I recently signed up to Facebook, and I have been exploring all the various little goodies that one can add to their pages. I am pretty fond of the Never-Ending Movie Quiz, and I am looking at my slowly growing list of friends to see what they have on their pages. The vast number of applications that can be added is daunting, so I usually just breeze past them.
However, on one person’s page I saw the “What God are You?” application. Apparently you take some type of quiz and then it tells you which god you are most like. What struck me was that they had Buddha listed as one of the gods you can be most like. What bothers me are the number of people who actually believe that Buddhists worship Buddha as a god. As a recovering Roman Catholic most of my family still is, and my wife’s family is protestant ranging from fairly open minded to the creationist “the bible is the literal truth” variety. The thing that some of them do not understand (we have not really had this conversation with the creationists) is that when we became Buddhist we did not just “switch allegiance” to a new god.
Are there some sects of Buddhism that revere Buddha as a god? Perhaps. Several weeks ago I read an article that suggested as much. But all the Buddhists I know, and the Sangha I am part of, would never say such a thing. I can accept that there are people that just do not know any better, although that is a pretty big part of a major religion to mix-up, but I get really frustrated when, after explaining to people that Buddha is not a god, they just assume he must be like the Buddhist version of Jesus Christ. Ah well.
Of course, I found out after my wife visited the fundamentalist branch of her family that they thought that Catholics worshiped Mary as a god(dess). Funny.
