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so I'm lost..
Seeker567
Explorer
Why do the Christians/Jews worship a god that got angry and resorted to violence all the time, when a Indian dude that lived 500 years before Christ, was peaceful and non judgmental, as well as in complete control of his anger?
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Consider that our projections of "God" often represent our best guess at what motivates nature and the natural environment of our realities. Do you understand or have room in your mind to examine the environment that brought about the Abrahamic views? If so, great, its a ripe and wonderful story of interaction between harsh conditions and coping skills to overcome personal suffering and cultivate humility.
If your question is really an expression of judgement for Christians/Jews, well... consider working with something more productive, like a meditation practice or learning the 4nt, 8fp etc.
Nah, who am I kidding. We're all morons and he In God We Trust thing seems a bit unconstitutional to me.
Our isolationism probably caused an elevation in suffering and loss of life and property to epic status. Hopefully, with time, the general US population can stop the habituation and act more wisely. Do you ever wonder, if our foreign policy had been closer in the 30s to what it is today, what the 1940s would have looked like instead? What the latter part of the 20th century might have looked like without George Kennan's containment policies?
Realize, also, that if we had not abandoned our desire to avoid war, your language and culture would be quite different from what it is today. Perhaps German or Russian, and under a totalitarian regime. We make stupid mistakes, get entangled in conflicts, but at least we are trying to put our muscles to use for humankind. Some delusion, sure, some wisdom, sure... effort. Not always right effort, but we're evolving.
as if they were human ie if you give them nice things, they
hopefully will bless you.
'God did not create man, Man created God'
History is full of instances where people accepted the dictate
of the conquerors in order to survive.
If this is true, why is it true? My understanding is that experience trumps belief, whether inside or outside Buddhism. Belief by its very nature implies uncertainty and doubt. It creates answers that sound reasonable or reassuring, but the basis relies on a past that can never be grasped. No one can 'believe' or 'hope' in the present ... and this is the teaching of experience.
But for those who have no practice or fail to investigate the beliefs they hold, it is like being stuck in the mud -- fervently believing what is not yet assured in experience. And there are entire institutions that continue to inspire their followers to do little more than believe or hope ... or, put another way, to live a life of doubt.
In the world of belief and hope there are gods of hope and gods of anger and goddesses of serenity and goddesses of jealousy. The stories are wondrous and horrifying by turns ... but that doesn't change the fact that they are stories as yet unverified by the customers of one religion or another.
The only usefulness of any of this is that it teaches us to use our beliefs and hopes as they become useful but to be wary of relying on them.
Not sure if any of this is relevant or not. Sorry.
PS. The best -- if not necessarily the most polite -- riff on religion I ever saw came from George Carlin:
I wonder if you have studied much history. War is terrible, one of the worst things we can do. Not THE worst, but one of the worst. Sometimes the worst thing we can do is nothing.
Now in contrast, the Greeks were always warring with others, defending themselves, or falling victim to environmental disasters, droughts, volcanoes, etc. Their view of the gods was that they were fickle and at times cruel. Their gods were jealous, immature and had to be appeased... or else catastrophe! The Greeks also had a pretty grim view of the afterlife. They were going to a gray world guarded by an unlucky god and a three-headed guard dog, and it didn't matter if you lived a moral life. There was no happiness or escape unless some hero half-god decided to pay a heroic visit, or if they had done something really spectacular that the gods liked. Then they might get an upgrade. (Early Greeks were a bit pessimistic and gloomy neh?)
Perhaps the early Jews/Muslims had an angry and jealous god because it was reflective of their world view in those times. Things were bloody, and there were many fights over territory and beliefs. They also suffered from environment strains, famines etc. Their god was strict, and quick to mete out punishment. He had some rules and if you didn't obey... then you deserved your lot in life.(This view could also be influenced by the strict patriarchal family systems they had). Their god also didn't want to you talkin' to other god's on the playground. (So early jews/muslims had a fearful view of the world which was a scary place if you were disobedient and didn't listen to dad).
Now, that all changed with the New Testament. All of a sudden a philosopher who is shaking up authority comes around preaching that god is loving, just and forgiving. That we should all be nice to each other too. So Jesus appeared and suddenly God is not so angry anymore. There is less fear and more love, and Christians pop up.
I see Buddhism as a similar movement. Siddhartha was walking around, philosophizing, and preaching love, truth and peace, shaking up tradition and telling everyone to obey their own authority. (The point is, both Jesus and Buddha had movements that occurred under a dominant and prevalent religion. They shook things up, and from that came modern various sects of Buddhism, and modern various sects of Christianity).
The atmosphere of religions change when disastrous things occur. I'm sure we have members from the UK who could explain how the bubonic plague impacted religious views of the time. (sorry UK members I slept through your history classes because it was really early in the morning and there were no mention of dragons). I do know that Lutherism started when Martin Luther nailed an essay to a church door listing all the faults of the Catholic church after he witnessed priests selling prayers for loved ones in hell. The priests were saying "Can't you hear the cries of your loved one's in hell? I can pray for their release for just 20 quid." Martin Luther was like "Wahhh! That's a lie! The bible doesn't mention any get out of jail free passes.. oh wait... commoners don't read the bible! I gotta spread the word!"
We create the Gods we need.
In times of war God is a warrior (who is always on our side). In times of peace God is love.
And Buddha is made of the same stuff.
For politicians Buddha is a conservative or a revolutionary (depending on political preference).
For philosophers Buddha is an intellectual; a thinker about the nature of the universe and of the nature of mind.
For emotional people Buddha stands for kindness and compassion.
In the mind of stupid people (like me) Buddha emphasized not-knowing.
Tell me what Buddha is, and I’ll tell you what you are.
Either way, the reason I think Christians cause so much havoc is because there are tons of them. The more people who are part of it, the bigger the percentage of crazies.
The US sure seems to've become war-hungry in the last decade or two... An economic history of the US shows that war has been good for the economy; war industry for WWII helped get the country out of the Depression, I remember reading somewhere, then the Korean War, Vietnam War...war creates jobs. Boeing just started hiring like crazy because they got a huge Defense Dept. contract for the Mid-East wars...Seattle residents are happy. What's good for Boeing is good for Seattle (I used to live there), the thinking goes. "Oh, joy! A war contract! The economy will finally recover from the recession!" *sighhh* :shake:
and yea as far as tempramant and understanding I think the Jesus model is similar to the Buddha
like the inquisition, and the "holy wars".
(sorry... it's my knee-jerk response to the word inquisition...)
That is a fact.
What is your personal response to war?
In the 2nd world war many people fled to the jungles to hide.
Are you prepared to fight to death?
Most people are not.
That is why you have 'surrender'.
In whatever situation, you still have to make a personal
choice. You can choose to fight or surrender.
You can choose to live or die.
You can choose to speak German, Chinese or English.
What do you choose?
how does your post relate to the OP?
But, to return to our muttons, I read the Tanakh (the "Old Testament") as a process, a journey. First we have tribal deities which amalgamate, in a patriarchal, nomadic society, into a single 'national God' (like the one in the American oath or the English "God save the Queen"). In the Moses story, this tribal deity morphs into a single god, Yhwh, which slowly or swiftly acquires the status of only God and acquires a capital letter. At the same time in the story, the people of this new nation, the Israelites, get scared of this mono-God which appears in fire, smoke and thunder. They ask it not to appear again and Yhwh agrees that there will be no more 'theophanies' - a rather spiteful passage, to my mind. Thereafter, Yhwh only appears by speaking to individuals like Samuel. God is in the process of withdrawing presence into the Ark of the Covenant. By the time we get to the late books of the Tanakh, Yhwh has almost completely disappeared, not even putting in a token appearance in, say, the Book of Ruth.
By the time we get to Second Temple Judaism (around the turn of the Common Era), the process is almost complete. At the destruction of Solomon's Temple and the exile, Ezekiel had a vision of Yhwh leaving the Temple. There is no vision of a return.
The Essene and Jesus message takes the process to its extreme of individualism.
The Jesus message was then taken up by theologians and the state with the consequences we know. The texts were redacted and some were outlawed, although the Gospel of Thomas, for example, continued to be used in the Eastern Churches.
My own view is that the great mistake against which Jesus warns and which 'Christianity' has made is to confuse 'faith' and 'belief'. There are many, many beliefs but, to my mind, only one faith, arising out of personal experience as a result, most often, of continued practice, which can be Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Parsee, whatever fits.
I've never heard that the Eastern Churches (I assume you mean Orthodox) include the Gospel of Thomas in their New Testament. I'm waiting to hear back from a couple of Russky friends on that.
Do Christians believe in a wrathful god? I think it all depends, depends on family, culture and personal history. It also depends, I believe, on geography and geology. This has been mentioned before: geography has as much an influence on the belief structure as anything else. I am not surprised that peoples from 'hard' landscapes follow a 'hard' deity. Looking beyond Christianity, it is worth noticing the atmosphere of Norse mythology compared with, say, Greek.
I suppose many Christians do worship a god who gets angry, even though, when questioned, they would say that their god is 'beyond emotion'.This has more to do with their own psychopathology than with Jesus' message: if we call the deity "Father" and our father was abusive, what then?
BTW, when I speak of the Eastern Christian churches, I do not mean the Greek or Russian Orthodox. I mean the far more ancient churches of the East, which still exist in places like Syria or (as far as has been allowed by the invaders) Iraq and which never fell under the rule of Rome/Constantinople.
This is precisely the sort of teacher I meet in both Jesus and Gotama. Through them I get a glimpse of Buddha Nature and Christ Nature. Beyond that? Ah! That's a whole new kettle of herrings - many of them red.
I'd bet most are moderate, fitting a typical bell curve, with extreme views simply being the most vocal, rather than representing the largest population.
“I grew up in the traditions of the Anglican Church and those are ‘the customs of my tribe.’ I’m privileged to be embedded in its wonderful aesthetic and musical traditions and I want to do all I can to preserve and strengthen them.”
In recent years I have gone to far more Buddhist temples in Thailand than I have Christian churches in America, but I have attended both. I hadn't been in a Catholic Church in well over 25 years, but when I recently went a couple of times it was like I was in a significantly different place. And yet, you're trying to take Christianity back to the Salem Witchcraft Days and beyond. The Methodist Church that I have attended a couple of times recently is a very different atmosphere than the one I attended as a child.
And, I think you have a rather purified view of Buddhism as practiced today. In Theravada Thailand, for example, slavery and corvee labor was abolished by King Chulalongkorn -- but not until 1905, even though four Buddhist kings had ruled before him...and that's just in the current dynasty. And, most of the modern sexual slavery of adults and children in Southeast Asian Buddhist nations that takes place today is controlled by people who profess to be Buddhist.
Thankfully, most of the responses I see in this thread are a little more balanced than your view.
I would add that, at the basis of both the judgmental, exclusivist and the non-judgmental, inclusive Christianities is a belief that there is 'Something' (Yhwh, Allah, etc.) that cares about each individual. That, more than the question of a Creator, may be the stumbling-block between modern Abrahamic and Buddhist beliefs.
If visiting temples and churches is what you think makes you more spiritual, I'm happy for you, but it still doesn't change the facts.
"And yet, you're trying to take Christianity back to the Salem Witchcraft Days and beyond."
I'm not "TRYING" to do anything,again, just stating the facts.
"And, I think you have a rather purified view of Buddhism as practiced today."
There is good and bad in everyone.
"Thankfully, most of the responses I see in this thread are a little more balanced than your view."
My opinion, however you might judge it, is my opinion, and every bit as valid as yours, sorry.
Namaste
Life is too short.
You have my compassion.
With Metta
In metta,
Raven