In one of the latest international surveys it is recorded that Christianity has over 2 billion followers, the largest among the religions. Next is the Islamic faith with 1.5 billion. Buddha Dharma has only 376 million and the Jewish faith has just 14 million followers. However, those figures in no way reflect the true following but are at best only lip-service adherence.
A true following can only be considered to exist if there is a strong determination to follow the profound philosophy of the group with resulting correct behavior.
If 2 million were following the true path of an internal motivated compassion and benevolence, Samsara, at least in the Western world, would be quite a different place.
The problem is that even if we consider Christians as those that attend the churches we find that what we term Dharma Virtue is lacking and that Christianity has become in large part a religion of Commandments with little true commitment and meditation seeking a true link to their God and prophet, while the Holy Spirit seems to continually be losing ground to apathy towards humanism and the idea that their God will give what their mental grasping requires.
The most used prayer, "the Lord's Prayer", uses two important phrases; The first is "Thy kingdom come", which is Christianity is considered as a belief that a later Messiah figure would bring about a Kingdom of God.
This Kingdom is seen as a divine gift to be prayed for, not a human accomplishment. A smaller percentge believe that this idea is frequently challenged by groups who believe that the Kingdom, presumably of peace and plenty, will come by the faithful working for a better world.
While the distance from the true spirit can be said to be true for all religions and philosophies, the fault of a deep internal and not deeper natural compassion here within Christianity seems proportional to the existence of a living exoteric practice not an esoteric one.
When we search for the Kabbalah equivalent in Christianity we find that, due to the increase of personal suffering, the number and accessibility of esoteric groups is on the rise, and false Christian esoteric groups have naturally raised their dangerous heads.
Here we divide esoteric groups into two categories: Hermetic and Nature-Oriented. Hermetic groups focus on structure and the thoughts themselves, while the second group is concerned more with visceral and emotional experience, without therefore a firm structure.
Since the 19th century, what is termed esoteric with a Christian base has thrived thrived. We find Rosicrucians, Freemasons, Theosophy, Christian Science, New Thought and other New Age based examples, each producing their own versions.
We must ask why these have arisen and find the answer in the fact that they have become independent and divorced from the mainstream religious powers and in fact are considered by many as dangerous sects.
They are all concerned more correctly concerned with matters of "spirit" than "commandment". Yet we must conclude that they do not really represent the Christian movement in its basic sense, although their aims may be worthy, and Eastern thought in terms of meditative practice also seems to have filtered into their practices
We must look then to early Esoteric groups in order to discover meaningful esoteric Christian roots.
Christianity: 2.1 billion
Islam: 1.5 billion
Secular Atheist: 1.1 billion
Hinduism: 900 million
Buddhism: 376 million
Judaism: 14 million