Pondering the parallels between the Christian myth of Adam and Eve approaching a tree with a snake in it and attaining knowledge of good and evil, with the snake and the gained knowledge seen as evil; and the Buddhist myth (new to me) of Mucalinda, meaning the Buddha also sat under a tree with a snake and there also attained enlightenment but here the knowledge so gained is good and the snake is seen as a protector
Could invent some really fun heresies by developing this line of thought further
@mcc I was kicked out at age 7 for asking “the wrong questions” in catechism. My older brother was kicked out too. I asked him why. He shrugged his shoulders and said: “For being related to you. What the hell did you do?” So, you could try asking a question they don’t like.
As always, I am completely infuriated by how virtually no western/English-language source discussing Buddhism you will ever find will ever make it explicit in which forms/strains of Buddhism the claims being made apply. Buddhism is huge! It's more denominationally diverse than Christianity! It spreads across a quarter of the globe and changed in every country it came to!
@mcc the one my friends always struggled with is there are Buddhist groups who engage in violent resistance and that, well yes, that's also Buddhism. Just not the ones who believe in pacifism. Which also isn't the rest, there's some in the middle!
@mcc I guess I’m mostly Zen but broadly Mahayana and I have to explain this to every new family member who asks me a question about Buddhism. Even just the three major early forms are huge and vastly different.
My analogy is it’s like just treating all Abrahamic religions like the same thing and never differentiating. Pretty flat understanding.
@mcc This is part of the lore of His Dark Materials. All societies in the multiverse have stories about a snake imparting knowledge, but in some of them the snake is a good guy.
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