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The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

signoregalilei.com

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Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#131

Post by asdff »

goodmythical wrote: post #128
asdff wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>what it is to live a good life That has to be the universal one, no? I feel like basic moral principles, at least directed towards the in group, are pretty universal. I'd argue they are more base than even humans and are shared with certain intelligent animals.

>That has to be the universal one, no? Not at all . Some believe one should come to forgive their enemies. Some believe that one should purge one's enemies from life itself. Some believe that one should have no enemies. Some believe that material wealth is fine to a point, some believe that the desire of possesing material wealth is a source of discontent, some believe that it is the source of many or all other disco…

But it all comes down to an expectation of some altruism. Yes you may vilify the out group but are the basic dynamics of helping your fellow person out really so different across space and time? I don't think so. Every culture has villages and relies upon others for mutual benefits. That is what I am talking about with this sort of universal baseline level of morality. Yes there could be a spectrum of acceptable cruelty but generally you have to think about these things in terms of a playground scenario vs the context that leads to a military operation involving poisoning a well. Would you play with someone who slapped you in the face and pulled your hair on the playground? No, and that is universal.

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#132

Post by asdff »

jact wrote: post #105
asdff wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically how christians have always operated since they first emerged and started doing the same throughout the hellenic world. Most (all?) christian traditions are pagan in origin. The main goal was not necessarily replacement but a sort of corporate ownership takeover of the littany of existing traditions, such that these cultures might be ingrained into a unified fold of christian power/influence/customs/laws/exp…

It is not true that Christian practices are mostly pagan in origin. You do not need to look far to find the origin of the vast majority of what you would have seen in a medieval church service. You can see the common origin if you compare and contrast an Orthodox Jewish synagogue service with an Orthodox Christian liturgy. The first half of the Divine Liturgy and the synagogue service are virtually the same even in t…

I'd call judaisim pagan too as it was originally polytheistic little different than the rest of middle eastern paganism, until it became a cult of yahweh that rejected the rest of the proto canaanite pantheon. So that tracks with my interpretation of "nothing new in christianity" really.

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#133

Post by asdff »

andrewflnr wrote: post #107
asdff wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the protestants think the saint stuff is absurd and even creepy when you get into the relics. I'm not sure where it came from but I'm guessing some weird roman religion origin.

There's no reason the Catholics couldn't have invented it independently. I think that's just the human instinctive approach to religion. Lots of little per-concept semi-spiritual entities, sacred and profane objects, etc.

It could be an independent thing but it just reeks of that culture practice used in roman and egyptian times of elevating some great man e.g. emperor to the status of a god and having them be worshipped as such after death, and makes sense in terms of continuity that it might have just been adopted over inventing the same concept in the same part of the world around the same time but somehow having this be a purely independent invention. Society was already socialized for this sort of thing and support the political control of their own leadership through deep cultural ties like making them a seemingly unassailable part of the religion or some unstoppable force of nature.

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#134

Post by thewebguyd »

donohoe wrote: post #44

I love how the article is “isn’t that neat?” and never touches upon any self-awareness that perhaps many religions are nothing more than stories.

They are just stories, but narrative stories work really well for human brains when it comes to psychological transformation.

I like to think of religions as psychological technology. One doesn’t have to believe the stories are real for them to still have power. One can engage with the fantastic map of the mind that Buddhism provides without literally believing a being achieved “enlightenment” under a tree. Likewise, in the Christian tradition, the desert fathers through Hesychasm realized much of the same stuff as Buddha, and one does not need to accept the dogma as true to make use of the technology.

Humans are myth-makers, and our brains have a neat ability to use myth to enact real change. Ricoeur dubbed something similar as the second naïveté, re-engaging with faiths after a period of rigorous critical doubt, seeing them for what they actually are, stories that provide a technology for the inner working of the human mind.

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#135

Post by annzabelle »

holdit wrote: post #80
wiradikusuma wrote: post #13

"Christianity in particular has a history of absorbing other religions’ traditions" -- Tangentially related: I'm a Catholic, so I don't know much about other "distros", but the Roman Catholic Church has a long, pragmatic history of absorbing local traditions in Indonesia. It's interesting dynamic. Catholic Church is notoriously top-down and hierarchical, yet local parishes can feel entirely distinct. It's not uncommo…

>the Roman Catholic Church has a long, pragmatic history of absorbing local traditions in Indonesia. This is straight out of the Manichaeism playbook whose followers believed that a wide range of previous belief systems including Platonism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism and Christianity each had a part of divine truth in them. This allowed them to absorb a diverse set of followers and contributed to them being one of the…

Manichaeism did run into a lot of practicality challenges. In particular, the restrictions on diets and behavior for the priestly class were very extreme. No harvesting food, no stepping in puddles, strict veganism, and celibacy.

I read a few books on it for a term paper in college, and the part that most sticks out in my distant memory is that the creation myth involves a lot of what were translated in my copy as aborted fetuses.

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#136

Post by asdff »

notahacker wrote: post #127
andrewflnr wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no reason the Catholics couldn't have invented it independently. I think that's just the human instinctive approach to religion. Lots of little per-concept semi-spiritual entities, sacred and profane objects, etc.

Religious groups other than Catholics with few plausible connections to ancient Rome have independently conceived the idea of the importance of things like relics (e.g Buddhism), but it's called the Roman Catholic Church for a reason...

Of course the buddhist and the classical world were not so separated as people assumed, there was a period of cultural exchange after the conquests of Alexander and resulting greco-buddhist rump states.

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#137

Post by bztzt »

wiradikusuma wrote: post #13

"Christianity in particular has a history of absorbing other religions’ traditions" -- Tangentially related: I'm a Catholic, so I don't know much about other "distros", but the Roman Catholic Church has a long, pragmatic history of absorbing local traditions in Indonesia. It's interesting dynamic. Catholic Church is notoriously top-down and hierarchical, yet local parishes can feel entirely distinct. It's not uncommo…

Buddhism itself also has such a history, for example with the Hindu gods, or with Shinto in Japan.

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#138

Post by asdff »

xhevahir wrote: post #109
asdff wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically how christians have always operated since they first emerged and started doing the same throughout the hellenic world. Most (all?) christian traditions are pagan in origin. The main goal was not necessarily replacement but a sort of corporate ownership takeover of the littany of existing traditions, such that these cultures might be ingrained into a unified fold of christian power/influence/customs/laws/exp…

I don't think Mexico is an exception in that respect. There are some pretty significant Incan elements in the Catholicism practiced in the Andes, Vodou and Santería stuff in the Caribbean, El Tío in Bolivia, Tetri Giorgi/Uastyrdzhi in the Caucasus, and lots of others no doubt. Christianity (and Western culture) didn't demolish these beliefs and practices.

Oh absolutely. Catholicism had to be modified wherever it was spread to fit existing societal expectations in order to maintain power structures and control. There is a sort of notion I think that colonialism meant a clean slate, but it was more akin to a corporate change in ownership as many of these cultures were already dominated by local or regional feudal powers, and well structured for this sort of exchange of power between one group of ruling class elites you pay tribute to, to another.

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#139

Post by u1hcw9nx »

saimiam wrote: post #115
u1hcw9nx wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Catholics surely put great effort into bureaucracy and organization. "The devil and a friend of his were walking down the street, when they saw ahead of them a man stoop down and pick up something from the ground, look at it, and put it away in his pocket. The friend said to the devil, 'What did that man pick up?' 'He picked up a piece of Truth,' said the devil.'That is a very bad business for you, then,' said his fr…

I don’t understand this story. What lesson/joke am I seeing here?

Raw truth is liberating. The moment people turn it into rigid systems, bureaucracies, political movements, or dogmatic institutions, it gets bogged down by ego, power struggles, hypocrisy, and rules. It starts to serve the evil.

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#140

Post by b00ty4breakfast »

graemep wrote: post #63
wiradikusuma wrote: post #13

"Christianity in particular has a history of absorbing other religions’ traditions" -- Tangentially related: I'm a Catholic, so I don't know much about other "distros", but the Roman Catholic Church has a long, pragmatic history of absorbing local traditions in Indonesia. It's interesting dynamic. Catholic Church is notoriously top-down and hierarchical, yet local parishes can feel entirely distinct. It's not uncommo…

> Catholic Church is notoriously top-down and hierarchical It has a hierarchy, but it has multiple hierarchies. It is not all that top down. Bishop's ave a lot of autonomy, and most decisions are made at the diocesan level. Dioceses have their own property and funds held by their own trustees. On top of that religious orders have their own hierarchy (and property and funds etc.). Then there are the rites such as the…

>It has a hierarchy, but it has multiple hierarchies.

the Church has been "multipolar" on multiple levels for about as long as it's existed.

A very easy to parse political example from recent history is during ww2 when Croatia had the catholic fascist Ustase collaborating with Nazi Germany and Italian fascists whilst in Poland the Nazis were actively suppressing the church and sending the clergy and other religious to the concentration camps.

A theological example would be the "conflict" (and I use the term lightly) between Franciscan Scotists and Dominican Thomists wrt stuff like the Univocity of Being

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