You Don't have to believe in God to Be a Buddhist

I believe in God but I'm only 1 of 25% of Buddhists who do. I consider myself to be a Christian Mystic Tibetan Buddhist. Religions that sprang from the old Testament like Christianity and Islam generally don't consider Buddhism to be a religion so many people of various religions around the world also consider themselves to be philosophically Buddhist because it is an excellent Compassionate Philosophical System of thought. In some ways the Dalai Lama is thought to be someone in some ways like the Pope is to Christianity. It is not that he was voted or elected to be this it is that when Tibet was taken over by China during the 1950s and he fled to India to Dharmshala and set up a Tibetan Government in Exile there then, people were amazed by his attitudes which reminded them of Ghandi and then later Mandela, Martin Luther King and others. So, he de facto became "The Buddhist Pope" in a de facto way without being elected and won the Nobel Peace Prize as a result.

But, back to the fact that "you don't have to believe in God to be a Buddhist". Buddhism is about how to stop suffering and how to become enlightened and how to help all beings in the universe "starting with Earth to stop suffering". So, in Buddhism there are 49,000 correct paths to enlightenment. Christianity is several of these potential 49,000 paths to enlightenment.

So, you will meet Priests and ministers of all religions who consider themselves to be philosophically Buddhist in addition to their religions that might believe in a God or Gods.

But, if you are worried because you don't believe in God that you are alone and won't go to heaven, don't worry about it. Buddhists 75% of them don't believe in God either but they still believe in reincarnation, enlightenment and heaven.

Even when I have studied about Jesus I can see the influence of Buddha's teachings upon him. I believe now that he learned about forgiveness by being exposed to the compassion of Buddhism. I personally believe as a young man he went to India and the Himalayas to master his Siddhis (magical empowerments) that allowed him to levitate, walk on water, and the multiplying of the loaves. In fact, raising one's body from the dead is still a Siddhi practiced in India and the Himalayas by some adepts there.

According to Tibetan History, Saint Issa (very similar to Yesu or Yeshua) which was what Jesus was actually called in Aramaic his native language, went with his wife, (likely Mary Magdelene and children to India) where he was a Guru and maker of miracles there after his resurrection and lived until he was 85 years of age there with his wife and family.