I tend to agree, although I wouldn't limit it to one religious tradition, or even to religion at all. For example, mindfulness meditation doesn't require any spiritual believe whatsoever. (In before: "But isn't that Buddhist?" Reply: "Who invented it is irrelevant. The practice itself is areligious, unless you go out of your way to make it otherwise for yourself.")

I find that being mindful of the world around me, and wishing well for the people around me, and even people I dislike and am predisposed to not wishing well upon, makes me a happier person. I think we all need that, or something like it: a reminder that the world is larger than ourselves, and that we're just one part of the whole, whether that be our relationship to the god of our belief system, or to our secular existence on a living planet in a tiny corner of an immense universe.

That stuff's good for us. I'm convinced of it.

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kaicianflone 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I completely agree. Mindfulness and goodwill are good for the soul. They quiet the noise and help us see ourselves more clearly. I practiced meditation for years (and I still do but with my rosary this time), and it helped me observe my thoughts, but it never really healed them.

That’s where Christianity felt different. Most spiritualities try to empty the mind of what’s toxic, but Jesus calls us to bring our darkness into His light. When we try to cast things out on our own, they return stronger. Like the demon who brings seven more, or the widow who denies her grief only to carry it for decades.

Mindfulness helps us watch the storm. Christ walks into it with us. One teaches peace through avoidance. The other offers redemption through surrender. That’s the difference that changed my life.

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wahern 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> mindfulness meditation

I doubt mindfulness meditation started with Buddhism. For one thing, it also figures heavily into Christian practice, especially of Christian religious--priests, nuns, monks, etc. Though, curiously, Christian asceticism arose adjacent to a community of diaspora Jain or Buddhist Indians near Alexandria, Egypt.

Institutional religion provides structure to help people pursue these practices. Which is why Buddhism has its very strong institutions, at least in Asia. Unfortunately, modern Western culture disdains institutional religion, understanding it only in caricature.

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kstrauser 11 hours ago | parent [-]

That's probably all true, but it's the complaint I hear from people where I grew up in the Midwest when talking about meditation. "I can't do that, I'm a Christian" is an all too common refrain, as though it were inherently not Christian (or pro- or anti- anything else).

And yes, in this specific case, if you attended a Zen Buddhist temple, you'd probably get a lot of assistance meditating, if requested. That's far from the only way to get that framework. By analogy, you can pray without attending church.

	▲	wahern 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> That's far from the only way to get that framework. By analogy, you can pray without attending church. Institutional religion lets dedicated people practice full-time. It's why in Asia there's the culture of donating food and money to monks--the whole community supports those who dedicate their life to preserving, developing, and practicing these methods. Religion in America is more free market religion--much more dependent on big donors and the small subset of very dedicated lay practitioners. There's no appreciation for the wider benefit provided by religious to the community. In theory even atheists could appreciate the benefit. There are arguments for why this is a better system on-the-whole, but there's a loss nonetheless. Religion is literally the only area where community systematically supports people who have zero profit interest or motive in practices like mindfulness, charity, etc. For all the corruption and self-serving one sees in institutional religion, whether Buddhist, Christian, etc, it's even greater in the "non-profit" secular charity space. (I'm in SF where the city shells out hundreds of millions to organizations that do social work, and where we blew past the point reasonably diminishing returns hundreds of millions ago.) Secular charity just doesn't scale without having to pay salaries and wages; compare Buddhist or Christian religious, who usually take vows of poverty. It's like the debate about public funding of open source. It's very difficult to do systematically without inviting alot of corruption and freeloading. The interesting thing about religious charity is that the primary motives of the religious are separate from the social/charitable benefit. Institutional religious communities, especially those with vows of poverty, self-select in ways secular institutions haven't figured out how to do, yet. Communists and anarchists never figured it out; if they had capitalism probably wouldn't be as dominate as it is today. And it's why people like Richard Stallman standout--though an atheist, he's committed to Free Software in the same way monks are committed to their religious dogma, and while Stallman is hardly infallible, it lends tremendous credibility to his arguments, and he serves as a personal model regarding his commitment to the cause. I think separation of religion and state is a good thing and benefits all parties, but Western culture went beyond that into denigration of religion. Oddly we do provide public support to artists, whom are often similarly dedicated and self-selected, though we justify this by exaggerating the social benefit of pure art.