The religious folks, however, can argue much the same thing about God. He is imagined in the minds of mere mortals here and now and one day His existence will become manifest. It’s just that for most of the faithful this manifestation occurs in the Kingdom of Heaven.
All I can do here [yet again] is to note this as a “general description”. What particular contexts in which Buddhists make claims of benefits. And you can bet there will be any number of folks lining up to argue that, on the contrary, we will benefit all the more if we think like they do, feel like they do, behave like they do.
If Buddhism “works” for someone, fine. But [from my frame of mind] it doesn’t make dasein, conflicting goods and political economy go away. And mere mortals of either the Eastern or the Western persuasion are still confronted with connecting the dots between the behaviors that they choose on this side of the grave and their imagined fate on the other side of it.
That doesn’t go away either. And we know for a fact there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of contexts in which those behaviors come into conflict.
And all the self-development and meditation in the world doesn’t seem to putting much of a dent into that.