[Buddha-l] demise in asia

[Richard Hayes]

On Mon, 2008-09-01 at 13:17 -0700, Jayarava wrote:

> Buddhism is a great missionary religion... though we westerners tend
> to favour a fairly dry and rational approach, and who ever had their
> mind changed by reasoned argument?

A lot of Asians became Christian through the power of reasoned argument.
They were told "If you become Christian, we'll give you food." Starving
Asians reasonably converted. A similar argument was used on American
Indians: "If you become Christian, we won't kill you." (That proposition
turned out to be false, of course. Many Indians converted and got killed
anyway.)

I think the most powerful argument a modern Buddhist can use would be
something like this: If you practice Buddhism, you won't have to go to
heaven and spend more time with a bunch of born-again Christians and
Muslim jihadis.

Dayamati