I don't know if you fail to see the relevance or you deliberately ignore it. Like I said, the Buddha never committed any of the terrible acts like those 3 sample acts I provided WHILE commanded his followers to obey and worship him at the same time, unlike the Bible god, who both committed the acts and commanded his follower to worship him. So all MN 130 described is some horrible environment happens at some realms, NOT some horrible things the Buddha committed. A Buddhist can just brush it aside and the Buddha would be cool with that. But a Christian who stops worshipping his god after hearing about the 3 evil acts god just did, is s/he still a Christian? I don't think so.Sam Vara wrote:I don't see the relevance of that, I'm afraid. You are talking about your opinion. What if another person finds that MN 130 is - for the reasons I outlined above - the least plausible and most horrific thing they have read. Which of two accounts is the more plausible and less horrific is a subjective matter. Some don't like floods and filicide, some don't like suffering extending after death.
Nope, completely irrelevant. Buddha never did any of those evil acts WHILE commanding his followers to worship Him. Hence Buddhists are never forced to perform mental contortion to meet both of those requirements, unlike the Bible's god and his followers.Completely relevant, as the topic in hand is merely how people deal with what they find difficult ("contortions") rather than agency.
Oh, because he's god, he should be worshipped while committing terrible terrible acts of terror! Got it!Again, you might not like the idea of a commandment to worship, but others might. It's a matter of opinion. some Christians might say that God does this rightly, him being God.
You're talking about picking and choosing what's convenient to you. But you ignore a key fact, the Bible's ridden with so many bad accounts that a Christian would have to throw out a lot of "bad" stuff in order to believe in the remaining "good" stuff. Problem is, if there're so many bad unreliable instances, what guarantee the reliability of the remaining good ones??Er, no. As I keep saying, it's perfectly possible to worship God without believing that you are worshiping a being who did all those naughty things. It's perfectly possible to believe you are worshiping a being who has been imperfectly described in the Old Testament. To love God, and to believe that the stuff about floods, filicidal commandments, and plagues was made up. It didn't happen in the way described. Just as Buddhists don't believe absolutely everything about the Buddha that they find in scriptures. It's tempting to deploy a crude literalism when criticising other religions, but I don't do it with Buddhism and I try to extend the same courtesy to others.
