Regarding the last point, that's true. Notice how there aren't any forums/communities/Discord channels centered on a single astrological sign.

It would be amusing though, to stumble upon a, say, Pisces forum where members try to figure out their behavior.

I’d be surprised if it’s not co-opted to do so. We saw what happened with vaccines: global tribes with half-baked ideas all swirling around crazy leaders. Only way it’s not going to be co-opted is if it can’t be due to some fundamental reason.

> I mean, these "self-introspection, consciousness-obsessed cultures like Hindu and Buddhism" are a source of hatred and violence. The Hindu majority is India is on this brutal trend. And in Burma-Birmania-Myanmar, the Buddhist population was almost unanimous in supporting the discrimination against muslims and the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya. People feel they belong to a religion and that those who do not are unenlightened strangers. The phenomena is well known and studied: religion leads to intolerance.

That is why it is important to fill these void with fluff. But that fluff requires some mythos otherwise it wouldn't hold the fluff together. There's a subset of these 2 religions that doesn't require you to believe in anything aside from the fact that "consciousness exist". However, this concept is quite hard for common folk to grasp. This is why I think that it is important to create a layer on top of this that the masses can feed unto.

The problem with using astrology as the basis for religion is that it doesn't correspond to reality at all. Simple statistical analysis would yield weird results that doesn't match with reality. How do you reconcile being bad at something X despite being born at month Y that supposedly makes you better at X. Or why does X today when my horoscope is Y?

The problem with this is that you as a non practitioner think you can look in and decide which parts of the religion are fluff and which are true. You really can’t, and that’s one of the biggest failures of secular Buddhism. Without significant training on the path there is no way for you to tell what is bs and what is the true deep stuff. I don’t really get this pattern of random westerners coming into Buddhism and thinking they immediately know exactly which things the Buddha made up and which he didn’t

> Without significant training on the path there is no way for you to tell what is bs and what is the true deep stuff. I don’t really get this pattern of random westerners coming into Buddhism and thinking they immediately know exactly which things the Buddha made up and which he didn’t

Why not? I just read it like any other book. When the Bhagavad Ghita says that there's nothing before and after my existence, that is true as far as I am concerned. I don't read the whole thing like a gospel nor do I think Buddha was correct on everything. He was just another person trying to make sense of things like the rest of us. When the Dhammphada says that I shouldn't dwell on emotions and that I am not my emotions; I can easily get the intuition by using the simulation hypothesis which is something that the people of old didn't have the luxury of.

Because the book literally says that you don’t have the training or insight to decide what is true or false in it. An explicitly laid out aspect of Buddhism is that you can’t tell yet. Sure you can ignore that part if you want to feel like you know what’s right, but the Buddha already saw people do this to much failure and gave teachings to try and prevent it

this makes buddhism sound like the mod of an edgy IRC channel: "lurk moar"

Well, it is! It’s a training. It’s like someone coming in to lifting weights and saying “squats are useless and no one should do them”. Without training you might not know that’s wrong. Buddhism is just like this

That's not religion.

That's just sociology playing out.