Copycat Theories Are Getting Old

Yesterday I was excited to get a chance to hear the radio show of Matt Slick from CARM.ORG. A caller had called in with this same old used up argument about Jesus was a copy of other myths or religions and he used Buddhism as an example. Quoting from the Dhammapada, well not quoting from it, but saying it said that Buddha was a savior god just like Jesus. Finding this irritating I decided to call and correct the guy who made the claims. See I have a friend who is a Buddhist and has been her whole life, a while back we got on this same topic and she spoke about how it irritated her that such claims were made of Buddha because they were just not true and she even felt insulted by them. She has no problems with Jesus but her problem is with the misuse of the Buddhist texts, I must admit I cannot blame her because many misuse our scriptures so often that it sickens me. So she had given me a translation of The Dhammapada just to show me that these claims were not true.

Back to the main point I want to make here, I gave Matt a call and I gave him a quote right out of the preface of my translation of the Dhammapada which was translated by devout Buddhist, since I have a copy of it on my computer as well I will now post the line from the preface of this translation that sums it up very well.

“To the seeker there is provided a grounded moral philosophy, with no references to a savior.” (The Dhammapada Translated By Ananda Maitreya)

Clearly this shows what my point is trying to make, this guy abused the text or quoted from a website instead of going to the source itself. Back when I was first given my copy of this Dhammapada I read the whole thing as it is small and only about 90 or so pages, I searched and read it twice trying to find clear similarities to Jesus but I just could not find any. Now you may say that they both taught that Humans should treat other Humans good, well what religion doesn’t teach that? It would be expected from any religious leader. Now to my main point, I was an Atheist, sadly for many years, when I first seen this argument about the Jesus stories being a copy of ancient pagan myths I had to laugh, even as an Atheist, ancient myths had me interested, to me they were ancient SciFi stories and I enjoy SciFi so I have read them. If those who proclaim these things would read the sources and teachings of these ancient myths instead of what some bad non scholarly book says they would find the claims they make are unfounded and simply not true. Now to be fair I have tried hard to read them again and find some of these claims they make, I have tried hard even to the point of trying to stretch stories to get a parallel and that still is very hard to do.

So I beg those who use them to stop, because you only make yourself look dumb in the long run, don’t believe everything you read in books or on the internet, examine the main sources yourself then see if you can find them. Even when I was an Atheist I knew this was not a good theory and would not use it because frankly I had enough brains, even then, to know better.