Been thinking about Christianity and Buddhism.
I'm almost certain that the Buddha had several extremely profound and straight-forwardly true insights about how the human mind works that he made the foundation of his teachings. (e.g. the four noble truths).
On the other hand, as far as I can tell, Christianity doesn't have any profound insights it is based on. My now deeply Christian sister said it's the first religion to advocate compassion for strangers, but this is most certainly untrue;
China had a popular utilitarian religion 200-400 years earlier.But sadly, this seems to make a tiny difference at best. I've asked people who are Buddhist or know Buddhists about how much Buddhists seriously meditate, and although I was expecting something like 'not very much', what I've heard is worse than that. The average Buddhist seems about as likely to have understood or adopted anything about mindfulness than the average "Christian" is to offer you their other cheek if you randomly punch them into the face. This may only be a slight exaggeration.
And then there is the other perplexing thing that the genuine insights at the core of Buddhism are obscured by the utter nonsense about rebirth and karma, which seems to be almost as central as the four noble truths. It is perplexing to me how someone who seems to have demonstrated a genuine scientific mind when it comes to examining the human condition can then turn around and just make stuff up. All of the religions just make stuff up. And frankly I think the rebirth stuff is even worse than the stuff that other religions make up because it directly contradicts the core message. If you reject the notion of a constant self or soul (and doing just that is super central to the Buddhist teachings), then saying that you will be reborn as a whale isn't even false, it's ill-defined. If a whale is born, then there is no way to change the universe such that the whale is or is not you. It's not like the information about who it is is somehow encoded in the particles of its brain. There is no room in physics to remember whether an animal is or is not a reborn version of you.
There is also no room in physics for an immortal soul, of course, but at least the Christianity is **consistent** in postulating that such a thing exists. The notions of heaven and hell in the afterlife aren't in direct contradiction with anything else in the Bible, at least not as far as I'm aware.
And it's also stupid because the ultimate goal according to the text is to stop being reborn altogether, which is odd because being truly mindful leads to positive well-being under just about any circumstances, and the Buddha says as much elsewhere, so what the hell.
I've read that many Buddhist scholars have debated this question (i.e., since we don't believe in a soul, what is being reborn?) but of course, they have an impossible task there because they start from the position of having to make sense of it, when the obvious-but-unavailable answer is that it doesn't make sense.
Sometimes I wonder if the Buddha was just bullshitting everyone, maybe including it just as a way to motivate people to be altruistic (because how good of a person you are influences what you are reborn as). But as much as I would like to believe that, I really don't. Seems wildly unlikely.
Anyway now I'm making two separate points. Back to the first, my impression is that for something like 99% of people, religion is entirely or almost entirely about rituals and community, and that can be provided equally well with just about any doctrine. Publicly pledging to believe stupid things has an important signaling function; it conveys that you are on a certain team, and this is valuable for others who are also on that team. This can create a sense of kinship, belonging, and also material benefits through a network of allies. That's what religion provides, first and foremost. This is why there are studies showing that being religious (on the personal level) correlates positively with all sorts of things from lifespan to income to happiness (not 100% sure if those were on the list, but they probably are). And this signaling function actually works *better* the more more absurd the belief is (because then the incentive to believe it for other reasons is weaker) so you really don't need it to be based on anything true.