Below is an essay that my now favorite religious scholar wrote.
"Is Immortality Important?" by Karen Armstrong.

Now I have read Armstrong, and understand, I think, why you like her writing. She is very clear and includes much learning from other major religions. She does a good job trying to find the common threads in all of them.

But as you well know, all generalizations are false. This is especially true as she shifts from her personal recollections of Roman Catholicism into a general description of these other religions. The parts of RCC she dislikes are very particular, localized, and not typical of the broader church teaching, whereas what she likes about other religions are broad, general features which are in direct conflict with the particulars of Hinduism or Buddhism or Confucianism.

That is if I were to go into the street, interviewing Buddhist monks, Hindu brahmins, Muslim imams, Confucian scholars, I would find two handfuls of anecdotes every bit as objectionable as her stories about first Friday masses. My Sri Lankan friend tells me of the superstition and witchcraft practised by their Buddhist country. My Brahmin Indian student tells me of the dangers of Hindu meditation. My wife tells me of the cruelty of Confucian duty in a Korean family. My Zoroastrian friend (Iranian wife of a German physicist) told me of the persecution endured in Iran. And as for Islam, let me direct you to the Middle East quarterly that asks whether Christianity and Judaism are as equally violent as Karen Armstrong maintains?

So do we judge a religion by the writings of its most learned sages, or by the practices of the majority of its adherents? A case can be made for both. But under either method of evaluation, Christianity uniquely stands out. (I could say Judaeo-Christian to be more inclusive, but given the 12 million or so practising Jews in the world, it doesn't merit "major religion" status.)

The only way to make Christianity look equally bad, is to compare its anecdotal, particular, uneducated folk practices with the textbook, generalized, non-specific philosophers of other major religions, which is what Karen Armstrong does. It isn't an apples-to-apples comparison, as if Pat Robertson is on a par with Lao Tzu, or with the rich, educated, prince Buddha, or the royal philosopher Confucius. But even though it is an unfair comparison, I would argue that she still had to cherry-pick to get an unfavorable comparison. The point being that Robertson is still a "good" man, an honest man, a man you can do business with, whereas none of that would be true of Buddha or Confucius. To say it another way, familiarity breeds contempt, and we condemn our brother for the splinter in his eye, yet admire the foreigner with a log in his. I have no doubt that were you able to interview Buddha in the flesh, you would be treated far worse than you expected, whereas the opposite would be true for interviewing Robertson.

Okay, let me address the proper comparisons.

a) Folk religion

How do the folk religions of Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity stack up? Let's make the assumption that income is correlated in some way to work ethic and general morals. Christianity wins that one hands down, though only in the past 3 centuries. Before that Taoism and Confucianism reigned supreme for 10 centuries. So that may be an unfair comparison. But perhaps diachronic or historical comparisons are complex, perhaps one could ask, how do two very close societies that convert to different religions fare? Singapore and Kualalumpur for example? Christianity wins again. There are lots of reasons for this, one of the better books I read on the subject was Rodney Stark, who preceded the book with this essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education (reprinted here)

We could look for other comparisons: child survival rates; attitudes toward the disabled or retarded or elderly; elderly survival rates; support for the arts and literature; development of science; military-civilian discipline. These are all characteristics of the non-professionally religious who make up the majority of any major religion. And once again, Christianity comes out on top, especially in the sanctity of human life category. For when life is sacred, then the investment in life reaches it maximum potential.

b) Professional religious philosophers

Here I will part company with Armstrong. All the things about Christianity that Armstrong likes are actually heresies of the Christian church, and much more aligned with what I would call the Bronze Age religion. I have a lengthy blog on the subject,  in which I contrast some of the characteristics of pre-Jewish Bronze Age religions.

The truly remarkable fact is that atheism has been so dominant in the past 100 years. This has almost never been the case in the history of the world, for the simple reason that historically atheists have been the most despised religion of all, fit only for thieves and murderers. (Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao ...) But what has been the most common religion is what I call homeostasis, the maintenance of cultural survival. From Gilgamesh to Hitler's 3rd Reich, the production of the right kind of babies has always been central to homeostasis. Any religion that advocates birth control and abortion will de facto, not be around for very long.

Imagine that culture is a living beast with a lifetime of centuries, and that you and I are merely transient red blood cells that are born in the marrow, fulfill our duty in the veins, and get recycled in the liver. How then does one red cell pass on this knowledge to the next crop of cells? By talking of a life external and eternal to our short lives.

In just such a way eschatology points to something bigger than ourselves, for whose purpose we were created, and whose duty brings fulfilment, and whose existence subsumes ours. Then Karen Armstrong's seething against "spiteful fantasies" of the afterlife misunderstands everything important about eschatology. Her search for "enlightenment of nirvana" becomes just another selfish attempt to attain a private eschatology. There is no escaping the accusation of selfishness unless there is a recognition of something greater than ourselves, something more eternal than ourselves, something that will continue upon our death. In other words, the very thing she condemns as selfish is the only thing that can rescue us from a selfish, self-absorbed destiny.

Like GWF Hegel, like process theology, like Hindu and Buddhism, like Bronze Age religion, she is putting a lot of sugar-coated philosophical god-talk on a central core of selfish, homeostatic religion. Conversely, no matter how legalistic, uneducated, childish, or primitive it may have been presented, an eternal destiny is the only escape from a selfish absorption with our own existence. Pantheism and polytheism are alike in their need for self-importance and the focus on the now. Which is probably why Islam was so successful in conquering the polytheistic Arabs and Hindus, but failed with the Christians.

And I haven't even gotten to the unique message of Christianity, that which separates it from the absolutist monotheism of Islam and Atheism that which Armstrong rejected along with her vows. But that would take me far beyond Armstrong's thesis.