alt Hacker NewsPeople keep highlighting very minor and accidental similarities, like the OP, or some surface-level similarities between the two texts you cite. Yet they seem to ignore essential and basic differences, not only about the Divine Nature but also about very basic questions like whether change is real or illusory, or whether a person exists from moment to moment. I just listed a bunch of them in my previous post. I don't see how anyone can realistically claim Christianity is syncretic with anything eastern. And historically, it was persecuted for three centuries precisely because it refused to be syncretic -- the Romans were happy to tolerate additions to their partheon but couldn't abide Christianity's claims to exclusivity.
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I specifically stick to monasticism because Christianity is the odd one out of all the abrahamic religions in advocating for monasticism, and monasticism started in Egypt which had significant enough presence of Buddhists.
As far as I am aware, Christianity is the only non Indian religion to advocate for monasticism or asceticism. It's really only Jainism and Buddhism that advocate for it other than Christianity (Hinduism picked it up from Jainism and Buddhism).
That being said, your reaction is exactly what the guy above was saying was an issue.
You conflate Buddhism with Roman polytheism. Buddhism is not dogmatic. Buddha is a man who saw idolatry all around him and quickly determined it was ineffective and false. A core part of Christianity is that God needs to reveal himself. Being before Christ, Buddha would not have known about the resurrection or that such a thing was possible. He made some observations and literally said if he was wrong ignore him. While many modern day incarnations of Buddhism are dogmatic and some have descended back into the very superstition the Buddha advocated against, the core story of Buddha is complete the opposite of Roman polytheism.
Again we see the parallel with Christianity where a bunch of people were marginalized for advocating against Hindu Polytheism, with Buddhism eventually winning the support of the great empire of the time (the mauryans).
Thanks for illustrating my point.
You didn't actually point to anything substantial; you kind of hand-waved at what you presumed "eastern religions" posit, but there are literally hundreds of eastern religions and philosophies that do in fact have very different attitudes towards the divine and basic metaphysics. The very first sutta of the Dīgha Nikāya--the Brahmajāla Sutta--has a section where the Buddha directly enumerates and engages with 62 of them present just in his neck of the world. Sectarianism, too, is as prevalent in the East as it is in the West. None of these things are monoliths. The world is large.
I honestly don't think you have the wisdom, the charity, or breadth of experience to understand or appreciate anything that I've written. And that's okay. You have a very real and meaningful investment in dismissing a priori the claims that I'm making, which is entirely understandable, especially for a Catholic who takes their faith seriously, as it would be for anyone else whose beliefs are jeopardized by implication. That's exactly the firewall that I'm talking about.
I don't expect the firewall to fail, in any case, so don't worry there. Catholicism is lindy. And if that firewall ever does fall and any of what I've written is integrated into the Standard Narrative, I'm sure Catholicism will also adjust to it, just like they've done every other time it has happened.