A Comparison of Hinduism and Christianity by Peter Kreeft

[thomas]

Comparing Christianity & Hinduism
PETER KREEFT
Kreeft outlines the main theological and practical differences, as well as the important common elements, between Christianity and Hinduism.

Peter Kreeft

There are two basic kinds of religions in the world: Eastern and Western.
The main differences between Hinduism and Christianity are typical of the differences between Eastern and Western religions in general. Here are some examples:

Hinduism is pantheistic, not theistic. The doctrine that God created the world out of nothing rather than emanating it out of His own substance or merely shaping some pre-existing material is an idea that simply never occurred to anyone but the Jews and those who learned it from them. Everyone else either thought of the gods as part of the world (paganism) or the world as part of God (pantheism).

If God is in everything, God is in both good and evil. But then there is no absolute morality, no divine law, no divine will discriminating good and evil. In Hinduism, morality is practical; its end is to purify the soul from desires so that it can attain mystical consciousness. Again, the Jews are unique in identifying the source of morality with the object of religion. Everyone has two innate senses: the religious sense to worship, and the moral sense of conscience; but only the Jewish God is the focus of both. Only the God of the Bible is absolutely righteous.

Eastern religions come from private mystical experiences; Western religions come from public revelations recorded in a book and summarized in a creed. In the East, human experience validates the Scriptures; in the West, Scripture judges experience.

Eastern religions are esoteric, understandable only from within by the few who share the experience. Western religions are exoteric, public, democratic, open to all. In Hinduism there are many levels of truth: polytheism, sacred cows and reincarnation for the masses; monotheism (or monism) for the mystics, who declare the individual soul one with Brahman (God) and beyond reincarnation (?Brahman is the only reincarnator?). Truth is relative to the level of experience.

Individuality is illusion according to Eastern mysticism. Not that we’re not real, but that we are not distinct from God or each other. Christianity tells you to love your neighbors; Hinduism tells you you are your neighbors. The word spoken by God Himself as His own essential name, the word ?I,? is the ultimate illusion, not the ultimate reality, according to the East. There Is no separate ego. All is one.

Since individuality is illusion, so is free will. If free will is illusion, so is sin. And if sin is illusion, so is hell. Perhaps the strongest attraction of Eastern religions is in their denial of sin, guilt and hell.

Thus the two essential points of Christianity ? sin and salvation ? are both missing in the East. If there is no sin, no salvation is needed, only enlightenment. We need not be born again; rather, we must merely wake up to our innate divinity. If I am part of God. I can never really be alienated from God by sin.

Body, matter, history and time itself are not independently real, according to Hinduism. Mystical experience lifts the spirit out of time and the world. In contrast, Judaism and Christianity are essentially news, events in time: creation, providence, prophets, Messiah, incarnation, death and, resurrection, ascension, second coming. Incarnation and New Birth are eternity dramatically entering time. Eastern religions are not dramatic.

The ultimate Hindu ideal is not sanctity but mysticism. Sanctity is fundamentally a matter of the will: willing God’s will, loving God and neighbor. Mysticism is fundamentally a matter of intellect, intuition, consciousness. This fits the Eastern picture of God as consciousness ? not will, not lawgiver.

When C.S. Lewis was converted from atheism, he shopped around in the world’s religious supermarket and narrowed his choice down to Hinduism or Christianity. Religions are like soups, he said. Some, like consomme, are thin and clear (Unitarianism, Confucianism, modern Judaism); others, like minestrone, are thick and dark (paganism, ?mystery religions?). Only Hinduism and Christianity are both ?thin? (philosophical) and ?thick? (sacramental and mysterious). But Hinduism is really two religions: ?thick? for the masses, ?thin? for the sages. Only Christianity is both.

Hinduism claims that all other religions are yogas: ways, deeds, paths. Christianity is a form of bhakti yoga (yoga for emotional types and lovers). There is also jnana yoga (yoga for intellectuals), raja yoga (yoga for experimenters), karma yoga (yoga for workers, practical people) and hatha yoga (the physical preliminary to the other four). For Hindus, religions are human roads up the divine mountain to enlightenment ? religion is relative to human need; there is no ?one way? or single objective truth.

There is, however, a universal subjective truth about human nature: It has ?four wants?: pleasure, power, altruism and enlightenment. Hinduism encourages us to try all four paths, confident that only the fourth brings fulfillment. If there is reincarnation and if there is no hell, Hindus can afford to be patient and to learn the long, hard way: by experience rather than by faith and revelation.

Hindus are hard to dialogue with for the opposite reason Moslems are: Moslems are very intolerant, Hindus are very tolerant. Nothing is false; everything is true in a way.

The summit of Hinduism is the mystical experience, called mukti, or moksha: ?liberation? from the illusion of finitude, realization that tat tvam asi, ?thou art That (Brahman].? At the center of your being is not individual ego but Atman, universal self which is identical with Brahman, the All.

This sounds like the most absurd and blasphemous thing one could say: that I am God. But it is not that I, John Smith, am God the Father Almighty. Atman is not ego and Brahman is not God the Father. Hinduism identifies not the immanent human self with the transcendent divine self but the transcendent human self with the immanent divine self. It is not Christianity. But neither is it idiocy.

Martin Buber, in ?I and Thou,? suggests that Hindu mysticism is the profound experience of the ?original pre-biographical unity? of the self, beneath all forms and contents brought to it by experience, but confused with God. Even Aristotle said that ?the soul is, in a way, all things.? Hinduism construes this ?way? as identity, or inclusion, rather than knowing: being all things substantially rather than mentally. The soul is a mirror for the whole world.

http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/apologetics/ap0008.html

[thomas]

Comparing Christianity & Buddhism

The great German Catholic theologian, Romano Guardini, wrote a profoundly insightful and orthodox meditation on the life of Christ entitled The Lord.

In it, he noted that no man in history ever came closer to rivaling the enormity of Christ’s claim to transform human nature itself, at its roots, than did Buddha (though in a radically different way).

Huston Smith says in The Religions of Man that there have been only two people in history about whom others asked not “Who are you?” but “What are you: a man or a god?” They were Jesus and Buddha.

Buddha’s clear answer was: I am a man, not a god; Christ’s clear answer was: I am both “Son of Man” and “Son of God.”

Buddha said, “Look not to me, look to my dharma (doctrine)”; Christ said, “Come unto me.” Buddha said, “Be ye lamps unto yourselves”; Christ said, “I am the light of the world.”

Yet contrary to the original intentions of both men, some later Buddhists (the Pure Land sect) divinized Buddha. And some later Christians (Arians and Modernists) de-divinized Christ.

The claims of Buddha and Christ are in fact so different that we may wonder whether Buddhism can be called a “religion” at all. It does not speak of God, or Brahman, as does Hinduism from which it emerged. Nor does it speak of Atman, or soul. In fact, it teaches the doctrine of an-atta, “no soul”—that we are made of “strands” (skandhas) of impersonal consciousness woven together by causal necessity without any underlying substance, self or soul.

Buddhism does not deny God. It is silent about God. It is agnostic, not atheistic. But it is not silent about soul. Its denial of soul has practical import: It teaches us not to be “attached,” not to send our soul out in desire, not to love. Instead of personal, individual, free-willed agape (active love), Buddhism teaches an impersonal, universal feeling of compassion (karuna). Compassion is something we often hear more about than agape in the modern West, for (as Dostoyevsky put it) “love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.”

Karuna and agape lead the disciple to do similar, strikingly selfless deeds—but in strikingly different spirits. Both points are shown by the Buddhist story of a saint who, like St. Martin of Tours, gave his cloak to a beggar. But the Buddhist’s explanation was not “because I love you” or “because Christ loves you” but rather: “This is the enlightened thing to do. For if you were freezing and had two gloves on one hand and none on the other hand, would it not be the enlightened thing to do to give one of the gloves to the bare hand?”

The Buddhist point is not the welfare of the recipient, but the liberation of the giver from the burden of self. The same end could be achieved without a recipient. For instance: A man, fleeing a man-eating tiger, came to the edge of a cliff. The only way was down. He found a vine and climbed down it; but there, at the foot of the cliff, was a second man-eating tiger. Then he saw two mice, one black and one white (yin and yang) eating the vine in two above him. Just before it broke, he saw a wild strawberry on the face of the cliff. He plucked it and ate it. It was delicious!

The “unenlightened” will wonder what the point is, or why he didn’t distract the tiger with the strawberry. But the “enlightened” will explain the parable thus: “The man tasted to the tiger exactly as the strawberry did to the man.” In other words, the man, the tiger and the strawberry are all one Self. The “illusion” of individuality is seen through. There is no soul, so there is no fear—no fear of death because there is no one there to die.

For Buddhism, egotism (selfish desire) causes the illusion of an ego. For the West, secular as well as religious, a real ego is the cause and egotism is the effect. Agape is a different effect from the same cause: altruism from the ego instead of egotism from the ego. To the Buddhist, agape is impossible; there can be no ego without egotism, no self without selfishness, because the self is not a real cause that might conceivably change its effect. Rather, the self is the illusion—effect of selfishness. There’s nobody there to love or to hate.

How can this apparent nihilism, this philosophy of nothingness, feel liberating to Buddhists? The answer is found in Buddha himself: his personality and the events of his life, especially his “great enlightenment.”

Like Jesus, Buddha taught a very shocking message. And, like Jesus, Buddha was believed only because of his personality. “Holy to his fingertips” is how he is described. If you or I said what Buddha or Jesus said, we would be laughed at. There was something deep and moving there that made the incredible credible.

The events of Buddha’s life are dramatic and offer a clue to this “something.” It is not, however, Buddha’s life or his personality that are central to Buddhism; there could be a Buddhism without Buddha. There could not, of course, be a Christianity without Christ.

“Buddha” is a title, not a given name—like “Christ” (“Messiah”). It is his essential claim; for it means “the enlightened one” or “the one who woke up.” Buddha claims we are all spiritually asleep until the experience of Enlightenment, or Awakening. Here is the story of how Buddha became Buddha, of how a man woke up.

Born Gautama Siddhartha, son of a king who hoped the prince would become the most successful king in India’s history, he was protected in a palace of earthly delights to make kingship irresistibly attractive to him. But curiosity led him to sneak away into the forbidden world outside, where he saw the Four Distressing Sights. The first three were a sick man, an old man and a dead man. Gautama puzzled deeply over these newly discovered mysteries of sickness, old age and death—to no avail. Then came the fourth sight: a begging ascetic who had renounced the world to seek Enlightenment. Gautama decided to do the same.

He spent years meditating on life’s deepest mystery: Why is man unhappy? After years of torturing his body to free his soul, all in vain, he decided on the “Middle Way” between his earlier self-indulgence and his later self-torture. Taking a decent meal for the first time in years, he sat in full lotus position under the sacred bodhi tree in Benares and resolved not to rise until he was enlightened. When he rose he proclaimed that he was Buddha. He had broken through the great mystery of life.

The breakthrough had to be experienced, not just verbalized. Buddhism is not essentially a doctrine but an experience. Yet Buddha verbalized a doctrine (dharma): the Four Noble Truths summarized everything he taught. Whenever he was pressed by his disciples to go beyond the Four Noble Truths, he refused. Everything else was “questions not tending to edification.”

The First Noble Truth is that all of life is dukkha, suffering. The word means “out-of-joint-ness” or separation—something very similar to “sin,” but without the personal, relational dimension: not a broken relationship but a broken consciousness. Inner brokenness is Buddhism’s “bad news” that precedes its gospel or “good news.”

The Second Noble Truth is that the cause of suffering is tanha, “grasping,” selfish desire. We suffer because of the gap between what we want and what we have. This gap is created by our dissatisfaction, our wanting to get what we do not have or wanting to keep what we do have (e.g., life, which causes fear of death). Thus desire is the villain for Buddha, the cause of all suffering.

This explains the “no soul” doctrine. Desire creates the illusion of a desirer alienated from the desired object, the illusion of twoness. Enlightenment is the “extinction” of this illusion. “I want that” creates the illusion of an “I” distinct from the “that”; and this distinction is the cause of suffering. Desire is thus the fuel of suffering’s fire.

The Third Noble Truth follows inevitably. To remove the cause is to remove the effect, therefore suffering can be extinguished (nirvana) by extinguishing its cause, desire. Remove the fuel and you put out the fire.

The Fourth Noble Truth tells you how to extinguish desire: by the “Noble Eightfold Path” of ego-reduction in each of life’s eight defined areas, inward and outward (e.g., “right thought:” “right associations,” etc.).

The content of the Four Noble Truths is specifically Buddhist, but the form is universal. Every religion, every practical philosophy, every therapy, spiritual or physical, has its Four Noble Truths: the symptoms, the diagnosis, the prognosis and the prescription. They are the bad effect, the bad cause, the good effect and the good cause, respectively.

For example, Marxism’s Four Noble Truths are: class conflict, capitalism. communism and revolution. Christianity’s are: death, sin, Christ and salvation.

The most crucial of the four steps is the second. The patient knows his own symptoms, but only a trained doctor can diagnose the hidden cause, the disease. Once diagnosed, most diseases have a standard prognosis and prescription which can be looked up in a medical textbook.

On this crucial issue—the diagnosis of the human problem—Christianity and Buddhism seem about as far apart as possible. For where Buddha finds our desires too strong, Christ finds them too weak. He wants us to love more, not less: to love God with our whole heart, soul, mind and strength. Buddha “solves” the problem of pain by a spiritual euthanasia: curing the disease of egotism and the suffering it brings by killing the patient, the ego, self, soul or I-image of God in man.

Yet perhaps things are not quite as contradictory as that. For the “desire” Buddha speaks of is only selfish desire. He does not distinguish unselfish love (agape) from selfish love (eros); he simply does not know agape at all. He profoundly knows and condemns the desire to possess something less than ourselves, like money, sex or power, but he does not know the desire to be possessed by something more than ourselves. Buddha knows greed, but not God. And surely we Westerners, whose very lives and economic systems are based on greed, need to hear Buddha when he speaks about what he knows and what we have forgotten.

But Buddhists even more desperately need to hear what they do not know: the news about God and His love.

http://www.peterkreeft.com/topics-more/religions_buddhism.htm

[Surya_Deva]

Peter Kreff presents a generally accurate comparison of the two religions, but there a few problems I noted in the comparison.

Hinduism is pantheistic, not theistic. The doctrine that God created the world out of nothing rather than emanating it out of His own substance or merely shaping some pre-existing material is an idea that simply never occurred to anyone but the Jews and those who learned it from them. Everyone else either thought of the gods as part of the world (paganism) or the world as part of God (pantheism).

This is false. The Jews do not teach that god created the world out of his own substance or a pre-existing substance. They teach that god created the world out of nothing. Hinduism does not teach that god is the world, it teaches that beyond the appearance of the world lies god. The appearance is maya. That is god’s potency and emanates from god. In other words Hinduism teaches the world is created out of the energy of god.

Eastern religions are esoteric, understandable only from within by the few who share the experience. Western religions are exoteric, public, democratic, open to all.

Hinduism is both esoteric and exoteric. The esoteric part are the various mystical Yoga traditions in which you must be initiated and then maintain a private and often secret practice. This is not to be divulged to anybody else. In modern times, this has bececome more lax and made public. These yogis understand reality as Nirguna Brahman, formless, absolute and pure consciousness and all duality as apperance, including reincarnation. There aim is to yoke with the divine and become self-realised. The exoteric part are the various sects of Hinduism which worship a personal god and observe various devotional rituals, hoping to win the divine grace and be freed from the endless cycle of rebirth. They worship Saguna Brahman as divinity with form and attribute. Yet, even some of them understand Saguna Brahman as temporal and Nirguna Brahman as ultimate.

Christianity is only exoteric and the esoteric part, Christian Gnosticism is considered heresy. However, it is far from being democratic. Free thinking and free speech and action are not encouraged. Blind acceptance of religious authoriy is encouraged.

Hindus are hard to dialogue with for the opposite reason Moslems are: Moslems are very intolerant, Hindus are very tolerant. Nothing is false; everything is true in a way.

This only applies to modern liberal Hindus who subscribe to universal liberalism, a view that unfortunately has been propogated by modern Hindu reformers such as Vivekananda, who themselves were inconsistent in maintaining this liberalism and were known to criticise other religions. But it is not a traditional Hindu view which is very clear about drawing a distinction between dharma and adharma, sat and asat, deva and asura, vidya and avidya. According to that view Christianity is adharmic, asat, asura and avidya - unnatural, false, ungodly and ignorant. However, Hinduism has no doctrine to kill those holding such views, but rather to destroy them intellectually in formal debate in democratic forums.

We see Christianity in the same way we see children. It is naive, immature and in need of guidance.

[thomas]

Did you notice the respectful way in which Peter Kreeft, a prominent Catholic philosopher, dealt with Hinduism and Buddhism?

Do you think you could learn something from that?

It’s fine to say “my religion is the greatest,” but must it always be accompanied by, “and your religion sucks”?

[Surya_Deva]

It’s fine to say “my religion is the greatest,” but must it always be accompanied by, “and your religion sucks”?

Pray/tell how is it possible to say my religion is the greatest, and not say other religions are less than great?

[thomas]

Very easy.

Just say “Hey everybody, my religion is the greatest in the world. Please come take a look.”

Instead of, “Hey stupid, your religion sucks and mine is great. Stop being an idiot and believe as I do.”

Can you see that one is a little more polite than the other?

Can you see that one has a greater possiblity of generating some interest in your religion?

[Surya_Deva]

It is already implied in the statement:

“My religion is the greatest” that “your religion is less than great”

A > B = B < A

[thomas]

Dealing with people is not mathematics.

You are like the pushy Christian who gets in someone’s face and preaches a few words about Jesus, and then asks them “to accept Jesus as his personal lord and savior.”

That’s very arrogant and invasive, and people naturally resist, even if something good is being offered. The messenger becomes the stumbling block to his own message.

People need space to be able to consider, contemplate, accept, or reject. And telling them their beliefs are stupid or wrong and trying to pull the rug out before they have had any opportunity to investigate something better, is very unkind.

[Surya_Deva]

I am not a missionary who is out there to convert people to my religion. The Hindu missionary has to worry about that, not me.

I am just average joe posting on a forum with others average joes, discussing and debating concepts.

I don’t care whether you convert to my religion or not, and nor I am going to try persuade you to convert to my religion.

[thomas]

That does not explain why you go out of your way to be disrespectful to other religions, especially Christianity.

[Surya_Deva]

I am not intentionally being disrespectful to other religions. I am just sharing my honest judgement about them.

Like I said we Hindus are allowed to do that. We can think, act and speak freely and critically. We are not insecure about having our beliefs, ideas and practices scrutanized.
In fact we invite the highest scrutiny.

I am proud to belong to a culture that has allowed that from day one. This is why we have the most diverse tolerant, rich and vibrant democracy in the world.

[thomas]

I too have the freedom to be a pompous and insulting ass, but at this time, choose to refrain to exercise that freedom.

Please carry on and disregard my pleading for you to be a reasonble person. I can see that it’s hopeless.

[Surya_Deva]

I am reasonable and always measure what I say, I am afraid however whatever I will say on the matter of religion is going to offend you.

We consider your religion to be adharmic. This is our way of saying we consider your religion to be false.

Is there anyway of saying this that will not offend you

[thomas]

That’s the least of it.

I think I will now go talk to a brick wall for awhile for some relief.

[Surya_Deva]

It has long been the culture within Hinduism to think, speak and act freely and critically. However, we do observe certain limits(maryadas)

1. We will not engage in slander, defamation, fallacy and personal insults.
2. We will not physically attack or silence the opponent. There is no censorship. However, if they physically attack, silence us, slander, insult, defame, we will respond appropriately and strenly
3. We will listen attentively to the opponents arguments and respond appropriately

When it comes to the arguments themselves we will be ruthless with them. If they are absurd, they will be called out as absurd. Hinduism is incredibly intolerant towards ignorance, wrong thinking and bad concepts/beliefs. It is your problem if you cannot separate your feelings from your concepts/beliefs.

In general Hinduism is very much like the academic world is suppose to be.

[thomas]

We have a difference of opinion about what a civil discussion should be.

In a forum such as this, my belief is that we should emphasize the good about our faiths, and not attack the faiths of others, especially when there was never a mutual agreement to enter into such a debate.

But do what you have to do. I will not respond in kind, because though I think Hinduism is a false religion, it is not entirely so, and has much good in it, as well as good people who embrace it, and I do not want to insult those people.

I will share what I can about my own faith when appropriate, and defend it from attacks, if practical. (It often takes too much time, since those who attack like to make MANY attacks that are full of distortions and that require much research to respond).

[Surya_Deva]

n a forum such as this, my belief is that we should emphasize the good about our faiths, and not attack the faiths of others, especially when there was never a mutual agreement to enter into such a debate.

The attitude that one does not want to hear anything critical about their beliefs is a reflecton of insecurity.

I do not believe in sugar coating things. I say things honestly as I think them. You do not, because you want to maintain some credibility. But we can read in between the lines my friend and we can clearly see you think about our religion, just as we think about your religion. We say it openly, you hide behind insincere platitudes.

[thomas]

[QUOTE=Surya Deva;41867]The attitude that one does not want to hear anything critical about their beliefs is a reflecton of insecurity.

I do not believe in sugar coating things. I say things honestly as I think them. You do not, because you want to maintain some credibility. But we can read in between the lines my friend and we can clearly see you think about our religion, just as we think about your religion. We say it openly, you hide behind insincere platitudes.[/QUOTE]

Please tell me again what I think. :roll:

I don’t mind hearing critical things about my religion, but why do you feel the need to do so so often? Also, it would be a little more fair if the criticisms were true some of the time.

I accept that you are an expert when it comes to Hinduism, at least until I know enough to believe otherwise, and I don’t expect that will be any time soon.

I do not claim to be an expert on Catholicism, but I am more of an expert than you both in knowledge, but more importantly, in experience. You might rightly speak as an authority when it comes to Hinduism and related religions, but should not be speaking with the same authority about other religions, especially Catholicism, since most of the time you don’t seem to know your rear end from a hole in the ground.

But if you’re looking for more ammunition, check out Chick publications.

[Yulaw]

Two men say they’re Jesus - one of them must be wrong

At this point, based on the numerous discussions the two of you seem to be having about the same topic, throughout the site, I?m thinking your only option left is Rock, Paper, Scissors

[charliotte]

Both can be Divine…
Day never sees the night… and night has no idea about day:p