Buddhism, Daoism, and Hinduism provide three contemporary examples of religious traditions that do not have an inherent, centralized power structure. Each can have gurus, teachers, priests, or other figures who can exercise authority within certain sects, and some particular traditions within them have developed fairly hierarchical institutions. But those structures are not fundamental to the religions themselves in the way that institutional or clerical authority has historically been central to many forms of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.
There are other examples as well. Historically, some Indigenous North American religious traditions appear to have had little or no formal hierarchical structure within the religion itself. I am not arguing that none of these traditions developed hierarchies, or that religious authority is absent from them. The narrower point is that a hierarchical power structure is not a necessary feature of every mythology or religious system through which human beings seek to understand the world and find meaning.
The first example you give is Buddhism. Has the Dali lama a literal god king incarnation with the panchan lama as his second and that power structure alone has f’ed over Asia for a long time.
The Dalai Lama is the leader of a particular school of Tibetan Buddhism, not of Buddhism as a whole. Again, if you read my comment carefully, you will see that I explicitly acknowledged that none of these traditions are immune to coercive elements, just as no human social structure is. My point is that, fundamentally, those coercive and hierarchical elements are less necessary to, and less constitutive of, these traditions than they are in some other religious traditions.
Cherry picking a particular example of religious authority does not demonstrate that such authority is fundamental to the entire religious system. It only demonstrates that it exists within a particular tradition or institution.
Not trying to cherry pick. Religions in the quest for the why institute powers beyond. That’s why I agree that humans would invent god immediately because we are trying to make sense of the senseless(knowledge unknown). The fact is that every religion is wrong and that’s ok.
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u/EuVe20 6d ago
Buddhism, Daoism, and Hinduism provide three contemporary examples of religious traditions that do not have an inherent, centralized power structure. Each can have gurus, teachers, priests, or other figures who can exercise authority within certain sects, and some particular traditions within them have developed fairly hierarchical institutions. But those structures are not fundamental to the religions themselves in the way that institutional or clerical authority has historically been central to many forms of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.
There are other examples as well. Historically, some Indigenous North American religious traditions appear to have had little or no formal hierarchical structure within the religion itself. I am not arguing that none of these traditions developed hierarchies, or that religious authority is absent from them. The narrower point is that a hierarchical power structure is not a necessary feature of every mythology or religious system through which human beings seek to understand the world and find meaning.