Bible stories are the same way, we’ve just heard them a million times so they don’t seem weird
“Hey Jesus what toppings do you want for pizza?”
“Plain with cheese”
Later the disciples are eating pizza with Jesus
"“Hey Jesus why did you say you like cheese pizza when you normally order pepperoni?”
“You dumb fucks how dare you not understand my hidden meaning, I am the true pizza and you are the pepperoni, the grease is my blood”
“Oh of course, sorry boss”
“Jesus… when you say ‘get me off this fucking cross, so help me God’… is that a test? Or should we actually get you off the cross?”
( More ranting and screaming and moaning )
The disciples nod wisely at their leader’s self-sacrifice for… their sins maybe? And he will always be immortal in their hearts, because they’ve already eaten him or something.
The disciples go home, wiser and holier and warily eyeing each other in confirmation of the deeper meaning behind their saviour’s last words: “Guys, please, I’m not fucking around, get me down, please, I’m so fucking thirsty… Jesus fucking christ”
… And one day, Jesus saw a fig tree. It was not the season for figs, and so there were no figs on the fig tree. But still, Jesus wanted a fig. He was upset there were no figs, and so he cursed the tree to never bear fruit again. If he couldn’t have a fig, no one could! Probably bathed its roots in a thin stream of uric acid, I don’t know.
Point is, that fig tree never made another fig, and when his followers asked how, Jesus zipped up his pants and said “if you believe in me, you can do anything. Not only can you totally curse trees to death, you can fuckin’ teleport mountains into the ocean. That’d be sick, dude.”
- The Book of Dave, 69:66-6
Thought that one always tied back to the whole “you shall know them by their fruits” thing.
As in those who talk nice but don’t produce anything useful (like a fig tree that doesn’t produce figs, just leaves) are not really doing what Jesus said. Don’t be like the Pharisees hollering out in the streets, just love God and do good in the world.
Yes but it’s still weird because it wasn’t the right time of year for it to have fruit. The tree would have if Jesus hadnt been a dick.
Well then you’re back to Ecclesiastes. Everything in its season etc.
Idk, I was just trying to put the best argument forward, but l’m not really a fan of the New Testament in part because of its inconsistency.
There is a story in the Apocrypha (decanonized Bible books) where childhood Jesus turns another kid into a tree. I like to think it’s the same tree.
I think you’re confusing the testaments, Jesus was ultimately a great guy as far as I can tell. The God used to be extremely cruel and vengeful in the old testament, though.
This is a common misconception, if you dig into it you’ll see that God is basically the same in both old and new testaments. Nobody talked about hell more than Jesus.
Lol? Read Matthew 21:18-46
I never told you he wasn’t goofy, ay!
… my original comment was a beat for beat parody of that passage…
You’re right, I somehow must’ve been distracted when replying to your second comment and totally lost a grip on what we were talking about
In response to calling a prophet bald:
“So he turned around and looked at them, and pronounced a curse on them in the name of the LORD. And two female bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths.” -New King James bible, 2 Kings 2:24
This is the real way to turn the other cheek
Yeah, Kings is wild.
Its almost like nonsensical parables are a recurring theme in religions in general and we shouldn’t be assuming a bunch of mystical morons from a thousand years ago knew any better.
A lot of the “nonsensical” comes from translation issues.
You’re not a Hebrew farmer living in the middle east 2000 years ago, and the parable has been translated from ancient Hebrew to Greek, then to Latin, then finally into English.
The same goes for buddhist parables
I’ve read that some of these parables originally had clever word play.
That’s a really good point, thanks for bringing that up
Where have you heard them a million times? I guess you grew up in a far less secular country.
The US. I grew up in the central and southern US and the shit is (or perhaps was) inescapable.
I think I can explain. In Buddhism, you have to understand if he didn’t the last into the pizza, but from where I stand it simply is. I hope that helps.
What
If you have to ask, then you don’t know
The fool asks ‘What?’
The wise man interjects ‘What’
The enlightened silently nods and thinks ‘WTAF’
Induction technique
I suddenly feel enlightened.
Beautiful words.
I certainly recognize most of them.
Realistic yakub is frightening
Peace be upon him 🙏
The Buddhist Monk walks up to the hot dog vendor and says: “make me one with everything.”
The monk pays with a twenty, which the vendor pockets.
“Where’s my change?”
“Change comes from within.”
My favorite Buddhist tale is that of the Chinese monk Birdsnest, so called because he always hung out in a tree.
Now, Birdsnest was famous and highly regarded, and a governor heard of him and decided to seek him out. The governor travelled for days to reach birdsnest, and when he arrived, he asked “hey, birdsnest, what was it that all the Buddhas taught?” Basically, dude was asking for a one sentence summary of religion, like the famous tale of economic study resulting in the one sentence summary of “no such thing as a free lunch”.
Birdsnest answered “Don’t do bad things, only do good things.”
The governor scoffed, and said “my three year old nephew knows that!”
“Easy enough for the three year old to understand,” Birdsnest retorted, “but still very difficult for the sixty year old to do.”
A monkey was in a tree above a river and plunged into it. He came out with a fish and scurried up a tree. Once safe in its branches he said to the fish, “Holy shit, good thing I was here. You were about to drown!”
Intention without awareness can be harmful.
Another one is the two monks.
Two monks are traveling. Their sect of Buddhism doesn’t allow them to touch women. They came across a river and when they crossed it they saw a woman who capsized her canoe. The elder Monk swam to the woman and helped her to the shore. She hurt her leg so he carried her to the rest of her party.
Once they were traveling again, the younger monk continued to badger the elder Monk on why he thought it was okay to touch that woman. The elder Monk said, “I am no longer carrying that woman. Why do you insist on continuing to carry her?”
I’d never heard the former, but I adore the latter. I also really enjoy the tale of the horse that came back.
Finally some good ones, so far down the list, relayed by Fender Rinpoche no less. The best of these parables should be a bit of a brain teaser imo, have an element of surprise at least. Open up new ways of thinking about the world, and leave some room for contemplation.
Highly regarded indeed.
Add meditation and thats the succinct version of the 8fold path.
Meditation might be implicit tho, and therefore not worth mentioning.
are they just trying to fuck with white people?
Not just white people, but people in general.
That’s Hinduism, not Buddhism.
Also, Zeus
TIL the Kama Sutra is just an average Netflix show released 140 years too early.
What kinds of Netflix shows are you watching?
Buddhism is a refinement of hinduism. Kamasutra is just one part of hinduism. There are philosophies like Advaita which are more complex than entire western theosophies.
Isn’t Buddhism at least partially about a lack of desire? Buddha is enlightened, meaning he has no desires, therefore if you asked him what he wanted on his pizza, he’d be like “Eh, whatever’s fine”
I am enlightened.
I think it’s more about attachment. We suffer because we get attached to feelings, desire, etc. When we should realize, those, along with most things, are ephemeral, or “not real”. I don’t think it is that Buddhist can’t have desire or are indifferent, but that they strive for lack of attachment. That’s probably a gross oversimplification and, like most religions, there are many different sects.
There’s a difference between wanting something and preferring something. If I want something and can’t have it, I’ll suffer. If I prefer something and can’t have it, that’s fine, I’ll get something else.
Lack of desire is a metaphysical control of your realm, essentially by not wanting, you cannot truly be hurt.
The physical path is about actualizing your body through routine use. Meditation for example usually had physical exercise as that allows your breathing to take a dominant part in your brain, regardless of thoughts.
One of the coolest ways of mastering the metaphysical realm is through imagination, as some buddhist sects just imagine a holy land.
Anyways, he’d probably dislike a meat supreme.
Never thought that depression meant that I was enlightened.
Teach me your ways.
Theres a meditative practice Dr Kanojia (healthygamergg, Harvard-trained psychiatrist with hindu roots) told in one of his video talks:
Always choose your second favorite dish on the menu.
He says your enjoyment will be the exact same, or even better since you become more conscious and dont waste the experience so to speak, like you’d do with the usual ‘ol faithul’ option. Also resonates with me because you learn how to notice your desires. In modern age there’s these lustful/ignorant choices everywhere and more than ever before
Eh, I usually go with whatever is cheapest.
Zen koans are basically ancient memes.
Ryokan, a Zen master, lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening a thief visited the hut only to discover there was nothing to steal.
Ryokan returned and caught him. “You have come a long way to visit me,” he told the prowler, “and you should not return empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift.”
The thief was bewildered. He took the clothes and slunk away.
Ryoken sat naked, watching the moon. “Poor fellow,” he mused, “I wish I could have given him this beautiful moon.”
Ok that’s pretty based I’m converting to Buddhism
See the other comment for a variation of the story.
I just wish I could live naked in a little hut at the foot of a mountain.
In another telling of the story he arrives to find his meager shack ransacked by the thief and writes a koan with a broken piece of charcoal on a torn piece of parchment:
He left it right there In the window The moon
That’s translated and also my memory from a book I read 20 years ago. Do not take this as historically or literarily accurate.
idk this one at least makes sense logically as in: the conscious lifestlye helps the monk see the beauty of life while the thief is chasing material clothes that ultimately in life dont matter like that.
Most koans though usually are designed as short riddles to be not logical at all/paradoxical and make you move beyond rational thought to experience intuitive/real understanding of reality. The worst one to me is the one hand clap koan, like what does it mean - aaah!
goes like: “Two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand?”
“what is the path to enlightenment? a sesame bun” *ding *
Before enlightenment, shitpost daily
After enlightenment, daily shitpost
Buddhism’s “Life sucks? Be nice and die and you’ll get a better one” sucks but it’s still better than “you should be nice to others, but that’s too much to ask so go be as awful as you want and just regret it later and that’ll be fine”. But even that was better than whatever the fuck people are interpreting from religions these days.
Before Christianty it was also a lot of “killing people is just really fucking cool, actually”, which even as an atheist I still admit was worse.
Not that Christians didn’t.
But they made some sort-of-safe havens.
Yeah. Personally I don’t see life as being “sacred” or anything and I think people should ultimately be free to choose to end their own if they really want to (provided they also get good support for trying to deal with whatever leads to that choice) - but it kinda scares me that this “sanctity” that is attributed to life is the only thing stopping people from being casually OK with murder.
Perhaps it depends on your definition of sacred. Life is the only mechanism that we know of by which the universe understands itself. If you ascribe to free will, life is the only mechanism able to change the course of events that were initiated by the Big Bang. If you don’t ascribe to free will, then it is the only mechanism able to witness the course of events that were initiated by the Big Bang.
That seems like something worth preserving in large, even if an individual life should be ended for compassion or justice. A life doesn’t have to be sacred, but Life seems pretty sacred to me.
Agreed
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Not a relgious scholar, but which religion taught that people are not equal in the eyes of the divine?
I could believe the forgiveness thing maybe. Again, not a scholar.
The Spanish missions have entered the chat. They actually sent people back to Spain when they said “yo, maybe Jesus wouldn’t be cool with us enslaving and murdering the locals”.
“Entered the chat” is a stupid phrase.
Ok
Then came the great religion of Arabian desert which made killing people cool again.
I’m not sure if Buddhism is particularly concerned with being nice
What the actual fuck are you talking about? Go educate yourself
Excuse me, if you actually understand the path and believe the point is being “nice”, then why the fuck are you talking to me like that? And if you don’t understand the path, then again, why the fuck are you talking to me like that?
The eightfold path concerns “right” or “wise” or “virtuous” action… but what do those have to do with being “nice”?? Haven’t you heard that light and dark create one another?
There are things that cannot be communicated by reading alone.
Zen is said to be based on a “special transmission outside scriptures”
I suspect that actually looking at someone (preferably while you’re together in the same room) lets you understand things better.
The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao.
Spiritual practices are experiential; you aren’t meant to just hear them, you are meant to practice them and be enlightened through lived understanding.
To be honest Tao Te Ching reads like an edgelord fanfic.
Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding
Could be death metal lyrics
yeah a lot of Buddhist proverbs and koans are about getting us to think LESS
And when they hit you with the real stick it really hurts
If you immediately know the candlelight is fire, the meal was cooked a long time ago.
Exactly Daniel Jackson
I understood this reference.
I felt a bit sympathetic to Buddhism up to the point when I actually visited a Buddhist temple and listened to the speeches of monks.
The amount of brain rot disguised as wisdom has made me feel Christianity ain’t that bad after all.
Sorry in advance to any Buddhist out there, but it struck me how the common perception of it differs from the actual thing.
It depends really. I grew up Buddhist and things were chill. Speeches I heard at temple were just telling us to be good people, be nice to people no matter their race or gender stuff like that, don’t do harm to people or animals.
Even Abrahamic religions have good and bad spiritual leaders, some are cult like and others are just trying to get people to have decent morals.
Fair point!
Late to the party, and no offence to buddhism, but i always loved this quote from Terry Pratchett
“Master, what is the difference between a humanistic, monastic system of belief in which wisdom is sought by means of an apparently nonsensical system of questions and answers, and a lot of mystic gibberish made up on the spur of the moment?"
Wen considered this for some time, and at last said: “A fish!”
And Clodpool went away, satisfied.” ― Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
(copies the quote from https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/46982-thief-of-time?page=2 but i’m rather sure its correct, so i didn’t check my copy).
I kinda lost my interest in Buddhism when I learnt that according to traditional Buddhist lore, women can’t reach Nirvana.
When they’ve collected enough good karma, they are reborn as a man.I mean aint that different from what the old testament teaches. Not saying the choice is between Christianity and Buddhism, but I’d assume most religions have patriarchy vibes baked into them. Not that I agree with religion, I see them all as means of various levels of crowd control for the masses, and somebody trying to benefit from it, be it a spiritual leader or an orange clown.
Good for them!
I hate you for making me laugh
Surely that’s not all sects of Buddhism.
That’s like saying, “I used to be a fan of pizza until I had one in Altoona, PA.”
There’s better pizza out there.
Wow, that’s an actual place. Is that Buddha’s favorite pizza joint or something?
Look up Altoona pizza.
American cheese? What’s wrong with those people…
A lot, they also framed Luigi
Altoona pizza
Their body, their choice.
More power to them, but that is NOT what i would choose lol.
A classic cult tactic tbh. Convince people that they can divine meaning from random nonsense and they’ll convince themselves that they are more enlightened and above those around them who don’t understand.
Out of curiosity, which Buddhist tradition was this temple out of? I’ve had similar experience, but I get the feeling like Buddhist thought might be about as diverse as Christian.
It’s m8ch more doverse than Christianity, actually. Buddhism isn’t so much a religion in the judeochristian sense as a characteristic that many religions have. There are Buddhist traditions that worship gods, there are godless Buddhist traditions that worship the Buddha, and ones thay don’t even wirshio the Buddha but just think he was a pretty wise dude. Some require you to meditate daily, others to chant some mantras, and there are Buddhist traditions like Zen that worship nothing and are all about getting your head out of your ass.
Plain Buddhism was kind of a downer so they made stuff like pure land buddhism that is more of a fun afterlife version instead of hardcore OG Buddha which is like kill yourself and stop existing forever because the world is just an eternal cycle of pain and reincarnation into more pain forever.
I get it, life sucks. but I ain’t giving up. This world is gonna have to stop me.
Yeah, Zen Buddhism kinda rocks.
Aye, perhaps not in the “Judeo-Christian” sense, but a religion nonetheless.
But actually it strikes me that “Judeo-Christianity” is more about theme or literature than form. The Christians claim a common God with the Jews, but that’s mostly it. In form Christianity seems more Greco-Roman than Judaic to me.
“Greco-Romo-Christan” maybe?
How does a monotheistic religion whose prophet explicitly claimed to be part of the succession of Jewish prophets and to have “come to confirm” their teachings seem more like a polytheistic religion where gods aren’t known for using prophets to send messages to the people to you? Serious question. I’m intrigued.
There are definitely elements of Christianity that mimic Greco-Roman (and other, older) mystery religions. Down to celebrating their deity’s birth at the same time and commemorating his death and rebirth by having followers share bread and wine.
My favorite theory of the origin of Christianity is that it was a Jewish attempt to mimic the mystery religions that were popular at the beginning of the Common Era.
The central point of mystery religions like the Eleusinian Mysteries is to cultivate the mystical experience. In judeochristian theology, that experience is considered sacrilegious. Some Jews let Jesus have it and became Christians, but nobody else is allowed. And the ones we call Jewish today didn’t even let that one guy have it.
The similarities between Christianity and Greco-Roman mysticism are only surface-level and were a marketing ploy to gain followers. In its core, Christianity is still Judaism, just packaged for export. Hence why two thousand years later, Christians are still quoting the Old Testament to justify bigotry, even though they claim to be followers of the guy who said “love each other as I have loved you”.
It feels to me like there’s an inconsistency between calling Christianity “Judaism for export”, and saying that it quotes the Old Testament for the purposes of bigotry. Or maybe it just feels antisemitic, even if not deliberately so. I mean it’s not like there isn’t bigotry in the New Testament, or radical acceptance in the Old.
But also I don’t think you can argue that Christianity is a mere extension of Judaism and at the same time argue that it shouldn’t utilize Jewish text.
Care to give any examples ?
As a Buddhist it definitely varies like any religion. There are some bozo temples out there
Don’t blame the religion, blame the people.
Buddhist or Christian, people love brainrot.
The hungry tiger jataka is my favorite
"One day, the Bodhisattva and one of his disciples decided to take a stroll in the forest nearby. This had become a regular practice. They often went for strolls.
While they were walking, the Bodhisattva notices something extremely terrifying. He saw a tigress, which looked weak and hungry. The tigress was about to devour her own cubs. Now, that moved the Bodhisattva’s heart. He did not want the poor animal to suffer the guilt of eating her own cubs. So, he came up with an idea.
He sent his disciple back to do something. The Bodhisattva had decided that he would offer himself as food to the starving tigress. He simply could not let her eat her cubs. And he knew if his disciple had seen this, he would definitely stop the Bodhisattva from offering himself. You may also like to read, The Tiger And The Golden Bangle.
After the disciple is gone, the Bodhisattva approached the tigress. With the utmost compassion in his heart and no malice, he let the tigress devour him. The tigress ate him and fed the cubs as well. After a while, the disciple returned. When he saw the Bodhisattva’s blood stained clothes, he realized what had happened.
He knew the Bodhisattva well. So, he knew the hermit had offered himself to save the tigress. He went back and told his fellow disciples of the Bodhisattva’s sacrifice out of love and compassion. "
I think I figured out why Bodhisattvas went extinct.
Nah, they just get reborn. Like, ping
The problem is that tigers have a taste for Bodhisattvas now.
Happens to me all the time
Upon seeing the blood stained clothes, the disciple said ‘Hey I was hungry, too! Fucking weirdo.’
The disciple was named Colonel Sanders and this was his inspiration to invent the hamberder and never be hungry again.
This guy doesn’t know the one about the pizza guy making him on with everything and then not giving him back and change. So he is angry cuz he didn’t get the anti joke.
One story that stands out to me is there were these warriors who fought a hundred dudes consecutively and then one guy who fought 100 of those warriors consecutively and then Buddha killed him instantly.
Dopest shit I’ve ever heard. Bastards established powerlevels before the Roman empire
He was tired from fighting all those other dudes. Of course he killed him
