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Comment by ninetyninenine | Hacker News Reader

Off topic: Im curious what’s the most prominent religion among HNers? Is it different from the normal population?

Buddhism seems to be number 1 after atheism which isn’t a religion.

I'd suggest "cultural Christianity" as the most likely candidate, possibly followed by "cultural Hinduism" and "cultured Buddhism". In short, I don't think the average participant on this site is directly religious but nearly all are inculcated in the religious traditions of the place they grew up in and carry those traditions - minus the supernatural aspects - with them whether they like this or not. The "cultured Buddhism" bit is related to those picking up "fashionable religions" which they wear as if they are clothes - optional accessories which can be discarded when they no longer serve their purpose.

As to myself I'd say I fit in the first category, having been through Catholic schools and a Jesuit college without the religious aspects really making an impact from a very young age onwards. I may not believe in any gods but I understand why some people do and I mostly like the society built around those ideas, especially when compared to other societies built around other ideas like Islam, Confucianism or Animism. I dislike the negative aspects of organised religion which range from free-ranging paedophile priests in Catholic churches to the "mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers" attitude of the likes of Erdogan just like I dislike the negative aspects of party politics and consider the two to have a lot in common.

While non-religious and religious are reasonably disjointed sets, atheism is not disjoint with religious. That is the set containing the union of atheist with religious is not the null set.

That's right. There are religions without any gods, so they are atheistic, but they still have other religious beliefs.

And there are many people that continue to be religious even after becoming atheists. "The little book of atheist spirituality" from André Comte-Sponville, touches on this subject, and many others. I'm would also call myself an atheist-catholic.

I remember a joke in the book where two rabbis are discussing the issue of god's existence during the supper, at the end, they both agree that god must not exist and then go to sleep. At the next day one rabbi finds the other doing his early prayers and confounded asks him why he is praying if there is no god, to which the other one answers "what does praying has to do with god?".

I like the one that goes "why did god create the universe? because he didn't have a choice".

Right. I actually meant what you said. What I said is a mistake.

Psychedelics bypasses religion and ushers you to spirituality via secret shortcut. Warning on box: "Some assembly required."

Vim

How about "waiting to see which AI god emerges supreme"?

startups.

Buddhism isn't a religion either... or is that what you meant?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism

"Buddhism, also known as Buddha Dharma, is an Indian religion"

Buddhism is both religion and not religion. Most of the core ideas are not metaphysical, and most modern (certainly western) practitioners don’t engage with the metaphysical (what most would consider to be “religious”) aspects at all.

Having come from a conservative Christian religious background (and finding I was wholly incompatible with it), I avoided anything even remotely resembling religion for most of my 20s.

It wasn’t until my mid 30s that I went down the Buddhism rabbit hole and what I found was entirely unlike what I expected based on my former experience with western religion.

There are also many forms of a Buddhism with varying positions e.g. Zen Buddhism is explicitly non-religious, tapping into the core insights without asking the practitioner to believe anything.

Scientifically religion is a much wider concept than the protestant christian tradition of centering belief, sola fide and so on.

This is almost exactly the path I went down as well, except on a shorter timeline.

However, I believe Zen Buddhism is one of the more ritualistic versions, as opposed to 'Secular Buddhism', which removes the spiritual aspect for a more personal philosophical take on some of the core principals.

A couple of the principals of Secular Buddhism resonate with me in particular:

- Karma is not some metaphysical storage of actions, but instead just consequences. If you constantly speed everywhere, eventually you'll probably end up with a ticket - Thats your "karma" (consequences) of your own actions you chose to take.

- Rebirth is instead interpreted as the rebirth of the self, in that each living moment you are not the same person you were a moment ago. The idea is that in striving to be a better person, you are 'reborn' as a better version of yourself in each moment which compounds over time. Almost like the "1% rule" where your goal is to be 1% better in some aspect than you were yesterday.

Funny that you mention this definition straight from the book, this is one of the themes that are quite intertwined in the book as well. My impression is that humans in the search of enlightenment (for the lack of other word, i.e the reason you get into a religion in the first place) get too attached to their -ism and forget about what exactly were the actions of the person that created it and what were they trying to solve.

For a book with similar tongue in cheek philosophical take on the theme "religion on a first person account" I recommend "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ" by Jose Saramago.

Asking whether Buddhism is a religion is like asking if Christianity is homophobic. You can point to parts of the scriptural canon where it indubitably is, and you can point to practitioners who clearly subscribe to a version of it that is, but not everybody who practices it or makes it a part of their lives subscribes to every part of it indiscriminately. Anybody who engages with it as an influence on their own lives, as opposed to keeping it at an academic arm's length, inevitably starts to make their own version(s) of it, even if they don't intend to, because any two people's understanding will be conditioned by two different cultural backgrounds, two different personal histories, two different ongoing experiences, and two different sets of relationships to other people.

When I was Christian, we didn't want to call our system a religion.

Years later when I was exploring Buddhism, no Buddhist I met wanted to refer to Buddhism as a religion.

So the mentality seems to be that everything else is "religion" and what "we" have here is something deeper.

I don't think it's common for Christians not to consider Christianity a religion. At least not where I grew up, in the American bible belt.

Although I can see how calling Christianity a religion implicitly makes it equal to other religions, which Christians might be opposed to, but that doesn't seem like a mainstream point of view.

I remember Bill O'Reilly said in an argument that "Christianity is NOT a religion, it’s a philosophy."

https://youtu.be/T8yyHzA1swA

As a former Christian, I never experienced anyone avoiding the idea that we were participating in a religious system. In fact, it was a matter of pride, and part of how the church encouraged its members to differentiate themselves from the world.

> Years later when I was exploring Buddhism, no Buddhist I met wanted to refer to Buddhism as a religion.

Having spent hundreds of hours exploring this topic over the last few years, I have to point out that this is because many forms of Buddhism aren't religious at all.

The differences between Christianity and Buddhism in both the underlying philosophical ideas and the manner in which most people practice those ideas could not be more stark.

And as I mentioned in a sibling comment, Zen is a good example of an explicitly non-religious form of Buddhism.

Hinduism is similarly often described by practitioners as a "way of life" to avoid the religion label.

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