I know people who are Buddhists without the ideology.
Historicity of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha
- Thread starter Cypress
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Dutch Uncle
* Tertia Optio * Defend the Constitution
Rolled in a doobie?
Margot
Verified User
Nice.
I remember our former governor Moonbeam Brown spent time in Japan studying Zen Buddhism. I kind of respected that about him; even though he was a practicing Catholic, his life was wide open to continuing his spiritual journey.
Online encyclopedias or AI are good starting points for opening up a topic for discussion, or as an independent corroboration of one's claims when other posters don't believe them.
We're not in Harvard graduate school here, it's not necessary to dig up obscure scholarly articles from academic journals every time we want to provide a backdrop for discussion, or to cite reference material.
Wouldn't that have made Moses stoned?
Dutch Uncle
* Tertia Optio * Defend the Constitution
While Zen is a religion, it's also a philosophy. As a philosophy, a person can be a devout Catholic, but also a follower of Zen.
One story Alan Watts told when he was still learing about it was meeting a Zen master. They had a nice chat and then Watts said something like "We should get together for lunch sometime". The Zen Master's response was "Why not do it now?" It was the spontaneous nature that caught his interest.
Again, not the negative aspects of impulsivity, but the conscious choice of living in the moment. Remember the past, look toward the future, but live in the present.
Consider MAGAts and other people who are perpetual victims. They live in the past. They focus upon past wrongs, blaming others for past actions and nurturing grudges.
Conversely is the person who lives in the future: I'll be happy if I can get that promotion, buy that dream car, live in a McMansion. By constantly living in the future, they'll never be happy since they'll always be chasing a bigger promotion, a fancier car or a bigger house.
Note that none of those examples involved religion. All involved a personal philosophy of how to live their lives.
Margot
Verified User
Hopefully!
Interesting. That would be consistent with overall Buddhist doctrine, which is to eliminate desires and regrets from your life.
Dutch Uncle
* Tertia Optio * Defend the Constitution
Agreed 100%. The power of Internet is Al Gore's "Information Highway"; the ability to look up information and learn something without having to go to the library and find an encyclopedia or taking a class in a brick and mortar school.
The Khan Academy is one way this ideal was realized. Doom Scrolling and only looking up those things that support their confirmation bias is not.
The people who complain about Wiki are the first to complain about TikTok being banned. Go figure. LOL
While TikTok can be a good tool, but unlike Wiki, it doesn't link references. Good for teaching someone how to make jalapeno poppers, not so good for teaching the history of Vietnam.
For 25 hours and five minutes, Mr. Booker, who will turn 56 this month, did not sit or exit the Senate chambers to eat or use a bathroom. His speech broke, by nearly an hour, a record set 68 years ago by Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, a segregationist who at the time was trying to block civil rights legislation.
Americans noticed. The social-media-savvy senator streamed the speech live on his TikTok account, where it garnered more than 350 million “likes.” And more than 110,000 people were watching on YouTube when Mr. Booker ended his speech in much the same way he began: with an homage to a mentor, the civil rights pioneer John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat who spent three decades in Congress.
Cory Booker’s 25-Hour Senate Speech Strikes a Chord in New Jersey
Many Democrats, including in Mr. Booker’s home state of New Jersey, reveled in his stamina and moxie as he assailed President Trump in the longest Senate speech on record.www.nytimes.com
Congress passed a law shutting down TikTok, and President Trump flouted it. Congress required advance notification for removing inspectors general, and the Trump administration fired them on the spot. Congress approved trillions of dollars in spending, and Mr. Trump ordered it frozen unless the federal programs receiving it passed his ideological litmus tests.
The new administration is quickly demonstrating that it does not intend to be bound by legal niceties or traditional checks and balances in its relationship with Congress. That has alarmed Democrats but drawn shrugs and approval from Republicans, who say that Mr. Trump is delivering what he promised even if it comes at the expense of Congress’s authority and constitutional status as a coequal branch of government.
Trump Kicks Congress to the Curb, With Little Protest From Republicans
The administration is showing it doesn’t view the House and Senate as equal partners. So far, Republicans, who hold both majorities, are accepting their new status.
When George Hornedo, 34, was still deciding whether to run in the Democratic primary for Indiana’s seventh congressional district against longtime incumbent André Carson, a party elder looked him in the eyes and said: “You are gonna get hurt.”
Hornedo went home that day and posted a TikTok video recounting the encounter. According to him, it highlighted the reality of the Democratic party.
“The people in charge don’t just fight Republicans, they fight anybody who challenges them,” Hornedo said. “That’s not democracy, that’s machine politics.”
‘They got us into this’: Indiana Democrat says party leaders cannot lead fightback
George Hornedo is one of many young insurgents challenging party’s status quo across USwww.theguardian.com
Agreed.
Confirmation bias is a pandemic. Most people only read what they already know they are going to agree with beforehand.
Denis Diderot is justifiably famous for democratizing knowledge and creating the first Encyclopedias, so that knowledge would be available and easily accessible to everyone -- not to just the people who had the time to go to the University of Paris and wander the library to find some obscure academic journal.
Dutch Uncle
* Tertia Optio * Defend the Constitution
Sadly true. It proves there's a sad lack of critical thinking being taught to Americans in school, at work and by our governments from local all the way to DC.
Instead, Americans be being fed the equivalent of disinformation heroin. Get'em hooked on one idea, such as "Inflation was all Biden's fault" then keep feeding it to them until they can think of nothing else.
It goes with the idea of one of MAGA's biggest heroes:
"If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself."