Please bear with me. This is more of a constant stream of thought in response to my previous post, with fragments of different ideas all over the place, than an formal retrospection. I’ve tried to organize it as much as possible for your convenience, but that’s not saying much, lol.
I had a few qualms with using Christianity as a comparative tool at first, but I thought about it and I’m really not able to explain what I was trying to say without referring to it in some way. First, I think it would be a safe assumption to say that, for most of us, it’s all we really know. If I was to pick something like the practice of Islam, not only would I not really know what I was talking about, but neither would the people I was trying to talk to. It’s frustrating sometimes because, even though I am happy to be Christian, it’s put alot of blinders on me. The only way I know how to break it is to explore other beliefs and see how they relate to mine, or what I’ve been told are mine.
I would say that Christianity, as we know it today, has skewed my ideas on “religion”, giving me only a Westernized understanding of what it is. I looked up the word and it said “religion” was a term made by the Anglo-Saxons in the 13th century CE. Heh, the infiltration of Western thought has penetrated a little deeper than I thought. What I also find interesting is that what we consider as the origins of modern religion started in c.1500 BCE with Zoroastrianism. There’s about three millenia there that what we know as “religion” being practiced, but it’s not being called that. That word isn’t in existence yet.
Regarding the people that lived in this window of time, this “religion” was most likely homogenized into the rest of their everyday lives so that it would remain more or less indistinguishable. Simply put, religion and life were the same thing. This is just an assumption, though.
What I’m starting to realizing now, as I continue to write this post, is that if I try to take away all outside influences on both “religion” and “way of life”, I’ll find that there isn’t really much of a difference. My choice of the words (more like labels on concepts) are proving to be insufficient. Words are subject to influence by culture and change in the times. There are two ideas that I’m trying to describe, but to put them in context of words distorts their meaning.
Maybe comparing Buddhism and Christianity wasn’t my main goal. Maybe what I was trying to do was better define the two words, or maybe extract the concepts from the current words and find new words to call them by. Maybe what was really important to me were these concepts.
I’ll stop there, but don’t think that means I’ve stopped thinking about all this. 
