When speaking to Jews and Christians, Dennis Prager often says that if you served Jews and Christians equally unripe cantaloupe, Jews would complain more because Jews don’t think suffering is good while Christians view suffering as Christlike.
Christianity encourages a passive relationship to personal suffering and to God and to Bible.
On Tuesday, Dennis Prager spent an hour interviewing Stephen Prothero, author of the new book, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World–and Why Their Differences Matter.
Stephen: “There’s a culture of complaint against God in Judaism that Christians find hard. My daughter went to a bat mitzvah recently. She saw this girl get up and read the Torah portion and then complain about it and say this isn’t fair to girls, what’s going on here?
“My daughter thought, how could this be? This is a religious service. She was used to the idea that whatever it says in the Bible is just right and you don’t fight with it. You don’t complain about it. You don’t shake your fist at God.
“In Buddhism, suffering doesn’t ennoble. There isn’t this idea that suffering is a good thing, Jesus suffered, we’ll learn from suffering, maybe we should endorse suffering because it will build our character. The tradition aims to get rid of suffering.”
“In Buddhism, you can fix suffering by a mental adjustment rather than by going out into the world and fixing the world. This is why Judaism and Christianity have had a different attitude to social justice than Buddhism, which holds that you were born into the situation you deserved.”
In a dialogue with a Buddhist monk on his old show “Religion on the Line”, Dennis said to the bloke, “If your brother died, and you were true to your religion, you wouldn’t mourn.”
The monk agreed.
