If the teachings of Jesus are a framework that religions have taken on and not a doctrine, then you should specify:
1. what the problem domain is
2. what the conclusions drawn about that domain are
3. what the principles are and how they are arrived at
4. what the methods are
5. how it can be applied to different religions, or non-religions (for example, what use does prayer to God or eternal damnation have to atheists?)
You should also deal with the problem of a supernatural being that you must believe in and follow (may be covered in (5)). I don't know many frameworks like that.
It’s not hard to do this, so I’ll leave that as an exercise for you.
Who said the framework has to be useful for atheists?
I'd be more than happy to go through all of those questions for Buddhism (or Prince2 or Rails or any framework), it would be easy. I can't see how it would be done for Christianity, nor for any formulation of Jesus' teachings, but if you know how, you should!
(I’m not asking you to answer your questions, since they don’t establish this.)
The problem domain for Ruby on Rails is how to build websites. That's why websites built using Rails are referred to as a Rails site.
The problem domain of Prince2 is how to manage a project. It's why projects which apply it are called Prince2 projects, or Prince2 organisations if they apply it more widely.
What's the problem domain for Jesus' teachings? Where has it been applied?
Edit: Because of the misnomer (people calling things Buddhism that aren't) it makes my initial phrasing seem circular. The Buddhisms are each their own religion which then applied Buddhism, which is why they're now know as Buddhism. So, Bon, the Tibetan shamanic religion is now known as Tibetan Buddhism.
It has been applied to each of the forms of Christianity as well as in many secular societies that eschew the religious components.
You could apply it to a school or business if you wished, or a family or yourself.
The various Christianitys just like the Buddhisms incorporate many of the beliefs and customs that existed before Christ and the Buddha’s teachings respectively were incorporated.
> The problem domain for Jesus teachings is ethical action and how to encourage it.
If it did have a problem domain it would be how to get into Heaven and not into Hell. Ethical action would be the way in which that is achieved. It does not, however, have a problem domain because without Christianity there is no problem to be solved. It is not a framework and is not expounded as a framework (this is an incredibly important point).
> It has been applied to each of the forms of Christianity
The different forms of Christianity are called sects because they share a doctrine. A doctrine that is supplied as dogma, I might add. Again, an important point.
Christianity has not been "applied" to the various forms of Christianity because they did not exist prior to being applied to. For example, you could not apply Google to Yahoo because Google is not a framework.
> as well as in many secular societies
Secular societies cannot, by definition, implement Christianity.
> You could apply it to a school or business if you wished, or a family or yourself.
You could not apply Weight Watchers to a school or business or a family or individual. You could apply its principles or methods. Weight Watchers is not a framework, neither is Christianity. Weight Watchers could produce a framework for losing weight but that would not make one thing the other, nor in the same category.
> The various Christianitys
Sect is the correct word.
> just like the Buddhisms
An implementation of Buddhism is not a sect. There are sects within religions that have applied Buddhism. Hence, your comparison is yet another category error and false equivalence.
> incorporate many of the beliefs and customs that existed before Christ and the Buddha’s teachings respectively were incorporated.
Rails incorporates many of the beliefs and customs of web developers and frameworks that existed before it was born, as does Twitter. That does not make Rails a company or a website or a micro-blogging service, and neither does it make Twitter a web framework nor a piece of software.
Distinguishing differences like these can be difficult, especially if you're not acquainted with the basic history of Asian religion, like Bon, or the many schools of Indian thought, Daoism etc (the History of Philosophy podcast[1] is an excellent resource for learning about them), or are not familiar with the many frameworks used by programmers and project managers and the like. Hacker News is a great place to get these kind of insights though so you're in the right place.
Getting into heaven or hell are why the problem domain is salient, but not the problem domain.
I didn’t say Christianity is applied to previous christianities. I said it was applied to the belief systems that existed before - I.e. the various paganisms.
This is well researched historical fact. You are the one making an error here because you are getting confused about the naming.
I’m not talking about sects. I’m talking about Christianity being applied to the belief systems that existed before in the various places where it spread.
You then go on to simply state that Christianity is not a framework.
Affirming the consequent isn’t an argument. We already know that you think this.
The rest of your statements just rely on made up stuff.
There is no such thing as ‘an implementation of Buddhism’. There is no such concept in comparative studies of religion.
You are just using that terminology to make it sound like it can be compared to the programming concept of a framework.
It’s pretty absurd to suggest Buddhism works like Ruby on Rails. Rails doesn’t incorporate beliefs and customs. Nobody believes in rails.
It’s a completely different class of entity, so at best it is a vague analog.
As such Christianity is just as much a framework as Buddhism is.
Same can be said about the Torah, the teachings of Jesus and Muhammad. Each has a plethora of religions built on top of them, that we group into big families (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) despite some members of these families having tried to kill each other for centuries.
I think that what makes Buddhism a bit apart is that it is also a framework several people use to build atheistic, humanist philosophies. It is less common (but used to be two centuries ago) to do the same with Christianity. There are also Jews who reject the belief in God and many religious parts of the Talmud but still follow many tenets of judaism for a variety of philosophical reasons.
Living in Asia, seeing the more cultish aspect traditional Buddhism can have, made it harder for me to see it as a kind of special religion, rather than one that is exotic enough to westerners so that they can transform it into a modern philosophy.
To labour the point I made earlier (somewhat), I can build you a terrible database using 4th normal form, that is called upon by a web framework using any number of patterns like the Active Record or Data Mapper patterns, pushed into an MVC pattern that is full of tacked on bits that make no sense (if you know what you're doing) and spewed out into an utter mess of a web page, but that wouldn't make 4th normal form bad, or MVC etc or the framework encompasing them a bad thing.
Zen Buddhism (Daoism + vestiges of Indian Buddhism) is not Theravada Buddism (Indian Buddhism) is not Tibetan Buddhism (Bon shamanism + Indian Buddhism). It's always spliced into something. Non-Asian Buddhism does the same thing but often bringing in the extraneous parts tacked on.
Where, for example, is there any doctrine in the 4 Noble Truths? Any part that says you need a guru? Any part that says to follow a book or a god (or gods) or the need to chant…? It simply doesn't have any of those things.
And if you chose to dismiss the religious and cultish parts, you can also find a lot of value in Jesus teaching about unconditional love and about inner spiritual discipline.
I have no qualms in people using a cleaned up religion as a source for spiritual growth, and will agree that Buddhism has many features that makes it particularly friendly, like its focus on non-violence, but don't be mistaken in what you are doing in the process. It is still a typical religion that has little inherent reason to be more sensible than any other source. All its advices have to stand on their own merit.
A doctrine is a belief of set of beliefs, not a set of premises or propositions for investigation nor a set of practices. For example, a hypothesis is not a doctrine, nor is the scientific method. Prince2, PMP, Scrum, Lean, Six Sigma et al are also not doctrines.
The 8-fold path is an alternative breakdown of one of the truths (the last one, presented - as all are - as "truth" because under examination/usage they should be shown to be correct), not separate.
Nowhere within the 4 or the 8 is there any requirement for belief or adherence to any authority in the form of a being or creed.
The Torah, the teachings of Jesus and Muhammad on the other hand all recognise Genesis and "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth..."
Thinking Buddhism focuses on the philosophical parts is like cherry-picking Proverbs from the bible.
Buddhism also has its own nonsensical cosmology [1]. We just don't care too much about it in the West.
>when asked abstract metaphysical questions, such as whether the world is eternal, whether the soul is different from the body, or what happens to a liberated person (tathāgata) after death and so on, Gotama stays silent, or points out that he has set these subjects aside
he seems to stick to the observable basics. Though as mentioned, of course people may have tacked stuff on subsequently.
It makes about as much sense to call Buddhism a religion as it is to call Ruby on Rails a website (if we're being precise).
Note: I can see how this could look like a rebuttal but it's not, I'm actually joining in with the discussion, riding along with it, not trying to be an arse. I liked the comment I'm replying to! :)