Reply #16: Your response is illuminating.

[patcox2]

I was just trying to point out that there is no valid distinction between the nature of Buddhist beleif and the nature of christian beleif on the basis that christians must have faith in the existence of a deity. You respond by saying that your formulation of what christians must beleive is based on how most christians define themselves.

Thats the issue I have been trying to address, and doing it badly. It is true that the majority of christians beleive in a literal, anthropomorphic deity and that christ is literally the "son" of this deity and also co-equal with it.

But the majority of Buddhists also beleive in deities, a whole pantheon of deities and demons and what could be called angels. Tantric and Tibetan and Chinese and Korean and Japanese forms of buddhisms all have multiple deities.

What I was suggesting is that when a religious beleif system is transplanted from one culture to another and the means of transmission is literate and intellectual (thats how Buddhism has been transmitted to our culture, as the result of study and scholarship) then the form of the religion transmitted will be the most intellectualized and "highest" form, without the more obviously silly superstitions. There is an intellectual filter in what we see of Buddhism.

Taking this suggestion one step further, I would suggest that there are philosophies of christian beleif, not outside the mainstream of liberal christianity, that are similar in their understanding of the nature of divinity to Buddhism. In other words, if you were a Tibetan intellectual whose first introduction to christianity was through recent liberal intellectual works of theology and philosophy, your impression of christianity would be very different and much more favorable. Just as most intellectual and liberal americans have a more favorable impression of buddhism, because their knowledge of it is a knowledge from intellectual sources of buddhist theology at its highest levels.

But if our hypothetical Tibetan intellectual were to learn christianity from Falwell and a crowd of pointy headed fundies, he would have a different view. And if American intellectuals learned their buddhism from a group of illiterate superstitious villagers, they would likewise have a different view.