Have you read Toynbee? He distinguishes between the Higher Religions and the primitive religions whose highest doctrines were Stoical.
Fraid not, but I'll have to check him(?) out. And are you trying to call Christianity a higher religion and Hinduism a primitive one? I don't know about you, but to me, Hinduism has more believable truth to it than does Christianity and is much more deeper in philosophical thought as well.
If you're calling Hinduism primitive and Christianity a higher religion all because it's more recent and teaches about love as opposed to peace, that's a mistake as Christianity doesn't really bring anything new to differentiate itself from other religions. While love is good, it's not that much of a change to all of a sudden make it "higher" and the other "primitive". If anything, Christianity would be primitive even though it has that one good teaching of "love" due to Christianity taking their beliefs from other cultures as opposed to coming up with all that good stuff on their own. Where's copyright laws when ya need em?
Mahayana Buddhism would follow Christianities lead. The Modern Zoroastrians -- the Sufis -- are STILL rather self-absorbed and ready with their Stoic Philosophies, but even they have incorporated the teachings of Love and Charity to some extent.
Aren't we talking about the ages of the religions in regards to which came before which? If that is the case, it doesn't matter if other religions incorperated a few good Christian beliefs, it still does not mean that Christianity came before the others. It would be like saying Hinduism is a new religion because the caste system is almost gone.
The more current a religion is, the more they've learned from the past and have corrected the past mistakes or flaws in the people's way of life teachings. That's why new religions pop up in the first place to make everything better. As you said, peace used to be the previous ideal, now it's love -- they updated it to be better. That all still doesn't change the origins of everything though. Zoroastrianism and Hinduism predate Christianity and that's where a majority of their beliefs came from, they're just updated for the times of Christianity.
I know you want to toot the horn of Christianity and show all the good qualities as if that's the best religion to follow morally, but that has absolutely no bearing on everything that made up that religion. Christianity, just as most past religions, is a mixture of various past cultures and beliefs that combined and updated everything to form a new religion. Love is that new update but that's about the only somewhat "unique" thing about it. The rest is all shared stuff from other cultures and religions which means Christianity isn't the origins of everything regardless of how much "better" (opinion) it may be.
- N
