The Bible is not one book but a compilation of many books so that trying to find the red thread of Christianity is next to impossible. Buddhism has not lost its red thread. It's still very much alive and well. But finding this red thread involves intuition and not one's mastery over words.
What Siddhartha awakened to can only be found by direct intuition (Zen = dhyāna). It transcends words and the six senses; all conditioned things including even thought. Still, it serves as the basis of all his discourses: they invariably hinge on that intuition.
Unfortunately, our secular age depends upon the flesh or in Buddhist terms, leading a conditioned life which guarantees continuation in samsara. Most of us are aware of how the modern mind prioritizes things. Its first duty is to having a good time, followed by sex, then marriage and finally the baby! Dharma is last.
With Christians it is about the same. God and prayer are there to get them out of jams due to their love of the flesh. They hope to be constantly forgiven having yielded to the temptations of flesh.
Those who believe in the afterlife will only return to a world of imagination, the sixth sense. While those who believe in absolute death or annihilation will go back to the womb from whence they came. But Siddhartha taught us the transcendent which is the true antidote to desire by which we fall into the imagination and with it the flesh.
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