Translated from the original by Chris
Tsilikas
A lot of faithful Christians, having
acquired Christian education, believe that the faithful of other religions have
the same perceptions and the same preaching about Hell and Paradise.
However, they are totally wrong as they will realise after reading the
following article. Of course our article discusses this important issue only
superficially and not in depth. Our intention by writing this article is to
stimulate the reader to look for more information about this great issue on his
own...
HINDUISM
Hinduism is the
traditional religion of India
and has been in existence for thousands of years now. This is why a founder of
this religion has never been reported. For the people in India the world is separated into
various ranks, ranging from inferior forms, eg plants and animals, to Gods.
Human beings are somewhere in between and can be reborn by taking various forms
(reincarnation). Instead of a soul they have ‘atman’ which means the deeper
hypostasis of any being, a person’s true self. When the person dies ‘atman’
leaves the physical body in order to dwell somewhere elsewhere. The place where ‘atman’ will dwell depends on
what Hindus call ‘karma’, that is to say the actions or deeds that the person
did when in life and the impact they had on one’s current circumstances, giving
him positive or negative energy for good or bad actions respectively. Thus
‘atman’ (the soul in a way) can dwell in plants, animals or objects and
therefore somebody who used to be a human being can now be a plant or an
animal. This perpetual chain of the repeated succession of births, deaths and
rebirths in which any individual is condemned is called ‘Samsara’. In other
words ‘Samsara’ is for Hindus what Hell is for Christians. Hence ‘atman’ needs
to escape from ‘Samsara’. Salvation (‘moksha’) comes with deeds, knowledge and
devotion. The deeds a Hinduist has to do in order to be liberated, are
sacrifices to the Gods and rites keeping the formalities by the book. And when
one does all these then he is accepted by the Gods. For the Hinduistic thought
sin is mainly ignorance. Hinduism does not wish to transform the world, but to
help faithful to be released from this world, which is conceived as fraud – a
delusion (‘Maya’) – and to delve into the real world which is the world of the
impersonal Divinity and is called ‘Brahman’. In short, the surpassing of the
world and the immersion into ‘Brahman’ constitutes what we call Paradise.
JAINISM
Jainism started
as a branch of Hinduism, but as years went by it constituted a separate
religion in India.
Alike Hinduism, it does not have a founder. Strange though it may seem for a
religion, Jainism does not accept the existence of God. For Jainism the world
is divided into ‘Jiva’ (souls)
and ‘Ajiva’ (inanimate, non-living). Karma (meaning the amount of deeds within
the duration of the life of every individual), is regarded as a subtle form of
matter. The matter provides karma with various bodies. All corporal beings have
two bodies, the infernal one and the karmic one, which derives from the
previous deeds and is attached to the ‘jiva’ (soul), determining the form that
the soul will take: human, divine, animal or infernal.
Salvation
(‘moksha’) is achieved through mental and moral discipline so that the soul is
released from the material bonds and is able to reach ‘Nirvana’ – a state with
a lack of composition and form – from which suffering and incarnation (what we
call Hell) are absent and which is a life of eternal bliss (what we call
Paradise ). Due to the fact that Jains do not believe in any omnipotent supreme
being (‘Brachman’) as we have already said, individuality remains eternal.
SIKHISM
Sikhism
(‘sikh’=disciple, learner) is a monotheistic religion that also sprang up from
Hinduism. It is considered an effort – although its followers do not accept
this – to compose Hinduism and Muhammadism within its teaching. Guru (teacher)
Nanak (1469-1539 A.D.)
is considered to be the founder of Sikhism. Sikhism accepts a supreme being, a
god, that created the world and it believes in the brotherhood of people. It
also accepts that this God is not only the cause of the material world but of
souls, as well. It teaches that everything in existence is a form of God, a
wave in the divine ocean. Because it has been influenced by Hinduism it regards
the objective world as an optical illusion. Paradise
and Salvation for Sikhism is the realisation by humans that God wishes to
communicate with them and is revealed to them through reason. Whoever realises
and comprehends this voice of God and answers with obedience achieves Salvation
from this life, which is completed after death in ‘Nirvana’. Hell, on the other
hand, is, as for Hinduism, when a person comes back into the troubles of life
via reincarnation.
BUDDHISM
Buddhism began
as a sect of Hinduism. The founder of Buddhism is considered to be Siddhartha
Gautama (6th-5th century B.C.), who is commonly known as ‘The Buddha’, meaning
‘the enlightened’. According to him, the cause of all villains and of suffering
in humans lies in human desire. However this human attitude is erroneous
because of the temporary and changeable nature of all things. What is bad for
humans, though, is that they do not have conscience of this reality. However,
all humans can exceed the tragedy of life, since a state of Salvation from
suffering does exist and is called ‘Nirvana’. The path that leads to ‘Nirvana’
is in between the selfish satisfaction of human passions and excessive physical
exercise. That’s why it is also called ‘The Middle Way’. This way leads to
consciousness which dissolves ignorance, and after it has been dissolved, the
person is finally directed to ‘enlightenment’, which is a state of total peace
and bliss. And here it’s worth making an essential clarification, we think.
While as we noted above Buddhism sprang up from Hinduism, it did not adopt its
central point, which is ‘atman’, something equivalent to our meaning of
soul. Buddhism rejects out and out the
existence of the immortal soul. The self is a continuously changeable
combination of natural and mental forces, and is constituted of five entities.
A being comes into existence only when these entities are joined together. For
Buddhism, ‘Nirvana’ – our Paradise – does not
declare the extinction, the elimination of the self, since for Buddhism the
self does not exist. It means the annihilation of the delusion of the self and
simultaneously the elimination of the entities that are related to this
delusion.
After the death
of Buddha, Buddhism was split in two, Mahayana Buddhism and Hinayana Buddhism.
The teaching in these two doctrines of Buddhism, concerning the salvation of
the person differentiated. Hinayana Buddhism cultivated the ideal that
salvation is achieved by ‘arahant’. That is, the one who was honoured to
advance in knowledge and to achieve salvation from ‘Samsara’ – from the
repeated births and reincarnations – exactly what Hindus regarded as Hell. And
‘arahant’ is the one who managed to do this on his own, without the help of
anyone.
On the
contrary, in Mahayana Buddhism, Bodhisattva replaces ‘arahant’. ‘Bodhisattva is
the one who although he has become an ‘enlightened’ (Buddha), he refuses to
enter into ‘Nirvana’ because he wants to save people. Hence, all people are
able and should achieve salvation with the help of a ‘Bodhisattva’. Siddhartha
Gautama – known to us as The Buddha – is believed to have been such a
‘Bodhisattva’.
CONFUCIANISM
Confucius
(551-479 B.C.) is the founder of Confucianism. Most Western people believe that
Confucius is God or someone with divine dimensions. Confucius, however, never
claimed anything like that for himself; and he neither wanted to declare any
new religion or any new religious system. Simply, when he became the governor
of a province in China,
he tried to apply a type of justice that would help people have harmonious
relationships with each other. Thus, he accepted the ancient traditional
religion of China,
which was polytheistic and paganistic, and he stressed respect towards it.
Confucianism teaches that after death those who are virtuous will continue to
live as virtuous spirits in the atmosphere, and in particular in the places
where they used to live as living beings and those who are evil will be punished
with eternal oblivion, that is nobody will remember them.
TAOISM
The founder of
Taoism is Lao-Tzu (6th century B.C.). For Lao-Tzu the universe is not
interested in human business and the mission of the people and their sovereign
is to find a way to live in harmony with the rhythm of the universe, so that
human activity does not impede it with innovative efforts. During the Han
Dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.),
Taoism is wide spread in China.
Its aim is to lead faithful to eternal life. But, due to the fact that man is
considered to be constituted only by matter, this eternal life is not regarded
as the intellectual immortality of the soul, but as the immortality of the
material body. How can this happen? As Taoism pronounces this can be achieved
through various exercises, which will help the person gradually replace the
mortal organs with immortal ones. So, there will come the time when the whole
mortal body is replaced with an immortal one, whose flesh is finally
constituted by precious matters. When the faithful reaches this point he
becomes immortal, is risen up into the sky and dies at the top of a mountain.
However this death is an illusion and is called ‘release from the body’. The
faithful temporarily takes the form of a corpse while the immortal body is
removed in order to live with the other immortals. This is achieved through
physical, respiratory, sexual and alchemic exercises. That’s why they also
prepared the elixir of ‘immortality’, which resulted in many people being
poisoned. To sum up, Paradise for Taoism is
the transformation of mortal to immortal, while Hell is the weakness of this
transformation.
During the Tang
Dynasty (618-907 A.D.),
Taoism is influenced from Buddhism, and approaches the western aspect of Hell
and Paradise.
Thus the publishing editions of the Daozang write about rewards for
virtuous actions and punishments for every sin. There was a deity who noted
down the various actions in the process of the life of a person and after his
death it decided whether the person would be classified in Paradise
or in Hell.
ISLAM
Its founder is
Muhammad (570-632 A.D.).
Due to the fact that Mohammedanism has been influenced by both Judaism and
Christianity, it has almost the same perceptions about Hell and Paradise. It believes in the resurrection of the dead, in
eternal life and in the final judgement. When this happens the sinners will be
condemned and sent to Hell, while the righteous ones will be rewarded with Paradise. However, the Muslim paradise does not have the
intellectual character it has in Christianity. Because of the deserted and arid
places of Arabia where the first Muslim lived – and as a result their life was
very frugal – they imagined a materialistic Paradise
with endless indulgence and pleasure, and with foods which the faithful Muslim
will enjoy. Thus, in various points in the Quran, their holy book, one can read
about this materialistic Paradise. There will
be rivers from waters and milk, as well as wine in abundance. Similarly, the
faithful Muslim will enjoy rivers from honey and abundant fruits. Such
pleasures will also be followed by beautiful virgin girls and young servants
just like pearls, the well-known to most of us as “huries of” paradise. Those
who were killed for their faith and for the spread of Islam will have a
particular place in paradise.
Writer Christos Pal
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