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Comment by ghusto | Hacker News Reader

Is Buddhism a religion? There's no supernatural higher power there?

Buddhism is actually a great example, because it shows how one can choose their religion just as they can their cultural preferences.

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Buddhism as actually practiced for the last 2500 years ascribes all kinds of deity-like features and the supernatural to the Buddha – travel Asia and you’ll see people praying to Amitabha Buddha in order to be reborn in his Pure Land, and even Theravada Buddhism that doesn't go whole hog with pantheons still holds that the Buddha was divinely immune to fire, poison, and drowning. A non-supernatural Buddha is largely a feature of the twentieth-century West, which thought it could get something in tune with a more rational era by reviving, so it thought, “original Buddhism” with questionable results. Even non-revival, supernaturally charged strands of Buddhism have their converts in the West.

Sure, and there are followers of Christ who also do all the things he said not to (Catholics). I don't take a religion's followers as good examples of the founders intents.

The intent of Buddhism's founder is ultimately unknowable. The earliest source we have, the Pali canon, already contains the supernatural and the mythological. It cannot be emphasized enough just how modern attempts to reconstruct the "original" Buddhism are, and they are simply unfalsifiable.

Yes? I dont think anyone disputing that religion can be chosen? How is this relevant?

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