This article gave me some great laughs. It's clear that the author only studied Buddhism for four years (a very short period of time) and has some very fundamental misunderstandings of Buddhist teachings.
For example, this explanation of karma:
> Together, these tenets imply the existence of some cosmic judge who, like Santa Claus, tallies up our naughtiness and niceness before rewarding us with rebirth as a cockroach or as a saintly lama.
That is not at all how karma should be understood. If I go give out $10,000 to the homeless, I'm a damn fool if I think I'm going to get $100,000 back in the mail!
> It's clear that the author only studied Buddhism for four years (a very short period of time)
This kind of response always sounds like victim-blaming to me.
If your system of <whatever> is so complicated that someone can't even hope to get the basics right in four years of study, maybe the right thing to do is, in fact, to ditch it.
Pretty much any introductory guide to Buddhism from any of the major schools will explicitly say "karma is not a deterministic system of merit and demerit". I'm not sure how the author came to that understanding of karma, but it's radically at odds with what the vast majority of Buddhist traditions actually teach.
Up front though in every other thing I’ve read is that this is going to be hard, so that doesn’t seem like a fair argument either. I don’t tell people that the VI text editor is easy to learn or even that it’s even superior to anything at all, only that’s worked for me and that I hope everyone finds something that works for them. It’s not like we need any more barriers to helping people code and write, yet they all take a set of complex practicing to be proficient given we aren’t wired by genetics or anything do such complex activities such as language and walking upright.
Bad analogy in my opinion. Learning basic vim can be done in a couple of hours and I think would benefit literally every programmer to know the basics because it is so much nicer to even navigate a single line of code using the vi keys (w, b, f, % etc) than any other alternative I've heard of.
belief systems can take years to fully adopt, since they attempt to rewire your way of thinking about the world. it's easier for the ones that dangle clear rewards and punishments, though some might call them shallow. for the ones more focused on inner retrospection, there's no obvious short term reward they can offer.
NO, not victim blaming. Where is the victim? And where is the blame?
But it does read like someone that has just gotten into Buddhism recently, has become lost in the 1000's of different sects and writings, and his 'takeaways' after a brief exploration seem very wrong. He is arguing against Buddhism for things that aren't Buddhist, more misunderstands of something he heard once, and sounded Christian.
Since in Buddhism there is no central authority, and every monk can write up some hot take on their views. It can be very difficult for newbies to wade through it.
For example, this explanation of karma:
> Together, these tenets imply the existence of some cosmic judge who, like Santa Claus, tallies up our naughtiness and niceness before rewarding us with rebirth as a cockroach or as a saintly lama.
That is not at all how karma should be understood. If I go give out $10,000 to the homeless, I'm a damn fool if I think I'm going to get $100,000 back in the mail!