s/o Do people attend religious services for the religious aspects, or for community?
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}
Anonymous
It seems you lost the argument, so now you’ve spent pages insulting everybody else. You’re even lying about OP lying, which is quite rich. Are you trolling? |
Anonymous
That's really not true, either of your comments. While believers in Buddhism have elevated him to Lord Buddha, Buddhism is a non-religious belief system. Buddha himself was atheist. While Buddhism has some trappings of religion, there's no worship of a deity, and although opinions on this are mixed, I think the better view of it is that it's not a religion. So do you have any other "religions" that don't involve a supernatural god (BTW, is there any other kind?). |
Anonymous
??? I don't know who you're addressing this to, but I've talked to countless Buddhists, and went on a ten day meditation retreat at a Buddhist wat in Thailand - and I'll tell you the believers don't regard Buddhism as a "religion." Some in fact get offended if you say that. So try again. |
Anonymous
All fine and good. But it's more of a philosophical system, as you say, for self improvement. There's no heaven. No God to be worshipped. Maybe we need a definition of "religion" |
Anonymous
|
I remember my Buddhist instructor saying 'no one has ever come back from heaven to tell about it, so why worry about it?' And if your belief system makes no room for the supernatural, you've knocked out the underpinnings of all the religions - i.e., a belief in of supernatural forces or powers. I think, definitionally, any belief system that doesn't believe in gods isn't really a religion.
|
Anonymous
DP. So do you. |
Anonymous
| Communionity |
Anonymous
“We” already have a “definition of religion.” The definition is easily accessible to all of us. “We” as anonymous forum users don’t define words and concepts like religion, or soul. I notice someone keeps proposing that people posting here make up definitions for words. It’s really intellectually dishonest to pretend words aren’t already clearly defined. |
Anonymous
Pew says you’re massively wrong. |
Anonymous
DP. We may each have a definition in our own heads, but that may be different from another poster’s definition. I do research (I’m not the atheist “I’m a research scientist” poster) and it’s not only very common, it’s actually expected, that you will establish a working definition at the very start of your report. |
Anonymous
The dictionary and encyclopedia records the definition and meaning of words. I don’t care who you are or what your job is: you don’t define words. You use the definition of words from dictionaries and encyclopedias in your “research.” 
You are intellectually dishonest. |
Anonymous
The definiton of religion is a heavily contested and complicated thing that often depends on the person using and what they are doing with the word. This is a quick introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5KHDR8jdbA |
Anonymous
Fake news. PP never thought about it that way so it never happened. |
Anonymous
You get your information from youtube, I love that for you. However, there are long established and reputable dictionaries and encyclopedias that provide humanity with definitions for words that are not heavily contested. They are considered the gold standard and accepted by educational institutions, etc. If you don’t like the established language that’s a you problem and youtube is not going to help that problem. If you attended college or university you would have learned how to gather information from reputable sources and make sure your professors had that information so they could verify your papers and work. |
Anonymous
|
Who determines the definition of a word?
Merriam-Webster has that honor in the US. To decide which words to include in the dictionary and to determine what they mean, Merriam-Webster editors study the language as it's used. In 1806, Webster published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. In 1807 Webster started two decades of intensive work to expand his publication into a fully comprehensive dictionary, An American Dictionary of the English Language. To help him trace the etymology of words, Webster learned 26 languages. Webster hoped to standardize American speech, since Americans in different parts of the country used somewhat different vocabularies and spelled, pronounced, and used words differently. In 1831, George and Charles Merriam founded the company as G & C Merriam Co. in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1843, after Noah Webster died, the company bought the rights to An American Dictionary of the English Language from Webster's estate. All Merriam-Webster dictionaries trace their lineage to this source. Merriam creates entries by finding uses of a particular word in print and recording them in a database of citations. Editors at Merriam spend about an hour a day looking at print sources, from books and newspapers to less formal publications, like advertisements and product packaging, to study the uses of individual words and choose things that should be preserved in the citation file. Merriam-Webster's citation file contains more than 16 million entries documenting individual uses of words. Millions of these citations are recorded on 3-by-5 cards in their paper citation files. The earliest entries in the paper citation files date back to the late 19th century. Since 2009, all new entries are recorded in an electronic database. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merriam-Webster So we have an established and accepted and highly respected and reputable source for our word definitions. We can make word definitions different in our own heads if we want, but society and institutions of education/business, the media, government, etc, uses established definitions. |