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The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

signoregalilei.com

161–170 of 193 posts

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#161
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, it was genocide.

It definitely was. There were at least sometimes extenuating circumstances though. My sense is that in the US and Canada settlers found a great deal of "apparently" uninhabited land, largely a result of the diseases that had swept through because of earlier contact, decimating the existing population. My guess is that had disease not done its work, the European settlers would have found it much harder to displace the…

I have yet to read 1491, but yes I imagine that it would have been much more challenging without that first strike. But the weapons capabilities of the europeans were also going to make it happen one way or another.

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#162

Ya know, the Divine sometimes works in mysterious ways. While it is possible these two fellas were a ripped-off Buddha story, it is also possible that they were actual people who lead these lives so that people who were Buddhists had some examples of how to adapt their previous Buddhist tendencies to Christian ones if they had an experience that caused conversion. Is there evidence to suggest they were not real peopl…

Religious stories about the Buddha were readily and literally coopted into Christian lore by early Church writers. Unless you presume the Buddhist stories were themselves historically accurate - which would start down a road of "both Buddhism and Christianity are true" - it's hard to imagine that these were coincidentally also stories about real figures.

>Religious stories about the Buddha were readily and literally coopted into Christian lore by early Church writers.

That's just another assertion of "They copied it!" Where is the evidence that this is so beyond an inference that they were copied?

>Unless you presume the Buddhist stories were themselves historically accurate - which would start down a road of "both Buddhism and Christianity are true" - it's hard to imagine that these were coincidentally also stories about real figures.

Life is suffering, and the Messiah took all human suffering on himself? I'm not sure these are mutually exclusive.

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#163
post #105
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically how christians have always operated since they first emerged and started doing the same throughout the hellenic world. Most (all?) christian traditions are pagan in origin. The main goal was not necessarily replacement but a sort of corporate ownership takeover of the littany of existing traditions, such that these cultures might be ingrained into a unified fold of christian power/influence/customs/laws/exp…

It is not true that Christian practices are mostly pagan in origin. You do not need to look far to find the origin of the vast majority of what you would have seen in a medieval church service. You can see the common origin if you compare and contrast an Orthodox Jewish synagogue service with an Orthodox Christian liturgy. The first half of the Divine Liturgy and the synagogue service are virtually the same even in t…

Judiasm is monotheistic, Christianity, if you ask anyone besides a christian, is polytheistic, you have The Father (1), The Son (Jesus is also God, or A God, 2), and The Holy Ghost (3). There was a big, big brouhaha about this, the Nicene Creed is a core part of protestant religions to help remind everyone that they're technically a monotheist religion and somehow Jesus is a Flavor of God and not separate despite most of the new testament has him as a fully separate person with his own separate agenda. Even if you discount The Father as a legal entity only you still end up with a polytheistic religion. Writing Jesus into the canon 2000 years later as a seperate but equal entity was bound to be fraught with continuity issues.

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#164
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Side note as another Catholic: Saints Josaphat and Barlaam never had an official decree of canonization. That process didn't exist (in its earliest form) until 1170 AD. Saints before that were generally just acclaimed by the Christians in the area and probably recognized by a local bishop. The Vatican does keep a "Roman Martyrology" by which they try to keep a list of all known saints, but the saints that existed bef…

Catholics surely put great effort into bureaucracy and organization. "The devil and a friend of his were walking down the street, when they saw ahead of them a man stoop down and pick up something from the ground, look at it, and put it away in his pocket. The friend said to the devil, 'What did that man pick up?' 'He picked up a piece of Truth,' said the devil.'That is a very bad business for you, then,' said his fr…

> A friend of mine (who’s a very brilliant mathematician) once told a story that, in the beginning of the ages, God was making up a dictionary of all the words that would be used in language. And one day he visited the Archangel Gabriel, and they left the dictionary in the taxi. And while he was in talking to Gabriel, the devil got into the taxi and wrote into the dictionary two words: “ought” and “should.”

-- Alan Watts

https://www.organism.earth/library/document/four-ways-to-the...

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its called syncretism. The Greeks and Romans have been doing it since the time of Alexander the Great.

It's interesting that in religion back then they took the idea of the gods' existence as an obvious fact. So when they encountered other people with different gods they assumed that they were actually the same gods, just by different names. If they encountered civilized/intelligent people with different mythologies it meant either that those people knew something the Greeks previously didn't or they had just gotten e…

I guess for the ones associating their gods with real phenomena, it seems almost inevitable.

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#166
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>what it is to live a good life That has to be the universal one, no? I feel like basic moral principles, at least directed towards the in group, are pretty universal. I'd argue they are more base than even humans and are shared with certain intelligent animals.

I think this is true up to a point. But you find chasmic differences as well. Polygamy is an obvious example, or lying to non-brethren (absolutely forbidden by Christianity, permitted I believe by other religions), or the caste system (unthinkable in Islam or Christianity, a base part of reality in Hinduism), etc. You find a very different attitude to wealth in many varieties of Protestantism compared to the Catholic…

> or the caste system (unthinkable in Islam or Christianity, a base part of reality in Hinduism), etc.

The historical prominence of the slave trade in both the Christian and Islamic worlds should make it quite clear that it was hardly "unthinkable" but instead very rationalizable.

Rigid systems of social power hierarchy and oppression based on ancestry, perceived race, and occupation (which is a lot of what the worst part of caste is) were very much features of Christian and Islamic societies, even if their religions didn't codify them.

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#167
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not true that Christian practices are mostly pagan in origin. You do not need to look far to find the origin of the vast majority of what you would have seen in a medieval church service. You can see the common origin if you compare and contrast an Orthodox Jewish synagogue service with an Orthodox Christian liturgy. The first half of the Divine Liturgy and the synagogue service are virtually the same even in t…

Judiasm is monotheistic, Christianity, if you ask anyone besides a christian, is polytheistic, you have The Father (1), The Son (Jesus is also God, or A God, 2), and The Holy Ghost (3). There was a big, big brouhaha about this, the Nicene Creed is a core part of protestant religions to help remind everyone that they're technically a monotheist religion and somehow Jesus is a Flavor of God and not separate despite mos…

> ... most of the new testament has him [Jesus] as a fully separate person with his own separate agenda ...

Just want to correct a couple errors of fact here, by quoting from the sources that you're misunderstanding.

"And he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, and knelt down and prayed, saying, 'Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.'" - Luke 22:41-42 (copied from https://biblehub.com/esv/luke/22.htm)

He doesn't want to suffer and die on the cross. Yet he chooses to serve the Father's agenda, not his own.

"I and the Father are one." - John 10:30 (copied from https://biblehub.com/esv/john/10.htm)

And note that, if you read just a few more sentences, you discover that this statement caused the Jews listening to him to pick up stones to stone him (for anyone who doesn't know, stoning was a method of execution: they intended to kill him). He asks (verse 32) why they want to stone him, and they reply (verse 33) that it's for blasphemy — "because you, being a man, make yourself God."

Finally, I want to address one other point in what you said:

> Christianity, if you ask anyone besides a christian, is polytheistic.

It's true that if you ask most people who are not Christians, most (not all, but most) will tell you that Christians worship three gods. But consider this: if you want to find out about Buddhist teaching, who would be a better source for explaining it to you correctly, a Buddhist, or a non-Buddhist? If you want to find out about Jewish teaching, who would be more informed about it, a religious Jew, or a non-Jew? (The word "Jew" is ambiguous, referring to both a religion and an ethnicity — so I use the term "religious Jew" to distinguish people who follow the religion from people who are ethnically Jewish but don't follow the Jewish religion). If you want to be well-informed about Islam, who would explain it to you better, a Muslim, or a non-Muslim? And if you want to understand what Christianity actually teaches, who's more likely to be correct about it, a Christian or a non-Christian?

P.S. To explain just a little further, the teaching of the Trinity is indeed one of the most complex teachings of Christianity to fully grasp, and there have been countless arguments and debates about it over the centuries. The council at Nicaea in AD 325, which formalized the Nicene Creed, did not completely settle that — some people continued to argue over the doctrine later — but it pretty well cemented the official church position. That the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit ("Holy Ghost" in older English texts, but "Holy Spirit" in modern English) are both three and one. The modern English translation of the Nicene Creed is probably worth quoting here (at least the relevant bits) so people can see what the actual teaching is:

"I believe in one God, the Father almighty ... I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial [which means "of one being, of one nature"] with the Father ... I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified ..." (Source: https://www.usccb.org/prayers/nicene-creed, though there are multiple translations, e.g. the translation I'm most familiar with says "of one being with the Father" rather than "consubstantial with the Father").

And before I quit writing this P.S., I want to mention one kind of awesome story about the council of Nicaea. Which is the story about what St. Nicholas allegedly did there. (Yes, the St. Nicholas whose life inspired the story of Santa Claus). Sadly, the story is probably not true, since Nicholas's name does not appear in any of the lists of attendees that have survived... but it's an awesome story anyway. The story goes that Arius was standing in front of the council arguing his position, which was that Jesus had not existed eternally, but was created by God the Father at one point. (The famous phrase is "There was a time when he was not".) That part is certainly historically true. What is likely not historical is the rest of the story: that Nicholas got so mad at Arius's denial of the divinity of Jesus that he got up and slapped (some sources say "punched") Arius in the face.

Which leads to this historical-humor variation on a famous American Christmas carol:

    He knows when you are sleeping,
    He knows when you're awake,
    He knows when you've denied the divinity of Christ,
    So if you're an Arian, DUCK!
P.P.S. One last note. My intention here is not to argue, but to explain. I am happy to argue/debate with anyone who wants to discuss further, but HN is not the right place for literal religious debate. If you want to argue or debate about Christian teaching, feel free to contact me at (my HN username) at pobox dot com. (And if you just write a note here that you've done so, that will avoid the possibility of my missing your email: my pobox address gets a lot of email).

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its called syncretism. The Greeks and Romans have been doing it since the time of Alexander the Great.

It's interesting that in religion back then they took the idea of the gods' existence as an obvious fact. So when they encountered other people with different gods they assumed that they were actually the same gods, just by different names. If they encountered civilized/intelligent people with different mythologies it meant either that those people knew something the Greeks previously didn't or they had just gotten e…

> So when they encountered other people with different gods they assumed that they were actually the same gods, just by different names. [...] It was more like two people with different, but honest, accounts of an event in the remote past trying to reconcile their own limited recollection or view point.

And not just with the classic Greek/Roman Gods. The similarities between Pandora and Eve, the Flood myths[0] like Deucalion and Noah; there are so many appropriated stories in the Abrahamic religions (probably others, but most familiar with Greek and Abrahamic ones) I don't even understand how these days religion is taken seriously given the historical pattern of appropriation and cleansing of the more fantastical shape-shifting, creature, magic-spell type bits.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#169
post #24

It’s quite ironic how the assimilationist nature of high church Christianity has ended up becoming what early Christianity was in opposition to. Early Christians were non-conformist, to the point of execution, and were sometimes even seen as anti-social. A thousand years later, Christians are incorporating obscure tales from the East. I think this is another argument for a separation of Church and state. It allows pe…

[dead]

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Religious stories about the Buddha were readily and literally coopted into Christian lore by early Church writers. Unless you presume the Buddhist stories were themselves historically accurate - which would start down a road of "both Buddhism and Christianity are true" - it's hard to imagine that these were coincidentally also stories about real figures.

>Religious stories about the Buddha were readily and literally coopted into Christian lore by early Church writers. That's just another assertion of "They copied it!" Where is the evidence that this is so beyond an inference that they were copied? >Unless you presume the Buddhist stories were themselves historically accurate - which would start down a road of "both Buddhism and Christianity are true" - it's hard to i…

We have records of versions of the story being repeated as it travelled from South Asia to the Mediterranean and the name slowly changing from bodhisattva -> bodisav -> Būdhasaf -> Iodasaph -> Ioasaph -> Josaphat
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