I think there are various kinds of Buddhists. You can use it like a philosophy of life in combination with different religions or beliefs.

Ok, so you weren't saying there are buddhist gods, only that some buddhists might also be theists but share another faith. I can see that. Buddhism is an atheistic religion, but not all buddhists are exclusive.

Your OP doesn't really establish or prove anything, or even posit anything with any sort of warrant. It comes off to me as simply voicing your worldview that religion is a man-made enterprise that has evolved over time and it encompasses other views of a higher power that have been spread. One of my good friends expressed to me maybe the most popular atheist accounting for religion, that men have invented a god for the sake of having something to hope in, and over time various views of this higher power combined with each other to form other religions, each taking what they like and leaving what they don't. It's a fun story, but I don't see the difference between that and Santa Clause. It doesn't have any bearing on whether there is a God, and whether, say, the God of the Bible, is true or not.

For instance, if we posited the God of the Bible, it still accounts for the situation of having thousands of religions that we see in the world today. People saw the creation and knew it would take a higher power to create it, and they chose to make up their own god(s) and follow it (them). The reason many gods share the same characteristics is because in creation we can see that God is:

*Loving--in that love exists as an abstract, universal entity, and in that people love and seek to love and be loved.

*Beautiful--nature

*Kind, giving, considerate--food tastes good, drinks are refreshing, sex feels good, the world is beautiful, flowers smell good, the earth has almost limitless resources for our creating useful things.

*Merciful--Whoever this God is could have made us in torturous pain our whole lives and as slaves. Also, as we give God no credit and ignore Him, He allows us to live out full lives on this wonderful earth.

*Gracious--plentiful food on the earth, rains, the seasons, children are a blessing, etc.

*Etc.

Romans 1 says that God's divine attributes, His eternal power and nature, can be clearly seen through what has been made.

Now, another reason in the Christian view that most religions share similar beliefs about God is that the Bible teaches that God has created human beings with a general, innate sense of right and wrong (known as the conscience). This is not perfect in anyone because it is corrupted by our nature to want to go our own way, but it is accurate to the extent that we don't distort it. This is why virtually all cultures concede that we should love our neighbors as ourselves, or treat one another as we want to be treated. It is why nearly all cultures believe it is wrong to steal, wrong to murder the innocent, wrong to rape, wrong to lie, etc. This common morality is largely because God has implanted us with this understanding.

So we can see that in the Christian Theistic WV, all religions should have some accurate depiction of God simply from what they observe in nature and in life, and what they know from being human beings, having the nature of a moral being.

If you add on top of those things the God-given revelation of the Bible, now you have a proliferation of religions being based off of corruptions or misunderstandings of the Bible--Judaism, Islam, Catholicism, Church of Christ, Church of God, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Scientists, etc. etc.

Now, I'm NOT arguing from this post that Christianity is true, nor am I arguing that the earth is a good place vs. a vicious terrible place where people are starving and the world is going to crap every minute...or that the Bible is true. I say that to be clear that I don't feel like hearing all the God-haters start bashing. My point is simply that in the Christian Theistic WV, the way they lay out their argument, it logically and reasonably accounts for why all the religions of the world seem to share many common beliefs though having different gods. I do this because a lot of my atheist friends seem to think that the fact that this is so makes it clear that all religions are made up in the mind of man and combined and shared and spread in different variations. They see it as obvious. But the other view makes sense as well, if you grant its presupposition, that the God of the Bible is true.

This is my little contribution...gl...

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I know you said you were not inviting debate, but you must admit the above is cherrypicking at best.

Well, I'm not sure if all cultures that have existed or currently exist share those values but lets just accept that they are largely good values. Do you believe that they are innately understood? Or, could it be that they are learned mores designed to optimize socialtal growth and development. That is, can a society that doesn't adhere to those basic values survive and thrive and be happy? I don't think you need to spend too much time thinking to come up with values such as those. We see in societies that don't value life, for example, where crime is rampant, murder and rape free, corruption spread through the elites that the society fares rather poorly.

you guys are touching on some really interesting subjects here. With regards to NDEs, I've had one myself and apart from shaking me to the core in a way that nothing before ever did, it completely altered my perspective on life and acted as a catalyst for a whole host of personal journeys and reflections.

Things get really murky when we try to decipher where the NDE is "coming from" or how it comes about, as in my opinion even if it was purely the hallucinogenic product of an oxygen-starved brain, that does not and cannot rule out its spiritual significance, not least because the brain itself is such a mysterious organ that we know relatively so little about.

The NDE I experienced was very much a case of "going somewhere", the reality of the situation was clearer, crisper, more vivid and significant than most of day-to-day life is. I felt that my consciousness went to a place that my physical body could not follow it to, and that when we die we will all experience this seperation and the realisation that we are still conscious after our physical deaths, a concept that all spiritual belief systems are pinned onto.

The best I can describe the place I went to is as a shadowland, very dark, very scary, very barren, charged by emotion and feeling and an intense rawness, it was a place you could never rationalise or get used to by filtering it through your preconceptions, the way that you can learn to steel yourself against most situations in this life, you could never do in this place, it stripped you bare and hit you at your core with an overwhelming and undeniable intensity. I saw the long dark tunnel, although I did not go through it as some people have done, before I took a step back from the abyss.

Also as a little sidenote Buddhist teachings do describe spiritual entities, akin to lesser gods or angels/demons, and in this respect Buddhism is not purely "atheistic" as some mistakenly believe.



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