• I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.ml
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    2 years ago

    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”.

    • rtfm_modular@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      Some sects are more dogmatic than others, with some woo woo metaphysical nonsense and ceremonial practices. Secular Buddhism though is definitely just the philosophy and practice of mindfulness that uses the same allegories but ditches the more problematic stuff.

    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      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.

    • Sordid@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      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.”

      • aspire2493@sh.itjust.works
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        2 years ago

        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”

        • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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          2 years ago

          As opposed to Buddhism which constantly tells people that life sucks and will always suck unless you follow the Buddha (founder), the Dharma(Gospel), and the Sanghu (church).

          Very different

    • Poplar?@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      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.