buddhism calls it dhukka (suffering, also mind that it's tied into the caste system) and promises a way to break out of it. So what was a jail in one context serves as a comfy blanket in another.
In that sense it's very much a mistake to see Buddhism as a uniform whole, or western adoption as appropriation or fetish, or really infer terribly much about one strain of Buddhism from the other.
Then, second note: All those eastern things should be compared, if you want to compare them properly, not to western religion or churches but to that and the whole philosophical heritage dating back to at least Socrates. And gods know in that context we don't need religion to fuck up, we're still recovering from Descartes and like to ignore inconvenient truths such that Newton was an Alchemist. Christians like to ignore that all the stuff that is actually valuable about Christianity, is more than memes furnished to propagate the system (and doing damage while doing so), is lifted from the Stoics. Racism once was "scientific". I could go on and on.