How about more than one teacher

Saffron

I have always believed that at the core, most religions are true -- but through the work of others, they've perverted the teachings and core meanings of their original Teachers.

There may very well have been a Teacher/Prophet/Instructor named Jesus.

There may very well have been a Teacher/Prophet/Instructor named Muhammad.

There may very well have been a Teacher/Prophet/Instructor named Buddha.

I think you get where I'm going with this. The same can be said for most New World, Paganistic, African religions, etc etc for example.

Is this a collection of people who taught? Was there most likely one figure who stood out amongst each race/geographic area? The merits of their teachings can be decided on a case by case basis. Has the advent of 'if you don't believe in our Teacher, you are damned to hell hurt peaceful coexistence amongst most religions? Would the world be a better place if we agreed that there were good many good teachers, and some people place an emphasis on one teaching, but that other teachings are true for others as ours is for us?

federica

In a word -?

Yes.

Stephen

To say that most religions are true is somewhat completely illogical. I've known a lot of Americans (as I am myself) who feel that way, because they've really only been exposed to the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) and they tend to think that all religions follow the same routine and teach the same things.

They do not. What they do mostly all share is a morality that could just as easily be attributed to natural human tendency. The rest of the religious teachings are mind-bogglingly different, in all aspects. On a single god or multiple, on how the universe came into creation, on what happens to you when you die (and more importantly, what you can do to change your destination)... they are not at all the same.

I don't consider Buddhism to be a religion, and I don't consider myself a Buddhist in the traditional sense. Nevertheless I have awakened to the reality of the nature of life by having a knowledge of what the Buddha taught and by (miraculously) attaining a life-changing insight and realization of these truths.

At its heart, religion is not either truth or fabrication, but the outcome of our desire for there to be an ultimate truth that we are failing to see. It is not that the truth is not right in front of us the whole time, but that we do not comprehend it and therefore feel a great hole in our lives that must be filled. Then we are confronted with a great multitude of possibilities and coupled with the threat of dying before figuring it out, tend to cling to one of them as soon as we feel comfort in its message.

I've been looking for the truth now for something like 20 years, and I've studied religion, philosophy, science, non-religion (atheism) and have been more-or-less agnostic, believing there was some greater purpose or truth but not knowing if we as a species did possess that knowledge or not.

Now I know. It has been said that all religion, taken together, contains the distilled wisdom of the ages. So much is absolutely true, but in turn the absolute truth of all nature and of life must be found from within. Though someone can tell you that such-and-such is the truth, it won't become a truth for you until you can meditate on it, see that it harmonizes perfectly with your own direct experience of life, and then realize its truth and even peer deeper into the reality of it all with complete one-pointedness of mind.