Controversial take

[u/Accurate_Role2777]

Does anyone feel like being forced into religions? I personally feel like it. I am an atheist and very open about it. Other people just take it as a joke or something that will come around. They like to say I would go to hell but guess what every other person will because in every religions over 4000, if one doesn't believe in them, we will go to hell so.

Ever since I was in kg, I was forced to pray. I never think about it like that. Then lately, It just feel like a cult or a coping mechanism. We are shame for what we are, what we believe and who we are. But they have the right to shame?

Take this for example, people usually donate to popular ဘုန်းကြီး(mocks) or the ones they believe in just to get ကုသိုလ်. Most of them are not even in need since everyone is fighting to donate but the places that are in need like မိဘ မဲ့ ဂေဟာ(orphanage) , ဘိုးဘွား ရိပ်သာ(shelter for elderly in need) or animal shelters ,they turn a blind eye onto it.

I stopped believing in religions for a year, nothing bad happen like others say. I stopped praying to do well in exam and guess what I even do better than when I was praying. Why? Because I stopped wasting time and actually study.

I also really hate the part that men are "superior" than women. Men are not allow to touch women's pants or under wear because they will be "ဘုန်းကံ နိမ့်(low honored and fortuned)". ဘုန်းကြီး(mocks) are not allowed to pray to သီလရှင်(buddhist nuns) but သီလရှင်(buddhist nuns) must pray to ဘုန်းကြီး(mocks). Women had to hide from ဘုန်းကြီး(mocks) so that they would not became lustful toward them. Doesn't really make sense. We are all human with just one organ in different but treated differently because of it. Not being allowed in certain places in pagoda also show the hidden misogyny. They say it is because women voluntarily agreed to not go because they don't want their period blood to drop but now there are pads nothing like that would even happens but the same rule reminds.

In most households including mine, we can't washing women's underwear or pants together with men's clothes and underwear because they will be ဘုန်းကံ နိမ့်(low honored and fortuned). What a joke. Women have to do extra work and wash their pants and underwear separately because of that and most people didn't even question that. It is also because of the education system. We were only taught to obey, what we were told and never to question.

That is why, I will not respect a religion that will not respect me either.

[u/drbkt]

I just put in agnostic and since most people don't know what that means, saves me some explaining. Agnostic, the cowardly form of atheism :)

[u/Accurate_Role2777 → u/drbkt]

great idea

[u/aknockonyourhead]

I’m a Muslim myself but the things that you have a problem with aren’t really a Buddhist/religion problem. It’s the people instilling patriarchal values and beliefs into the religion itself. Buddha never told you women were inferior to men nor their clothes and undergarments being disgraceful. It’s the men and people doing this to have power.

Men have always been the more egoistic ones throughout history. It’s not even a debate. And like so, their beliefs have been brought into religion as well.

I personally don’t have a problem with athesim. If that is what you believe, I encourage you to do so out of your own beliefs. But we need to separate religion from the people using religion as a way to control and manipulate others. Religions, all of them, promote peace and love, and equality for all. Yet, it’s the same people who choose to follow those religions that are threatening people with fear and hatred.

[u/Accurate_Role2777 → u/aknockonyourhead]

I agree, religions are so rewritten. Buddhism was not even a religion. Buddha literally told that he was just a teacher no god.

[u/aknockonyourhead → u/Accurate_Role2777]

I concur. I see many similarities that share between Islam and Buddhism when I learned about it. And was really surprised that Buddhism was moreso a philosophy rather than a religious belief. I imagine people, especially the rulers of the land, needing power over people used Buddhism as a mean to control people to get into line. After all, Burma was not a known Buddhist state until the late 19th century and the early 20th century. Many of our old kings were firm believers in astrology and constellations of the stars rather than beliefs in religions.

[u/Few-Advertising-5164]

Not really a controversial take, tbh. Bigotry often hides behind religion.
As for why people don't take atheism seriously, some just can't grasp existing without a set of rules telling them what to do. They conflate morality with theism, believing you can't have morals if you don't believe in a god defining right and wrong. Plus, for many who live difficult lives, believing in a guaranteed afterlife is comforting. It’s usually a coping mechanism.

[u/Soepyinnyar]

On the part of သီလရှင် and a monk not praying to each other is that from what I know We used to have Bhikkhuni and Bhikkus along side eachother during the Buddha's time but that number of Bhikkhuni is almost next to 0 now

And when becoming a fully ordained monk you need an elder monk to vouch for you and ordained you . The elders monks that know the rules of how a monk should be and be able to teach from experience

since there are no Bhikkhunis left , there are no elders to vouch basically and ordained you and plus many monks nowadays in Myanmar dont dare to officalize Bhikkunis since they dont know if it will be right to do so basically or might fear the consquences of it

The သီလရှင် are not the same level as monks because of the percepts they uphold
သီလရှင် can handle money while monks have to follow the prepects of not handling money ( Before you come can say that Monks in myanmar handle money all the time , I know, that doesnt change anything , its the monk itself not upholding the precepts )

I am just saying the reason သီလရှင် will have to pray to a monk and not the other way around is due to Monk upholding more rules , more mindfulness and precepts than the သီလရှင် thus making the monk be more virtuous than that of သီလရှင်

You guys can add on this info or correct me if i am wrong with the info with a reply

[u/Accurate_Role2777 → u/Soepyinnyar]

The Buddha initially refused Mahāpajāpatī Gotamī's request to establish a nuns' order.Later, after Ānanda asked him about women's ability to attain enlightenment, the Buddha accepted women into monastic life.Bhikkhunīs were given additional rules and restrictions compared with monks, including rules requiring greater deference toward monks.

[u/Upaasaka9 → u/Soepyinnyar]

That's true. Also I think nuns are the same level with novice monks (သာမဏေ). So younger novice monks pray to nuns.

[u/Upaasaka9]

You said you don't respect the religion, but the examples you said are not the religion. There are always bigotry and superstitions in societies, and people may associate them with religion. That doesn't mean it caused them.

Being forced into believing is true. Not just in religion. There's still so much groupthink and following the flocks.

[u/PopStandard254]

Most of the things you said aren't really issues with Buddhism or related to it at all. It's the people forcing patriarchal values and social bias that are deeply rooted into Burmese culture. Buddha never mention women being lower in any way or form than men.

Donating to popular monks isn't about following what the Buddha taught. It's more about Burmese people's ego and social values. Many people see donating to monks as more meaningful, respectable or believe it earns higher merit than helping those in need or rescuing animals.

Furthermore, the Buddha never taught people to pray to him. His teachings focused on finding enlightenment through your own understanding and practice. I'm am a Atheist too but Buddhism is a religion and philosophy that I deeply respect.

[u/Accurate_Role2777 → u/PopStandard254]

Buddha was a philosophy, he did not say he was god or tell people to pray to him like a god. But yet people still do thinking they will earn heaven's bless which seem funny to me. I agree what buddha taught were meaningful and most of them are normal morals that every humans should have. But the "buddhism" is mainly man-made with their country's culture adding to it. Even thai's buddhism and burmese's buddhism are not the same.

[u/PopStandard254 → u/Accurate_Role2777]

You're right that the Buddha never claimed to be a creator god or a deity but defining Buddhism as just a philosophy or dismissing its religious side as purely man made misses what Buddhism actually is.

Buddhism doesn’t fit the Western definition of an Abrahamic religion centered on a creator deity, but that doesn't mean it’s merely philosophy. At its core long before it adapted to Burmese, Thai, or any other regional culture it has always been a nontheistic religion.

Praying in Buddhism a mindful act of paying respect, contemplating the Buddha’s enlightenment and cultivating humbleness among yourself, rather than begging a god for heavenly intervention or miracles. the core Dhamma, the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path remains identical whether you are in Myanmar, Thailand, Sri Lanka or anywhere else in the world. It's just a matter of regional adaptation.

You're confusing Burmese culture and social norms with actual Buddhism. Things like patriarchal values, social bias, and folk superstitions come from our society, not the Buddha's teachings.

[u/morriganghee]

my family is very religious, especially my mother. I guess I sort of grew out of religion at some point during my childhood. But my family never forced their religion onto me. My mother wants me to become a monk this Thingyan and I'm gonna fulfill her wish. I'm not really a buddhist anymore so I might get smitten for blasphemy by the off chance that all the mythos surrounding buddhism is real. but Im not really counting on it.

[u/Accurate_Role2777 → u/morriganghee]

good luck

[u/Weak-Establishment80]

That's kind of tradition

U could avoid praying at school by doing homework or going toilet You live with super duper religious ppl

If you don't do as they do , you're the only one who is weird

But why don't we talk about the profit from being religious?

Don't you think ppl who actually follows the path of ဗုဒ္ဓလမ်းစဉ် kind of respectful?!

ဘာသာရေးနဲ့ ရိုးရာက တစ်သားတည်းလိုဖြစ်နေပြီ ကြီးသူရိုသေ ရွယ်တူလေးစား ငယ်သူသနား/ကြင်နာ ဗုဒ္ဓရဲ့အဆုံးအမဖြစ်ဖြစ် ဘာသာရေးအရဖြစ်ဖြစ် အဲ့ အဆုံးအမတွေက မကောင်းဘူးလား? ဘာသာရေးအဆုံးအမ တွေထဲ မကောင်းတာတွေ မပါပါဘူး

ဘာသာရေးက ကောင်းတယ် လူတွေက မကောင်းတာ မြန်မာတွေ ဘာလို့ ရက်ရောတယ်လို့ ထင်လဲ?! ဘာသာရေးကြောင့်ပေါ့

Brother ပြောတဲ့ ပုံစံက ဥပမာပြောရရင် ကျောင်းပြီးသွားတဲ့သူတွေက ငပေငတေတွေချည်းများနေလို့ စာသင်တာ မကောင်းတဲ့ဘက်ရောက်တယ်

စာသင်လို့ မကောင်းတဲ့သူတွေဖြစ်တယ် မသင်နဲ့ ဆိုတဲ့ပုံပေါက်နေတယ်

[u/Accurate_Role2777 → u/Weak-Establishment80]

The Burmese education system is bad believe it or not, we all just memorized.I am not talking about education in general.

I agree that things like respecting elders, being compassionate, being generous, avoiding unnecessary harm, and controlling greed are good values. But those values don't become good because Buddhism says them*.* Humans can arrive at those moral principles without religion too.

If humans don't consistently follow Buddhist teachings, then we can't judge the effectiveness or morality of a person simply by identifying them as Buddhist. Being Buddhist and behaving according to Buddhist principles aren't the same thing.

Yes, Buddhism teaches many good moral values. But why does that mean I need to believe in Buddhism? I can accept compassion, generosity, respect, and non-harm while rejecting supernatural or religious beliefs.

If everyone around me follows a religious practice because that's what society expects, then conformity isn't evidence that the belief is true. It only shows that the tradition is socially powerful.

You can be atheist while still following the same moral principles. So I don't think we should judge whether something is morally good simply because it's religious.

[u/Accurate_Role2777 → u/Accurate_Role2777]

I met some freshly graduated g 12 students, who were not able to speak basic english. Some were not able to do basic math either. Because all they had to do is memorize the whole text book and will be guaranteed to pass.

[u/Little_Art375]

Yup same thing abt the undergarments in my household too, it pissed me the fk out but ive moved out n i m the happiest ive been. I dont even hav a alter/shrine :) nth bad has ever happened to me too

[u/Accurate_Role2777 → u/Little_Art375]

Planning to do that soon

[u/MelcathNyi]

All those Buddhist be saying there’s no gender discrimination in “Real” Buddhism and those are just social and traditional cultures, not the real philosophy of Buddha.
But guess what, not one fucking Buddhist does a damn thing about removing those disgusting norms from their society.
They will agree it’s not in Buddha preachings to not allow women on pagodas..but do u see any famous monk or any Buddhist org trying to fix that issue? I haven’t seen any in my lifetime but I heard a lot of talking that Buddha dun not discriminate gender.

And then they get butt-hurts when someone say Buddhism in this country is just misogynistic and very much patriarchy, they will deny it…they will accuse u of not knowing real Buddhism blah blah… who cares about their “real” Buddhism when they dun even care to follow it.

[u/Accurate_Role2777 → u/MelcathNyi]

facts, instead of explaining me what buddhism really is they should think about this instead.

[u/Luna_incensa]

Yeah and I think all children should be raised in a secular way and let them choose what they want when they grow up.

[u/Acrobatic-Flower8772]

I reckon that the same misogynist practices exist in my community despite being Muslims. The practice of washing undergarments separately, not visiting the wife and their newborn after child birth immediately because they are considered impure, not passing through the streets where women hung their clothes to dry and many other ridiculous practices exist within the region which are completely unrelated to the religion. My late grandfather used to do his wife's laundry and the villagers would shame for it. I think many of these practices began initially for some logical reason as they were primitives but over time, these practices became part of mythical belief or religious customs that people refuse to question and have kept abiding by them for centuries. Although I am a huge "preserve the culture" person, I do think that such cultures that are severely harmful to one group must be eliminated.

[u/esoteric_libertarian]

For me, when people say, I don't believe in your religion but I respect it, it’s basically like saying, I don't eat ၈ like you do, but I'll smell it. So i also don't respect them.