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Last Updated on September 25, 2024
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Common people or the masses always fail to distinguish between 2 ideas – being the founder of organized religion and being only a philosopher. This is also because religious leaders and evangelists appeal to their secular side first by saying their religious leader like Jesus or Buddha belongs to the whole humanity. They say this not because they want to be secular but to be sensitive to other religious beliefs and cast as wide a net as they possibly can. Their initial pitch for the religion could sound like secular but they could also have other ulterior motives that you may come to know only after attending their events and activities. This is the typical – Bait and Switch strategy employed in marketing.
There is a huge marketing problem with figures like Buddha or Jesus. In this day and age, they appeal as philosophers only to secular individuals, atheists, or rationalists. So, I think that they might have been philosophers at one time but now they are more religious figures than philosophers from a marketing perceptive. This is a perception problem. Too bad, they can’t even carry their own philosophies they created without facing all these marketing problems.
This has become so bad that we can’t get their followers who are part of organized religion now to take a step away from the religion and look at only philosophy. This is because their philosophies serve religions, which was started later on, rather than the other way around.
The political environment is not helping either. With Identity politics everywhere, all religious people feel like they are competing with other religions and their religion is the only one that should win.
In conclusion, given all these marketing problems, we would need non-religious figures rather than religious ones to get religious individuals to look at secular humanist ideas seriously without getting sidetracked by religion. Then, we would have a chance to focus on philosophy rather than religion which is needed badly. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we can’t appreciate good ideas or good people in religion. We surely can. But, we are going to face all these marketing problems while running a campaign for secular humanist values with religious figures.
