[FRIAM] cafeteria buddhism

[glen ☣]

The recent mentions of various aspects of Buddhism by RobertW, Marcus, and Steve, and my perhaps too flippant rejection of it, got me wondering.  I started seriously doubting Americanized Eastern religions after/while reading Tao of Physics so long ago.  But I didn't think much of it after that.  I remembered it when I stumbled on someone making fun of Madonna's apparent cafeteria spirituality (circa 2000?).

I'm a big fan of syncretism. (My official religion is Holonic Pantheism in a Rhizomic Bath.)  But I worry about it quite a bit.  An analogy with numerical methods might help communicate my point.  When you express some mathematical problem and try to apply an algorithm to it, it's wise to examine the problem to see if it meets all the prerequisites assumed by the algorithm.  If you apply it inappropriately, you may get garbage, or you may get something that looks right, but isn't.  Or you may get something that works perfectly well, but then you change the problem slightly and have a false confidence in how the new algorithm will work.

Picking and choosing the yummy parts of a tradition (like Buddhism) is attractive.  E.g. many of the drugs we take that make our lives so much better were developed through purposefully harming various animals (from mice to beagles).  -- Or, more interestingly, I really _enjoy_ harming myself by drinking too many pints on the weekend. -- What are the implications of adopting concepts like Dharma without the rest of the context?


On 01/21/2017 02:21 PM, Robert Wall wrote:
> The Buddhist have their notion in the /Dharma/, which is kind of an Operators Manual for the brain. But people don't seem to WANT to live that way even though they like to decorate their homes with statues of the Buddha. 

-- 
☣ glen