Heaven Without Her by Kitty Foth-Regner

Author:Kitty Foth-Regner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2012-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

AS THE YEAR 2000 melted away and I dug deeper into the “which God?” question, it became clear that I would actually have to learn something about each religion in order to evaluate its truth claims; the “proof of ” exercise had been a bust, giving me nothing concrete to go on.

Even worse, I was discovering a bottomless pit of possibilities—there seemed to be literally scores of religions out there. Sure, many seemed to be permutations of major belief systems, but still, what if some weird offshoot of Asatru or Falun Gong turned out to be true? And what if I missed it?

Fortunately, before I’d driven myself crazy with such speculation, my friend Tim e-mailed me to suggest I begin by evaluating the big five—Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Then, he said, if truth hadn’t yet made itself known to me, I could wander down some less-traveled roads.

And so, using Sire’s The Universe Next Door as my tour guide and supplementing it with lengthy Internet sessions and books by men like Dave Hunt and Dr. Walter Martin, I formalized my search for the one and only true God. Honestly, I did hope the whole thing would turn out to revolve around Jesus, for simplicity’s sake. But I was nowhere near ready to concede the race to Him.

I started with Buddha (alias Siddhartha Gautama), the “Enlightened One,” who founded Buddhism hundreds of years before the birth of Christ. Not that Buddha claimed to be God. In fact, it seems that Buddhism generally denies the very existence of a Creator. But Buddhists are apparently supposed to honor images of, and objects associated with, Buddha. And why not? He was the one who came up with dharma, or “saving truth,” to help humankind overcome suffering and achieve nirvana; if dharma is truth, he no doubt deserves some adulation.

It turned out to be an intellectually challenging religion. For instance, I read that Zen Buddhism, the most common form in the West, says that the final reality is the Void—something that is neither nothing nor something. The individual, on the other hand, is something—the aggregate of previous individuals. A Zen Buddhist’s goals include realizing that his roots are in nonbeing and emptying his mind of thought. When he dies, he disappears, and another person emerges from his body, feeling, mind, consciousness, and perception.

Or something like that.

It made no sense to me—no doubt because I am such a slave to Western thought. When I did my Google search for “Proof for Buddhism,” what came up were essays explaining that Buddhism is true because it works, presumably by giving people peace. Which didn’t make sense to me, either; how peaceful can you be, knowing that upon death you’ll disappear?

But the biggest stumbling block for me was Buddhism’s denial of a Creator. I had already been persuaded on that point, and so felt safe in moving on.

Next up was the Hindu universal spirit, Brahman (and the hundreds of thousands of gods that make up Brahman).

At first blush,

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