# Atheists - What drives you? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [April 29, 2013, 6:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/atheists-what-drives-you/657030 "2013-04-29T18:09:43Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 84
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2013, 11:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/atheists-what-drives-you/657030/84 "2013-04-30T11:07:40Z")
> [@bldysabba](#): > > [Brief hijack] > You seem to be postulating a far wider philosophical gap between Hinduism and Buddhism than I think exists. For instance, the ‘atman’ aspect of Hinduism exists to reconcile with the ‘Brahman’. Which is to say your true unchanging self is the same as everything else(which to me really says it doesn’t exist). And there are strains of Buddhist thought that also talk about ‘atman’. On the (very slightly) broader question of whether you can be both Hindu and Buddhist at the same time…I don’t know, but I think it’s quite possible. > [/Brief hijack] Yes, any such proposition is bound to be disputable. But nevertheless, I think that you can really only hold to ‘every religion says more or less the same’ if you ignore most of what most practitioners of any given religion will believe in actuality, ending up with the watered-down concepts of modern day ‘private’ spirituality, believing that ‘there must be something’ without actually attributing anything to that something… And if that’s all there’s to your religion, well, it just seems to me that nothing really is lost getting rid of this vestige, as well. It’s just trying to have your cake and eat it, too: you get the supposed comfort of believing in some higher principle without any of the discomforts of having to confront whatever you believe in with reality—as there’s really no discernible claim made about this object of belief, it can’t be in conflict with the world as we experience it. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/atheists-what-drives-you/657030)._