There is no possibility of assurance in these other religions. Ask any Hindu, Muslim, or Buddhist if they will achieve nirvana or go to paradise when they die, most of them will say no. Rather, they will refer to the imperfection in their lives as being a barrier to this realization. There is no assurance in their belief systems. Consequently, salvation depends wholly on an individual's working to gain merit.
Even the fundamental concept of God, on which there is a plea that we should agree, reveals wide divergences. To say that we can unite with all who believe in God, regardless of what this God is called, fails to recognize that the term
God means nothing apart from the definition given.
Buddha, contrart to popular belief, never claimed to be deity. In fact, he was agnostic about the whole question of whether God even existed. If God existed, the Buddha taught emphatically that he could not help an individual achieve enlightenment. Each person must work this out for himself or herself.
Hindu teaching is pantheistic, "Pan" meaning "all" and "theistic" refers to "God". Hindus believe tha God and the universe are identical. The concept of
maya is central to their thinking.
Maya is the dualistic perception that the physical world is an illusion: we think we are personal, but we are not. To this philosophy, all thinking and feeling is illusory. Reality is instead spiritual and invisible. Brahma is the ultimate reality, the Universal Soul. Every person, indeed, everything that exists, is Brahman since all is god.
Buddhism also teaches that the material world is an illusion. It is readity apparent why modern science came to birth through Christians, who believed in a personal os and an orderly universe, rather than in the context of Eastern philosophy. This explains why most scienctific progress has come from the West rather than the East. Why would a person investigate what he believes is an illusion?
In Islam and Judaism we have a God much closer to the Christian concept. Here God is personal and transendent (separate from his creation). Surely we are urged, we may get together with those who believe in God in personal terms.
But, as we examine the Muslim concept of God, Allah, we find he is not God and Father of Jesus Christ bet rather a God who is utterly transcendent. Knowledge of Allah comes from the Qur'an, which came through Muhammad. He taught that he was the final prophet of Allah.
The picture of God in the Qur'an us of one who is totally removed from people, one who is capricious in all of his acts, responsible for evil as well as for good, and who is certainly not the God who is "so loved the world that he gave his one and only son.". It is a totally distant concept of God tha makes the idea of the incarnation of Jesus Christ utterly inconceivable to the Muslim. How could their God, so majestic and beyond, have contact with mortal human beings in sin and misery?
Of the great religious leaders of the world, Christ alone claims deity. It really doesn't matter what one thinks of Muhammad, Buddha or Confucis as individuals. Their followers emphasize their teachings. Not so with Christ. He made himself the focal point of his teachings. The central question he put on his listeners was, "Who do you say that I am?" When asked what doing the works of God involved, Jesus replied, "The work of God is this: ti believe in the one he has sent" (John 6:29)
Finally, on the question of who and what God is, the nature of salvation and how it is obtained, it is clear that Christianity differes radically from other world religions. We live in an age in which tolerance is a key word. Tolerance, however must be clearly understood. (Turth, by its very nature, is intolerant of error.) I two plus two is four, the totat at the same time cannot be twenty-three. But one is not regarded as intolerant because he disagrees with this answer and maintains that the only correct answer is four. The same principle applies in religious matters. One must be tolerant of other points or view and respect their right to be held and heard. We cannot, however, be forced in the name of tolerance to agree that all points of view are equally valid, including those that are mutually contradictory.
