>>27124
>They believe everything about religion is a political tool, a brain washing apparatus for the powerful at worst, or a bunch of idiotic fairy tales at best.
Have you heard of the Burakumin? Basically, because of Buddhist beliefs, butchers and executioners, while an essential part of society, were viewed as dirty and treated as second-class citizens in Japan. They were corralled and made to live in designated areas.

This discrimination still exists to some extent today and yakuza are largely the descendants of these people. Point being, Buddhism also isn't all love and peace and compassion.

http://www.hikosaemon.com/2011/11/when-talking-about-burakumin-never-say.html

>>27124
On Buddhism, it always seemed to me (a complete layman to religion) that the idea of rebirth was central to its teachings, because otherwise if merely death would be enough to end suffering you wouldn't need any other values or framework and could just kill yourself. That is to say, it becomes very close to what seems to be called "philosophical pessimism."

Or in other words, to me it always felt like Buddhism started its logical axioms but then backtracked when it realized that the logical implications were not conducive to society: the game-theoretic move given those axioms is to not play in the first place (either kill yourself if your expected valuation of life becomes negative, and to certainly not leave any descendents behind). So to avoid this, the notion of reincarnation and cycle of suffering across lives was introduced. Thus you now have an incentive to "play the game."

>>27128
Buddhism didn't introduce the idea though, it was present in hinduism and jainism. I can't see it as a pretext, it's just how those people thought and what they believed in, the culture Siddhartha Gautama was born in. Suicide can be a solution to the same problem, but it's not the solution Buddhism proposes, since it's considered as harming you and others. Still, in cases of extreme suffering I do think buddhism (or some of it) accept suicide as a valid option, I remember hearing about a supposed technique, from Tibet probably, to end your life in such situations.

>>27126
Started in my early 20s. Took me a couple of years to read shonen manga, 5 to read easy literature and 8 or 9 to read something like Teito Monogatari. Part of me will always be I suppose, though I'm a weeb with decades development, so my taste might be stranger than most in the category.
>>27127
Don't worry about it anon. I'm surrounded by people who would very eagarly point out to me something like the modern political history of Sri Lanka, a country with Buddhist majory and Buddhism as official religion and yet with its own share of atrocities, including Buddhist monk assassins. I'm very well supplied on people ready to bash my enthusiasm irl, but thank you, your post is helpful to me in more ways than you know.
>>27128
>>27129

>>27133
>Part of me will always be I suppose
Think that could be said for those who "move on" for other reasons?

>>27134
If they still care about it, continue to consume it with a degree of zeal and appreciation and can still remember why they first fell in love with the media, but that is no longer the main thing in their lives, I think so. If they've grown bitter and all there is left is irony and sarcasm, and they remember the stuff they liked with scorn and regret, then probably not. I don't know, maybe it's a case by case sort of thing.

The internet is for kids now. Maybe smartphones are why.

>>27151
That and tablets. Seriously, fuck parents who give 3 year olds tablets. I shouldn't have to listen to the same nursery rhythm ten times in a row just because you're too lazy to properly raise your cum mutant.

>>26551
Having read Childhoods End years before watching Eva, I thought it was pretty obvious.

Every anime imageboard I've been to in the last 7-8 years or so has felt off, incomplete to me, and I finally figured out why. At first I thought it was because I hadn't found the board populated by "my" kind of posters that I remembered posting with before a mass exodus. But what I finally realised after drifting around and lurking a lot was that all those posters were still out there, but no board was fundamentally the same wavelength as the one I used to post on simply because no one ended up in the same spot. All the different types of posters confined themselves to their own unique boards and this allowed isolated zones to exist. Without all the other myriad of poster types to interact with each other and keep things in motion, most boards become stagnant, or just went more and more along their own preferred paths of posting, content, and general atmosphere that they cultivated. With all the imageboards now in existence, without a single centralized board that brings every type of poster together under the same roof, you can only get one specific kind of community or another, and it will be one that has become heavily hardened against anything but its specific style of posting and interest. And a major part of what made a specific older board I have in mind so fun and fresh was the constant jumble of all these posters into one pot. I guess the joke is on me, because all these posters probably like their personalised zones to post only in the ways they liked best, leaving myself outside. You won't get the extreme opposite ends of the imageboard otaku spectrum having to see each other in one thread, and so there is no exchange of new ideas.

>>27233
What about those big ones like 4&8chan? I hear they're shit now but they surely they'd still have some of that content mixture you talk about?

I, too, am autistic OP

>>27234
Well, that's the problem. A lot of the posters I'm talking about left those boards for other places. Worse still, much of 4/a/ was repopulated by very young newcomers who had a completely different attitude due to social media and discord, and couldn't be shamed into lurking or conforming. Ironic that such a disrespectful generation destroyed a board that was made into what it was best for by its own chaotic disrespect. I genuinely don't think that it could be made to work anymore, because newer generations of internet users simply could never understand the value and purpose of anonymous posting. Everything is more about identity and interpersonal communication, I don't think they care for the kind of impersonal message-board-like posting that existed prior to their arrival. Sure tripfags always existed but even they were a different breed.

What I want in a board, simply can't exist anymore. People decided they would rather move off into their seperate closed spaces.

>>27237
I've met a few younger folk that learned the value of anonymity, but had to do it the hard way. Scared straight if you will. Shame there's no good way to do that in large scale. Even data breaches aren't enough to teach kids the importance of this stuff. They're all just that starved for attention.

>>27241
I feel that anonymity is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Traditional forums can have pockets of really good discussion (even today, but such forums are rare), and that's merely pseudonymous. The bigger factor is that the general shift towards synchronous communication instead of asynchronous works. Mailing lists are pretty much dead (outside of very specific purposes like lkml), and things like Reddit pretend to be forums but really are closer to the slow-end of synchronous communication given that threads are "ranked" with a heavy time-weighting factor, which penalizes old threads in favor of new ones. Moreover you can't even comment on threads more than a year or so old. So in the end it's really closer to the twitter feeds than traditional forum medium.

>>27243
In 4chan's heyday, like 2007-2012, wasn't it already so fast-paced that communication was practically real time?

I've seen archived threads from as far back as 2004, and the majority of posts looked like the same kind of inane nonsense you'd see today.

>>27236
Shit like this almost makes me glad to be "foreveralone". Who needs some cunt in their life telling them what they can and can't do?

>>27246
>Who needs some cunt in their life telling them what they can and can't do?
Probably someone who eats dino nuggets.

>>27124
Buddhism is currently starting to interest me too. I prefer Daoist texts from a philosophical standpoint but looking at the religion itself it strikes me as just being an ethno religion similarly to orthodox christianity, whereas buddhism seems less bound to the customs of a specific country. The religious view can in some circumstances be just what those who live in the margins of society need.

I already had a brief stint as a christfag a few years ago. It's been a long time since I've read the gospels but I remember certain parts of them such as "let the dead bury their own dead, take up the cross and follow me", and "those who are hated by the world, know that the world hated me first" began to stir my mind and I started to see past the contradictory and arbitrary customs that make up normalfag society, that I had been blinded by before. Unfortunatly, in the case of Christianity the only requirements are to believe that Jesus is the son of God. This requirement is so simple that anyone can do it, and they can drag in whatever ridiculous customs they have as long as it doesn't contradict it, making the whole religion a normalfag's paradise.

Buddhism, on the other hand, makes it very clear in its teachings that the normalfag view is incorrect. The experience of material interactions between bodies, the passions and the sensous world, leads to erroneous cognition and clinging to them, believing that they are real will only lead to suffering. It seems a lot more like an Ancient Greek philosophical school than a religion in some ways, practicing philosophy as a lifestyle rather than the sterile academic exercise that modern philosophy is.

Of course, it's not perfect as >>27128 demonstrates. It seems every human institution is bound to conventional modes of behaviour to some degree, no matter how inconsistent and contradictory they are. Normalfags either do not notice this, or they do not care, but I do. However, as long as I have a body I am forced to participate in at least one of these conventions and I am unwilling to participate in mainstream society. I have not managed to make any progress on my own so I need to use the tools that are available to me. I cannot even imagine someone who is able to be completly free of human convention, such a person would surely be a beast or a god, as Aristotle said.

>>27133
The way you describe your family makes them seem very ignorant and prejudiced. They may be able to come up with some massacres in Sri Lanka but I've heard some disturbing stories about Iraq that really doesn't paint Liberalism in a good light either. They way that people highlight the faults of their enemies whilst ignoring their own is simply ridiculous. I struggle to find any necessarily true cognitions and am instead drowning in a sea of beliefs and likely stories. When I think like this it reinforces my belief that it is necessary to go beyond discursive reasoning in order to gain any wisdom, in order to go beyond the state of avidya.

>>27273
>>27273
>clinging to them, believing that they are real will only lead to suffering
But ironically it seems it's those who realize the absurdity of the world that feel the pangs of discontent, while the normal cattle live blissfully(?) in their ignorance. And while I suppose you can meditate to still the mind and avoid feeling that discontent, you've still ultimately got to participate in the world.

>>27274
>normal cattle live blissfully(?) in their ignorance.
No, they have plenty of turmoil in their lives but it is not a matter of trying to gain solitude and wisdom for them. Their problems usually stem from their relationships and the employment that they all herd themselves into.

>>27273
you should look into Gnosticism, it should be right up your alley:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/Gnosticism

Keep in mind though that
1. Taking the Gnostic doctrine of the Archontic deception seriously will lead to an extremely conspiratorial/paranoid outlook on the world and may drive you insane

2. there are those who claim that Gnosticism itself was a conspiracy designed to lead to the destruction and damnation of its followers:
https://www.amazon.com/Satanic-Secrets-Jesus-Christ-Satan/dp/B09SGMNQDQ

>>27279
Also, according to Gnostic science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, "To know these ten principles of gnostic Christianity is to court disaster."
http://ww3.haverford.edu/religion/courses/222a/ten.htm

>>27279
I've already read this book but I couldn't really understand it. All I remember is a extremely complicated mythology that I couldn't keep track of. There are many different ways to cultivate a religious conciousness though, so it's not neccaserily a bad thing.

>>27283
I think religion is all fake, I just read about it because I'm a geopolitics nerd and religion is politically significant due to people trying to either live by it or to artificially fulfill prophecies.

In the specific case of Christianity, the more I read about it, the more I think it was consciously created for political/warfare purposes. Check out this article by Marcus Eli Ravage that articulates some of what I'm getting at:
https://archive.org/download/antimarcusEliRavage-ARealCaseAgainstTheJews/antimarcusEliRavage-ARealCaseAgainstTheJews_text.pdf

>>27289
inb4 you're just too closed-minded to get it/you haven't read enough/you're egotistical

>>27289
I want more pads in my anime.

>>27289
It's fake but it's still interesting and can be beneficial to those that believe in it.

I think religions role on Geopolitics is often overplayed, most of the time it was just an excuse at best.

>>27292
>can be beneficial to those that believe in it.
oh absolutely, just look at the Amish or the Hasidic Jews, the sense of community those people have is incredible.

>I think religions role on Geopolitics is often overplayed
Whether you mean the influence of politics on religion or the influence of religion on politics, you're wrong on both accounts.

>>27297
I don't think I am wrong really, even something like the crusades was actually driven by temporal factors not religious ones, religion was just a tool used to encourage it.

This thread is pretty sad. Is this what I have to look forward to as I get older? It'll probably be far worse by then.
I guess I'd better enjoy things while I still can.

>>27289
>Religion is all fake
What I'm really curious about is how it started. I find it hard to believe that a bunch of people came together and decided to spin a tale, so there must be some kernel of truth that got blown up by a game of telephone through the generations. Also this is less true for Christianity where there's not much in the way of directed "practice", but for many of the eastern "religions" that are often intertwined with philosophy and medicine, there are interesting nuggets in there relating to the workings of the mind/psychology that deserve to be studied in their own right.

But either way, most people seem to be primed to subscribe to some religious system as a form of anchoring to maintain their stability, and so whether or not there's any truth by virtue of their believing in it the followers end up getting a sense of belonging. It's the same psychological mechanism that cults end up exploiting. And even those who claim to denounce Religion (with a capital "R") still end up succumbing to "religion" (lowercase r) in other forms (e.g. "scientism", political ideology, etc.).

Another element that's often lumped into religion is extra-material phenomenon, e.g. that there's some "higher force" or "higher energy" that we're a part of. Many of the eastern practices are more explicit about this, e.g. you'll see things like "kundalini" or "qi", and there are enough similarities between the various branches that they either all originated from the same practice or there's something worth taking seriously there, at least in terms of the purported effects (disregarding the explanation of the mechanism behind it).

That said, after investigation of the above (through personal experience via Hatha yoga as well as just reading up on the notable people in the traditions), while I do believe that the _effects_ are real, I'm very skeptical as to the validitiy of the explanatory framework used. (That is, the fact that you feel a tingling in your brow when you do some breathing + visualization is true, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the cause is due to some non-material energy.) And the fact that the people who claim to have undergone "kundalini awakening" or those who claim to be "experienced Yogis" haven't really amounted to anything substantial bolsters that claim.

E.g. take the example of "Gopi Krisha" who is supposedly one of the people who had a spontaneous "Kundalini Awakening." Sure he wrote all about it, but if you look at it overall, aside from a bunch of written books nothing else seems really notable. Surely a far cry from some sort of pinnacle of genius and creativity that he claims were the effects of this awkening. But fine, maybe he was a layperson who was unable to really put that to good use. Surely if you look at some famous Yogis you should see some wisdom shine through? Alas, if you dive deep what you'll often find are petty quarrels over things like "true lineage," supposedly renounced Yogis involved in land disputes, and nothing substantive to distinguish the "enlightened" person from a charlatan.

Nice gif by the way.

>>27301
Not necessarily. After all, the power of drills shouldn't be underestimated.

>>27305
The concept of "enlightenment" exists because an "enlightened" person is considered infallible. That's my understanding of it.

>>27306
I try my best to stay optimistic. I don't really mind being a loser, have been for a long time now. I'm sure all these kids will grow out of their bastardized form of otaku culture and go back to wherever normals go on the internet. Someday imageboards will be forgotten and they won't have the reputation that attracts edgy kids. It's all just a fad for them.
...right?

>>27305
>I find it hard to believe that a bunch of people came together and decided to spin a tale

I don't think it's that unlikely. Most likely a long, long time ago a few old men sat by a fire and talked about life, why are we here? Who made us? Why does Lighting happen? Etc. And they came up with theories and possible explanations and they kept talking about this with other interested people passing it down the line, they added to it and modified it and made it more interesting they created stories about these events.

There might be some truth mixed in but it would be lost to time, some of these tales might have grown from real life actions of certain people that were turned into legend over time and then turned into myth. For example, maybe Thor was a real man, maybe a chief who did some manly things and got bards to sing about him, people created entertaining tales about him and over time they morphed into the supernatural or they might have fused with tales about another great man or other gods to create what we now know as Thor. But this all happened so long before recorded history that it's impossible to know and might have been forgotten to time thousands of years ago.

>>27309
I was referring to Jesus in particular, since all the events told in the Gospels are quite specific and centered around a single person. And by all accounts (e.g. letters between Roman governors) the person was indeed real, so then the question becomes what exactly did Jesus do to get so many followers.

>>27308
I don't see things getting better anytime soon, but there's also no point in being bitter about it: there's nothing you can do about it but enjoy your interests and hobbies. Plus, we always have TC and some other small imageboards as bastions.

>>27311
Yeah, it's not all bad. TC is actually pretty good. I've visited a few times briefly, but never stuck around long. I'll probably stick around now. I don't feel like such a loser here, and there's probably good information around here somewhere.
At the very least it's good to have someplace other than Kakashi Nenpo.

>>27301
What itt exactly made you feel sad?

>>27313
It's not so much anything in the thread itself, but rather the thoughts they invoke.
Were things really much better before? Did I really miss out on a greater sense of community than a few slow imageboards?
Then I have to wonder, where are things going to go from here? The imageboard format seems to be dying. Especially the sites where I don't feel completely out of place. Will there be places like TC by the time I'm 30 years old? I've never felt "at home" on any of the boards I frequented up until recently.
Maybe sad isn't the correct feeling. It certainly isn't pleasant.
What do I know, I'm just a dumb kid.

>>27314
I'm 20, and I can relate to this sentiment. I hope there's enough people in our boat to coalescence some day.

I also think people view imageboards of the past with rose tinted glasses. If you look at archives yourself, you can tell there was always massive amounts of dumb, inane shit. So they weren't really bastions of serious discussion.

Post edited on 19th Apr 2022, 6:22am

>>27315
>If you look at archives yourself, you can tell there was always massive amounts of dumb, inane shit.
Yes there was lots of dumb stuff, but the variance was a lot higher. You could find pockets of creative, original humor and interesting, serious discussion more easily. Now everything is homogenized and anodyne.

>>27314
>Were things really much better before?
Yes, they were.
That doesn't mean there wasn't trolls, cancer, dumb shit. But there was a mindset and a sense of community which was authentic. This idea of being "ironic" about things didn't exist. Normalfag behaviour was shamed. There was a particular self-depreciating pride in being an outcast, weirdness was celebrated, degeneracy was a bonus point. Mainstream politics were rejected. It felt more juvenile, in both bad and good ways. We laughed at everything.
It was a very different place from the real world, with it's own rules. Now all the internet feels like a mere extension of the real world.

>>27315
>If you look at archives yourself, you can tell there was always massive amounts of dumb, inane shit. So they weren't really bastions of serious discussion.
I've noticed that. It's hard to compare the archive to how a board was however, as nonsense threads usually die and are created pretty fast and good threads tend to stick around a while. That's my assumption anyhow.
Oh, and people didn't always post the same shit everywhere. I don't know why people assume every board is the same or want them to be as such.
Either way, I have a lot of fun picking through archives.
>>27320
That sounds really nice. Some people still have that pride. At the very least, I do.

>>27315
>If you look at archives yourself, you can tell there was always massive amounts of dumb, inane shit. So they weren't really bastions of serious discussion.
Maybe it's hard to explain my feelings about it. At that time I felt at home, I felt that I had the freedom to discuss seriously when I wanted to and the dumb inane shit was something I was fine with and enjoyed because it wasn't going against anything I was trying to do. Maybe it's just a symptom of growing older on the internet, but it really does feel like even behind all the dumb inane shit back then, there was a different intent in the posters. People actually valued it a little bit, even if they were behaving like idiots for fun. It looks like people who post on imageboards now don't really give a shit and just see the whole internet as their dumping grounds, with no respect for any user-moderated culture they happen to run into. I don't mind stupid shit, but people who grew up on phones and twitter really don't value anything at all, even something as simple as an imageboards community.

>>27299
>I don't think I am wrong
That's because you don't know enough about the relevant religions, or about politics in general.

>>27337
No I think it's because you don't.

You're all wrong!
Now prostrate yourself in the presence of our God, Her Moe-ness, Yurie-sama!

>>27311
Do you mind sharing those sites?
I am always interested in checking out new places. So far TC is the only place I know worth investing time in and I really would appreciate some variety.