The Connections Project

Protestantism

In a way, protestantism is a partial return to the roots of Catholicism: that is to say, there's a lot more similarity between the two than there is between Judaism and Catholicism. The biggest difference remains the differing interpretation of the prophesied savior: protestants believe Jesus fulfilled the prophesies, Jews believe the savior is yet to come.

Modern day protestants selectively pick and choose things from Judaism to support whatever preconceived worldview they already have: thus homophobic protestants like to cite Deuteronomy, a Judaic text, to support a view directly opposed to their own text (the New Testament). At the same time they conveniently ignore many verses from Deuteronomy which would be very unpopular. In short, the average modern protestant doesn't even know what's protestant and what's Jewish.

Protestantism is a direct descendant of Catholicism. It arose when heretical Catholics rejected many of the Catholic doctrines. In principle, Protestantism is a lot more humanist and liberal than its mother religion. In theory, there is no privileged protestant with greater access to God than others (whereas Catholic priests are privileged). The Church is theoretically quite optional in protestantism. The protestant needn't attend mass or confession, being himself a priest just by virtue of believing in the religion. Of course, in practice, the modern protestant has strayed from these forming principles, thus the rise of megachurches and famous pastors.

A key difference between Catholicism and Protestantism is the worship of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Catholics worship Her, whereas protestants hold such worship to be idolatry, a deadly sin.

The relation between Shinto and Protestantism depends largely on one's interpretation of Shinto. The confusion rises from the fact that the Japanese word for "god" can also mean "spirit". Thus, Shintoism can be viewed either as a polytheistic paganistic religion, or as a spiritualistic philosophy. The former is radically, violently at odds with Protestantism, whereas the latter is perfectly compatible.

While Buddhism passively respects and admits Protestantism, the converse is not true: protestants believe that Buddhists are evil and Hellbound. There is almost nothing in common between the two religions. Protestants believe in a single eternal deity, whereas Buddhists don't even believe such a thing is possible, that the Abrahamic God (if He exists) is just another God and will eventually pass away like everything else in the universe.

Islam and Protestantism are quite similar, so it's ironic that their followers are famously hostile toward one another. In essence, Islam is just Protestantism together with one extra prophet, Muhammad.

In practice, both Muslims and Protestants are fundamentalist, but in different ways. Very loosely speaking, Muslims are fundamentalist in a conservative way, while Protestants are fundamentalist in a libertarian way.