Generational Dynamics World View

[pbrower2a]

(09-15-2017, 11:37 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote:

(09-15-2017, 10:51 AM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: >   Buddhist majority countries in SE Asia routinely demonstrate that
>   main stream Asian Buddhism is not the benign, "peaceful," "non
>   judgmental" force many Western adherents claim it to be. For
>   Western adherents, the main attraction of Buddhism is, that it is
>   not of direct Abrahamic origin. Ergo, it's not your (GI) parents
>   religion. Ergo, it is for the Blue Boomers who claim Abrahamic
>   religion is part of "Western Paternalistic Oppression. "

>   Although even this truism is subject to questioning, since in the
>   time line of religious development, Judaic beliefs predated
>   Buddhist ones, and the Diaspora brought Jews to the very states in
>   India where Buddhism started. A number of the Buddhist precepts
>   are identical to a subset of the 10 Commandments. Verrrrry
>   interesting.

Back in college I took a comparative religions course, and the
professor remarked that many people believe that many elements of the
story of the life of the Buddha were copied from the life of Jesus.
He added that the only problem with this belief is that the Buddha
lived several hundred years before Jesus.  (Actually, I sat in on the
comparative religions course for four semesters because it was so
fascinating and always different.  It was taught by world renowned
religions expert Huston Smith, who died earlier this year at age 97.)

I remember seeing a theory that Jesus in his missing years was a ship's carpenter on one of the many ships that plied a trade between India and Rome. Jesus would have gotten an introduction to Buddhism and adopted it to his Jewish teachings.

Quote:On the other hand, there are ancient texts in Hinduism and Judaism
that date back millennia BC, and there are known contacts between the
Babylonians and the Persians, and between the Persians and the Hindus,
and these ancient civilizations must have borrowed from one another.
The Moses concept of "10 commandments from God" is bound to be very
appealing because of its utter simplicity, and it seems very likely,
as you suggest, that it traveled to other ancient civilizations.

Except for "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" and the demand that people keep the Sabbath holy, any culture would insist upon people obeying commandments like the other eight. Murder, theft, adultery, fraudulent oaths, perjury, and disrespect for parents would rend any pre-industrial society. Covetousness? Know thy place, ye peons!

Quote:It's also very interesting that there are significant differences
between the versions of the Ten Commandments adopted by different
religions -- Catholic, Jewish, Protestant and Muslim.

https://undergod.procon.org/view.backgro...eID=000824

I shall have to look.

Quote:Whenever I write about Burma, commenters on the Breitbart site simply
cannot grasp the concept of non-peaceful Buddhists, even though
Buddhists could not possibly have conquered such huge regions of Asia
without the usual torture, rape, massacres, and genocide that all
ethnic and religious groups perpetrate in all crisis wars.  If I write
a sentence like "Buddhists are raping and murdering Muslims in Burma,"
the commenter will reinterpret this as "Muslims are raping and
murdering Buddhists in Burma."  This drives me crazy.

Although the Buddha is undeniably a man of peace, his followers need not be. It is worth remembering that the Japanese of WWII (really nasty cause) used Buddhist concepts to encourage young men to fly kamikaze missile-aircraft.

Westerners who wanted to fill a spiritual void with a religious heritage that demands comparatively little but offers them what they want (a rationale for peace in a war-torn world and an intellectual challenge that alienated intellectuals invariably crave) fit Buddhism to their values. For many that can work well.

So the Buddhism that they do not know well is better than the Christianity or Judaism that they know perhaps too well.