Friday, September 25, 2009

Comparing post death within Buddhism and Christianity

In Christianity, it is said that good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell when their body dies. That may be right, but it is not the entire story. In Buddhism, good actions are ingrained as good karma in the mind-continuum and bad actions and thoughts as bad karma. Good karma takes us up to higher realms such as heaven and bad karma to the lower realms such as hell. But this is not the END. In Christianity, death appears to be so - it is all over with; you stay put where you are sent. In Buddhism, that is not the case. You continue to get reborn in new bodies and realms continuously until such time as you rectify every badness into goodness. We are reborn repeatedly until we perfect goodness and learn to reject badness.

Nor is the Christian view a COMPLETE belief. There are other options to heaven and hell. You might be reborn again as a human or an animal on our own or another planet among other possibilities. You do not find these options in the Christian faith. It therefore seems that Christianity has either lost a part of reality or perhaps it has over simplified matters to make it easier to understand. Whilst the Christian viewpoint is not wrong, it would seem more useful to me to broaden and deepen the perspective to its fullest scope.

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