Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
To a religionist, there has to be a qualitative difference there. Buddhism is not a religion because it has no gods. Buddha figured all that stuff out logically because he was a good, insightful student of human nature and human civilization. He was no prophet.
The Koran (sorry folks I'm an American so I spell words in proper English) purports to be divinely inspired. Mohammed, like Jesus, Moses, Joseph Smith, Zarathushtra, Bahaullah and Ras Tafari, are believed to have received inspiration from a god. That qualifies those Abrahamic and para-Abrahamic belief systems as religions, and those men as (alleged) prophets. (Isn't it interesting that one of the requirements for being a prophet is that you have to have a penis. My wife says that men invent religions so we never have to say, "I don't know.")
I call that a really huge difference between Buddhism and Abrahamism.
Scientology is young enough that we have good records of its origin. It is a synthesis of Dianetics, which was a secular philosophy for self-improvement, and a science fiction scenario about the Thetans, central figures in Hubbard's novels. He craftily combined them into something that satisfies the Internal Revenue Service's definition of a religion, thereby evading income taxes. Members of the church rarely emphasize the aliens and all that crap; Scientology seems to be primarily a tool for gaining power.
I can't believe I, the most outspoken atheist on this forum, am saying this, but to call Scientology a religion is an insult to religion. Every legitimate, respectable religion on earth has a strong, solid core of sincerity.
Now that's a stretch. Jung reminds us that all of the traditional polytheistic religions had the same pantheon: "archetypes" that occur in nearly all societies and nearly all eras. The gods and goddesses are externalizations of the dimensions of our own "spirit" or psychological structure. This multidimensional model tells us a lot about ourselves. If you went out drinking Saturday night instead of going to your daughter's soccer game, it means that your Reveler might have been suppressed for a while, so it overruled your Parent. If your family are butchers but you decide to become a veterinarian, it means that your Healer is stronger than your Hunter.
Monotheism compresses this rich, useful model of our spirit into a pathetic one-dimensional spectrum, so that everything we do, think and desire falls somewhere between "good" and "evil," with no nuance and no extenuation. It's no wonder that monotheistic communities are so violent, half of their spirit is suppressed for so long that it festers and becomes part of what Jung calls the "Shadow," or what Lucas calls the "Dark Side," and eventually the pressure causes an explosion.
One of the first things the One God did, in his Ten Commandments, was to abolish polytheism, arguably authorizing war against the "heathens" or "pagans." And it's been downhill ever since.
So to compare Islam, Christianity or Judaism to polytheism is an insult to polytheism.
Islam is roughly the same age that Christianity was when it entered its Reformation, followed by the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Some scholars see signs of Islam actually heading into its Reformation. Unfortunately, our Reformation was one of the bloodiest eras in European history. They had a war among the various Christian sects that lasted literally a hundred years. And none of them had nuclear weapons.
