I’ve found it curious that many of the pioneers of Western Buddhism – those who brought Buddhism to the West and helped popularise it – are Jewish. Frank Descher details this phenomenon in his 2017 essay ‘Jewish Converts to Buddhism and the Phenomenon of “Jewish Buddhists” (“JuBus”) in the United States, Germany and Israel’. Rodger Kamenetz,…
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Over the last 50 years in the UK, the proportion of the population identifying as non-religious – often referred to as ‘Nones’ – has been on the rise. The British Social Attitudes Survey from 2019 found that over half (52%) of the UK population regard themselves as belonging to no religion. Hannah Waite, from the think…
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Can you be an atheist and a Buddhist? At first glance, it seems like it would be inconsistent to be both, to be someone who does not believe in God but belongs to a religion. But there is now a growing form of Buddhism, in the Western world at least, which is based on humanism…
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