Amaury de Riencourt

"It does matter a great deal to the West whether Christ rose bodily from the dead, multiplied bread of loaves or even existed at all; it does not matter one whit to the East whether Rama, Shiva or Buddha ever existed since their importance is neither factual or historical but purely symbolic...because in the East there is no conflict between fact and faith, since Eastern faith (sraddha) aims basically at subjective cognition rather than the objective "believing to be true" of the Westerner. The West has always attempted to impose dogmatically its various viewpoints because, imbued with Biblical, Catholic, Koranic sense of God-given historical mission and the conviction of having the monopoly of literal religious truth, it felt that it was objectively in the right - regardless of the increasing conflict, within its own cultures, between the spiritual messages (often mutually contradictory) of its "revealed" religions and scientific knowledge."