Right Wing Discussion Thread The Fourth

[Dagashi Shojo]

heh

I don't Sam Harris has made any criticisms of Buddhism though.

I don't think he has either but that's probably because he's an illiterate who thinks Buddhism is always what appears in magazines for suburban mothers.

At least he isn't a 'Buddhist atheist' like Stephen Bachelor.

[Jochizyd Republic]

I don't think he has either but that's probably because he's an illiterate who thinks Buddhism is always what appears in magazines for suburban mothers.

I mean, he isn't wrong. It's a very popular way of life for western hipsters and upper class hipsters. Some being actual practitioners and some being hippie new age shitlords.

I meant the new age stuff.

Speaking of that, I really hate the New Age Movement.

[Nusaresa]

I don't think he has either but that's probably because he's an illiterate who thinks Buddhism is always what appears in magazines for suburban mothers.

At least he isn't a 'Buddhist atheist' like Stephen Bachelor.

I mean he isn't wrong either since Buddhism is fundamentally atheistic.

But then again yeah he is loony.

[-Fahrong-]

....

Huh.

Am I far right?

Well, no disrespect meant, but you've described yourself as such:

I'm a Far(ther) Right Winger.

But I think people of multiple ethnicities living together is fine and good. And I don't think Gays, Transsexuals, Secularists, or even Liberals should be mistreated in an ideal society.

I also think that the government should control the economy and environmental destruction is one of the biggest threats of this age.

Or, you know, liberals are also interested in racial equality and black rights too.

Shocking idea, I know.

It's almost like equality is a tenet of Liberalism in general.

'Farther Right'? Bloody hell, this is why we need to stop using left and right wing. If I hear farther right, im going to think of someone farther then far right. Though that doesnt even matter because Jochis specific beliefs dont need to be shared by others who happen to have slid to the same point on the bar that he is supposedly on. It is so utterly useless.

[Jochizyd Republic]

The New Age has (almost) ruined Rumi for me. Can't read his poetry without being angry at what other people think it means now.

Religions and Spirituality is always, at it's heart, Reactionary.

[Nusaresa]

I mean, he isn't wrong. It's a very popular way of life for western hipsters and upper class hipsters. Some being actual practitioners and some being hippie new age shitlords.

I meant the new age stuff.

Speaking of that, I really hate the New Age Movement.

Well it's a matter of accessibility, neoliberal capitalism, and the information age actually. There isn't anything particularly harmful or dangerous about it, it's just that they tend to take things out of context and damages reputability of certain faiths and lifestyles.

In fact I'd say the main reason why meditation (and yoga from Hinduism) is such a big thing and why it's used more often (as it should, for health benefits) is thanks to New Age-y beliefs.

[Dagashi Shojo]

At least he isn't a 'Buddhist atheist' like Stephen Bachelor.

I mean he isn't wrong either since Buddhism is fundamentally atheistic.

But then again yeah he is loony.

Buddhism is filled with accounts of deities, titans, spirits, and hellbeings. It doesn't have to believe in a permanent monotheistic God to be theistic. Of course, a Buddhist could reject most of those as myths, but Bachelor essentially wants to reduce Buddhism to some nice meditative exercises. You can remove deities from Buddhism, but remove the element of rebirth, and it loses next to all of it's meaning.

[Ashkera]

I mean, he isn't wrong. It's a very popular way of life for western hipsters and upper class hipsters. Some being actual practitioners and some being hippie new age shitlords.

I meant the new age stuff.

Speaking of that, I really hate the New Age Movement.

Like whatever, man. You're just upset that Syncretic Buddochristohinduslam doesn't exactly match your preferred, like, aesthetics. You need to vibrate some crystals and tap a chill gong, brah.

[Nusaresa]

Well, no disrespect meant, but you've described yourself as such:



It's almost like equality is a tenet of Liberalism in general.

'Farther Right'? Bloody hell, this is why we need to stop using left and right wing. If I hear farther right, im going to think of someone farther then far right. Though that doesnt even matter because Jochis specific beliefs dont need to be shared by others who happen to have slid to the same point on the bar that he is supposedly on. It is so utterly useless.

language is terrible let's remove it and use pictures and sign language instead

The New Age has (almost) ruined Rumi for me. Can't read his poetry without being angry at what other people think it means now.

it has always been ruined for me

in fact i was /this/ close to being a new age shitlord due to rumi and some dude who pestered me about rumi

[The East Marches]

I'm on mobile, will be home after train ride shortly. It's econ war time. Get your 1913 trash ready.

I have often been called a financial wizard. The French edition of
my book of memoirs 76 Jahre meines Lebens was published under the
title Memoires d' un Magicien. The American edition has the title
Confessions of the Old Wizard. Yet the truth is that nothing in the
world has so little to do with magic as dealing with money. Money
must be handled with clear and cool calculation. Anyone who does
not obey this maxim is in danger of tying himself up in all the many
ways of earning and spending money. Money can no more be
conjured into existence than the alchemists were able to make
gold. But money has many different kinds of attributes, some of them
very intricate, so that the majority of people frequently fmd themselves
unable to understand certain fmancial transactions. For this
reason the monetary system is enveloped in a cloak of tnystery,
secrecy and magic.

Money is not always synonymous with wealth. It is true that we
call well-to-do people millionaires, and thus unwittingly link this
term with the currency concept - Mark millionaire, Dollar millionaire.
But wealth is not only money. It makes a great difference
whether a millionaire possesses one million Deutschmarks in cash
or in his bank account, or whether he owns property of t~e same
value. The difference lies in the ways in which such wealth can be
used. Money may · at any time be converted into other goods,
other properties, or other people's services, but the reverse is not true.
The magic of money lies in its protean nature, which enables it to be
used at all times, in all directions and for all purposes. This constitutes
its wizardry, its secret, its mystery, its magic.

Hardly any other object of human culture has been judged in so
many different and contradictory ways as has money. Here it is
praised to the skies, there it is cursed and condemned. For some it is
man's highest good, for others it is despicable. Yet once one has
mastered certain principles, nothing is so easy as dealing with money.
The most important of these is the difference between 'yours' and
'mine'. Many failings in the field of money occur not because of
any intention to deceive, but simply because those dealing with
money lose sight of the concept of property.

The fact that money can at any time take the place of other
material goods effaces its boundaries. Besides this, the fact that the
so-called double entry system of book-keeping has introduced
impersonal in addition to personal accounts, is confusing for the
inexperienced. To complicate matters, credit transactions, which are
indispensable in trade and commerce, make it possible to confound
present with future money. Borrowed money is never property,
is never 'mine'; it belongs to others and is thus always 'yours'.
But even the most inexperienced are sure about one thing: money
is a possession which brings many and great advantages in its wake.
In the primitive barter economy of past ages it was difficult to
accumulate extensive wealth. It was impossible to add indefinitely
to one's herd of cattle (pecus-pecunia), because the supply of fodder .
and accommodation was limited, and because cows are mortal.
But with money it was and is possible to acquire anything at any
time, and to preserve it.

The invention of money was the pre-condition for the development
of the modern national economy. Money became the epitome
of property. For this reason the need to acquire money is, next to
love, the most universal of human urges. How to make money -
this question and its attendant problems engages more of man's
thoughts and efforts than almost anything else. The correct answer
to the question is: through work and saving. But work requires
exertion, and saving means forgoing the immediate utilisation of
income - and thus privation, loss of present comforts. This requires
a strength of charactet' not possessed by everyone.

For this reason men's thoughts turn to other ways of making
money. Such ways, requiring less effort, or at least less physical
effort, and offering much scope to human fantasy, have gradually
developed in our modem economy. People are always trying to get
something for nothing - to bet, enter lotteries, speculate on the stock
exchange, and lend their savings for interest. They speculate not
only with their own but also with borrowed money. Here the
magic of money actually becomes tangible. The amount of work
involved in these ways of making money is not very great. Men
also hope for strokes of good fortune which will make them rich,
for accidental discoveries of mineral deposits, for appreciation in the
value of land, for gifts from rich benefactors, or even for pennies
from heaven. Whichever way is chosen 'everyone clamours for gold,
everything depends on gold'.

The significance of money as personal property is hot restricted
merely to man's normal day-to-day needs. Not only do monetary
riches permit a greater enjoyment of life by making it possible
to acquire the goods and services necessary to live, eat and dress well,
by enabling one to travel and to develop the mind and spirit, and
by affording the means necessary to employ one's leisure to the full;
money also gives its owner power over other people, and over the
direction of social life. All goods can be bought with money.
Money buys other people's labour which can be freely employed
for one's own social or economic purposes. Money empowers those
who wield it to make use of personal or material forces. 'If I can
afford six horses, is their strength not mine! They make me feel
like a real man, as ifl had twenty-four legs.' He who has money can
control the means of production - a fact which led Marx to demand
that these means of production should not be left in private hands,
but turned into public property - collective ownership.

[Jochizyd Republic]

I meant the new age stuff.

Speaking of that, I really hate the New Age Movement.

Well it's a matter of accessibility, neoliberal capitalism, and the information age actually. There isn't anything particularly harmful or dangerous about it, it's just that they tend to take things out of context and damages reputability of certain faiths and lifestyles.

In fact I'd say the main reason why meditation (and yoga from Hinduism) is such a big thing and why it's used more often (as it should, for health benefits) is thanks to New Age-y beliefs.

Oh I think there is something harmful and quite dangerous about it. It erodes spirituality or at the very least, the integrity of spirituality in the eyes of people.

They do to spirituality what SJWs do to good causes.

[Ashkera]

language is terrible let's remove it and use pictures and sign language instead

"Sure. ...wait, crap, we turned it back into a language again."
- Ancient China, probably

[Jochizyd Republic]

I meant the new age stuff.

Speaking of that, I really hate the New Age Movement.

Like whatever, man. You're just upset that Syncretic Buddochristohinduslam doesn't exactly match your preferred, like, aesthetics. You need to vibrate some crystals and tap a chill gong, brah.

Syncretism, Although I disagree with it, is not always like that. and it's unfortunate that it usually is in the West.

[Napkiraly]

I meant the new age stuff.

Speaking of that, I really hate the New Age Movement.

Like whatever, man. You're just upset that Syncretic Buddochristohinduslam doesn't exactly match your preferred, like, aesthetics. You need to vibrate some crystals and tap a chill gong, brah.

Never forget the chakras. Never forget the chakras.

[Nusaresa]

I mean he isn't wrong either since Buddhism is fundamentally atheistic.

But then again yeah he is loony.

Buddhism is filled with accounts of deities, titans, spirits, and hellbeings. It doesn't have to believe in a permanent monotheistic God to be theistic. Of course, a Buddhist could reject most of those as myths, but Bachelor essentially wants to reduce Buddhism to some nice meditative exercises. You can remove deities from Buddhism, but remove the element of rebirth, and it loses next to all of it's meaning.

>tfw I do that to a certain degree

Well in a way it's a way of life. The nice thing (and arguably why it's so easy to mutilated) is that Buddhism when removed from the religious orders, is something that is more like a philosophy and a method of treatment. And in a way it original started off as such. The 4 noble truths is the diagnosis of the human condition in the broadest sense.

The deities, asuras, spirits are a result of Buddhism's ability to be a syncretic faith. And in it's early stages, it was a more radical subsection of Hinduism in a way. Many concepts in Buddhism is derived from the concepts discussed in Hinduism (atman-anatman, dharma, sunyata, etc).

This was also why Buddhism almost all but vanished in India and Nepal. Because of it's syncretic properties, the majority Hindu population could simply 're-integrate' Buddhism and well, it did. The Buddha in Hinduism is another avatar of Vishnu.

[-Fahrong-]

'Farther Right'? Bloody hell, this is why we need to stop using left and right wing. If I hear farther right, im going to think of someone farther then far right. Though that doesnt even matter because Jochis specific beliefs dont need to be shared by others who happen to have slid to the same point on the bar that he is supposedly on. It is so utterly useless.

language is terrible let's remove it and use pictures and sign language instead

The New Age has (almost) ruined Rumi for me. Can't read his poetry without being angry at what other people think it means now.

it has always been ruined for me

in fact i was /this/ close to being a new age shitlord due to rumi and some dude who pestered me about rumi

No, that sounds like an awful idea!

[The New Sea Territory]

One nice example of fetishism would be this big influence of new age ideology, what I ironically call Western Buddhism. You know how even top managers in the United States today like Buddhism as their justification. The way they perceive the situation is this: All my financial activity, my business, this is just superficial, it's all a social game. The truth of my personality is in my mystical experience and so on. In reality, it's exactly the opposite. Your mystical experience or whatever, your inner journey, is a mask, something that you construct, that you leave, so that it is easier for you to work on the market. This is why, when you have this publicity for transcendental meditation courses, they first start with some kind of criticism. They say: We are crazy in our societies, we long only for money and so on, but discover your true self, discover that money and a social career do not matter. But then there is always a second paragraph where they say: But through transcendental meditation, you will be even more successful on the market. This is why I effectively think that this would then be our fetish and this is why I claim that some kind of vague oriental spirituality is becoming the predominant form of ideology. By this I mean that even if formally, the majority remains either atheist or Christian, Christianity itself is already reinterpreted in this vague oriental spiritualist way, like, the point is to realize your true self, to find peace and enlightenment and so on. This is why, for example, the Dalai Lama is so popular in the West. He is perceived as preacher of some kind of enlightened hedonism. If you open almost any book by the Dalai Lama - I check them in the bookstores - he begins with: All living beings want to avoid pain and be happy. Personally, I think that this is simply not true. We humans do everything possible not to be happy. There is this phrase from the American constitution, 'the pursuit of happiness'. No, we try to pursue non-happiness, to sabotage ourselves. But what I want to say is that this is why the Dalai Lama is so popular in Hollywood. What he promises is some kind of enlightened hedonism, in the sense of: follow our way, do a little bit of meditation and your life will be much more relaxed. You will be able to enjoy it without getting into too many traumatic experiences and so on.

[Jochizyd Republic]

At least he isn't a 'Buddhist atheist' like Stephen Bachelor.

I mean he isn't wrong either since Buddhism is fundamentally atheistic.

*Nembutsu intensifies*

[Nusaresa]

Well it's a matter of accessibility, neoliberal capitalism, and the information age actually. There isn't anything particularly harmful or dangerous about it, it's just that they tend to take things out of context and damages reputability of certain faiths and lifestyles.

In fact I'd say the main reason why meditation (and yoga from Hinduism) is such a big thing and why it's used more often (as it should, for health benefits) is thanks to New Age-y beliefs.

Oh I think there is something harmful and quite dangerous about it. It erodes spirituality or at the very least, the integrity of spirituality in the eyes of people.

They do to spirituality what SJWs do to good causes.

I'd argue that there was very little spirituality involved in Buddhism to begin with. The rest are details added after the fact through oral tradition. In Theravada Buddhism the Buddha is generally not seen as a divine being, rather a human who went through as many lives as they could have gotten through to realize that there was a way to break that cycle of suffering and 'rebirth'.

And even then, reincarnation in Buddhism is a sticky idea as it's not what most actually think it is. Buddhism discards the idea of the self and by extension a permanent soul that exists after death.

That's called cultural appropriation bruh. But then again it's only as harmful as it wants to be.

[The New Sea Territory]

Religions and Spirituality is always, at it's heart, Reactionary.

Sure, sure.

[Nusaresa]

I mean he isn't wrong either since Buddhism is fundamentally atheistic.

*Nembutsu intensifies*

Pure Land is heretical and I consider it to be theistic as all hell.

One nice example of fetishism would be this big influence of new age ideology, what I ironically call Western Buddhism. You know how even top managers in the United States today like Buddhism as their justification. The way they perceive the situation is this: All my financial activity, my business, this is just superficial, it's all a social game. The truth of my personality is in my mystical experience and so on. In reality, it's exactly the opposite. Your mystical experience or whatever, your inner journey, is a mask, something that you construct, that you leave, so that it is easier for you to work on the market. This is why, when you have this publicity for transcendental meditation courses, they first start with some kind of criticism. They say: We are crazy in our societies, we long only for money and so on, but discover your true self, discover that money and a social career do not matter. But then there is always a second paragraph where they say: But through transcendental meditation, you will be even more successful on the market. This is why I effectively think that this would then be our fetish and this is why I claim that some kind of vague oriental spirituality is becoming the predominant form of ideology. By this I mean that even if formally, the majority remains either atheist or Christian, Christianity itself is already reinterpreted in this vague oriental spiritualist way, like, the point is to realize your true self, to find peace and enlightenment and so on. This is why, for example, the Dalai Lama is so popular in the West. He is perceived as preacher of some kind of enlightened hedonism. If you open almost any book by the Dalai Lama - I check them in the bookstores - he begins with: All living beings want to avoid pain and be happy. Personally, I think that this is simply not true. We humans do everything possible not to be happy. There is this phrase from the American constitution, 'the pursuit of happiness'. No, we try to pursue non-happiness, to sabotage ourselves. But what I want to say is that this is why the Dalai Lama is so popular in Hollywood. What he promises is some kind of enlightened hedonism, in the sense of: follow our way, do a little bit of meditation and your life will be much more relaxed. You will be able to enjoy it without getting into too many traumatic experiences and so on.

>sunyata intensifies
>annata intensifies

[Jochizyd Republic]

One nice example of fetishism would be this big influence of new age ideology, what I ironically call Western Buddhism. You know how even top managers in the United States today like Buddhism as their justification. The way they perceive the situation is this: All my financial activity, my business, this is just superficial, it's all a social game. The truth of my personality is in my mystical experience and so on. In reality, it's exactly the opposite. Your mystical experience or whatever, your inner journey, is a mask, something that you construct, that you leave, so that it is easier for you to work on the market. This is why, when you have this publicity for transcendental meditation courses, they first start with some kind of criticism. They say: We are crazy in our societies, we long only for money and so on, but discover your true self, discover that money and a social career do not matter. But then there is always a second paragraph where they say: But through transcendental meditation, you will be even more successful on the market. This is why I effectively think that this would then be our fetish and this is why I claim that some kind of vague oriental spirituality is becoming the predominant form of ideology. By this I mean that even if formally, the majority remains either atheist or Christian, Christianity itself is already reinterpreted in this vague oriental spiritualist way, like, the point is to realize your true self, to find peace and enlightenment and so on. This is why, for example, the Dalai Lama is so popular in the West. He is perceived as preacher of some kind of enlightened hedonism. If you open almost any book by the Dalai Lama - I check them in the bookstores - he begins with: All living beings want to avoid pain and be happy. Personally, I think that this is simply not true. We humans do everything possible not to be happy. There is this phrase from the American constitution, 'the pursuit of happiness'. No, we try to pursue non-happiness, to sabotage ourselves. But what I want to say is that this is why the Dalai Lama is so popular in Hollywood. What he promises is some kind of enlightened hedonism, in the sense of: follow our way, do a little bit of meditation and your life will be much more relaxed. You will be able to enjoy it without getting into too many traumatic experiences and so on.

We do want to avoid pain and be happy.

But he is right about the other stuff.

[Jochizyd Republic]

Religions and Spirituality is always, at it's heart, Reactionary.

Sure, sure.

For legitimate religions anyway.

[Minzerland II]

heh

I don't Sam Harris has made any criticisms of Buddhism though.

I don't think he has either but that's probably because he's an illiterate who thinks Buddhism is always what appears in magazines for suburban mothers.

>Sam Harris
>'illiterate'.

[Nusaresa]

We do want to avoid pain and be happy.

But he is right about the other stuff.

Except enlightenment is not about finding a 'true self' and that even then, 'happiness' is transient and temporary.

aka everyone sucks at buddhism

even i suck at it since i vehemently do not believe in reincranation and further stress that it isn't important to consider anyways