We have also discussed enlightenment, suffering, attachment, love, mindfulness, meditation, mantras, meditating on scripture, Buddhism’s 8-fold path, wisdom in Buddhism versus Christianity, effortless effort, faith, Jesus, mercy, grace, dominion, placebo effect, and power.
Now let’s compare and contrast a few more teachings of Christianity and Buddhism.
The Buddhist belief in karma simply states that what we do in this lifetime can have eternal positive or negative consequences. Their belief in reincarnation basically states that the consequences of our actions in this life could lead to promotion or demotion in the following life cycle. According to Buddhism, following the eightfold path is important because a person’s positive or negative actions in life will determine what they are reborn as in their next life - whether they are promoted or demoted.
A big problem with reincarnation is that there is only limited anecdotal evidence for it and our current scientific research models can't easily prove or debunk these findings. For example, one criticism of reincarnation is the problem of memory, since it would mean that reincarnated people should be able to remember their past lives. On the other hand, Christianity contains a lot of evidence for the afterlife through many very well documented NDE’s (near death experiences). For more on this topic which we do not have nearly enough space to cover here, you can check out the following book: Imagine Heaven by John Burke, and the movie After Life.
While Buddhism teaches reincarnation, on the other hand Christianity teaches that each person is appointed to die only once (Hebrews 9:27), and that what Christians do in this lifetime will have eternal reward in heaven. But if anyone does not believe in what Jesus did for them, then it makes no difference how “good” they try to be, because they will have rejected God’s offer for forgiveness for their shortcomings and even more importantly they will have rejected a relationship with God, therefore they will not be able to spend eternity with Him in heaven, so they will have chosen to go to hell instead (because hell is the only place where God is not present).
This next topic is especially controversial: interconnectedness – Buddhism teaches that all of reality is interconnected, which is their basic way of “proving” that spirituality exists.
Buddhists believe that everything in the universe is interconnected, and they basically believe that everything is all part of God, therefore we are all God. But if Buddhism is correct when they believe that we are all gods and part of the greater collective consciousness called God, and we will all eventually merge together into that greater consciousness after we achieve enlightenment and die, why would we even need to learn a standard of goodness (aka morals) such as the eightfold path? If we are part of a greater collective consciousness, shouldn’t we all intuitively know this and know how to be good?
Christianity on the other hand states that we are all inherently selfish and we should follow the standard for goodness created by God, starting with the 10 commandments and ending with having the love of Jesus and following the golden rule (treat others as you would like to be treated - Matt. 7:12). The Bible says that our good works are like filthy rags compared to a perfectly good and holy God who has never had an evil thought in His entire existence (Is. 64:6). By comparison, even the “best” human being is closer morally to the Nazis than they are to a perfectly good God.
So a big difference between the 2 religions is that Buddhism tries to be good through a set of rules (just like devout Jews who do not believe in Jesus still do to this day), yet Christians are supposed to rely on Christ’s sacrifice and His help through the Holy Spirit to love God, love others, and love themselves so that they can be more like God Himself, in whose image we are all created.
Many Christians do not fully understand Jesus’ grace (undeserved favor) and mercy (undeserved forgiveness) for them, so they rely on their own good works to get them into heaven, not realizing that all they really need to do is believe in Jesus and seek to know Him like you would a loving Father – then prove their love and obedience to Him by changing the way that they think and behave. Unfortunately many Christians truly do not understand how much God loves them so they skip out on the relationship part, thinking God is distant and uncaring, and they focus only on their good works. But that is a huge mistake because first and foremost, God is a person. Simply following the rules without getting to know Jesus does not earn one’s way into heaven, no more than following the 8-fold path will earn one’s way into heaven.
In the next blog post we will examine the most controversial aspect of interconnectedness – how it relates to God. We’ll look at how modern science proves interconnectedness and God, as well as how it all fits into what the Bible says about the nature of God’s relation to human beings.
