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Relationships and Society

Naturalized Buddhism for westerners can encourage a form of bad conscience: it can seem to us that adhering to Buddhism restrictedly to the practices considered to be secular, we can be spiritual without being religious, whereas without realizing we're moved by typically religious drives.
Now that the Buddhist traditions confront themselves with cognitive neuroscience and other natural sciences, trying to build up or expand an edifice for studying the mind and conscious experience, it seems vital to stand for the legitimacy and self-sufficiency of Buddhist traditional thought, maintaining critical distance from the prestige (and thus privilege) the scientific apparatus holds in modern western society.
From the XIX century on, Buddhism has been called to confront challenges and opportunities collateral to the religious and cultural structure that characterized it in the pre-modern period.
An article from The Guardian in 2019 states that the mindfulness movement has become the "new capitalist spirituality" – "magical thinking on steroids" that, instead of subverting the "neoliberal order," now "only serves to invigorate its destructive logic."