F
Fone_Bone_2001
Guest
Sometimes this works; sometimes it doesn’t. It depends on the religion. Different religions operate within incredibly different philosophical and cultural frameworks.
Religions of the Far East are far more genuinely amenable to this sort of thing than the Abrahamic faiths.
That definitely doesn’t work. Such a person is neither Christian nor Muslim.
You’re not a Christian if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth is Lord, and the Son of God, and God made flesh. But this belief is completely unacceptable in Islam, whose Qur’an explicitly teaches that God has no Son.
Likewise you’re not Muslim if you don’t acknowledge Muhammad as a prophet of God, indeed the Seal of the Prophets. But the Christian belief is that in every sense, Jesus Christ is the climax, fullness, and culmination of revelation from God. So in Christianity, believing that Muhammad is a prophet is completely unacceptable.
These two religions are the only major ones that believe in evangelizing and converting others. You simply cannot be both.
While this combination is not self-evidently impossible, like combining Christianity and Islam, it’s still probably impossible nonetheless. On the surface, many Buddhist teachings and techniques might seem useful in Christianity, while Christian teachings don’t seem to contradict Buddhist dharma.
But if you’re going to dig deeper and truly try to practice each religion in its fullness, you’re going to find unavoidable incompatibilities.
Ultimately, the goal of Buddhism is incompatible with the Christian journey of discipleship: your main objective can’t be to eliminate your suffering if you’re going to willingly “take up your cross” and follow Jesus through it; likewise, you aren’t willingly taking up your cross if you’re making it your main objective to eliminate suffering.
I think it’s an unfortunate consequence of sometimes admirable, sometimes problematic American attitudes of pluralism and multiculturalism. People want to have it all, or at least render different religions equal in some way.
This just doesn’t work, though. I think most often such people, in attempting to practice multiple religions, ultimately end up failing to do justice to either of them.
Perhaps one could; I don’t really know enough about Wicca to answer that question. To what extent do Wiccans do magic? Buddhism, like most mainstream world religions, frowns on witchcraft.
But I agree with you in principle, Taestron: it depends on the combination. One can, for instance, be Taoist and Confucianist, or even Taoist, Confucianist, and Buddhist. This is common in China.
Or one can combine Shinto and Buddhism, as do most Japanese who are also religious (which is not the majority of the Japanese population today).
Hinduism as well is an extraordinarily flexible religion.
Too often what you get, though, are western people - often Americans - trying to combine one or more of these faiths with Christianity or Islam, or one of their offshoots. That’s just not going to work.
I think there are two problems with this approach, though. In ascending order of importance:
(1) This practice by necessity makes the believer out to be the final authority. In this case you’re not relying on the wisdom, insights, and fruits of a religion’s great teachers and sages, who are surely more knowledgeable than you, but are instead acting as though you are uniquely qualified to work out where these far more religiously advanced men and women than you went wrong. If I’m going to explore Buddhism, I should be learning from the Buddha and his disciples, not learning from them while critiquing their beliefs. If I’m going to explore Christianity, I should be learning from the saints and fathers, not learning from them while I critique their beliefs.
I don’t think anyone can truly learn in that manner; you’re always second-guessing those whose experiences and wisdom are greater than yours in the first place.
(2) And more importantly, some contradictions concern things that one can’t throw away lightly. If you’re exploring Christianity and Islam, for instance, you can’t just say, “Well, I’ll have to decide for myself if I think Jesus is the Son of God, and go from there.” No, that is the point of no return: what you decide will either preclude your being Muslim or your being Christian.
What is a Christo-Pagan?
But now I know a bit about your faith’s meetings. Peace