On Islam and Buddhism

🚨🚨🚨Double Trigger Warning🚨🚨🚨: This post is likely to offend Muslims and Buddhists.

Firstly, this post only expresses personal views and this is my 7th week into my Christian internship. Most of the things discussed below are based on my superficial preliminary research and as always any feedback/input are much appreciated and welcome. 🙏

On Islam

As alluded to in my previous post titled “On the Holy Spirit and Miracles”, the existence of the Holy Spirit is an a posteriori knowledge to me personally and I have yet to find a way to prove the existence of the Holy Spirit using a priori reasoning. I believe based on my initial superficial research that the Prophet Muhammad is considered to be the last and final prophet to receive the Holy Spirit. This view contradicts my personal subjective experience and therefore I personally consider Islam to be a false religion.

On Buddhism

The biggest problem I personally have regarding Buddhism is that they teach people to harvest God like spiritual power. Furthermore, some of the practices involve relics that are formed using human body parts including skulls and skins. Coming from the perspective of a Christian intern, this is practicing witchcraft. Further details can be found in the Wikipedia article on Śarīra.

As far as I’m aware, nowhere in the bible are Christians taught to practice such things. We are in fact actively warned against such practices and Jesus performed exorcism to cast out demons.

I would also like to ask the following questions to Buddhists. How many times throughout human history, has the dragon slayer became the dragon, and the revolutionary became the dictator? Could we really trust human nature to have God like power? My personal opinion is that the desire of such spiritual power also stems from pride.

As always, not seeking to convince or persuade, but open to respectful discussions. 🙏🫶😘

Edit: it has been pointed out to me by a friend that witchcraft practices also occurred in Christianity throughout history, which is factually correct, but I want to stress that those practices deviated from scripture. We all make mistakes, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do better or go back onto the right path. It’s also been pointed out to me that the scenario of dragon slayer becoming the dragon doesn’t really exist in Buddhism. I’m mistaken there and will do further research before following up with the topic. Sincere apologies on the error. 🙏