Buddhism

• Buddhism is not a religion, it's a philosophy, a framework for looking at life.
• Why is it the best one? There isn't a best one, get stupid ideas like that out of your head. It's a useful one in that it leads to less suffering.
• Meaning less of the suffering we inflict on ourselves and the suffering we inflict on others.
• No Buddhist would consider me a Buddhist, but that's okay because I don't think they are either. 😉
• Zen seems to come the closest if you avoid the bullshit and just sit.

I do not consider Buddhism the religion to be Buddhism. Yes, the religion is based on the Buddha's teachings but then they screw it up, as humans do with so many things, by adding magic to it because people are never satisfied with reality.

AFAIC Buddhism is a philosophy. A long time ago a guy figured out a way of looking at the world that made life better. He taught some others guys and then got convinced to let girls into the club (but only as second-class citizens) and then he died. The people he'd taught spread the word and a couple of hundred years later someone had the brilliant idea of writing things down.

Now, because of that “couple of hundred” years I consider everything the Buddha said to be apocryphal. Maybe there wasn't even an actual Buddha. Maybe it was woman and someone didn't think that was cool so they retconned her out of the story. It doesn't matter, what matters is that some wisdom was arrived at and was, eventually, written down so that it could be discovered by us. But what really matters is the way that wisdom, that way of looking at the world, can impact your life for the better.

this went off the rails.

See, the teachings attributed to Buddha are really useful. There's the Four Noble Truths which lay out why none of us are ever happy and what we can do about it. There's the Three Marks of Existence that teach us where we're going wrong. There's the Noble Eightfold Path which is actually the fourth of the Four Noble Truths that points us in right direction.

To me Buddhism, meaning the teachings of the Buddha, is a practical self-help guide more than anything else. It's basic premise is that our problem is mostly how we look at and think about the world. We're all screwed up about how things really are and