bubbatheclown

So I think that a bunch of men were smarter than the God who wrote the Bible, and were clever enough to add rules He never mentioned at all.

Fixed

Jesus didn't make any kind of sacrament or ordinance out of vines, unless you ironically relate that to the eucharist. Paul describes christians being "grafted in" to Israel. If Jesus's body is the temple, you are grafted in by being a member of the body of christ, which is literally how the church is defined in scripture. If you are not sacramentally united to God via the human nature of Christ you are not saved.

Again, the idea of Jesus making a sacrament was the invention of later men.

More specifically we know that the idea of the Eucharist was an adaptation of the symposion, a banquet that was a focal activity of many communities in the Hellenistic world at that time. Victims (sacrificed animals) would be slaughtered and the meat would be shared at the banquet, which was often accompanied by the singing of hymns and praying of prayers to the gods. Early Christians who hailed from this cultural milieu intuitively understood this to be how religion in general was practiced, so that was how they did things. It was that culture's mode of expressing their faith, and it did not take on the later form of consuming an unleavened wafer or drinking from a shared sacramental cup of wine at a specific moment. It was quite simply a meal shared with other believers.

Jesus literally said "this is my body". "evangelical" heretics are the ones going against the plain reading of scripture. "Yes lets take scripture super literally about everything until it mentions sacraments".

Jesus said "I am the vine and you are the branches." Is Jesus a plant, then?

Also saying that sacraments are just a metaphorical symbol is something that literally no one ever believed until well after the protestant reformation, other views like sola scriptura and sola fide exist on a spectrum and you can find church fathers saying all sorts of stuff but sacraments being nothing but metaphors wasn't even a view any historical christian took seriously. Not even Zwingli himself was that extreme.

Again, you're talking about people who lived after the closing of the Biblical canon. Just because a misconception is passed down through many generations doesn't make it truth.

I mean, there's nothing to deny.

Insofar as Jesus commanded his followers to be baptized, and to hold a supper in remembrance of him (at unspecified intervals), Evangelicals already do that. But insofar as "sacraments" has some meaning beyond that, the burden is on proponents to prove said extrabiblical doctrine conceived of by men who lived centuries after the NT canon closed holds any weight.

Inb4 OP realizes Martin Luther called his church Evangelical before it was called Lutheran

Also the state line thing is relevant, not because crossing some imaginary line matters but to emphasize the fact that he traveled a long distance to engage in these protests.

The distance from Antioch, Illinois to Kenosha, Wisconsin is a less than 20 mile drive. He'd likely been there plenty times before growing up (having apparently lived in Antioch his entire life), and it's confirmed that he knew at least one person in the local area (his friend who he was staying in Kenosha with).

He unnecessarily interjected himself into a dangerous situation, sure, but less directly than Pretti did (who physically threw himself between ICE agents and the person they were in an altercation with). In fact, Rittenhouse immediately disengaged and attempted to flee at the first sign of confrontation, and only opened fire after being cornered and assaulted by a lynch mob, at least one member of whom tried to take his gun.

Finally, Rittenhouse was 17 (young enough to be indisputably still a kid, whose sense of good judgment perhaps wasn't as developed as an adult's) whereas Pretti was 37.

I don't even disagree that Pretti's shooting was unjustified but the comparison you're trying to draw between him and Rittenhouse just doesn't work. Even the Wikipedia article for Kenosha reads like an almost comically open and shut case of self defense.

Frigging Mike Pence, a man now chiefly remembered for saying "No, Mr. President, I won't go along with January 6", has since endorsed Trump's attempt to renegotiate the matter of Greenland.

We do not need more land, nor are we entitled to more land, but we do need more access to places like Greenland than we have now for strategic reasons, namely as the linchpin that would make Golden Dome viable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_system)#Strategic_value_of_Greenland

Trump claimed to have secured said access. The other side denied this, though it's possible they're just trying to save face publicly, since capitulating to those evil Yankees might not go well with European voters. The best way to ascertain the truth is to keep an eye on Greenland over the next 3 years and to see if there's a buildup of US assets there.

You're not wrong about the Evangelical Right per se, but their irreligious opponents have always been guilty of the same sin.

Separation of church and state neither means that America is an officially Christian nation nor that the opponents of religion are specially privileged to use the state to lessen the role of religion in society via the education system or other state-funded channels of influence. Secularism means governmental neutrality in questions of or pertaining to religion. Both sides have refused to acknowledge the limitations placed upon them by the constitution, and if the Evangelical right really kicked off in the 1970s then chronologically speaking it was the irreligious who were the first to cross that line.

(And as an aside, the Establishment Clause only applied to the Federal government until the 1940s.)

There's no use trying to talk to you when you're sperging out like this. Another time, I guess.

And for the record, the Canadians are currently modeling their prospects of fending off a US invasion, and what they're saying is that it'd take the US perhaps as little as two days to overrun the country. The Canadian national defense strategy centers around Mujahideen-style guerrilla tactics because they know anything else would be futile. If that's true of Canada then Greenland is a washout.

And what would Europe do to respond? France needed US logistical support for Operation Serval (re: deploying some 5,000 men against jihadists in Mali riding around in old pickups), and they're among the more competent armies in Europe. They simply don't have the means to wage expeditionary warfare on a scale large enough to defeat the US across the ocean.

Again, I don't want any of this to happen. And it probably won't happen. Trump talked a big game about Iran but then ultimately lacked the resolve to invade and overthrow Khamenei's regime, which is to say nothing of Europe (sure enough, today he dialed down the rhetoric at Davos, ruling out the use of force to acquire Greenland). But what's clear is that Europe is in no position to thump its chest and credibly threaten America. The only tool in your toolbelt to pull that off is nukes, and we have those too.

I don't support the US laying a finger on Greenland. Neither do the vast majority of Americans. Not even Republicans.

But do you know what could change that in a relatively short time (re: a few months or years)? The collective experience of being spoken to by Europeans like this.

I have to disagree with this take for two reasons.

First, specific to Venezuela, this isn't a case of foreign companies gobbling up the oil rights back in the 1920s with the imprimatur of a tinpot dictator flanked at all times by g-men under the employ of an American banana conglomerate and then still being there 80 years later at the start of 2007. Rather, the democratically elected government of Venezuela, two decades after the 1975 nationalization, voluntarily invited the oil companies back in the 1990s because it thought this deal would be of economic benefit to the country. Venezuela entered into the contract of its own volition and then reneged on its end of the bargain.

Second, you act as though "introducing the technology" was a singular act that happened sometime in the early to mid 20th century. In fact, the Western oil industry continues to develop new technologies and export access to such abroad. For example, one bit of trivia about the current sanctions regime on Russia is that it's meant to block Russian access to tech that, in a few years, they'll need to drill deeper when shallower reserves are depleted. In a recent conversation with my dad, who worked on a rig in the Gulf of Mexico back in the '80s, he attested to how drastically less efficient the whole process was back then compared to today.

Also I feel like constant waves of new immigrants joining a community disrupts the formation of a new culture and constantly ties them back to the foreign culture. Thomas Jefferson ending the slave trade, for example, led to a sudden cutoff to the influx of people from Africa, and at that point there was a sharp cultural divergence, and now African immigrants arriving to the US have little in common with American blacks, with little love lost between the two groups. If immigration is never cut off the population will continue to frame itself as a foreign cohort, will be viewed that way by the natives, and will fail to assimilate long-term into the fabric of the host country.

This encapsulates my thoughts on the topic exactly.

People look back on the immigrant scares of the 1920s and are like "Hey look, they integrated just fine". Which, they did...with a 41 year (1924-1965) moratorium on new arrivals to help nudge this process along. Nowadays we probably don't need 40 years; maybe 10-20 would suffice. And it doesn't have to be a total ban either. Just reduce the influx of new arrivals from a given large minority group to a trickle (re: enforce existing caps and try to distribute it even-ish among different countries) so they can't exercise an outsized influence on the people already here.

Why are you referring to yourself in third person?

Known Knowns: Things that we know, and that we're fully aware we know.

Known Unknowns: Things that we know we don't know.

Unknown Unknowns: Things that we don't know we don't know.

Unknown Knowns: Things that we know or are either unaware of knowing, or we consciously deny knowing due to motivated reasoning.

Agreed. But kind of odd that you find this point to be best illustrated by citing a poorly researched article while ignoring that we have a president right now holding rallies where he claims we have the greatest economy in history and that his tariffs are in fact being paid for by other countries while right wing media stays almost entirely silent.

Trump is not an academic or an "expert". For one thing, his job is as such that he can say whatever nonsense in public and still do the job (or at least sign the papers his advisors wave in his face) in private, unlike an academic/expert/journalist whose entire purpose is to produce/disseminate factual information. You could argue that it's possible for such a man to come to believe his own lies and start making decisions on the basis of unbridled delusion, but at the same time there's no way to prove that -- and Venezuela, at least, seems a straightforward example of White House policy being tangibly shaped by the people advising him (re: Marco Rubio).

And while it's unfortunate that Trump lies as readily as he breathes, everyone expects it at this point, and most people just tune it out as white noise. The effect of one known liar on public trust is not as damning as to behold vast institutions, especially the quiet bureaucracies that keep the machinery of complex modern society running, where nobody inside can be trusted not to perjure themselves.

Again, the author of the PBS article in question is not the only person here who can be reasonably implicated in dishonest behavior. That includes the authors of all the secondhand articles which held it up as a source credible enough to singlehandedly debunk a presidential administration's talking points significant enough to be the official casus belli for a military intervention abroad. I don't know how big this list is, but it at least includes the author of said CRS article, which was likely read by Congressional staffers who help inform the behavior of their bosses.

You might say that "the fish rots from the head" but this was not behavior they learned from Trump. Left-media is and has always been opposed to Trump. This is behavior they learned elsewhere, or that emerged naturally within their own spaces.

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is a publication of Congress. It is publicly funded and officially non-partisan as opposed to being, say, a privately company owned by a left-aligned oligarch. I bring them up as an edge case; a sin that the CRS is capable of committing is well within the realm of plausibility for CNN or The Guardian or PBS or the Associated Press.

The CRS recently published a report titled U.S. Capture of Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro: Considerations for Congress. It's fairly short, but at one point it writes:

"Some experts have disputed the Administration's claims about Venezuela, including those regarding the existence of a non-international armed conflict, Maduro's direction of TDA, and stolen oil."

The underscores were added here to represent hyperlinks. For stolen oil, the hyperlink takes you to a January 4 PBS article titled Fact-checking Trump's claims after U.S. strike on Venezuela and capture of Maduro.

It's pretty long, but under it's stolen oil section it only mentions the 1975 Venezuelan nationalization and subsequent buyout at a loss that the target companies accepted, quoting the Washington Post that "The U.S. was much more interested in having Venezuela be a provider of oil -- relatively cheap oil -- than to have a production collapse in Venezuela...As a result, the change was relatively uncontroversial at the time."

This section goes on, but makes no mention of any subsequent moves by the Venezuelan government to the same or similar effect, lending the impression that 1975, half a century ago, is the last time Venezuela stole oil from foreign companies.

There's just one problem: it isn't true. In 2007 the Chavez government carried out a new round of nationalization. While it was more wide-ranging than just the petroleum industry (it also affected the electricity and telecommunications sectors), our focus here is oil so here at the deeds:

It was ordered that PVDSA, the state-owned oil company of Venezuela, must own a "60% stake in all heavy crude projects in the Orinoco Belt, forcing foreign companies to accept new contractual conditions or leave the country. As a result, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips withdrew from Venezuela."

Subsequently, these two companies sued Venezuela in an international court, the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). It awarded both a cumulative $10.3 billion in damages, of which Venezuela has paid back only a small fraction (possibly as little as <3 percent). Even this is less than what both companies claim they are really owed in lost earnings, which amounts to several tens of billions of dollars.

So why did CRS imply that the stolen oil claim had been debunked by experts? Because their source was a shoddy, poorly researched PBS article...

...Which is what this thread is really about. Secondhand reporting.

I don't know what the CRS article author's intentions were. Did they intentionally seek to misrepresent the full extent of the current regime's wrongdoing? Did they naively assume that PBS did its due diligence on the topic? Or was there "motivated reasoning" involved, wherein they found a source that fit their biases and purposefully avoided doing further research that might call the reliability of said source's claims into question?

Either way, the primary think tank to service U.S. Congress just cited a PBS article and did no fact checking of its own on the matter.

Like I said, CRS is an edge case. If they did this, then what about private companies allowed to be as openly partisan as they want?

Let's say you've got ten journalists working for various oligarch-controlled publications. The first to the punch does his research, realizes this is a nuanced issue with more than a little evidence favoring claims made by the Trump Administration or the GOP at large...and decides to lie about it (either directly or by omission). Maybe there's a non-zero chance someone could hold him accountable for lying.

But then what about the other nine? Well, if they cite him as an expert, thus proclaim that "the experts have debunked Trump's talking point", then they're also being untruthful but in such a way that there's no skin off their back whatever happens to the first guy. If someone calls them out for this, they can always claim they assumed the initial source to be factually correct.

But hey, who am I kidding? No one's actually going to comb through the news and find every case where the first guy was cited.

In other words, as long as someone is willing to write a full article, however spurious its contents, it can be held up by all the rest via secondhand reporting as the "experts debunking" whatever pesky facts are getting in the way of the narrative. They can basically manufacture evidence to support any position they want.

We are truly living in a post-truth world.

Do they not consider Maduro a legitimate head of state?

He isn't. Maduro lost the 2024 presidential election but fraudulently claimed victory and then refused to transfer power to his opponent, who was forced to flee abroad. That man is the legitimate and lawful President of Venezuela until his term expires, whereas Maduro was an usurper holding the country hostage and preventing the lawful president from assuming his duties.

In this respect Maduro was actually worse than most dictators out there, since the people of Venezuela decisively repudiated the notion that he has any legitimate right to rule. In most such places (re: Iran or China) people aren't afforded the option of a free vote for whichever candidate they please, so it can be conjectured but not unambiguously proven that most of them don't support the status quo. In Venezuela they were given such a choice, upon which they rejected Maduro in a landslide.

Honestly the trial is a sideshow. He can walk for all I care, so long as he's in custody long enough for a new government to take charge in Venezuela.

The very first novel (actually, maybe second) I tried to write, back in like 2012-2013 when I was a teenager, was absolutely, gobsmackingly unhinged and quite frankly the product of a disturbed young mind. I wrote up a synopsis for it on DDO at one point but even that didn't do justice to how frigging weird it was.

Anyway, it was a sci-fi divided into story arcs. One of them, among the last ones I wrote I think, had a character who was surgically modified so that his body and mind operated at a faster tempo than everyone else. He ended up roping the MC into the same condition somehow, then tried to seduce him to the "dark side" of the type of uninhibited sociopathy this arrangement would enable.

That character was not Bubba the Clown. Bubba was a side character. He was a man who constantly dressed like a scary clown and traveled from planet to planet living as a serial cannibal. Because for some reason he had fangs and craved human flesh. I don't remember what his connection to the main storyline of that arc was.

That became the name of my first DDO account. And for nostalgia's sake I decided 12-ish years later to reuse it for my account here.

Happy late birthday.

On the contrary. It was Otto Von Bismarck (founder of the German Empire of WW1 fame) who established the modern welfare state. Which served to legitimize the authoritarian status quo of the day, and half a century later would be co-opted by Nazi Germany to legitimize its own self.

In a virtuous society, you don't have to bribe people to retain their loyalty to the republic. And in a non-virtuous one, they can just as readily be bribed by a different master who offers them more. People must be taught that this mindset is unacceptable.

But I guess it's understandable that this thread was made, since America has developed what's rather undeniably a presidential cult of personality. The whole industry of "presidential historians" who base 90% of their assessments on moving speeches or a grandfatherly demeanor or how the economy was doing in a given 4-8 years has perpetuated this sense of grand mythos surrounding these men, as opposed to just treating them as dudes hired by the public to do a job. Instead of treating the Federal Government as a vast machine with a lot of moving parts, and the often incredibly complicated issues facing it with the nuance they deserve, all discourse ends up coming down to whether or not the current President has the mandate of heaven.

And then those same people are shocked when at long last someone who grew up and spent their entire life in this cultural milieu assumes the office and starts acting like a Caesar lol

Presidents? Sure. But if we look at Congress (which, you know, actually passes budgets and enacts laws), then it looks something like this:

Recession of 1953-1955: Republican majority in both houses

Recession of 1958: Democrat majority in both houses

Recession of 1960-1961: Democrat majority in both houses

Recession of 1969-1970: Democrat majority in both houses

1973-1975 Recession: Democrat majority in both houses

1980 Recession: Democrat majority in both houses

1981-1982 Recession: Split Congress

Early 1990s Recession: Democrat majority in both houses

2001 Recession: Split Congress

Great Recession: Democrat majority in both houses

Covid Recession (unavoidable because of a frigging global pandemic, but whatever): Split Congress

Until maybe a hundred years ago people were buried in wooden boxes, which would themselves decompose.

On a psychological level, it's to imbue man with a special dignity by drawing a distinction between us and other organisms that get torn apart by predators, chewed up, digested, crapped out as fertilizer, etc. A human cadaver is to be untouched for as long as possible, and this is taken as a mark of respect not reserved for animals. The fostering of this mindset was a crucial step in the development of humanistic thought.

In general, belief systems that practice cremation rather than burial blur the distinction between humans and beasts. Which makes sense if you believe in reincarnation, for example. You were some animal prior to being born as a human, and will be again after death. One notable exception is the Zoroastrians, who believe in the eternal human soul but dispose of corpses in a manner that would shock modern observers.

Different hives have different personalities, different developed strategies for building comb, different evolved thresholds for aggression, even regional foraging patterns that can shift from generation to generation. And these changes in hive behavior are not completely explained by genetic mutations. That’s culture without a true language.

This actually does sound kind of like culture. Though I would exclude that behavior which can be intuitively grasped by every generation in a vacuum, since this is "rediscovered" as opposed to transmitted.

I would proffer that genetically encoded behavior is distinct from culture, which is something that's created by a group of organisms, as opposed to an underlying factor that creates them.

Language, almost by definition.

It should be considered that while no animals is as smart as an adult human, plenty are as smart as, say, a young child. Which begs the question of why extremely few animals have even managed rudimentary tools. The answer is that even what we consider basic civilization isn't something that can be figured out in one generation. Whatever Gen. A has learned, it must find some way to impart to Gen. B, and so on. Wherever this is possible, the end result is that knowledge will be gradually improved upon.

But there is no chain of transmission with animals. A young animal does not learn a coherent language from their community, assuming their species isn't solitary, and are generally with their parents for too short a time to be taught even assuming the parents had one. So for example, gorillas are smart enough to learn hundreds of sign language signals (if not over 1,000) but this doesn't translate to their children also knowing sign. So whatever you teach a gorilla dies with it. Gorillas are also taught using pedagogical aids that they themselves do not memorize how to employ for their children, or may involve the use of tools that they don't know how to manufacture.

Culture, at its most basic, is an intergenerational meme. You cannot have intergenerational memes without a language to teach those memes.

Christianity has stopped being an issue for the West since the age of Enlightment

The UK was still 93% Christian in 1950, as were 91% of Americans.

https://countryeconomy.com/demography/religions/uk?year=1950

https://news.gallup.com/poll/358364/religious-americans.aspx

The idea that a Christian supermajority was only stopped from pushing bloody theocracy by some "enlightened" minority is absurd. Clearly a government that respected freedom of religion was allowed to proceed with the Christian supermajority's consent. Or in other words, the Christians of the 19th and early 20th centuries had arrived at these values on their own. Even if convinced by the arguments of Enlightenment-era deistic thinkers, this couldn't have happened unless said Christians believed such to be compatible with the teachings of their religion.

Buddhism, on the other hand, didn't change over time.

All religions change over time in practice, if not in doctrine too.

Buddhism wasn't originally divided into 3-4 major schools (Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana, arguably Ambedkarism) but now it is. These schools weren't themselves originally divided into subgroups (e.g. Pure Land, Chan/Zen, Nyingma, Kagyu, Gelug, Sakya, etc.) but now they are. Mahayana kept "discovering" new sutras until 500-600 years into the common era, or roughly a thousand years after the Buddha lived.

Buddhism wasn't originally intertwined with secular state power, but by the Middle Ages this was happening across East Asia, especially in Southeast Asia. Even today, the 969 Movement is a Buddhist nationalist movement in Myanmar, trying to preserve the country's "traditional Buddhist values" and standing in opposition to the country's Muslim minority, its members even participating in the Rohingya Genocide. The movement's leader is a Buddhist monk. In Sri Lanka, the country's Sinhalese Buddhist majority discriminates against its Tamil Hindu minority, and a few years ago suppressed an insurgency by the latter using draconian collective punishment tactics.

And if you dive a bit deeper you'll realize that more and more Westerners are participating in some movements that resemble Buddhism, like the new age movement.

Sure, Buddhism has a novelty to it for people who haven't been raised in the tradition. Not sure why I'd need to "dive a little deeper" when literally everyone knows about this but okay.

Even so, some 60-70 after the explosion of Buddhist movements in the West only about 1% of Americans (3.3 million people) identify as Buddhists, in a country with some 20-25 million Asian-Americans. This is far worse than the retention rate of Christianity among White-Americans.

https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/

The fact that some people used Buddhism to justify violence doesn't make it less useful.

You're obviously holding Christian and Buddhism to different standards. When Buddhists do violence or theocracy, you say it "isn't real Buddhism". But when Christians do the same, you take this as proof that Christianity is bad. I would appreciate a little consistency.

The problem is that you're looking at it from a Christian perspective.

No, I'm explicitly not looking at it from a Christian perspective. If I did, I'd call all non-Christian spirituality either fake or demonic. I gave a secular description of spirituality that maps onto Buddhism and Christianity alike.

Buddhism is very clear about it. Spirituality is about training one's mind and state of being in order to reach peace among people.

"We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ."

-2 Corinthians 10:5

"Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is an excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me -- practice these things, and the peace of God will be with you."

-Philippians 4:4-9

"For this is the message you heard from the beginning: we should love one another...Do not be surprised, my brothers and sisters, if the world hates you. We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love each other. Anyone who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him. This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters."

-1 John 3:11-16

This is the main argument of this thread. Buddhism has everything we need to progress because in order to progress we need at least not to kill one another. 

Given that the Christian West voluntarily stopped killing people in the name of religion around the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries without these values being imposed on them by an outside force, why do you think this is unique to Buddhism? And do you think violent Buddhist fundamentalists aren't a thing?

is the most peaceful philosophy

Jesus said "blessed are the peacemakers" and "turn the other cheek", but you don't seem to judge Christianity by the ideals of its founder alone. Rather, what you're interested in is how a religion pans out in practice. So then, let's take a cursory glance at Buddhism history.

Premodern Japan had prominent Buddhist monasteries such as Enryaku-ji and Mii-dera, which were independent fiefdoms that collected rents from peasants and were backed by sohei (a caste of warrior monks). These sometimes waged wars of aggression against secular fiefdoms or against each other on account of theological differences.

The practical dynamics at play largely resembled those in Medieval Europe or the fire temples of Zoroastrian Iran, where pious nobles made donations of land to monastic institutions, which over the course of centuries often managed to accrue vast landholdings. Their power was only curbed by the warlord Oda Nobunaga at the end of a long struggle to unify the politically fractured country.

And if that was true in Japan, then we can assume it was probably true in other East Asian/Southeast Asian countries as well.

Indeed, we can assume Southeast Asia (where Theravada as opposed to Mahayana Buddhism dominated) was probably even less egalitarian-minded. The Theravadin suppose that only a small elect, not the laity, are sufficiently self-controlled to achieve salvation. All laypeople can really do is hope that they'll be reincarnated one day as somebody who becomes a monk, and tread water (re: not accrue more bad karma and end up in a non-human body) in the meantime by earning merit.

And how does a Theravada layperson earn merit? By supporting the livelihood of the elect. It is a feature, not a bug, of Theravada societies that the many live to serve the privileged few. This takes the form of public, socially sanctioned rituals.

Finally, let's examine Tibetan (or Vajrayana) Buddhism, the most well-known Buddhist school in the West. Prior to its annexation by communist China, Tibet was a stratified society with rigid social boundaries where the large majority of the population consisted of serfs whose land was owned by a small, often clerical elite. Live dismemberment was practiced as a form of (ostensibly non-lethal) punishment until 1913.

spiritual ideology

Also a rather subjective claim. If you measured spirituality by such metrics as the intensity of one's devotion and willingness to discard worldly vices, the intensity/frequency of religious experience, general personality traits (e.g. sense of tranquility) outside of moments of religious experience, etc., you will find both spiritual and not so spiritual people in all religious traditions. For example, I hardly think you would claim some hard drinking Chinese guy with a Buddha figurine on his shelf is more spiritual than, say, a Benedictine monk.