Yea. The individuality of the soul is a very basic belief in Christianity. Especially to the early Christians, as their concept of the individual was unique at that time, and probably one of the greatest influences on the later development of western civilization.
In Christianity, Zathrus has a soul, and it is not a soul he's shared with thousands of other people.
A bit. So you're saying the little bit I read that was completely and totally wrong in saying that Buddhism teaches you to release your attachment to desires and this world?
All Buddhism teaches that. People confuse Karma with Christian concepts of good and evil, but they are not the same. For example, lets say a large black man was raping your teenage daughter, and you had a gun. Under Buddhism you should not shoot the rather aggressive black man. Not only are you hurting your daughter because her suffering is going to bring her closer to Nirvana, but it will cause you to reincarnate as a lower being, as you committed violence.
This is too weird, dude. No one knows what Buddha believed, there's almost no historical records left from that era. And what makes it weird is that whenever anyone makes similar claims about Jesus, you cut them to pieces for not following the historical record.
And you took that atom/solar system analogy right from some sloppy religious thinker without examining it. First off, they're not similar at all, an electron is more of an energy state than an orbiting object. And secondly, you're claiming there's no supernatural in Buddhism, yet Buddha could see inside an atom and out to the planets, and understood principals of science that wouldn't be discovered for millenia?
While that is what many people teach and think, the problem is that little of that is in the historical record. For example, Buddha could not have rejected the supernatural, the concept didn't really exist during his time. If you don't have a concept of science, of empirical observation, how can you oppose that with the idea of the supernatural? This is the supernatural, and that is, what?
However, I am probably being unfair. Does it matter if people imply modern ideas to the past history of a religion? No, all religions do this. And Christianity is steadily devolving. Christianity used to be the one religion that embraced change, Christ taught that we should make things better and better. Now all the Christians want to return to the old testament.
The Germans still sent scientists to Tibet to measure their heads to see if they were Aryan.
However, that was mostly Himmler and Austrian nazis. Hitler and the German nazis wanted mostly to return to the original Germanic religions.
They still believed in reincarnation tho. Goring was sure he was the reincarnation of some ancient Germanic king. And reincarnation was the basis of their racial theories. It's really hard to explain the innate evil of the Jews just because of bad genes. There must be more.
So you're saying that all the mentions of heaven and Jesus's visit to hell to talk to Satan were all inserted later, and that actually Jesus taught a passive acceptance of evil in the world?
That's the other problem. For 2000 years Buddhism has been about demons and all sorts of superstitions. Completely foreign and unacceptable to any westerner. The only way to make Buddhism even remotely acceptable is to imagine a simpler Buddhism that might have existed in the remote past.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. You're taking a completely modern Christian concept, a concept that even Islam doesn't have, the idea that committing evil makes you suffer here and now, and trying to apply it to an ancient dead religion.
No they don't. Christianity teaches that the world is real, evil is very real, and it's a Christians job to fight evil. Buddhism teaches that the world is illusion, and any efforts to alleviate suffering only prevents people from moving up on the wheel of life.
Buddishm invented the idea of reincarnation. The basic principal of reincarnation is that if a person is born black, or crippled, they deserve it because of a sin they committed in a previous life, and to alleviate their suffering could keep them from moving up on the wheel of life, as Karma says that a person who has sinned must suffer in this life in order to move up the wheel of life.
And it goes a lot further than teaching you to accept your life. Buddhism states plainly that the world is illusion. If the world is illusion, it's a waste of time to improve people's lives. Stuff like building plumbing systems so people don't shit in the street.
Buddhism is a fatalistic religion designed to maintain a racially based caste system. Even for those people it's an obsolete religion, when the British conquered India in the 1800's Buddhism had been extinct in India for almost 5 centuries.
There's no way a modern American can really accept the basic principals of Buddishm, our religious thought is millenia advanced over Buddhism.
That's why the books make no sense. They're not about a real religion, more of what a modern person fantasizes that Buddhism should be.
