Darrin Rice:
I'm very thankful that The Buddha was very pragmatic and his teaching are mostly practice oriented, goal oriented. Buddha could have been elevated to Godhead status by his followers also if he had not gone to great lengths to make sure that did not happen.
But don't you think that Buddha *has* been elevated to Godhead status by many followers? Surely the very reason there is even a need for a "pragmatic dharma" movement is precisely that there is a lot of non-pragmatic stuff around.
When I look at what the Buddha actually taught versus what Buddhists teach, and compare that difference with what Christ actually taught (insofar as we can figure that out from the Gospels) versus what Christians teach, I see very little difference between the differences. Spiritual followers appear to be, the world over and across all paths, extremely capable f*cker-uppers of the messages of their spiritual founders :-)