The Spiritual Glass Ceiling

Something I noticed about Christianity as compared to Buddhism:

In Christianity, a person can never, ever, ever, never, ever, be 100% good. We can be, like, 99.999% good, but not all the way. We (Christians and Catholics) are taught from birth that we have that Original Sin, that we’re inherently flawed, and we just gotta live with it. Catholics go to confession because they are always sinning, that somebody always did some kind of sinning somewhere, and not a week goes by where somebody did no sinning. If there was only one constant in Catholicism, it’s sinning.

(This is where it gets really blasphemous.)

Regarding God: He is like the president of the company, that 100% shareholder, but the difference is the highest position any employee can reach is vice president, unless that position is held by Jesus, which leaves the rest of us with managerial positions. No matter how much we try or learn or do, the best we can be are managers who have to go to confession every week.

Now, Buddhism. Buddhism started because some guy, Siddharta Gautama, discovered enlightenment and the path to enlightenment. In Buddhism, anyone can be a buddha (enlightened one). You can be any gender, age, ethnicity, profession, and you can even have a sucky past, but if you started today you still have a chance to be a buddha. It supposedly takes a long long long time, aeons even, but at least there is a chance that anyone can be a buddha.

Here’s Wikipedia’s entry on buddha

Starting today, if I’m good and patient and think things through and am very aware of what I’m doing all the time and try to help people live better lives, there’s a good chance that someday I’ll reach buddhahood.

Starting today, if I’m good and patient and think things through and am very aware of what I’m doing all the time and try to help people live better lives, I’ll still have to go to confession. And there’s absolutely nothing I can do to totally clear my record. Even if I spent the last week stuck at home and delirious with the flu, this week I’ll still have to go to confession. The way I see it, if I have to go to confession, and if I don’t have any sins, I’m gonna have to make some up just to make the visit worth it. And that would be lying. Shit.