If you know the right facts, you can easily kill blind faith. Buddha as I know did not like Hinduism, the tradition of sacrifices, the tradition of yagnas (sacred fire offerings) didn’t appeal to him. He didn’t know what was reality, and why we suffered? So, he went on long quest to ask his inner self. In the end he emerged with something that would kill any faith that’s based on God.

You see in religions like Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Sikhism etc, there is God, depending on your good or bad deeds, God rewards or punishes you. If you are rewarded, you feel happy, if you are punished, you feel sad. Right?

Well, Buddha found out the powerful fact that happiness and sadness lies entirely within you. You can turn it on or off as per your will. That is you can stay happy, and calm, all the time if you wished too.

If you can stay happy all the time, what can God do to you even if it exist? Of course, people in those times did not have the scientific tools to disprove God, they wouldn’t even be able to explain what lightning was, they had no idea about nuclear fusion that powers the sun. So Buddha said, it didn’t matter if God exists or not. If you can take control of your feelings, then God doesn’t matter.

Suddenly God became powerless before this fact. I wonder what would have happened if these thoughts had reached Arabia, there could have been no Christianity, and no Islam. Jews would have struggled to hold ground against such a powerful fact.

If these thoughts had reached Afghanistan and Iran, Zoroastrianism would have had tough time, Zorastrians invented the concept of God, may be single God (Ahura Mazda), they invented the concept of heaven and hell, and these concepts stuck with later religions. What would have happened if they discovered that this God was powerless before an well trained brain which can control its thoughts and feelings? It’s really funny.

  1. They might have got mad, wanted to destroy India and Buddhism.
  2. They might accept Buddhism and abandoned their religion.
  3. They could have coexisted.
  4. They could have formed a new mixed religion.

But yea, it would have made a very different world.