Buddhism and the American Declaration of Independence
Buddhism is perhaps the only religion that is based on an assumption that ‘All men are created equal’. Note that these are the first words of the declaration of independence (American). And also note that, while all religions stress that ‘all men are brothers…etc..’, none seems to be really founded on this pre-supposition, in the way Buddhism is.
For instance, there is a clear demarcation of various ‘classes’ or ‘races’ of people – in both Hinduism (class system) and Christianity (Israelites, Galatians, Romans…). Islam makes a clear demarcation of the ‘believers’ and ‘non believers’. In other words, each religion seems to have some categorization of the human race – into a ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ categories.
Buddhism seems to be based on a lack of such categorization.
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