Isn’t generalizing the entirety of Buddhism based on the actions of one or two extremist factions, kind of exactly the same thing as generalizing the entirety of Islam based on the actions of one or two extremist factions?
Looking forward to seeing the mental gymnastics that it will take to claim those two things are in any way different
Then what’s the point of this post? Because it sounds like “Buddhism bad because there’s at least one bad faction that can be identified in its entire history”
The post doesn’t say that Buddhism or Christianity are bad. Westerners are just more familiar with the fucked up parts of Christian history than the fucked up parts of Buddhist history. As a result Buddhism is sort of portrayed as this peaceful religion whose adherents do no wrong, which doesn’t survive contact with actually reading about history.
Interesting you say Westerners when my experience with the “Stop saying all religions are bad, Buddhists never did anything wrong” people are typically Asian.
Can they typically read Chinese history books? Because the person portrayed in the OP can’t. I think it’s pretty clearly implying someone from a different cultural background who is unfamiliar with Buddhist history, like most Westerners whose deepest thought about Buddhism is usually along the lines of ‘peaceful monk’.
People in the west who also know nothing about buddhism, also tend to do a lot of hand-waving and virtue signaling about western misconceptions of buddhism.
Do a lot of misconceptions about buddhism exist in the west? Yes, of course. Is every notion of buddhism entertained in the west a misconception? Not by a longshot. And unless you know which is which, it’s kind of chauvinistic to go around declaring every statement made about buddhism to be “orientalist.”
There are people in the west, both scholars and practitioners, who understand buddhism on a much deeper level than the average normie who only knows about a few miscontextualized concepts that were appropriated by the “self-help” industry. As well as on a much deeper level than the smugly dismissive not-your-average-normie who responds to every mention of buddhism with an overplayed and poorly thought-out accusation of romanticized orientalism.
This is a really bizarre set of assumptions to make based on ‘I’m pretty sure the meme is just saying the average westerner doesn’t know much about Buddhist history’, which is just true if you aren’t a religion nerd or a history nerd. Good luck with all that, though
The point is that western atheists will present Christianity and Islam as uniquely bad or wrong, and that claim something like Buddhism is somehow more acceptable because no one has committed atrocities in its name.
That is, of course a false, orientalized, view of Buddhism. A genocide is being carried out in its name now. Pointing that out isn’t to say all Buddhists are bad, that would also be orientalist. Rather, it’s being pointed out to say that you can use any ideology to justify whatever action you’d like.
And my whole point is that you can’t just point to a few examples of extremist factions who commit atrocities in the name of religions, and use that as evidence to claim the whole religion is bad.
Because it’s absolutizing, overgeneralizing, chauvinistic, and culturally imperialistic to make a claim like that.
What matters isn’t whether it’s abrahamic, vedic, or even animistic in origin. That’s beside the point entirely.
The point of the post is a reaction to people who say “Stop saying all religions are bad and lead people to violence. I’m Buddhist and we never did anything wrong!”
True Believer fundamentalists depend on the moderates to exist.
I’m not an expert on Buddhism, but I know with Abrahamics the moderates finance and enable the fundies (often without knowing), and provide them with a veneer of respectability.
Fundies are by nature parasitic. You can see this with sects of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all depend on more “practical” donors for financing and support why they do more esoteric things.
OP’s post is a reaction to people who react to people who say “all religions are bad” by saying “nuh uh, Buddhists never did anything wrong”. Your experience or lack thereof with such people will dictate whether this feels like a strawman or not.
It is most definitely not a “Buddhism is bad because some Buddhists are bad” argument.
In that case, the problem originates in playing the game thats rules are set by the ignorant in the first place.
If someone says “all religions are bad,” the proper response isn’t to engage with it as you would with a rational argument made in good faith; i.e. by perhaps offering counterexamples. Because it’s not a rational argument made in good faith.
The proper response is to reject the assertion on the basis that its an absolute statement and an overgeneralization. And then going into the ethics of such a chauvinistic, exceptionalistic, and culturally-imperialistic statement as “all religions are bad.”
The point isn’t to put any religion on a pedestal. But anti-religious bigotry doesn’t belong on that pedestal either.
chauvinistic, exceptionalistic, and culturally-imperialistic statement as “all religions are bad.”
Okay you’re gonna have to explain to me what the heck anti-theism has to do with chauvinism or imperialism or bigotry or any of those words. Cause it sounds like you’re doing an academia word salad to sound superior to others, but whose text when you parse it doesn’t really mean anything at all. Like Jordan Peterson, but leftish.
seems to be one of those people who wants to say, “ah but my particular interpretation of my particular religion is good, it’s just all the other ones that are bad”
I guess the flaw is already in the wording: (from the post) “Buddhism never did anything problematic”, Buddhism cannot do anything, people can (in the name of Buddhism)
Yeah, it seems any doctrine can be malappropriated by people who never tried to understand it and twisted toward some diabolical purpose. That doesn’t mean the doctrine at its core is flawed.
I’m against religious extremism as much as anyone else. But I’m also against generalizing entire cultures based on the actions of extremist factions. There’s no way to convince me that could be based in anything other than ignorance.
Good for you, you can hold that opinion as long as you don’t try to take away anyone’s right to following their own beliefs/religions/paths (inasmuch as they themselves are not using it to harm or oppress others, of course; but in those cases you can prosecute the extremism without persecuting the belief systems).
In case you don’t already understand this, in many places, religion is so deeply and inextricably intertwined with culture that it would be impossible for you to outlaw religion without committing cultural imperialism.
So in that since “anti-religion” can be just as dogmatic, chauvinistic, ignorant, and oppressive as religion can be.
When I said I oppose religious extremism, that includes anti-religious extremism. You don’t get a pass just because you claim your worldview is better. Everyone believes their own worldview to be the best. That isn’t justification to repress other worldviews.
In other words, if ignorance is a sin, you’re just as sinful as the rest of us. Find me the person with infinite and perfect knowledge of all that is, and I will show you someone who is sinless.
This may sound absurdly simplistic but think about it. Suppose (to take the most improbable example) you decided, or were told and chose to believe the world was created by an invisible entity who, despite all the evidence that he or she occasionally disliked us but was mostly indifferent actually loved us and thought about us all the time . Suppose, piling absurdity upon improbability, you also decided, or were told to believe , that this same person decided to split himself in two and turn one part of himself into an ordinary person like you and me and pay a visit to a desert tribe and get himself arrested and executed for treason, at which point he performed a conjuring trick, came back to from the dead, vanished mysteriously but planned to return and punish all the bad people and make everything nice (though in the meantime, the bad people could go on getting away with it and the good people go on getting buggered up by the bad people-that is, when they were not getting cancer, or run over or bankrupt. Or tortured, of flogged or were worked like beasts or raped or killed in power struggles which were nothing to do with them) Suppose you were misguided enough to believe that lot. What you would do?
Would you devote all your spare hours to finding someone who would disabuse of these intently peculiar delusions, so that you could finally sleep at night? Or would you go, once a week or more, to listen to someone telling you that you were quite and every thing you believed was true and what’s more, if you ever stopped believing it, terrible things would happen to you even after you had died?
Okay, first of all, what does anything you just said have to do with buddhism?
I’m familiar with evangelical christian religious trauma. I spent a large chunk of my twenties recovering from that, and I’ve become pretty good at spotting it in real time. You don’t have to convince me of its toxicity.
But that leads me into my second point: as long as those people aren’t hurting/abusing/oppressing/exploiting others, I don’t give a shit if they trade the one life they’re given for a mediocre existence because they’re scared of what the preacher says will happen to them otherwise. I mean I can feel compassion for them, but I can’t help them unless they want to be helped. And the moment someone like that indicates that they’re ready to leave the cave of ignorance, I’ll take them by the hand and lead them out, as far as I can at least, because ultimately that’s a path they’ll have to walk themselves.
I don’t go so far as to believe I need to destroy religion. Because as I’ve already said, that’s as chauvinistic and intolerant as it is exceptionalist. And it will only perpetuate cycles of animosity, fear, and hatred; which does not cultivate understanding or bridge gaps or reduce ignorance. Quite the opposite.
Now, if someone is hurting/abusing/oppressing/exploiting others, then they should be held accountable for those harms. That’s whether they do it in the name or religion or anything else, including if they do it in the name of anti-religion.
What is your solution to the paradox of tolerance? If you believe in a permissive tolerant society, as you appear to, then do you not see a danger where by tolerating the intolerant, we allow them to grow and become stronger, to the point where they could drag us back to the more intolerant and judgemental times of our societies’ recent past?
Yeah, it’s a military coup, and they’re killing Buddhists too. But of course they found some fake buddhists to side with the junta to try to try and lend it some semblance of legitimacy.
So people are latching onto that and trying to say it’s Buddhism’s fault, because I guess that sounds edgy?
They’re doing a genocide of Muslims.
Isn’t generalizing the entirety of Buddhism based on the actions of one or two extremist factions, kind of exactly the same thing as generalizing the entirety of Islam based on the actions of one or two extremist factions?
Looking forward to seeing the mental gymnastics that it will take to claim those two things are in any way different
They aren’t? That’s why we don’t say all Muslims are the same as the Taliban or all Christians the same as MAGA.
Then what’s the point of this post? Because it sounds like “Buddhism bad because there’s at least one bad faction that can be identified in its entire history”
The post doesn’t say that Buddhism or Christianity are bad. Westerners are just more familiar with the fucked up parts of Christian history than the fucked up parts of Buddhist history. As a result Buddhism is sort of portrayed as this peaceful religion whose adherents do no wrong, which doesn’t survive contact with actually reading about history.
Interesting you say Westerners when my experience with the “Stop saying all religions are bad, Buddhists never did anything wrong” people are typically Asian.
Can they typically read Chinese history books? Because the person portrayed in the OP can’t. I think it’s pretty clearly implying someone from a different cultural background who is unfamiliar with Buddhist history, like most Westerners whose deepest thought about Buddhism is usually along the lines of ‘peaceful monk’.
People in the west who also know nothing about buddhism, also tend to do a lot of hand-waving and virtue signaling about western misconceptions of buddhism.
Do a lot of misconceptions about buddhism exist in the west? Yes, of course. Is every notion of buddhism entertained in the west a misconception? Not by a longshot. And unless you know which is which, it’s kind of chauvinistic to go around declaring every statement made about buddhism to be “orientalist.”
There are people in the west, both scholars and practitioners, who understand buddhism on a much deeper level than the average normie who only knows about a few miscontextualized concepts that were appropriated by the “self-help” industry. As well as on a much deeper level than the smugly dismissive not-your-average-normie who responds to every mention of buddhism with an overplayed and poorly thought-out accusation of romanticized orientalism.
This is a really bizarre set of assumptions to make based on ‘I’m pretty sure the meme is just saying the average westerner doesn’t know much about Buddhist history’, which is just true if you aren’t a religion nerd or a history nerd. Good luck with all that, though
The point is that western atheists will present Christianity and Islam as uniquely bad or wrong, and that claim something like Buddhism is somehow more acceptable because no one has committed atrocities in its name.
That is, of course a false, orientalized, view of Buddhism. A genocide is being carried out in its name now. Pointing that out isn’t to say all Buddhists are bad, that would also be orientalist. Rather, it’s being pointed out to say that you can use any ideology to justify whatever action you’d like.
And my whole point is that you can’t just point to a few examples of extremist factions who commit atrocities in the name of religions, and use that as evidence to claim the whole religion is bad.
Because it’s absolutizing, overgeneralizing, chauvinistic, and culturally imperialistic to make a claim like that.
What matters isn’t whether it’s abrahamic, vedic, or even animistic in origin. That’s beside the point entirely.
The point of the post is a reaction to people who say “Stop saying all religions are bad and lead people to violence. I’m Buddhist and we never did anything wrong!”
Not really.
True Believer fundamentalists depend on the moderates to exist.
I’m not an expert on Buddhism, but I know with Abrahamics the moderates finance and enable the fundies (often without knowing), and provide them with a veneer of respectability.
Fundies are by nature parasitic. You can see this with sects of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all depend on more “practical” donors for financing and support why they do more esoteric things.
OP’s post is a reaction to people who react to people who say “all religions are bad” by saying “nuh uh, Buddhists never did anything wrong”. Your experience or lack thereof with such people will dictate whether this feels like a strawman or not.
It is most definitely not a “Buddhism is bad because some Buddhists are bad” argument.
In that case, the problem originates in playing the game thats rules are set by the ignorant in the first place.
If someone says “all religions are bad,” the proper response isn’t to engage with it as you would with a rational argument made in good faith; i.e. by perhaps offering counterexamples. Because it’s not a rational argument made in good faith.
The proper response is to reject the assertion on the basis that its an absolute statement and an overgeneralization. And then going into the ethics of such a chauvinistic, exceptionalistic, and culturally-imperialistic statement as “all religions are bad.”
The point isn’t to put any religion on a pedestal. But anti-religious bigotry doesn’t belong on that pedestal either.
Okay you’re gonna have to explain to me what the heck anti-theism has to do with chauvinism or imperialism or bigotry or any of those words. Cause it sounds like you’re doing an academia word salad to sound superior to others, but whose text when you parse it doesn’t really mean anything at all. Like Jordan Peterson, but leftish.
seems to be one of those people who wants to say, “ah but my particular interpretation of my particular religion is good, it’s just all the other ones that are bad”
I guess the flaw is already in the wording: (from the post) “Buddhism never did anything problematic”, Buddhism cannot do anything, people can (in the name of Buddhism)
Yeah, it seems any doctrine can be malappropriated by people who never tried to understand it and twisted toward some diabolical purpose. That doesn’t mean the doctrine at its core is flawed.
I’m against religious extremism as much as anyone else. But I’m also against generalizing entire cultures based on the actions of extremist factions. There’s no way to convince me that could be based in anything other than ignorance.
"
Good for you, you can hold that opinion as long as you don’t try to take away anyone’s right to following their own beliefs/religions/paths (inasmuch as they themselves are not using it to harm or oppress others, of course; but in those cases you can prosecute the extremism without persecuting the belief systems).
In case you don’t already understand this, in many places, religion is so deeply and inextricably intertwined with culture that it would be impossible for you to outlaw religion without committing cultural imperialism.
So in that since “anti-religion” can be just as dogmatic, chauvinistic, ignorant, and oppressive as religion can be.
When I said I oppose religious extremism, that includes anti-religious extremism. You don’t get a pass just because you claim your worldview is better. Everyone believes their own worldview to be the best. That isn’t justification to repress other worldviews.
In other words, if ignorance is a sin, you’re just as sinful as the rest of us. Find me the person with infinite and perfect knowledge of all that is, and I will show you someone who is sinless.
This may sound absurdly simplistic but think about it. Suppose (to take the most improbable example) you decided, or were told and chose to believe the world was created by an invisible entity who, despite all the evidence that he or she occasionally disliked us but was mostly indifferent actually loved us and thought about us all the time . Suppose, piling absurdity upon improbability, you also decided, or were told to believe , that this same person decided to split himself in two and turn one part of himself into an ordinary person like you and me and pay a visit to a desert tribe and get himself arrested and executed for treason, at which point he performed a conjuring trick, came back to from the dead, vanished mysteriously but planned to return and punish all the bad people and make everything nice (though in the meantime, the bad people could go on getting away with it and the good people go on getting buggered up by the bad people-that is, when they were not getting cancer, or run over or bankrupt. Or tortured, of flogged or were worked like beasts or raped or killed in power struggles which were nothing to do with them) Suppose you were misguided enough to believe that lot. What you would do? Would you devote all your spare hours to finding someone who would disabuse of these intently peculiar delusions, so that you could finally sleep at night? Or would you go, once a week or more, to listen to someone telling you that you were quite and every thing you believed was true and what’s more, if you ever stopped believing it, terrible things would happen to you even after you had died?
Okay, first of all, what does anything you just said have to do with buddhism?
I’m familiar with evangelical christian religious trauma. I spent a large chunk of my twenties recovering from that, and I’ve become pretty good at spotting it in real time. You don’t have to convince me of its toxicity.
But that leads me into my second point: as long as those people aren’t hurting/abusing/oppressing/exploiting others, I don’t give a shit if they trade the one life they’re given for a mediocre existence because they’re scared of what the preacher says will happen to them otherwise. I mean I can feel compassion for them, but I can’t help them unless they want to be helped. And the moment someone like that indicates that they’re ready to leave the cave of ignorance, I’ll take them by the hand and lead them out, as far as I can at least, because ultimately that’s a path they’ll have to walk themselves.
I don’t go so far as to believe I need to destroy religion. Because as I’ve already said, that’s as chauvinistic and intolerant as it is exceptionalist. And it will only perpetuate cycles of animosity, fear, and hatred; which does not cultivate understanding or bridge gaps or reduce ignorance. Quite the opposite.
Now, if someone is hurting/abusing/oppressing/exploiting others, then they should be held accountable for those harms. That’s whether they do it in the name or religion or anything else, including if they do it in the name of anti-religion.
And I’m prepared to die on this hill, so…
What is your solution to the paradox of tolerance? If you believe in a permissive tolerant society, as you appear to, then do you not see a danger where by tolerating the intolerant, we allow them to grow and become stronger, to the point where they could drag us back to the more intolerant and judgemental times of our societies’ recent past?
Who exactly? Wasn’t there a military coup? What is the connection to Buddhism?
Yeah, it’s a military coup, and they’re killing Buddhists too. But of course they found some fake buddhists to side with the junta to try to try and lend it some semblance of legitimacy.
So people are latching onto that and trying to say it’s Buddhism’s fault, because I guess that sounds edgy?