The words 'ancestor worship' bring to mind some oriental practices that involve some formal methods of venerating ancestors, mostly recently deceased ones. This post is about the general concept of venerating or honoring ancestors, which seems to be a very universal phenomena. The exact words themse…
Blog posts : "General"
Other Religions are Good Precursors to Improved Buddhism
Improved Buddhism has a great appeal intellectually, as it dispenses with mysticism, supernatural phenomena or creatures, spirituality and spirits in general, as well as all non-scientific concepts. As knowledge of science becomes more and more widespread, and deeper and deeper on an individual basi…
Counseling About Motivation
One of the important roles of a higher level individual in a modern religion can be counseling. As noted elsewhere, counseling can be done by professionals in the field, but this type of counseling is done without knowledge or involvement in the religious aspects of life. Is that an important aspect…
What Can Be Learned From Marcus Aurelius?
Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor in the 100's, and ruled when the Roman Empire was still very powerful and controlled the lands around the Mediterranean Sea, stretching well into Asia Minor and up to England. It was the tradition at that time that the emperor's oldest son would succeed him as emp…
Dominant and Submissive Personalities in Improved Buddhism
Unfortunately, there is no clear definition of personality in psychology; the variety of human behavior has befuddled the profession of psychologists for over a century. One of the early attempts at classifying people by their personality was done by Isabel Myers and Katherine Briggs, who developed …
Community in Improved Buddhism
Recall that the main purpose in designing an improvement for Buddhism is to make the resulting system enduring, in other words, each factor should be considered to see if it will tend to make the religion more permanent and stable, and that should be one of the major metrics for deciding on specific…
Improved Buddhism's Behavioral Code and Deception
Two of the things which a religion can still give to individuals in the twenty-first century are a behavioral code and a set of goals. To try and understand the details of how the first one might work, consider one activity which is usually considered deplorable, except by those who do it profession…
The Waning of Religious Influence
The Tretyakov Museum in Moscow recently hosted an exhibition of the paintings of V. V. Vereshchagin, who concentrated on painting portraits and scenes from India and Central Asia during the last half of the nineteenth century. The paintings are very realistic, and convey more than just the details o…
Funding Improved Buddhism
Someone is going to have to pay for any new religion. The money has to come from donations, at least initially. A religion might be endowed by donors, and then support itself from earnings from the endowment, but that simply moves the funding problem into the startup period of the religion. In gener…
Philosophy Underlying Improved Buddhism
Buddhism in its original form is sometimes referred to as a philosophy rather than a religion, as it has no gods. It does have some legacy spiritism, with reincarnation being the main element used to drive individuals to follow the guidelines for life it provides, and the sutras have mention of the …
Improving Buddha’s Eight-fold Way
Religions tell people what to do. Not as much as a boss tells his employees what to do or a military leader tells his troops what to do or a parent tells his children what to do, but in a more general way. It takes too many man-hours to d…
Means and Ends in Religious Education
What good is a religion which does not have any supernatural assertions in it? If a religion, improved or not, teaches or assumes that there is no reincarnation or any substitute for it, what is left for it to do? One feature remaining is religious…
Nihilism
Nihilism, in short, is a small branch of philosophy that consists of saying life has no meaning or purpose. It is connected with the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who used the phrase “god is dead” in the sense that at his time, the nineteent…
Long-term Goals of a Religion
The title can have two interpretations. One is to continue asking about the motives and hopes that a designer of a new religion might have, and the other is to ask what missions should be put into the teaching of a religion that are more than immed…
Buddha as the Designer of a Religion
One way to look at a religion is to look at its beliefs, or its behavioral guidelines, or its structure, or its facilities, or its members, or many other aspects. One way that does not seem to be very common is to ask what was the founder or fo…
The Meaning or Purpose of Life
Philosophers have been discussing their versions of the purpose of life for as long as philosophy has been recorded. Almost all of them grew up in an environment of beliefs in magical creatures, and while any particular philosopher might have a…
What is a Religion?
If we are trying to offer improvements to an existing religion, it would be good to know what the limits are. If there is to be a suggestion for removal of some concepts, does that push what is remaining beyond the bounds, leaving what is left …
Goals and Improved Buddhism
Let’s clearly define what is meant by goals. When the founder of a new religion puts the time in to record or spread his teaching, he is doing it for some personal goal. It could be benevolent or malevolent, rational or irrational, selfish or altru…
Improved Buddhism and Governance
There are many ways that a religion can interact with a governing body. One way is simply tolerance, where the governing organizations put no restrictions on what a religion group does. This, of course, is impossible in some situations, as competin…
Anatta and Karma
Buddha was raised in a time of conflicts in metaphysics. Some Hindu philosophers preached the doctrine of reincarnation, which meant that there was some essence that moved from body to body when the first one died and a new one was born or co…
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