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Buddhist Retreat: Why I gave up on finding my religion (2003)

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Re: Buddhist Retreat: Why I gave up on finding my religion (2003)

#31

Post by strken »

wayoverthecloud wrote: post #28

"Meditation can even exacerbate depression, anxiety, and other negative emotions in certain people." If the author had put enough serious time in meditation, he would notice that meditation doesn't exacerbate negative emotions, it just makes you aware of the negative emotions that were already there and that you were ignoring by social media, alcohol, drugs, tiktok, etc. Meditation makes you aware of where the proble…

The anecdotal claims from you and the author are the sort which I'm hesitant to believe without a study of more people.

Re: Buddhist Retreat: Why I gave up on finding my religion (2003)

#32

Post by FrustratedMonky »

DasCorCor wrote: post #24

The author is projecting his Catholic upbringing on the religion. Buddhism is not a singular hierarchical institution in the way Catholicism is. It has evolved and changed as it migrated from India through Tibet, China, Japan, then the USA. Does it have people that take bad actions - yes. Every human institution does.

Exactly. This sounds like he got exposed to some esoteric branch that itself was influenced by Christian Missionaries. Back when the east was being explored by the early colonial powers. Christian Missionaries were doing their thing, and converting all the local religions to Christianity. And out of that came a few Buddhist sects that have real Christian leanings, like the metaphysical ideas, gods, heaven, hierarchy, a perverse interpretation of karma, etc...

So if this guy got into those first, then his view of Buddhism is skewed.

"What’s worse, Buddhism holds that enlightenment makes you morally infallible—like the pope, but more so"

-> Said no Buddhist ever.

Re: Buddhist Retreat: Why I gave up on finding my religion (2003)

#33

Post by aphantastic »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #30

Anything can be done terribly wrong and misused while formally correct if approached without reason and measure. Instead of judging Buddhism, just practicing the simplest form of it by just meditating daily and consciously trying to be mindful and kind throughout every day usually does a great job. The same can be considered a simple form of Christianity as well though.

> The same can be considered a simple form of Christianity as well though.

To an uninformed external observer perhaps. But to be Christian means to accept Christ as your Lord. There is no Christianity without Christ. Not even a “simple form” of it.

Re: Buddhist Retreat: Why I gave up on finding my religion (2003)

#34

Post by FrustratedMonky »

stavros wrote: post #6
belfalas wrote: post #3

This article gave me some great laughs. It's clear that the author only studied Buddhism for four years (a very short period of time) and has some very fundamental misunderstandings of Buddhist teachings. For example, this explanation of karma: > Together, these tenets imply the existence of some cosmic judge who, like Santa Claus, tallies up our naughtiness and niceness before rewarding us with rebirth as a cockroac…

> It's clear that the author only studied Buddhism for four years (a very short period of time) This kind of response always sounds like victim-blaming to me. If your system of is so complicated that someone can't even hope to get the basics right in four years of study, maybe the right thing to do is, in fact, to ditch it.

NO, not victim blaming. Where is the victim? And where is the blame?

But it does read like someone that has just gotten into Buddhism recently, has become lost in the 1000's of different sects and writings, and his 'takeaways' after a brief exploration seem very wrong. He is arguing against Buddhism for things that aren't Buddhist, more misunderstands of something he heard once, and sounded Christian.

Since in Buddhism there is no central authority, and every monk can write up some hot take on their views. It can be very difficult for newbies to wade through it.

Re: Buddhist Retreat: Why I gave up on finding my religion (2003)

#35

Post by makeitdouble »

aphantastic wrote: post #33
qwerty456127 wrote: post #30

Anything can be done terribly wrong and misused while formally correct if approached without reason and measure. Instead of judging Buddhism, just practicing the simplest form of it by just meditating daily and consciously trying to be mindful and kind throughout every day usually does a great job. The same can be considered a simple form of Christianity as well though.

> The same can be considered a simple form of Christianity as well though. To an uninformed external observer perhaps. But to be Christian means to accept Christ as your Lord. There is no Christianity without Christ. Not even a “simple form” of it.

You could define Christianity as believing in Christ, bust more and more people consider themselves somewhat Christian without any of the Bible setup.

> Although many non-practicing Christians say they do not believe in God “as described in the Bible,” they do tend to believe in some other higher power or spiritual force in the universe.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/05/29/10-key-fi...

Re: Buddhist Retreat: Why I gave up on finding my religion (2003)

#36

Post by FrustratedMonky »

This was from 2003.

I think at the time the author(John Horgan) was a kind of a 'religion debunker', and maybe he had latched onto a few sects of Buddhism that sound kind of 'Christian' and 'debunkable'.

He has some follow up writings that indicate his views on Buddhism may have shifted.

From 2023

https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/a-buddhism-critic-goes-on...

"But I’m glad I went on the retreat. The Lama, during our private chat, said Buddhism isn’t true, but it works. Something worked during the retreat, but what was it? "

Re: Buddhist Retreat: Why I gave up on finding my religion (2003)

#37

Post by t-3 »

jdietrich wrote: post #26
xanderlewis wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not making any comment about Buddhism, but the fact that something is ‘2,500 years old’ doesn’t seem to have much bearing on its validity. There’s plenty of misguided rubbish that’s been knocking around for millennia — I would imagine Buddhism has other selling points.

The selling point for the kind of people who read HN is probably this - the similarities between what Buddhism has been teaching for 2,500 years and the state of the art in evidence-based psychotherapies are uncanny . Long before the likes of Jon Kabat-Zinn were explicitly making the connection, Beck, Adler, Low and Ellis independently rediscovered an awful lot of Buddhist principles, with only a little help from the…

It's not really anachronistic, is it? Religion and psychotherapy have been basically indistinguishable until the modern era. "Someone 2500 years ago striving to improve human mental health had some success" isn't so surprising.

Re: Buddhist Retreat: Why I gave up on finding my religion (2003)

#38

Post by tempaway646464 »

Some of these points are quite good. I've followed Buddhism quite a lot, taking the view that if you ignore the reincarnation bit (which was probably inherited from other religions in the area buddhism sprang from) then buddhism isn't really a religion at all, its more like a philosophy.

I've seen people at buddhist retreats suggest some wilds benefits to meditation (magic powers etc). Thats clearly nonsense. But one thing I've noticed about meditation (and yes, it is just sitting still) is that it makes it harder to lie to yourself. And thats really important because Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self

I think the author here is right to point out the problems of enlightenment (its a sortof fictional ideal that no-one ever achieves but we might as well critique it). The Buddhist point of view is that wanting leads to suffering and so the ideal is not to 'want' anything. But really, if you truly achieved 'not wanting anything, that wouldn't be much different from being dead. We need wants. Its more about getting wants in balance.

Re: Buddhist Retreat: Why I gave up on finding my religion (2003)

#39

Post by booleandilemma »

joyeuse6701 wrote: post #5

Pretty bad takes and pretty shallow. It seems rather obvious this person is at the beginning of understanding, which is good, and the skepticism necessary, but too bad they quit already. They’re missing out.

I guess a Buddhist telling you that you're unenlightened is the equivalent of a Christian telling you that you won't be saved.

Re: Buddhist Retreat: Why I gave up on finding my religion (2003)

#40

Post by lacy_tinpot »

whiplash451 wrote: post #10
aatarax wrote: post #8

There are many flavors of buddhism. I am partial towards the Thai Forest tradition because it emphasizes practice and experience over dogma and so avoids metaphysical discussions. > But what troubles me most about Buddhism is its implication that detachment from ordinary life is the surest route to salvation. The response from the Thai Forest would be to engage in your life skillfully while paying attention to what c…

How is that different from stoicism ? Asking genuinely.

The Greeks and Indians are closer to each other culturally than people are willing to admit. They should be considered cousins in terms of their philosophy, cultural, and religion.

That there were Greek states and colonies in Norther India/Gandhara that spoke Greek for generations is not given enough scrutiny imo. The cultural impact of that transmission not always clear outside of something concrete. Like the most obvious being the Greco style Buddhist statues in Gandhara.

So Stoicism is probably similar because of some cultural link that's lost. This is especially likely considering that the rise of Stoicism coincides with Alexander's conquest and lateral cultural contact.

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