[…] with Buddhism, it’s easier in a way; there’s isn’t this strict morality based on the supernatural. It’s based on Cause and Effect, not some afterlife or a God that we don’t even know even exists.
It sounds like your knowledge of Buddhism comes from modern re-interpretations of it. The truth is that authentic Buddhism involves the supernatural just as much as Christianity and other religions do. You say that it’s based on “cause and effect”, but Buddhism does not use these terms in the physical, deterministic sense. It considers the
causes to be the moral qualities of one’s intentional actions, and the primary
effect to be rebirth into a specific realm of existence. These moral qualities are the same as what we call virtue and sin in Christianity, so the big difference you think you see between these two religions does not actually exist.
In Buddhism there is no underlying substance called a soul. (See: Anatta )
This is another misunderstanding. The
anatta teaching does not hold that “there is no soul”. It holds that “there is no soul
to be found in anything phenomenal”. (Linguistically challenged translators often use “aggregates” or “composite/compound things” for “phenomenal”.) The intended point is simply that man’s soul can’t be found in an arm, a leg, a brain, a though, or a feeling. This obviously does
not lead to the observation that “there is no soul”, but lamentably this is what modern re-interpreters of Buddhism have turned it into. Buddhism simply holds that the soul is invisible and intangible, just like all other religions do. As for the term “anatta”, it consists of the negating prefix
an and the Pali word “atta”, which is a cognate of Sanskirt “atman”, which means
self or
soul. Ordained Buddhists throughout Asia actually use this word to refer to themselves in speech, which makes it pretty obvious that they
do believe that the soul exists. As I’ve argued elsewhere, it is only through lack of familiarity with underlying culture, history, and language that allows modern scholars and writers to see in Buddhism what isn’t there: the denial of man’s soul.
Neither Buddhism nor Jainism is founded on faith in a creator god.
Neither is Christianity, which is based on the incarnation of the Creator God on earth. Absent the incarnation, Christianity would not exist, nor would any other religion.
