These recent posts make me realize another aspect of the contrast.
Abrahamic expectations often conclude that priests and people in general are unreliable when compared to God, and sometimes result in mistrust of Religion as a whole and attempts at communing directly with God.
Dharmic expectations tend to instead prefer to choose which teachers to trust, to which extent, and in which combination. There is an implicit yet unavoidable acceptance of one's personal responsibility over one's own practice and religious judgement.
I find the Dharmic approach much preferable, among other reasons because it is not vulnerable to the serious, obvious yet often neglected weaknesses of the Abrahamic one: there is basically no way to make God-conceptions accountable, nor is there much of a way to even attempt to make them comparable to each other. Far too often people end up trapped in their own self-serving conceptions with no way out of their validity flaws.
Worse still, such a situation leads to ever worse troubles at relating to others and establishing meaningful links of trust and cooperation. Which is a very bad situation for anything that intends to have religious significance.
