Buddhism

Buddhism often gets called "atheist", because it doesn't posit a Creator or a judgemental deity. Westerners inclined to it also often portray it as a pragmatic religion, agnostic about deities and souls, and focused on subjectively experimental things such as meditative practice leading to enlightenment, or at least to greater calm and compassion if you're not sure you believe in enlightenment. All of which has elements of truth; there's text of Buddha being agnostic about the afterlife, meditative enlightenment is core, and Buddhism actively teaches non-existence of an eternal soul. Of course, that makes problematic the question of what is reborn.

But if you've seen Asian art in museums, or read Journey to the West, this austere version might raise your eyebrows, as it did mine. For we have the six realms of Buddhist cosmology, including the realm of the devas (blissful long-lived beings, not necessarily with physical form anywhere, who have a load of good karma and probably won't reach enlightenment because they're too blissful) and the hells where sinners with bad karma can be frozen, roasted, disembowelled, crushed to jelly, etc., over and over for billions of years. You do get out eventually, and there's sort of a redemptive point, so it's more like Purgatory than Christian Hell, but still colorfully horrific. And the overall cosmology is baroque.

Incidentally the bodhisattva vows include not "abandoning the Mahayana by saying that Mahayana texts are not the words of Buddha or teaching what appears to be the Dharma but is not". Yay, scripturalism! And someone muses about karma, the Chinese earthquake, and the Holocaust

-- And huh, there's an Atheists International group in Bloomington. Bye now.