Buddhism usually gets gentle treatment from a secularist. Christianity usually gets its well-deserved forty whacks, but the religion of the smiling fat man receives mitigated praise. And yet what nonsense it is.
Buddha inherited a problem from Hinduism, which had decided to adopt the doctrines of reincarnation and karma. The upshot was that each individual was trapped in a never-ending cycle of lives driven by karma. The Buddha claimed to have discovered a way for an individual to escape the cycle of lives.
Notice that there is not a tittle of evidence for either reincarnation or the theory of karma. What appears to happen to an individual is that he dies and that is the end for him – a frightening enough prospect.
What the religious geniuses that thought up the cycle of lives managed to produce was a self-created problem and a prospect, which for horror, approaches or even equals the Christian invention of Hell. Then we are supposed to congratulate the Buddha for discovering the answer to a predicament which never existed in the first place.
