Mike Dulak grew up Catholic in Southern California, but by his teen years, he began skipping Mass and driving straight to the shore to play guitar, watch the waves and enjoy the beauty of the morning. “And it felt more spiritual than any time I set foot in a church,” he recalled.

Nothing has changed that view in the ensuing decades.

“Most religions are there to control people and get money from them,” said Dulak, now 76, of Rocheport, Missouri. He also cited sex abuse scandals in Catholic and Southern Baptist churches. “I can’t buy into that,” he said.

      • Cosmonauticus@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I wish you ppl would stop with your fetishization for any religion outside of the Abrahamic ones. Sikhs are just like any group of ppl and have committed fucked shit in the name of their ideology. Imperial (let’s invade and massacre Asia) Japan was Buddhist who used it as justification for nationalism, violence, and persecution. Which sounds pretty damn similar to what Jews, Muslims, and Christians do/did. And let’s not forget Hindu nationalism and their problematic caste system

        And no this isn’t a bashing of religion as a whole because I personally find the argument that religion is the root of all evil as childish. I have no issues with anyone believing anything they want. It only becomes a problem when you feel the need to impose your belief on others. EVERY group including religion, race, class, ethnicity, sex, political party, etc is guilty of that

        • snooggums@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          The non-Abrahamic religions stick with thr peace and love parts in the US because they are not the dominant religion. Any religion ends up being cooped into being used to justify violence when it is on top even when the core tenets are supposed to be peaceful and accepting.

          This also tends to be true of most human organizational structures, but religion adds a layer that make it easier for members to accept extreme behavior by the people in their group.

        • amanneedsamaid
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          1 year ago

          Buddhism was probably 10% the justification for nationalism that Shinto was in Japan, so that’s a pretty bad example.

          Also, using Buddhism to encourage nationalism ≠ Buddhisms fault

            • amanneedsamaid
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              1 year ago

              I would make the same argument, and say that radicalized religion is the issue, not religion itself.

              Most every religion becomes radicalized over time, but that doesnt define the inital religious teachings.

              So yeah, Christian nationalism ≠ Christianity’s fault.

        • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Moralists with authoritarian leanings are the problem.

          Plenty of those around nowadays who, instead of a religions, latch on to some well meaning cause and then proceed to try and shove other people around under the cover of said cause, bringing along the more tribalist (hence unthinking and easilly manipulated with the right words) members of the cause, all the way to pretty much pogroms and purges (though, fortunatelly, not normally involving killing people).

          Whilst the vehicle (religion, some ideologies, politics, any “cause” supposedly beyond questioning including nationalism), being something that most people follow in a mindless way is ideal for such subvertion and abuse as an easy source of supporting usefull idiots for people indulging their lust for power over others) the reall problem is, IMHO, a certain type of individual who will seek social situations they can abuse to be powerful (all the way down to the school social bully who uses connection rather than physicallity to have power over others), so it’s really such people we should be weary of and alert for rather than their chosen vehicles.

          • Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            Yeah absolutely, and the problem is they’ll always find an excuse - someone on here recently argued to me that since we punch Nazis we should also punch people who use words like ‘unalive’ because it’s an attack on our culture - he was being entirely serious too.

            You can see people rubbing their hands in glee at every climate change story too and it’s scary, I’ve been involved with a lot of green groups and eco-positive movements which are full of wonderful people who really care about making a better world - then there are overly online lunatics who never lifted a finger to help native species or anything like that but have decided it’s a wonderful excuse to live out their most destructive and hateful fantasies.

            Religion is a way of harnessing that awful impulse in people and using it for the benefit of a small theocratic aristocracy, it’s a way of saying ‘you can get away with being the awfull person you want to be if you do it in the name of our gang and to our enemies’

        • barsoap@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Buddhism has a talent for conversion by syncretism. Tibetian Buddhism is Buddhism meeting Tibetian Shamanism, Chan/Zen is Buddhism meeting Taoism (which already was very close), both Therevada and Mayayana are rather more Hindu, and what we’re seeing in the west is Humanist/Christian, depending on the practitioner. A good dividing line might be belief in reincarnation: Legit Atheists don’t care, hell-conditioned folks find relief, whereas originally the whole thing was Hindu and Buddhism calls it dhukka (suffering, also mind that it’s tied into the caste system) and promises a way to break out of it. So what was a jail in one context serves as a comfy blanket in another.

          In that sense it’s very much a mistake to see Buddhism as a uniform whole, or western adoption as appropriation or fetish, or really infer terribly much about one strain of Buddhism from the other.

          Then, second note: All those eastern things should be compared, if you want to compare them properly, not to western religion or churches but to that and the whole philosophical heritage dating back to at least Socrates. And gods know in that context we don’t need religion to fuck up, we’re still recovering from Descartes and like to ignore inconvenient truths such that Newton was an Alchemist. Christians like to ignore that all the stuff that is actually valuable about Christianity, is more than memes furnished to propagate the system (and doing damage while doing so), is lifted from the Stoics. Racism once was “scientific”. I could go on and on.

        • amanneedsamaid
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          1 year ago

          Buddhist sects as a whole are not exception, but I couldn’t find an example of violence at “its inception”. All the examples I could find are from much later.