Meh. All of everyone’s religion is pizza-parlor religion. ALL. Without exception. Some people have (perhaps unwittingly) had St Paul or St Augustine or John Calvin or whoever go to the pizza parlor and order on their behalf, so they might tend to blithely assume that THEIR religion is unadulterated, straight from the source, yada yada. It isn’t. Reading the Bible is already in the pizza parlor. Paul (who never met or saw Jesus) took his outsider’s impression of what Jesus might have said and might have done, added a great deal of his own material, changed the message to appeal more easily to non-Jewish people, and invented the beginning of what we now regard as Christianity.
Musical aside: This would be very similar to considering Adam Lambert’s the ultimate all-time authoritative version of the music and legacy of Queen - IF Queen had never made any recordings, so that Lambert never had a chance to hear what Freddie Mercury sounded like, and had to just guess; and IF the Adam Lambert version of the band toured only in the smaller venues in Russia, and changed the songs and the set lists to be more popular with rural Russians, by giving them a Russian folk-style interpretation. Can you imagine the recordings from the Chelyabinsk concert of that weird alternative-universe Adam Lambert version of Queen (the one where he never actually knew what Freddie Mercury sounded like, and had changed the songs to be more popular in Russia) being the only Queen recordings anyone listens to, two thousand years from now - the canonical version?
If you’re a Christian, then unless you started your life as an observant Jew, and unless you (literally, not spiritually) met Jesus and heard directly from him exactly what he wanted to say, then congratulations, you are a “pizza parlor Christian” just as much as anyone who might be accused of the same. The fact that some people aren’t satisfied with St Paul’s pizza-parlor religion, and want to change up their order a bit, is merely what has been done forever.
There is this really douchy guy I knew in college who went on to found his own cultish megachurch franchise who famously (okay, “famously” within limited circles) rejected the 10 commandments.
(He was eventually kicked out of his own church for alcoholism and unspecified mistreatmemt of his wife, who divorced him. He is currently working on founding his second megachurch empire, so he has his own personal schisim.)
Considering that is all you ever say on these matters I;m willing to guess you know nothing. You have not cited any specific points to illustrate where I am wrong.
That’s the arm chair buddhist. The main aim is to escape the cycle of death and rebirth because apparently it’s a trap full of pleasures that don’t fully satisfy.
What I am saying is that they paint a negative picture of existence and seek to escape the cycle of it. Of course the expedient method is suicide, so I think to prevent that the concept of rebirth was put it (since it would render it moot).
The whole religion falls apart without rebirth and karma.
I didn’t say they reject that part, I said they don’t care about it - it’s not a focus of their religious practice.
And Buddhism is the only religion, AFAIK, whose founder saiddon’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’ When you know for yourselves that, ‘These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness’ — then you should enter & remain in them" That’s to say - not dogma, but not radical skepticism neither. And, in contrast to Christianity - no infallible scripture.
I realise the irony of quoting Buddhist scripture to make that point
Buddhism is, in fact, opposed to nihilism. Madhyamaka, in particular, is an explicit rejection of both essentialism and nihilism, providing the ‘Middle Way’ between the two. While things (including people) don’t have any intrinsic, fundamental nature (svabhava), it doesn’t therefore follow that they have no nature at all—that’s not what the ideas of emptiness and no-self mean.
Buddhism recognizes the paradoxical nature of the notion of substance, which is foundational to many traditions in western philosophy. It’s supposed to be something capable of standing on its own, of having its properties just by itself, the ultimate show stopper: it is what it is, because it is. One aspect of Buddhist philosophy is that this doesn’t make terribly much sense, which is why it denies the presence of such an absolute and intrinsic nature of things. But that doesn’t lead to nihilism.
A better (though still somewhat incomplete) view is something akin to relationalism: the metaphor of the net of Indra is often used to elucidate this concept. Picture a net with a jewel at each vertex, such that each reflects all the others. The idea is now that this reflection fully exhausts the nature of each jewel: there is no further ‘inner nature’, only the ways in which the jewels relate to each other, and each has its properties due to these relations (this is the idea of dependent origination).
It’s a complex and subtle concept, and can be hard to grasp, but it’s worlds away from nihilism. This mostly concerns ontology, but it extends towards a rejection of moral nihilism, as well: because things have no inner nature, but are what they are by virtue of their relatedness, you and me are ultimately not really two separate things (non-duality); hurting you makes thus as much sense as hurting myself. Indeed, the fact that Buddhist tradition derives value-statements from metaphysics is one of its most fascinating aspects, since it seems to run counter to principles like the fact-value distinction in western philosophy. There’s more to it, of course, but I can’t remotely do it justice, both because I don’t want this to turn into an essay, and because I simply haven’t penetrated the matter deeply enough.
Well what they seem to mistake with nonduality is that there is no right or wrong with that worldview. They can’t really make moral or ethical claims if things are empty in their own nature. To me it just sounds like a dodge to not say it’s nihilism. Nihilism is that things don’t have inherent meaning or significance and neither does our attempts at it. It’s subjective.
Not to mention that the analogy of hurting someone else doesn’t make sense. If I hurt you I feel no pain but if I hurt myself I feel pain. Not really sure where the “makes no sense part comes in”. I think it helps to know that this was created in a different time and that it likely doesn’t keep well despite what some might say. Hurting you isn’t hurting me. That’s kind of a point against their nondualism.
And I believe in the first link it refers to our daily mundane lives as something that is an illusion in that Buddhism isn’t life denying because what is happening is that our lives are an illusion because it’s transitory and impermanent
Of course there is. This isn’t a relativist view—indeed, it was conceived to counter wrong views about the world.
This just doesn’t follow. Again, while nothing has a fundamental, essential nature, that doesn’t mean that anything goes—far from it.
Which is a claim Buddhism explicitly rejects. There’s a very deep, well-developed moral philosophy attached to it, but of course it’s easier not to engage with it and reject it out of hand.
Go back to the metaphor of Indra’s net: each jewel is what it is because of all the others. So I am what I am, at least in part, because of you. Hurting you thus reflects directly onto myself, and diminishes me. As I said, it’s complex and subtle, and richly repays open-minded engagement—but of course, you can also just flatly reject it and cling to your misguided ideas.
My ideas aren’t misguided but rather show the flaws in their philosophy.
If there is no inherent good or bad, any morality is based (essentially) on subjectivity. Buddhism for some reason seems to think there are “good” and “bad” actions or karma, when really it’s just based on perspective. Ultimately we cannot say why something is good.
Indra’s net is full of holes. hurting you diminishes me in no way whatsoever, you can even use psychopaths as an example. They literally don’t suffer from hurting others. They might have gotten that way through past experience, or genetics, in that case the Net might work. But in the case of them hurting others, they aren’t diminished in any way. Not to mention that is a claim they cannot prove. PLus the whole reflection bit does lose out when you have to find the origin of everything which would then result in infinite regress. It’s the same problem people have when they cite God as the uncaused cause.
For a religion that advocates questioning they dont do it enough to themselves.
I’m not going to defend Buddhism as true but your understanding is so blatantly superficial that your criticisms can be pretty safely ignored. Sorry, man. It’s baffling too because you are so obviously into existential shit but you have put no effort into understanding something that seems up your alley.like seriouy, it doesn’t question itself enough? Can you name another religion that would say “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him”?
And your proclamations are blatantly wrong even by normal real world reasoning. If a psychopath harms someone, he opens himself up to revenge and the justice system. If he does something low grade, he is still lowering himself in other people’s view and reduces his chances of social advancement. Even if he doesn’t suffer emotionally. Even if you ignore karma.
I really can’t understand how someone so into this stuff would think such superficial arguments are useful.
How can a philosophy whose prime goal is to eliminate suffering be nihilistic? Add to that things like ahimsa—don’t cause others to suffer. How do you know that suffering is going on? You look at the evidence. If it seems like you’re causing suffering, then stop doing that. How can that be nihilistic? That’s clearly stating a moral value. Nihilism denies any moral values, it denies that life has no meaning.
Buddha explicitly rejected nihilism. WTF are you talking about?
I think it depends upon your lens. Sociologically, it sounds legit to me self-identify as a Christian Unitarian even if you don’t believe in either the Trinity or divinity of Jesus. In terms of original doctrine, it’s a stretch. But as noted, in terms of original doctrine, lots of Christian beliefs are a stretch, starting with the Pauline tradition.
As for Jews for Jesus, that goes beyond stretch and into the territory of misrepresentation. I can buy a JfJ organization in theory, I’m just dubious about the actual one.
Anyway, to the distinction between self-identification and doctrine, I wanted to add the distinction between a doctrinal perspective and a sociological one.
However. Even from a doctrinal perspective, it’s seems legit to me to present yourself as believing “Adjective-religion”, eg Unitarian Christian, Secular Buddhist, or even something eyebrow raising like “Non-theistic Christian”. It has the advantage of clarity after all. Maybe I should say at least somewhat legit.
Ok. But how do you refer to practicing Buddhists such as Robert Wright, who take a pass on the reincarnation concept? There are a fair number of them after all.
