Contrast Paganism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

A brief, less than exact comparison and contrast of Statism, Naturalism, Paganism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam:

A long line of good sense seems to flow from Vedanta Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and modern concepts relating to a Field of Consciousness. Such models for belief systems seem to make a line of coherent sense regarding: MONOTHEISM, HEAVEN AND HELL, IS/OUGHT, MORAL SERVICE, ORIGINAL SIN AND SALVATION, FREE WILL, SACRED TRUTHS OR CONTEXT DEPENDENT METAPHORS, REINCARNATION OR RESURRECTION, ALMS, PURPOSE, ESCHATOLOGY, SIGNS OF END TIMES, TRANSITION TIMES, APOCALYPSE, STURM AND DRANG, IMAGE OF GOD, AND THE GOD PARTICLE. Other belief systems are found in Islam, Buddhism, Paganism, Human Secularism, Statism, and Naturalism. However, I believe these system are more confused and not as well suited to preserving decent and sustainable civilization.  Bahai and Shinto also seem unnecessarily syncretismtic and confused.

MONOTHEISM:
- *All (except Paganism): God is one.
- Hinduism and Christianity: Respect that the one God often assumes a common form or aspect, by which to communicate, as flesh, to human beings.
Judaism and Islam: God does not assume any long term aspect, flesh, or identity – other than as God.

HEAVEN AND HELL:
- All (except perhaps varieties of Statism, Paganism or Buddhism): Tend to believe consciousness continues hereafter, after death of the body.
- Christianity and Islam: Character of hereafter is entirely heavenly or spiritual, with no more death.
- *Hinduism and Judaism: The here and now is fundamentally spiritual, perhaps reincarnating, and recreating; matter is derivative of the mind of God, but it is in respect of such matter that human kind relates; form no clear hypothesis as to the quality of matter or quality of cycles of life and death by which God may avail the hereafter.

IS/OUGHT:
In respect of what faith is the ring of power held? In respect of what faith ought it be held?

All (except Secular Humanists, Pagans, Statists, and Libertarians): Ought is derived in respect of intuitions, empathies, and notions about the character of the conscious will of God.

1. *Hindi: Ought is derived in respect of feedback between the field of consciousness and its particular perspectives and expressions; ought is derived in respect of flux in the character of consciousness.
2. *Christian: Ought is derived in respect of the Great Commandment and the Golden Rule.
3. *Jew: Ought is derived in respect of the Ten Commandments and the decent preserving of the society of one’s fellows.

4. Muslim: Ought is derived from a notion that God commands us to worship and present ourselves -- humbly, cleanly, and chastely -- to God; ought is derived from protecting the faith and waging it to the diminishment or destruction of non-believers, non-adherents, and apostates, as judged by fallible fanatics.
5. Secular Humanist and Pagan: Ought is derived from Nature.
6. Statist: Ought is derived in respect of those who rule the State.
7. Egoist, Libertarian, and Objectivist: Ought is derived from your own particular consciousness and its desires.

My hope is on the first three.

MORAL SERVICE:
- All: Serve God (except some secular Pagans consider State, Earth, or Science to entail limits of God)
- *Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Christianity: Preach of a God who wills charity, good faith, and good will (empathy).
- Islam: Tests believers by enlisting them in jihad against unbelievers; believers are to be eternally rewarded; unbelievers are to be eternally punished; believers are agents to help enforce the difference.

ORIGINAL SIN AND SALVATION:
- All:  Man is imperfect and flawed and needs guidance to help avoid sin and evil and seek the good and the redemptive
- *Vedanta Hinduism and perhaps Zoroastrianism: Sin is not absolute in itself; the Field of consciousness is limited yet unbounded and undetermined, unfolding in respect of feedback among its parts; subfields and pursuits may overlap in interests; God records, reconciles, and synchronizes, but may also learn and experience fluxing, competing, cooperating, amplifying, and dissimilating waves of empathy. Perhaps, God is a Great Artist and Writer, but the book and the pictures may not be complete, and there is not availed to humanity an absolute, pre-set, final map for manifesting God’s intentions and teleology.
- *Vedanta Hinduism: Redemption consists in intuitive experience that God is with us, soothing our fears, comforting us that death of the body is necessary but not final as to consciousness, availing our communications, experiencing feedback of our empathies, guiding us in our pursuits of happiness and fulfillment; inspiring faith that our pursuits are worthwhile and meaningful. God works through each of us, and, in feedback and hindsight, God may celebrate or mourn aspects of each of our choices. Indirectly, God experiences varieties of joy and remorse from choices synchronized through us, learns accordingly, and adjusts the unfolding design of the general field that constitutes our ground of being. Those aspects for the design of our bodies that please God are carried forward; those that do not are not. Sometimes, tests and hardships are needed, to test and record how to improve the unfolding design.
- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Relate more to a concept that entails original sin and an absolute and pre-set standard, for all time, for judging the rightness of any particular here and now event or choice. Much stock is put in a need somehow to work off sin or to be washed of it by grace.

FREE WILL:

All: There abide limiting parameters.
*Hinduism and Zoroastrianism: You have free will, even as you must toil for your living.
Judaism and Christianity: You have free will, even as you must toil for your living, in that you are laden with original sin.
Islam: You should obey the Koran, but God determines and has predetermined whether and how you will.
Paganism and Human Secularism: Free will is an illusion; your choices are either predetermined or random.

SACRED TRUTHS OR CONTEXT DEPENDENT METAPHORS:
- All: Employ parables and figures of speech
- *Hinduism, Judaism, and Christianity: Respect context, point of view, frame of reference, history, poetry, meaning in communications among human beings.
- Islam: Takes significant parts of holy text as literal word of God, and violently condemns human beings who fail or refuse to receive or understand the original text as such.

REINCARNATION OR RESURRECTION:
- All: Relate human beings to God
- *Hinduism: No heaven, no Messiah, only reincarnation; God is the essence that is directly experienced and intuited, but not via secondary senses.
- *Zoroastriansim: No Messiah; God is the essence that is directly experienced and intuited, but not via secondary senses.

- Judaism and Christianity: God gives expression through a Messiah (Judaism: Messiah is to come and rule on Earth; Christianity – Messiah has already come and will come again, to rule on Earth, defeat evil, and restore the faithful to heaven).
- Islam: No Messiah; only hellfire retribution for nonbelievers and eternal rewards hereafter for the faithful and obedient.

ALMS:
- All: Charity and Government
- *Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and Christianity (excepting Catholicism): Prefer that alms come by way of charity than by way of government.
- Judaism, Catholicism, and Islam: Imagine that rules of kosher or legalisms can and should regulate minutiae of human interactions; conflate governmental regulation and taxation with charity (Catholicism); conflate government with church (Islam).

PURPOSE:
- All: Purposefulness
- *Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Christianity: Find purposefulness in living in harmony with one another and in reverence of God, without need of acting as agents to condemn non-believers or alternative believers.
- Islam: Finds little purpose in the here and now, except to serve God, by fencing the faithful and disposing of non-believers. (Without unbelievers, how do Muslims expect to occupy themselves in the hereafter? By imagining taunts for those who burn in eternal hellfire? What sort of seized and depraved mind would idealize such a system?)

*ESCHATOLOGY, SIGNS OF END TIMES, TRANSITION TIMES, APOCALYPSE:
Buddhism: Eventual escape into nirvana by learning to give up all desires.
*Vedanta Hinduism, perhaps Zoroastrianism: Flux among recurring forms for allowing consciousness to give and communicate expression; God learns in cycles, beginning anew, preserving designs based on appreciated knowledge, repressing undesired designs; perhaps karma; perhaps no end times, perhaps an eternal present, perhaps fluxing between periods of expansion and collapse or renewal and death.
Judaism:  Eschatology not knowable to humanity.
Christianity:  Salvation possible to perfect, eternal, heavenly bliss; those not saved to be apart from God.
Islam:  Dualism of eternal heaven or paradise versus eternal hell
*Paganism:  Midwife like beliefs, sometimes regarding human slaves and service to extraterrestrials.
Statism, Secular Humanism, Naturalism: Eventual entropic dissolution into nothingness; no meaningful hereafter after death; no real higher purpose.

STURM AND DRANG:
- All: Potentially helpful or harmful, or inspiring or depressing, or enlightening or apocalyptic – depending upon methods and purposes of practitioners
- *Buddhists, Secular Jews, and Protestant Christians: Tend to be less beholden to those interlopers who pretend to have a universal trump for speaking directly for God.
- Corporatists, Collectivists, Marxists, Imams, Mullahs, Priests, and ex cathedra Prophets: Tend to want to impose moral precepts based more on elite or hierarchical authority for masking territorial and personal preferences, than on insight or analysis of what is needed in terms of church and state in order to preserve a society that avails decent respect for human freedom and dignity. Some easily stoop to justify deception, torture, poison, murder, and genocide.

IMAGE OF GOD:
- All (except Statism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Paganism): Consider that man is created in an image or form like God.
- *Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Paganism:  May tend not necessarily to consider the human form as the apex of creation or evolution. May view consciousness as entailing spirituality that is not restricted to the human form.

- *THE GOD PARTICLE (by Edwin Klingman): See *’s, above. Plus, consider how a notion of consciousness, as expressed in aspects both of particles and of field, is not restricted to any particular kind of form (like human beings). Perhaps, upon removing the emphasis on a myriad of forms of God, Vedanta Hinduism or Zoroastrianism may be closest to what I intuit and to what Klingman calculates. (Klingman leans more to a dualism, i.e., wilful and not particularly measurable particles of consciousness coupling and interacting with empirically measurable matter.)
- I intuit no perfect need to hypothesize a dualism, inasmuch as empirical matter may be entirely derivative of (or byproduct of) perspectives of consciousness communicating in respect of a shared ground of being, i.e., the common Field of Consciousness (aka, God). However, Klingman’s notion of a dualism performs an invaluable service! That is, it avails a way to weight or quantify analyses of groupings or subfields of the universal Field. IOW, it simplifies the standard model of physics without doing damage to its empirical and predictive functions. It allows particles of consciousness to be indirectly lensed or quantified, by measuring (cosmological constants of?) their cumulative effects.
- *MYSELF: As to the Field of Conscious Will, I relate the consciousness aspect to intuition and the will aspect to empathetic purposefulness. Intuitively, I am more like a Vedanta Hindi or a Zoroastrian; empathetically (and culturally), I am more like a free thinking, Protestant Christian, accepting of redemptive powers of God and the flawed nature of man, but with quibbles about the concept of Original Sin. To me, the concept that God cares to relate to us is more important than any complicated explication about whether, how, or why the concept became flesh.

NOTE: Aspects of Buddhism compare favorably with Vedanta Hinduism, insofar as those Buddhists who are more appreciative that consciousness is not wedded to empirically measurable bodies, so that consciousness cannot cease. However, the cessation of desires by reaching nirvana seems foreign to a relevant, changing, learning, adventuring, purposeful, sometimes remorseful, God. As to Paganism (Wicca, Gaia’ism, Hedonism, Asceticism, Marxist Collectivism, Corporatist Collectivism, etc.) — its varieties seem to consist mainly in play acting, corruption, and nonsense on stilts.

NOTE: Egoism (Libertarianism and Objectivism) finds purpose in no purpose higher than particles of egoism, yet tends to expand such particles into a field that encompasses one’s family and those persons or causes one admires. Egoism seems a bit solipsistic or incoherent insofar as it tries to avoid reconciliation of particle of egoism to common field of consciousness by trying to define all in respect of each individual’s particular perspective. It does not seem to be a serious philosophy, although it does well point up the danger of rewarding bums and commies. IOW, purely collectivist (communistic) notions are not serious philosophies, either.

NOTE: Islam is a viciously syncretistic combination of Judaism and Christianity. It is like Judaism in denying that any Messiah has come, but like Christianity in proclaiming “good news” that a redemptive resurrection is at hand (for believers who serve as agents to help God sort souls by guarding the faith of believers and making retributive examples of non-believers). In that, Islam combines the worst features of both. That is, it takes retributive (eye for eye) justice from the Old Testament, combines it with a concept of evil for affronting God by following so-called satanic deceits in setting up “partners” (a Messiah), and then justifies jihad for diminishing or destroying all who decline to accept its interpretation in toto. In short, Islam is a gross impediment to free thought, honest belief, human dignity, and enlightened and empirical investigation.

*NOTES:

*ZOROASTRIANISM: Zoroastrianism rejects monasticism and asceticism. It has regard for a dualism of good and evil, but not of matter and spirit. (Might good and evil be two sides of one essential coin?)  Does it see the spiritual world as not so different from the natural one?  It rejects predestination. Human beings bear responsibility for situations and the way they act toward one another. At the end of time, evil is defeated, souls are reunited. Active participation is a central element in Zoroaster's concept of free will; participation in life through good thoughts, good words, and good deeds is necessary to ensure happiness and to keep chaos at bay.
*VEDANTA HINDUISM:
The goal of Vedanta is a state of self-realization or cosmic consciousness, which can be experienced by anyone, but cannot be adequately conveyed in language. There is no sole book source for its philosophy. Different schools vary in how they relate a dualism of Reality (nature) and God (consciousness), which are different but mutually inseparable.

Fortunately, in good faith and good will, leaders regularly arise to bring the independent minded middle class together, to move humanity towards a better way. Often, when the hour looks bleakest, there is sent to us a Zoroaster, Aristotle, Paul, Galileo, Spinoza, Berkeley, Schopenhauer, Washington, Wilberforce, Lincoln, Planck, Templeton, Reagan, Fritjof Capra ...

WHAT I BELIEVE:  I don't find any particular tradition to be entirely satisfactory.  I doubt heaven, and don't believe in original sin, although I do believe mortals are prone to be flawed and need guidance.  I think a kind of reincarnation makes sense.  I do believe in a Field of consciousness, which interrelates with particular perspectives, the interrelation resulting in expressions of free will.  I think there abides an essentially spiritual quest to establish higher levels of decent, stable, surpassing, civilizing communications, though yin and yang will play.