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There are scarier religious thoughts out there -- the strangest are the Jains.

This was founded about 900 BC by Mahavira (though he is supposed to be only the 21st in the line of Tirthankaras that stretch back to infinity. They believe that there is no creator god, that the universe has always existed and will always exist -- they argue with those who believe in a creation that it is not possible for something to be created out of nothing.

in their religious view, when you die, you get reincarnated. If you are good, you go higher. You can even become a god like Indra or Varuna, but the gods too die and reincarnate, and they can't do anything about your eventual faith, so praying to them is senseless.

But if you escape this cycle of reincarnation, you go to a higher plane (you become an Adinath). In that higher plane, the Adinath don't care or know or think or remember anything about the lower plan. But this is not heaven as the adinath cease to exist. They have vanquished death, suffering, thought, everything. The supreme point for these is oblivion.

Buddhism took this and softened it quite a bit (Hinayana Buddhism, the older form as practised in Sri Lanka) or a lot (Mahayana Buddhism with it's sub-forms Tibetan, Zen, etc.)

This was founded about 900 BC by Mahavira (though he is supposed to be only the 21st in the line of Tirthankaras that stretch back to infinity. They believe that there is no creator god, that the universe has always existed and will always exist -- they argue with those who believe in a creation that it is not possible for something to be created out of nothing.

Sounds like your average modern day evolutionist. Dawkins and his ilk come immediately to mind.

And they say that *science* is not a religion.

right.....

They believe that there is no creator god, that the universe has always existed and will always exist — they argue with those who believe in a creation that it is not possible for something to be created out of nothing.

It is not possible for man to create something out of nothing. So their "argument" is correct — as far as it goes. But the argument has no necessary application to God. I gather Jains and Buddhists do not see this.

They reject creation out of nothing — but then the supreme achievement of their eschatology is the attainment of the state of "nothing" — of personal oblivion, the total annihilation of ego identity, the merging of self with Self....

Question: Does this make "Self" a sort-of "nothing," too?

I confess I can't figure out this stuff. :^) But I do note that the natural sciences did not rise in the East, but only in the Western cultural context, preeminently informed by Christianity and certain ancient Greek philosophers....

Thank you so very much, Cronos, for your fine synopsis of the main currents of Eastern religious belief!

Yeah, well, the thing about that reincarnation stuff that no one has been able to answer yet is: if there is no personal god, and all things go on and “karma” determines who goes on to the higher planes, then WHO IS KEEPING SCORE???