The Four Noble Truths

 Buddhism is built on the foundation of the "four noble truths". Not believing that any "divine" source of wisdom exists, I need to weigh up this foundation against my own experience.

The first "truth" is that life is full of suffering, something undeniable in the present day. But right at the start, we see Buddhism throwing out the baby with the bathwater, denying any role to the wonders and joys of life. 

The second "noble truth" calls upon us to accept the first truth as the way things are. Also, pretty good advice. You really need to get used to all the awefulness on the news which, incidentally, tends to present mostly horrible news. It is wise to avoid imagining some kind of utopia where everything is (mostly) happy and wonderful. Suffering is not the whole truth. In fact one may argue that it's not the main truth.

The third and fourth noble truths basically assert the Buddhist "program" of how to escape suffering - ultimately by escaping the wheel of reincarnation. That ultimate goal makes no sense to the modern mind (at least this one), nor does it come close to identifying a way to escape most of the suffering experienced by most of the people most of the time. To be sure, some suffering is self-inflicted. For this, we can look to Mindfulness or "Cognitive Therapy". You can even deal with relatively minor pain through meditation. But Buddhism has nothing to offer the victims of continuing war. The ongoing brutality of Buddhist regimes in Sri Lanka and Myanmar are evidence of this. In this world, "politics" is the leading cause of preventable suffering. Buddhism (and its precursor, Taoism) deliberately steer clear of politics. Buddhism as practiced by Buddha himself even steers clear of family responsibilities and the "suffering" that comes of feeding yourself.

So, for me, two noble truths get part marks and the other two get zero.. I'm not a Buddhist, not even a little bit.

The same is true of the "Eightfold Path", but here it is possible to bend things to modern life to come up with something useful. An example of such a "bend" is the idea of the "right view", which means a correct assessment of what is going on in the world (accepting the four noble truths for example). It certainly is important to have the "right view", but such a view is not what Buddhism has in mind. To cite just one small difference, "correct view" would, at the very least, be deeply skeptical of reincarnation, the foundation of all Buddhist practice, just as the idea of "God" is central to the Abrahamic religions.

Even so, the eightfold path is a good checklist to see if you are wasting your life on things that truly don't matter or, worse, causing others to suffer.

Western. minds will note the tendency of "Eastern" minds to come up with the four this, the eight that and so forth. It's very evident in Mao's approach to communism. Sadly the real world doesn't fit into these structures. They just provide a student with the illusion of wisdom while providing the "instructor" a way to test the "understanding" of students. In the West, such teaching methods are met with skepticism outside of engineering, chemistry and medicine where vast amounts of memorization are required before you get to the real wisdom of the subject.