Aphorism

All organized religions are organized wishful thinking.

Corollary:  All organized religions are cults.

Commentary:

“ There was only one Christian, and they killed him”

Frederick Nietzsche.

I’m using Christianity as my example, but my thesis 

applies to all religions. The Bible doesn’t say what

happened to Jesus when he was “wandering in the 

“wilderness” for twenty years. For the Jews, wilderness 

could have meant anywhere that wasn’t there, where they 

were. Some scholars have proposed that Jesus might

have found his way to India and Tibet, studied and 

practiced  Buddhist meditation and yoga there, and 

became an adept. There are videos on YouTube that 

go into this. There is anecdotal evidence, as well as 

historical writings, that support this idea.They say the 

person that came to India from far away was named

“Issa”. Jesus/Issa are quite similar, given distances 

of thousands of miles and different cultures. If true, 

this would be rational evidence for some of the 

phenomena associated with Jesus. The “miracles” 

he supposedly performed are a good example. The

Tibetans have countless examples of documented 

“miracles”performed by Buddhist adepts. Raising 

the dead? My own teacher, Trungpa, is said to have 

done that to one of his teachers that died. Another 

teacher, Trinley Norbu, is said to have done it too.

These were Buddhist yogins that were alive in my time. 

He predicted my future two times about two different 

things. Other miracles; being in two places at once, 

transporting his body to another place,

appearing as different beings, are all stories I heard 

from my fellow students Trungpa saw what is happening 

in the USA today. He urged his students to move to 

Nova Scotia to avoid the mess. Many did. So, in light 

of these and other examples I could give, the miracles 

that Jesus allegedly performed, a main reason to the

claim he was the Son of God, are not that extraordinary 

or evidence of divinity. The few teachings of Jesus the 

New Testament includes are interesting. “Love thy 

neighbor as thyself”, the Golden Rule, is the same as 

the Buddhist idea of compassion. “Unless you are like 

one of these, (children), you cannot enter the kingdom 

of Heaven”. Unless you are free from the pollution of 

discursive mind, Buddhists would say, you cannot 

attain enlightenment would be the same idea.

If the Catholic (or any) Church practiced the actual 

teachings of Jesus, the world would be a better place for 

sure. The history of the Catholic Church, as an example, 

is one of greed and genocide, hardly what Jesus would 

have taught. The Catholic Church genocided the Gnostics. 

In the teachings of Gnosticism, it is said that adherents 

to that could have a direct relationship to God without 

intermediaries. That would have eliminated the need for 

the priesthood, and the Catholic organization did not 

tolerate that idea. Having said that, the Christian ideals 

of kindness and decency are central to the values of 

tradition in the USA. It’s better to get a little bit of 

something good than nothing at all. I do emphasize,

however, that organized religions always stray from

whatever founding principles that are good that they

may be based on into corruption. It is better to get 

nothing at all than something bad.