Vigils took place across the nation for an Oklahoma teenager who died the day after a fight in a high school bathroom in which the nonbinary student said they were a target of bullying.
Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old who identified as nonbinary and used they/them pronouns, got into an altercation with three girls in an Owasso High School bathroom who were picking on Benedict and some friends. The girls attacked Benedict for pouring water on them, the teen told police in a video released Friday.
Benedict’s mother called emergency responders to the family home the day after the fight, saying Benedict’s breathing was shallow, their eyes were rolling back and their hands were curled, according to audio released by Owasso police.
Buddhism sure as hell has oppressed others. The Tibetan caste system where Lamas were on the top and everyone else was basically a slave, for example. And then there’s the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, which was encouraged by the monks.
As for Jainism, it teaches that men are a superior species to women and women cannot attain salvation without being reborn as a man first.
Gnosticism I don’t know much about. Did they preach against slavery? Did they preach about equality between men and women? Did they say that children should be protected from harm? I doubt that they did all three (or other modern progressive ideas), but feel free to disabuse me of that notion.
Part of the problem is that it’s pretty difficult to invent new things for your religion to be for or against when new concepts or technologies arise. Buddhists (despite what I said above) are supposed to refrain from killing. Would Siddhartha Gautama think that AI is alive? If so, is it immoral to ever turn one off? That is a moral question that has a great potential to arise in the very near future and I don’t think any religion is prepared for it.
Women did have power in Gnostic Christian history before the conservative wing of Christianity crushed them. From what I can tell they still had to deal with entrenched Roman sexism but it was still progressive for the time. I’m honestly not sure how they fall on slavery but as they believe that all humans have a piece of god in them I would hope they’d be against it. Part of the trouble is most gnostic writings were destroyed for “heresy”. You’re right that plenty of Buddhists have been horrible, Myanmar right now is a good example. Didn’t know that about Jainism so ty.