(November 17, 2022 at 12:44 pm)Ahriman Wrote:(November 17, 2022 at 12:35 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: It absolutely IS Buddhism. Just as one can be a philosophical (as opposed to a religious) Christian, it’s perfectly possible to be a secular Buddhist.
Boru
Many western people think it's possible, but it's not. Buddhism requires its adherents to believe in a number of supernatural things, such as karma, "nirvana", various otherworldly realms, etc. You can't be a "secular Buddhist". That would be like, if I still called myself a Catholic despite not caring about God. Like, no?
There appear to be a number of layers to this onion.
The earlier references I made to "atheist Hindus" are to people who might not even be considered atheists on this forum. They reject the idea of the traditional Hindu gods (Shiva, Deva, etc.) but still hold to cosmological and metaphysical claims that are uniquely and recognizably Hindu. For example, they hold that there are eternal truths about the world that are metaphysical and therefore not provable by science. They probably hold that Brahman is a kind of Ground of Being, and that human thought is intrinsically tied, somehow, to this fundamental non-material eternal basis.
So if this is true, they are atheist only in the narrow sense that they don't believe in a certain kind of god, but they are certainly religious.
I would call this very different from a "cultural Catholic" who rejects all the supernatural or metaphysical teachings of the church, but who still wants the cultural and aesthetic aspects of the religion in his life. I can understand the appeal of this, though to be strict it might be seen as a kind of cosplay.
I don't think that "cultural Catholics" are the same as secular Jews, since Jewishness is also an ethnicity. (Though I understand that there are very strict Jews who deny that an atheist can be a real Jew -- so there is still disagreement.)
