"Privately, I believe in none of them. Neither do you. Publicly, I believe in them all..."

All of the gods that came before were made up. The current god is real.

It continues to amaze me that people don't examine that obvious truism of human culture and say to themselves "wait a minute...."

Hinduism seems to me like a remnant of the old polytheistic religions. The three east Mediterranean religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) are three variations on a single theme.

I've never been able to figure out where Buddhism fits in. It seems to be some middle ground between the monotheists and the Hinduism. Technically, I guess it is not theistic, though practically it certainly seems like it is.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/10/2022 10:00AM by Brother Of Jerry.

https://vividness.live/protestant-buddhism


Protestant Buddhism

Many Western Buddhists would consider the following ideas obviously true, and perhaps as defining Buddhism:

Everyone can potentially attain enlightenment
Religious practice is your personal responsibility; no one can do it for you
You don’t necessarily have to have help from monks to practice Buddhism effectively
Non-monks can teach Buddhism; celibacy is not essential to religious leadership
Ordinary people can and should meditate; meditation is the main Buddhist practice
Careful observation of your own inner thoughts and feelings is the essence of meditation
Ordinary people can, and should, read and interpret Buddhist texts, which should be available in translation
Ritual is not necessary; it’s a late cultural accretion on the original, rational Buddhist teachings
Magic, used to accomplish practical goals, is not part of Buddhism
Buddhism doesn’t believe in gods or spirits or demons; or at any rate, they should be ignored as unimportant
Buddhism doesn’t believe in idols (statues inhabited by gods)
Buddhist institutions can be useful, but not necessary; they tend to become corrupt, and we should be suspicious of them
Everyday life is sacred

These ideas come mainly from Protestant Christianity, not traditional Buddhism. They are not entirely absent in traditional Buddhism. However, mostly, in traditional Buddhism:

Only monks can potentially attain enlightenment
Religious practice is mainly a public, ritual affair, led by monks; the lay role is passive attendance
There is no Buddhism without monks
Only monks can teach Buddhism, and celibacy is critical to being a monk
Only monks meditate, and very few of them; meditation is a marginal practice
Meditation is mainly on subjects other than one’s self
Only monks read Buddhist texts, their interpretation is fixed by tradition, and they are available only in ancient, dead languages
Essentially all Buddhist practice is public ritual
Much of Buddhist practice aims at practical, this-world goals, by magically influencing spirits
Gods and demons are the main subject of Buddhist ritual
Buddhists worship idols that are understood to be the dwelling-places of spirits
All reverence is due to the monastic, institutional Sangha, which is the sole holder of the Dharma
Everyday life is defiled, contaminating, and must be abandoned if you want to make spiritual progress

Buddhism is still understood and practiced this way in much of Asia.

I enjoyed studying comparative religions as a youth. Studying the eastern religions and philosophies made me realize that Christianity isn't all that. People have come up with perfectly good alternative explanations about the nature of reality. They get along just fine without the Christian myth.

I remember reading a story set in ancient Pompeii where a woman went to the temple of Jupiter to pray. That started to make me realize that the Abrahamic god isn't all that, either. It's just the current nomenclature.

BoJ, Hinduism isn't polytheistic--or at least not in the sense that you appear to indicate. Your description would be more apt for the earlier Brahmanism.

The way to think about this stuff is historically. The proto-Indo-European peoples had a vision of gods in a unified "heaven" or functioning under a super-God. When the Indo-Iranians moved into the two eponymous regions, the two tribal groups shared that lesser pantheon with the caveat that the gods of the one were the demons of the other. That fact is evident in both the early religious literatures.

After the separation had occurred, the religions of the two peoples evolved in different directions, resulting in the caste-system of Brahmanism in India. But in both lands the focus on the unitary heaven intensified. The upshot was Zoroastrianism, in which there is a single dominant God, Ahura Mazda, and the lesser gods descend to the status of spirits or just angels and devils; and eventually India's three sister faiths--Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism--in which the single cosmic reality is the "God" to whom all beings ultimately belong and will eventually merge. There remain "gods" in all three Indian traditions, but they are just another subordinate category of beings like spirits, humans, and cockroaches, tied by their individual emotions to the illusion of individuality until their eventual reunification with the Cosmic Unity.

You thus have two different forms of monotheism arising from the same proto-Indo-Iranian substrate within several centuries of each other. Something similar happens in that other Indo-European cradle, Greece. For by the Axial age of around 600 BCE the Greek philosophers have stopped talking about "gods" and increasingly speak of "God," meaning the cosmic order or cosmic unity. Meanwhile the Hebrew priests and scribes had met the Zoroastrians in their shared Babylonian captivity and imbibed from them their monotheism, which became the basis of the YHWH cult that King Josiah imposed with his reforms.

So all of these faiths emerged from the same process of polytheism transforming into monotheism. In India there was not a Father God but rather a Father Reality; and in Iran, a personal and volitional God emerged who would come to define the three Abrahamic religions. That's why the Bible speaks approvingly of Cyrus and other Iranian emperors and came to include the books of Job, Second Daniel (now removed), and related apocalyptic themes that are strongly attested in the earlier Iranian Avesta.

Also intriguing, and the subject of research of William McNeill at the University of Chicago and Harvard's Joseph Fletcher at the time of his death in the middle 1980s, is the possibility that the Chinese notion of an overarching "Tian," or "heaven" also arose from Indo-European influence. For that concept seems to have originated in the late second millennium BCE from the northwest, around today's Muslim Xinjiang, in which Indo-European languages were spoken and whence Buddhism would ultimately enter China.

Also interesting, but tangential, is the persistence to one degree or another of polytheism in all of the monotheistic religions. India never wholly lost its gods; the Chinese people, as opposed to the ruling elite, continued to worship local deities right up till the 19th century; the Jewish prophets could not stamp out worship of local fertility goddesses; the peoples of the Greek world reacted to the more monotheistic and rational God by shifting their allegiances to the Mystery Cults; Christianity ultimately opted for a three-part God, a Mother of God who was for many centuries worshiped, and an array of saints who were also effectively worshiped by tens of millions; and Mohamed felt it necessary to launch a figurative and literal war against the gods of Palestine and Arabia. It appears, in other words, that a distant Father God doesn't, or didn't, meet the emotional needs of peoples who wanted a relationship with a divine mother or with various gods with their own individual, approachable, personalities.

In short, there was no purely monotheistic religion or culture anywhere. What happened was that the monotheistic theme in Indo-European religions wielded a tremendous influence over the various polytheisms and created several different flavors of relative monotheism. Hinduism is much closer in that regard to Buddhism than it is to the more polytheistic Brahmanism.

    
  

I was more worried about your reaction, Jesus, since rumor has it you know a lot about God.

Pfft!  I'm just here for the laughter.

It may be a koan.

Humans have always made up gods, but for a reason. God creation expresses an ineffable side of human existence.

Physical materialism has failed in its quest to explain existence, passing the buck with its version of "it will all be explained in the next life".

Belief systems are mythological, yet in NDEs people meet these conjured gods. They meet the God they believe in, or no god if they don't believe in gods. I have to wonder if we all are similarly mythological. The creation of a story.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. But there is no beginning or end because time is only an experience. God and Man are co-created. Or imagined, or conjured, with real consequences for us. We are thought forms in the flesh. Against that backdrop, I see real utility in worshipping an obviously mythological Christ.

Bacchus is the only true god.

  
  
  

All gods are equally real.