One would see rationalist talk ill about almost all religions, but not much against Buddhism. It would look counter intuitive, rationalists are here to slam all religious practices, and why not they slam Buddhism so much? Buddhism was slammed, that too by a rationalist nation China. By the time it slammed Buddhism, this religion had become impure, and was well diverged from in initial teachings. Yes one has the right to be stupid and follow Tibetian Buddhism, but China thought its the duty of the state to teach rationalism to the people and bring them out of their stupidity.

Buddhism has lot of belief that are untrue. They believe in previous and past life, they believe in Karma which is a kind of accounting system that keeps track of ones good and bad deeds and assigns a score (very similar to loyalty score assigned by China to every citizen), Buddhist believe in spirits and so on.

Though Buddhists have got many things wrong, they had invested a lot in psychological studies and had got one thing right. That is they figured out that ones happiness and sadness is not the function of external world, but lies within ones brain. Its very true.

Imagine a man who has a corrosive family, none in his family respect him and they just abuse him. Just imagine Leo Tolstoy, the world knows how his family abused him. So imagine a man like him and he is very sad because of his family. Now imagine he goes to a liquor shop and drinks. His wife, children and relatives are the same, but he finds his sadness disappears and he starts to feel a kind of forgetfulness and happiness. I wonder Tolstoy was a drunk, but writing gave him happiness despite everything around him was pulling him down. As you see from this example these people are able to ignore the sadness and are able to generate happiness. That’s what Buddhism says, it says you r feelings can be detached from the world around you.

People believed that ones happiness and sadness was controlled by God, or some supernatural forces, but Buddhism said that one can manufacture these feelings in ones mind. A trained Buddhist can choose to become sad when he wants to, and can become happy when he wants to. He can observe and comment and debate about himself, a trait very very few in humanity have.

When ever God is knocked off, blind faith is shut down, we rationalist are happy and feel that humanity is one step closer to the truth, and hence we love Buddhism despite all its shortcomings.