I am a Buddhist and if anyone wants to question my beliefs then they are welcome to do so...

@joefromchicago,

joefromchicago wrote:

I'm inclined to view Buddhism as a non-religion, simply because it eschews any metaphysical teleology (I'd lump it in the same category as Confucianism),

Isn't their whole reincarnation business metaphysical? There certainly is no physical reason to believe it. (Now that I've written this, I'm getting a sense that we've had this conversation before. Have we?)

1 Reply

@Thomas,

Just a quick point. Reincarnation, which involves transmigration, is a Hindu belief. Rebirth, which doesn't involve any sort of mystical transmigration, is Buddhist. They are contradictory.

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@FBM,

That seemed implausible, so I checked the all-knowing Wikipedia. But it turns out to agree with you and disagree with me. I stand corrected, and am now inclined to agree with Joe that Buddhism is not a religion.

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@Thomas,

I still don't see why some people can't use it as a religion and others as a practical philosophy. I still see the question as a false dilemma.

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@FBM,

The dilemma isn't between religion and practical philosophy. It's between religion and irreligion.

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@FBM,

The dilemma isn't between religion and practical philosophy. It's between religion and irreligion.

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@Thomas,

Practical philosophy is included in irreligion, I think. I know some Buddhists who pray to the Buddha just as if he were a god, and I know others who simply try out his ideas without any sort of worship or blind belief. I know some who practice reverence without treating the Buddha as a deity. There is plenty of room in the human mind for other categories than religion and irreligion.

Let's look at a range of Buddhisms:

Secular and philosophical:
http://www.e-reading.ws/bookreader.php/134630/Pyrrhonism.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/Buddhism-Without-Beliefs-Contemporary-Awakening/dp/1573226564

http://www.stephenbatchelor.org/index.php/en/stephen/confession-of-a-buddhist-atheist

http://books.google.co.kr/books/about/Buddhist_Philosophy.html?id=BWSYZwEACAAJ&redir_esc=y

Religious:

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/buddhist-human-pearls

http://www.einterface.net/gamini/buddhist.html

http://www.buddhamind.info/leftside/under/buddha/practices.htm

There are also cultural Buddhists who self-identify as Buddhist just because their family "always has been Buddhist," but who know little and practice less of what the Buddha taught.

Trying to put Buddhism into a neat category is like trying to nail jello to a tree. It's just not going to work out the way you would like it to.

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@FBM,

I like to think of light as consisting of wavicles.
By the way "fuzzy" thinking, as in the depictions by poets and the paradoxes of mystics (as in Eckharts' "I see God with the same eye that God sees me" can be profoundly preferrable to petty efforts at literal and logical depictions.

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@JLNobody,

Humans don't rely on or use careful reasoning nearly as much as most people seem to think they do. There's plenty of room for fuzz, and it's often a good thing. Wink

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Scientists and mathematicians have been using fuzzy sets and systems for a while:

Quote:

Before illustrating the mechanisms which make fuzzy logic machines work, it is important to realize what fuzzy logic actually is. Fuzzy logic is a superset of conventional(Boolean) logic that has been extended to handle the concept of partial truth- truth values between "completely true" and "completely false". As its name suggests, it is the logic underlying modes of reasoning which are approximate rather than exact. The importance of fuzzy logic derives from the fact that most modes of human reasoning and especially common sense reasoning are approximate in nature.
The essential characteristics of fuzzy logic as founded by Zader Lotfi are as follows.

In fuzzy logic, exact reasoning is viewed as a limiting case of approximate reasoning.
In fuzzy logic everything is a matter of degree.
Any logical system can be fuzzified
In fuzzy logic, knowledge is interpreted as a collection of elastic or, equivalently , fuzzy constraint on a collection of variables
Inference is viewed as a process of propagation of elastic constraints.
The third statement hence, define Boolean logic as a subset of Fuzzy logic.

http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~nd/surprise_96/journal/vol4/sbaa/report.fuzzysets.html

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This is not about "fuzzy thinking." You boys are playing a word game to attempt to avoid acknowledging that Buddhism is a religion. It has the central hallmakr of a religion, which is the blind faith belief in an undemonstrated premise. (I have no doubt that you'll both get into paroxysms of even more absurd word games now.)

The Buddhist believes that there is a special form of human understanding which is different from and superior to ordinary human understanding, and calls that "enlightenment." The Buddhist believes that that understanding is a attainable by the application of special methods--and only by the application of such methods. The Buddhist believes that your boy Siddhartha attained an advanced state of enlightenment which merits the honorific of "Buddha," and hence the name of your own personal, favorite dog and pony show.

Every one of these is an undemonstrated premise which must be taken on faith in order to participate in Buddhism. Bleating about "fuzzy thinking" is just a dodge to avoid acknowledging these things.

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@Setanta,

Quote:

You boys are playing a word game to attempt to avoid acknowledging that Buddhism is a religion. It has the central hallmakr of a religion

A ;ot of people have gone to the mat arguing that it is not a religion, because there is no demand that their is a supernatural entity running the show. The argument is the Buddhism is not a religion, it is a philosophy.

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I can see no reasonable argument that dictates that there is a need for a god or supreme being for a "religion" to exist.

All systems that tout a supreme being or super-human controlling power are religions...but not having that particular quality does not mean that a system is not a religion.

Buddhism is a religion...that is obvious to almost everyone except Buddhists who need to claim superiority over other belief systems. As Ican used to say, "There is something about the air of the subcontinent..."

Setanta is correct on this one.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

This is not about "fuzzy thinking." You boys are playing a word game to attempt to avoid acknowledging that Buddhism is a religion...

I never said that it wasn't a religion. It is. And it is also a practical philosophy. My argument is that to say it must be one or the other is a false dilemma. It seems to be both.

1 Reply

@FBM,

A dictionary definition of Religion is-
the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.

but as far as I know Buddhism doesn't believe in any gods?

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

...The Buddhist believes that there is a special form of human understanding which is different from and superior to ordinary human understanding, and calls that "enlightenment."

And which is attainable by perfectly mundane training. To be a physicist is a special form of human understanding, superior in certain ways to ordinary human understanding. Being a psychologist/doctor/psychiatrist/historian/philosopher, etc, are special forms of human understanding superior to ordinary human understanding in certain ways. It's mundane. You gain from it to the degree that you study and practice it, just like everything else. No magic involved.

Quote:

The Buddhist believes that that understanding is a attainable by the application of special methods--and only by the application of such methods. The Buddhist believes that your boy Siddhartha attained an advanced state of enlightenment which merits the honorific of "Buddha," and hence the name of your own personal, favorite dog and pony show.

And we believe that becoming a psychologist/doctor/psychiatrist/historian/philosopher, etc, is attainable only by the application of special methods. What's the difference? The Buddha taught a way to alleviate one's own suffering in ways that are not so different from Cognitive Behavior Therapy. Sure, Buddhism has cultural accretions and anachronisms due to it being 2 and a half millenia old, but why would anyone expect otherwise? Aristotle and Epicurus said some pretty wise and useful ****, but they also seem to have believed some pretty ridiculous ****. Should we discount everything Newton discovered because he was also an obsessive alchemist? I think not.

Quote:

Every one of these is an undemonstrated premise which must be taken on faith in order to participate in Buddhism. Bleating about "fuzzy thinking" is just a dodge to avoid acknowledging these things.

I'm currently reading the Majjima Nikaya in preparation for writing my graduate thesis. I can tell you without equivocation that faith is NOT required in Buddhism. If you like, I can track down the multiple suttas in which the Buddha said that faith is only one avenue. The Buddha's central premise was simply that one can resolve one's own stresses through mental training. Modern psychologists say much the same thing, just with different terminology. Maybe they say something like "self-actualization" instead of "enlightenment." So what?

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@Romeo Fabulini,

Romeo Fabulini wrote:

A dictionary definition of Religion is-
the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.

but as far as I know Buddhism doesn't believe in any gods?

Buddhism isn't a person, so it can't believe or disbelieve. That's an anthropomorphism. Buddhist teachings don't include a Supreme Creator God, if that's what you mean. However, it's still called an atheistic religion. A rare bird. Belief in minor deities is left up to the individual, as it's such a trivial mental phenomenon that it doesn't hamper the goal of relieving one's own stresses through the mundane meditation methods described in the suttas.

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@Romeo Fabulini,

Romeo Fabulini wrote:

A dictionary definition of Religion is-
the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.

but as far as I know Buddhism doesn't believe in any gods?

That is a definition of religion.

Are you saying it is the only one...or are you just pretending it is so you can make an invalid point?

Since you just looked it up...why not list any other definitions you see. Or would that be asking you to be too honest?

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@JLNobody,

JLNobody wrote:

Simple. Buddhism contains multiple versions; it is not a cultural monolith. It may be seen to have properties--at least versions of it do--that fit into some conceptions of the category, "religion", and it may be seen to have properties that don't fit into such categorical conceptions.

Despite your apparent need to complexify this issue, it's really very simple. Either Buddhism has all of the requisite attributes of a religion, or it doesn't. For instance, suppose a "widget" is defined as having attributes A, B, and C. Then suppose we have an unknown entity X, and we want to know if X is a widget. If X has the attribute A, doesn't have the attribute B, and kinda' has the attribute C, then we can confidently say that X is not a widget, since it does not have all of the attributes necessary to fit into the widget category.

Thus I know that a dog, which is a mammal with four legs, a tail, hair, and a cold nose, is not a cat, which is also a mammal with four legs, a tail, hair, and a cold nose, because the dog isn't a member of the genus Felis and cannot interbreed with cats. You may want to say that a dog may be seen to have properties that fit into some conceptions of the category "cat." You'd, no doubt, be viewed as slightly insane if you did so, but I suppose there's nothing stopping you from saying that a dog is kinda' a cat because they share some of the same characteristics. I question, however, whether saying a dog is kinda' a cat is at all helpful in our understanding of either dogs or cats.

And it's the same with Buddhism. If Buddhism is sorta' a religion and sorta' not a religion, it's not a religion. It may bear some of the attributes of religion, but then so do fraternities, private social organizations, street gangs, and the like, and those are rarely described as being sorta' like religions.

You want to have it both ways - you want Buddhism to be a religion and not a religion. I'm not sure why it's so important for you to straddle the fence on this issue, but there you are. I will say, however, that few Christians or Hindus or Muslims would have any doubts about whether their faiths constitute religions or not. Why Buddhists are so confused where others are so certain is, to me, an abiding mystery.

1 Reply

@FBM,

FBM wrote:

This seems to be another example of the all-or-nothing, black-or-white thinking. Nobody to my knowledge has suggested that "nothing that appears in the world can be placed into categories." Some things can be more easily categorized than others. A watermelon is a berry, not a reptile. Easy.

I agree. You might want to tell JLN that.

FBM wrote:

Is light a particle or a wave? Depends on which test you run. Categories are a product of the human mind. The rest of the world is under no obligation to conform to it. Rather the other way around, seems.

Well, yes, but then religions are products of the human mind as well.

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I am a Buddhist and if anyone wants to question my beliefs then they are welcome to do so...

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