Originally Posted by
Faux Newbie
And see, this and the people who work hard to live that way (like yourself) are the ONLY reason I am not just rabidly anti-Christian.
The person I spoke of vaguely with Syn above was my father, a Catholic. At four years old, he, his parents, and a family friend, were in a car accident. His father and the family friend were killed right then and there. On a stretcher in the hospital, he remembered his mother being declared dead numerous times. She ended up living. (She was badass in a way most martial artists will never be, and scary as hell!)
When he retired, he spent volunteer time with dying kids at the local hospital, watching movies with them, doing fun stuff with them. A kid would die, he would do the same with the next one. He NEVER talked about it, people didn't realize how much he did, but he was around dying kids for a decade, who knows how many. Part of why was because he knew how hard times sometimes make it hard to have a childhood, people make you into a survivor but forget to make you a kid.
Conversely, in Catholic school, my best friend's parents divorced(GASP!), and the priest and the nuns basically made an environment where he and I were targeted (me for being friends with him), I would not call it bullied because we fought harder and better than the kids who were emboldened by this, until all they had was words, but they all believed (and many still believe) that they were on God's side. Hell, I had one guy tell me in adulthood that that behavior was important to make us good people! (At the time, his only job was as a calender model, lol). My friend later became a fullback in college ball.
Likewise, when my best friend died some years back, whose parents were Christian, but not their children or their children's friends, there were two services, one in one state, one back in our home town. The first one, the minister was fine, thoughtful to some extent, but still reinterpreting a man's life who they didn't know in terms of the minister's own belief system and approach to it. Slightly tacky, but not worse than that. The second one reinterpreted his life in terms of needing forgiveness how that guy saw it, for things that don't even need forgiveness. For my friends parents alone, I kept my silence, as did others. There was no shortage of people ready to beat the tar out of that guy. I know full well when I go, despite neither I nor my wife being religious, she will be approached with the same crap, because that's how it always is, which ****es me off to no end.
I have known far more bad Christians than good, and I think I've known more good Christians than most Christians. I've also dealt with a good number of Buddhists, but far less really bad ones (though two come to mind). I really think there is a more developed mechanism in Buddhism for preventing ego from restricting morality, I think the development of it is historically demonstrable, and I think that, as someone who has to deal with a majority of Christians, I would be a fool to ignore it.
That said, this in no way has a bearing on your personal faith, but in regards to a vast majority of Christians, I would be naive to believe that it is not ego based.
My view is not that the idea of Christianity is wrongheaded, but that established checks to make sure that ego doesn't creep into one's relationship with God are lacking, imo. Being a Buddhist master entails a certain risk of ego, but the attraction for those with ego is way higher to be on a contact basis and on the side of an omnipotent being than of being the most egoless being. It's game theory, one can excuse way more behaviors than the other and entails way more power, and Buddhism just has more practical exercises to try to minimize it and way more agency to call someone on being a bad Buddhist.