You were correct. Buddha didn’t just believe in the supernatural, he argued for it against the skeptics and atheists, some of whom were early materialists and moral nihilists (Ajita Kesakambali completely rejected the notion of afterlife). It seems extremely unlikely that he wasn’t believing in the supernatural.
I was interested in what LWers have to say about Buddhism. Recently, I’ve fallen into a rabbit hole of what seems the perfect religion with minimal negative parts. After reading this post, and reading your response I discovered that I deluded myself, I have started adopting a metaphorical understanding, not very dissimilar to Christians interpreting their holy texts in insane ways.
The labyrinths of complex texts with easily extractable and molded meaning, is a big challenge.
(I am new to LW, if this comment seems low quality enough that it shouldn’t exist, please let me know)
People changing their minds is exactly the kind of comments LW exists for.
I had similar expectations about Buddhism as a “rational religion” in the past. I guess what helped me was seeing how Christianity is shown in anime, e.g. the Pope is a young guy riding a dragon, and then I started to suspect that our idea of Buddhism might be just as wrong, for similar reasons.
Also, the statements about wonderful effects of meditation remind me of Silva Method that used to be popular here when I was a kid. I spent some time doing that, but didn’t get any supernatural powers. Meditation doesn’t seem much different.
Wikipedia says it was over 400 years from the death of the Buddha, until the scriptures of the “Pali Canon” were written down. It would almost be miraculous if anything factual survived 400 years of being told and re-told by the spoken word alone.
It strikes me as false to equate low likelihood of factual validity, and any information in the scriptures is warped to the point of being false. Is this fallacious reasoning?
I think the arguments of the dissidents and contemporary critics would be warped by necessity, but their central arguments would still be expressed. A refutation cannot satisfy majority of the targeted audience if it doesn’t contain enough of the proposition’s truth.
You were correct. Buddha didn’t just believe in the supernatural, he argued for it against the skeptics and atheists, some of whom were early materialists and moral nihilists (Ajita Kesakambali completely rejected the notion of afterlife). It seems extremely unlikely that he wasn’t believing in the supernatural.
I was interested in what LWers have to say about Buddhism. Recently, I’ve fallen into a rabbit hole of what seems the perfect religion with minimal negative parts. After reading this post, and reading your response I discovered that I deluded myself, I have started adopting a metaphorical understanding, not very dissimilar to Christians interpreting their holy texts in insane ways.
The labyrinths of complex texts with easily extractable and molded meaning, is a big challenge.
(I am new to LW, if this comment seems low quality enough that it shouldn’t exist, please let me know)
People changing their minds is exactly the kind of comments LW exists for.
I had similar expectations about Buddhism as a “rational religion” in the past. I guess what helped me was seeing how Christianity is shown in anime, e.g. the Pope is a young guy riding a dragon, and then I started to suspect that our idea of Buddhism might be just as wrong, for similar reasons.
Also, the statements about wonderful effects of meditation remind me of Silva Method that used to be popular here when I was a kid. I spent some time doing that, but didn’t get any supernatural powers. Meditation doesn’t seem much different.
Wikipedia says it was over 400 years from the death of the Buddha, until the scriptures of the “Pali Canon” were written down. It would almost be miraculous if anything factual survived 400 years of being told and re-told by the spoken word alone.
It strikes me as false to equate low likelihood of factual validity, and any information in the scriptures is warped to the point of being false. Is this fallacious reasoning?
I think the arguments of the dissidents and contemporary critics would be warped by necessity, but their central arguments would still be expressed. A refutation cannot satisfy majority of the targeted audience if it doesn’t contain enough of the proposition’s truth.