I do think some people think it’s that easy, but you are way too complicated to buy that and a great many Christians certainly do not. Prayer, confession, making up for sins, dark nights of the souls, the entire Jesus reframing of the ten commandments meaning that even if one acts well, but one’s attitude is bad, one is sinning and perhaps not a good person, the need for contemplation, and so on. YOu can participate in Buddhism in utterly low level effort ways also, certainly in the East, where people go through the motions of some Buddhist rituals, donate money to monks, get monks to bless their tourist bungalow project and figure they will reach enlightenment some life way in the future.
You have any guarantee for whatever you are doing now? Likely a mix of trying to not have certain problems, perhaps using heuristic plucked from here and there, following advice and ideas likely trickling through dozens of systems and experts. You are investing time right now in all sorts of activities - you have any guarantee they are helping? If that’s all going fine, well then there’s no motivation to engage in Buddhism or any other possible solution, since it is supposed to be a way to deal with and end suffering or end suffering’s bite, so to speak. But it seems to me you are taking yourself out of the equation. If you are not drawn to Buddhism - because you are satisfied with your own methods, or becuase you don’t feel you are suffering much, or because something feels off about it - then don’t try it. If you are interested and have strong motivation, then you need to do something, and yes, we have to use our intuitions, to a great degree AS WE ALREADY ARE in how we try to solve these things. Obviously I am not selling Buddhism, since I don’t like it. But I am trying to put it in a context. You already have a set of things you do to make things better. That’s your religion, philosophy, self-help thingie. How many years do you think it will take you to figure out if it is working? How many years will it take to work? If you aren’t doing much to try to fix things, but just basically like most people muddling through as best you can, well that has no guarantee of anything at all. It is what it is. Not saying that’s wrong, but you are investing ALL of your time and energy in that. Satisfied, well, obviously choosing a spiritual path of any kind would be sort of odd unless you thought it sounded fun or you were just curious. If you think a one shot ritual can save you, well, that seems like an obvious choice. But you don’t, at least it seems you don’t so that version of Christianity, which I actually think is in practice extremely rare, is not for you.
There is scientific evidence that Buddhist meditation has certain effects, expecially for long term practitioners. If you want those effects, well, you actually have science on your side.
Yes, but it isn’t a tease. If you believe it, then the job is done as soon as you surrender. There’s no waiting and trying harder and gotta do it more, there’s no “why isn’t this working?” (There can be plenty of that if you’re praying to God to improve your life and you’re not getting results, but I’m talking about just believing that what you’re doing is working somehow in some transcendent world).
These seems like some version of Christianity you would never buy. And it is precisely a get rich quick scheme. Monday morning you are heading back to that job. If you think you can flip a switch in your brain and believe that you solved all those problems that easily, you’re a lucky guy even for a fundamentalist. I am pretty sure many fundamentalists worry, suffer, fear god (isn’t that their phrase), wonder if what they just thought or did means they are going to hell, grieve tremendously when loved ones die despite them supposedly being in Heaven and so on. And I am sure many have times when they wonder if they really have surrendered to Jesus. They may not talk about this, though I will bet many do, but the US, for example, puts a premium on branding oneself and being positive.
If all they have to do is surrender, then they don’t need to go to church and they don’t need to pray, except to ask for things. And why get pissed off about things like gay people. Perhaps some of them say this one phone call to God is all you need, but they aren’t buying it either.
And, of course, there are lines of worship and participation in the Christianity that mirror those in Buddhism. Long processes of deepening faith and connecting to God, though religious practice, and not easy to spot markers a long the way.
I don’t like Christianity either, by the way. For different reasons from why I don’t like Buddhism.