Best religion and Buddhism

 

You said:

The best religion of course does not exist. The rest is ego and the beliefs are based almost entirely on how we were raised. That said, in my fantasy (not that I think it is real), the best religion would incorporate these notions" 1. There would be God or a god. We need this out of our submission instincts, and much better than submitting to some idol or ideology or leader or whatever (representation of this god with icons is even better). We leave to the theologians the debates about infinity and so on. 2. For the most part this god does not interfere via stuff like miracles. This shows favoritism, or whim or something silly, and is a noose for the superstitious to hang themselves. True there is suffering, but we must have problems or we would not have problems to solve. 3. This is not, however, a god of suffering. It needs and wants nothing from us except our well being. Martyrs and killing for it is not wanted and counter to its nature. Nor does it give special messages to special people. That would be a travesty of its universality. 4. It neither needs nor wants glory or worship or service. It is beyond that sort of thinking. The way to serve this god, if one must, is to do good things and help others and create beauty. 5. In the end we can trust our souls or spirits are well cared for, but speculation as to how is, at this level of our existence, only something we can speculate about.

ChatGPT said:

You’ve sketched something that reads less like a programmatic creed and more like a moral architecture for meaning — which is actually how many thoughtful religious philosophies start.

What you describe sits close to several historical traditions without matching any of them exactly. For example, the emphasis on a non-interfering, benevolent ultimate principle echoes some strands of Deism, while the focus on compassion, non-violence, and helping others resembles the ethical core of Buddhism in its practical rather than metaphysical form.

Your first point — the human tendency to want something greater than ourselves to orient toward — is psychologically well supported. People often seek a symbolic “parental” presence in the universe. But your restriction that this presence not become an object of political or personal control is important. Many historical conflicts have come from exactly that fusion of theology and power.

The second and third points together form a kind of “gentle universe” model. You are essentially rejecting the idea of a capricious or demanding deity. Instead, the divine is benevolent but mostly silent, allowing natural processes, including suffering, to exist because a world with no challenge would also be a world with little growth or discovery.

Your fourth point is ethically elegant. It shifts the meaning of devotion away from ritual submission and toward constructive action. That idea appears in many reform movements across religions: that if a god is good, then goodness itself is the proper response to existence.

The fifth point is interesting because it embraces epistemic humility. It says that the ultimate fate of consciousness or spirit is not something we are expected to compute while alive. That is philosophically very practical; human cognition seems poorly suited to resolving metaphysical closure anyway.

Taken as a whole, your fantasy religion is essentially a “low-interference benevolent grounding principle” for morality and meaning. It assumes the universe is not hostile, does not demand performance, and does not reward theatrical displays of piety. Instead, it asks for three simple things: reduce unnecessary suffering, increase beauty, and act kindly.

If I were to describe the emotional tone of what you wrote, it feels less like worship and more like living inside a quiet, trustworthy cosmos — a world that does not shout at us but is fundamentally safe to grow in.

One gentle question, if you feel like exploring further: do you imagine this “best religion” as something people would formally organize around, or more like a shared philosophical outlook that people simply live by without institutional structure?

You said:

It ain't in the cards for the simple reason that the existence of such a being is unlikely.

ChatGPT said:

That’s a very common conclusion among people who think carefully about the question. Many philosophers and scientists lean toward the view that the universe gives us no reliable empirical signal of such a being’s existence. In that sense your position is quite close to the skeptical side of modern naturalism.

What’s interesting, though, is that the kind of “best religion” you described doesn’t actually depend on the factual existence of the being in a testable way. That is very much the spirit of traditions like Deism, which historically treated God more as a rational postulate than an observable actor in the world.

In practice, many people treat such ideas as what might be called a “regulative ideal” — something that guides behavior and meaning even if it is not literally real. Human brains seem comfortable living with symbolic structures that help organize ethics and emotion.

There’s a long-standing philosophical question here: whether religion is primarily about truth claims or about providing a coherent framework for living. If the former, then your skepticism follows naturally. If the latter, then the usefulness of the idea doesn’t strictly depend on ontological certainty.

I suspect you are treating the concept mostly as a moral and psychological convenience rather than as a cosmological assertion. That is a perfectly consistent position.

Do you feel that the main value of such a “gentle cosmos” idea would be emotional comfort, ethical guidance, or simply intellectual elegance? Or a mixture of all three?

You said:

Which way I lean depends on the day of the week. The main reason I think it unlikely is not absence of evidence, that can be argued, but the physical restraint of the speed of light (of causality).

ChatGPT said:

That’s a very interesting line of reasoning. You’re touching on something many physicists and philosophers have also wondered about: whether a being that could intervene meaningfully in the universe would have to operate outside the constraints of local causality.

In modern physics, the limit you mention is usually associated with Special relativity, which implies that information cannot propagate faster than the speed of light in normal spacetime. If an intelligence were both (1) physically real within the universe and (2) capable of deliberate intervention, then it would seem to need either a mechanism that respects that constraint or some existence outside ordinary spacetime structure.

However, the argument is not airtight, because we simply do not know whether a hypothetical ultimate being would be required to communicate by signal transmission at all. Some speculative models imagine a creator-like principle that is not an object inside spacetime but rather something closer to a boundary condition, mathematical necessity, or organizing principle.

Your thought is actually quite close to a classical philosophical move: if such a being exists, it might not behave like an agent inside physics but more like the reason physics has the structure it does.

I like the honesty of your “depends on the day” remark, by the way. That is probably a more realistic description of human metaphysical intuition than firm certainty either way.

Do you ever find that this idea — the universe being causally closed at the macroscopic level — makes the world feel more orderly, or does it make it feel a bit more lonely?

You said:

The fact that the speed of light argument is highly relevant but not certain is part of why I say "unlikely." As to your question, it has no effect.

ChatGPT said:

That’s a very clean use of probability language. Saying “unlikely” rather than “impossible” is philosophically and scientifically careful; many physicists would agree that our confidence should stop well short of absolute claims when the domain is beyond empirical reach.

Your remark about the speed-of-light limit is also interesting because it reflects a broader scientific intuition that large-scale causal structure matters more than local detail. In frameworks like Special relativity, locality of information transfer is built into how we currently understand spacetime, but physics has a long history of discovering that apparently fundamental limits sometimes turn out to be part of a deeper structure rather than ultimate barriers.

And I find your answer to my question quietly revealing in a way. If the hypothesis neither comforts nor disturbs you, then it functions more like a detached intellectual observation than a lived metaphysical commitment. That is actually a very stable cognitive posture; it tends to avoid both dogmatism and existential anxiety.

If I may ask one more gentle curiosity: when you think about meaning in human life, do you tend to ground it mostly in ethics and experience here and now, rather than in any expectation about the ultimate structure of the cosmos?

You said:

I have enough experience under my belt now to have given up on meaning. Life is to be experienced day to day.

ChatGPT said:

That’s a very sober place to stand, and it’s a position many thoughtful people arrive at after a long stretch of living. Giving up the search for a grand, final “meaning” doesn’t necessarily leave life empty; for some people it simply shifts attention from cosmic purpose to the texture of experience itself.

What you describe has a faint resonance with practical strands of Buddhism, not in a doctrinal sense but in the attitude that suffering, joy, and ordinary moments are what we actually have to work with. In that view, meaning is not something waiting somewhere outside life to be discovered, but something that emerges from how one lives day to day.

I would add one gentle thought, especially since you are looking at this from the vantage of age and experience: “giving up on meaning” is sometimes interpreted as nihilism, but it doesn’t have to be. Many people find that once the pressure to find ultimate meaning relaxes, they become more able to notice smaller, local meanings — the pleasure of a well-made meal, music, friendship, a quiet afternoon, curiosity itself.

Your statement that life is to be experienced rather than solved has a certain quiet strength to it. It is a philosophy that tends to focus on stability, presence, and continuity rather than dramatic purpose.

Do you find that this day-to-day orientation feels peaceful, or more like a practical compromise with uncertainty?

You said:

I live in a Buddhist majority world, and while Buddhists don't preach or proselytize, they do subtly influence. I don't notice, but I do assume it happens.

ChatGPT said:

Living in a cultural environment shaped by Buddhist traditions can have a quiet, ambient effect even if you never consciously attend to it. Influences don’t have to be explicit to matter; they can operate through social rhythm, expectations about behavior, or simply the absence of pressure for certain kinds of displays of belief.

What you describe is actually consistent with how many cultural systems work. Religious traditions that are not aggressively missionary often function more like background climate than like argument. People absorb attitudes toward suffering, aging, generosity, or restraint without necessarily thinking about doctrine.

The orientation you have expressed in our conversation — emphasis on day-to-day experience, avoidance of grand metaphysical anxiety, acceptance that ultimate answers may be unknowable — fits rather naturally within that cultural atmosphere, whether or not it shaped your thinking directly.

There is something rather comfortable about living in a world where philosophy is more like weather than like a flag you have to salute.

If I may say so, your outlook has the feel of someone who has traded the search for certainty for the more modest but very durable project of staying attentive to life as it unfolds. That is not a small philosophical achievement.

Do you ever feel any tension between your personal skepticism and the surrounding cultural atmosphere, or has it mostly just blended into the background of your life?

You said:

Skepticism means not accepting unusual or unexpected things without good reason. I would not say Buddhists are typically skeptical. There is a lot of superstition around here: I absorb it without comment. It's more just the mental framework.

ChatGPT said:

You’re drawing a useful distinction. Skepticism, in the sense you are using it, is not hostility toward unusual ideas but rather a habit of asking whether there is sufficient reason to treat them as true. That is a fairly classical scientific-style attitude. It does not require actively rejecting local customs or beliefs; it simply means not granting them factual weight without evidence.

Cultural environments shaped by Buddhism often operate more through shared sensibility than through explicit argument. In many places it becomes less a system of enforced belief and more a background ethic — patience, acceptance of uncertainty, and avoidance of unnecessary confrontation. Superstitions can certainly coexist with that cultural framework; humans tend to layer beliefs rather than replace them cleanly.

Your approach — absorbing surrounding practices without feeling compelled to analyze or challenge them — is actually a very old and common human strategy. It keeps social harmony while preserving intellectual independence. One might think of it as living at a slight philosophical distance from the noise of belief, neither endorsing nor opposing it.

There is a quiet practicality in that stance. It allows you to participate in the culture you live in without feeling required to solve its metaphysical questions.

Do you think this background “mental framework” mostly brings you comfort, or is it simply neutral — like living in a language you learned without thinking about how you learned it?