A couple of Sundays ago a friend of mine posted a comment on my "Terror in the Night" post on this blog. I was very gratified that he took the time to post, and so I'm reprinting his comment, and my reply, in the hope that we can have further dialogue.
First, a short introduction of Dan. He's a great and interesting guy I met through a discussion group I used to moderate for readers of Townhall.com, the premier website of conservative political commentary. Dan makes his living translating between Japanese and English. The following are his comments:
For what it's worth coming from someone who fled Christianity when he was 18, I had the same night terrors for years as a child. I had been taught that one who died in a state of rejection of God would go to Hell, whereas one who died in a state of acceptance, Grace, to use your term, would go the other way ... **regardless of how they had actually lived their life**. Recall the constant refrain of "Good works do not get you into heaven."
I knew that (1) I was nowhere near as destructive and hateful as some other kids and adults in my environment, but (2) I found it impossible to sustain any faith in the Christian God for more than a few minutes at a time. The possibility of dying in a state of rejection of God was very real to me. This actually fueled a certain level of nihilism in me, because of the apparent capriciousness of God. After some years of my practice of Buddhism, I have lost nearly all my anger toward Christianity (this is not the time to discuss what I see as irritating habits of Christians). My view of how the universe works ("God", if you prefer) is that He/She is not really the cruel, capricious bastard I had "believed" in.
So what's the point of bringing this to the attention of Don and his Christian readers? I'd like to recommend that you address with your children the question that kept me up at nights. You may save them a lot of unnecessary misery. Whether or not it is true that "good works do not get you into Heaven", it is certainly true that good works tend to be the mark of a good character, and that will not be overlooked by any Force for justice.
My reply:
Dan,
First let me apologize for not getting back to you sooner.
I want to thank you for reading my blog, and especially for taking the time to comment on it. I always welcome comments, even if (or perhaps, especially if) they are in disagreement.
Reading your comments I can't help wondering what concept of God you were presented as a child to convince you that he was cruel and capricious. If it was the picture conceived and codified by John Calvin--the God who arbitrarily decreed before the advent of creation the select cadre of those whom he would irresistibly transform their will and thereby allow them to believe and be saved, but doom the rest to damnation--well, I can't believe in the fundamental goodness of that God either. I do believe that to give our existence and our relationship with God any meaning whatsoever, it was essential for man to be given absolute free will, and that an inevitable result of that free will is that many people choose to worship themselves rather than God.
My second question is regarding the concept of faith you were taught. Your comment that you were unable to sustain any faith in the Christian God for more than a few minutes at a time, causes me to suspect that you saw faith as a type of emotion or feeling, defined, perhaps, as the absence of doubt. But I think faith, just as courage, is rightly defined as action rather than feeling, a reliance, in the same way that I rely on a chair to hold my weight when I sit on it. My faith doesn't mean that I no longer have doubts, nor that I don't struggle at times with certain philosophical issues, but it does mean that, in conjunction with the extraordinary evidence for the resurrection of Christ and Biblical messianic prophesy, I see the Christian worldview as the most reasonable and logical system of thought that speaks to every facet of human reality, and also resonates with the deepest cravings of my inner life--my conscience, my longing for justice, my insatiable appetite for beauty and superlatives of all kinds.
Let me confess that I find your anthropomorphic characterization of the universe logically inconsistent with the "pure" Buddhist view that there is no god. From my, admittedly, meager reading about Buddhism, I understand that Siddhartha Gautama dealt with the question of the origin of the universe primarily by avoiding the question altogether. This seems completely inadequate to modern man. Whatever one can say about the various controversies regarding cosmology and the Christian doctrine of creation, at least we don't ignore it.
If I read you correctly, your anger at Christians--which presumably grew to encompass Christianity itself--was due to the injustice of Christians believing they could go to heaven regardless of what kind of life they lived: the doctrine of salvation by faith, not of works. First, don't feel alone in your anger at Christians. If you read my blog My-Road-Back, which is my story of return to practicing Christianity because of the events of 9/11, you'll see it was similar anger that drove me away from the church for so many years. But let me point out that the tension between the concept of God's redemptive grace and man's need to obey God's law has been present in Christianity since apostolic times. The apostles Paul and John had to deal with a heresy we have since called antinomianism whose adherents thought they should sin even more so God's grace would increase:
Shall we sin to our heart's content and see how far we can exploit the grace of God? What a ghastly thought! We, who have died to sin--how could we live in sin a moment longer? (Romans 6:1 Phillips translation)
My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense--Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only ours but also for the sins of the whole world. We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands. The man who says, "I know him," but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But if anyone obeys his word, God's love is truly made complete in him. This is how we know we are in him: Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did. (I John 2:1-6 NIV)
What seems to me particularly ironic is that your disgust at the behavior of Christians was based on Christian morality: you were evaluating the justice of Christianity by the yardstick of Christian moral truth inculcated in you through your Christian upbringing and American culture steeped in Judeo/Christian values.
This brings me back to the question of cosmology. If we exist in a purely material universe, which is ontologically essential in the absence of a personal, creator God, then morality is not--and cannot be--anything more than an evolutionary construct derived from primate behavior that necessitated close-nit social bonds for survival; there can be no such thing as moral absolutes. Morality becomes a thing of personal whim, and any particular variant of morality only has authority to whatever degree of political or social power its adherents can acquire. No one can, in any objective sense, say that one variant of morality is "better" than any other except with regard to its success as a survival strategy. From this standpoint we cannot honestly say that Pol Pot's moral vision, which necessitated the butchery of 20% of the population of Cambodia in one year for the objective of creating a truly equal and classless society, was "bad"--just unsuccessful.
This leaves me asking: when Gautama created his eight steps in the path of enlightenment--right views, right aspirations, right speech, right conduct, right mode of livelihood, right effort, right awareness, right concentration--from whom, or what, did he derive his concepts of the right? And why should I give his concept any more weight or authority than Pol Pot's, or Confucius', or Mohammed's, or Jesus', or the Marquis de Sade's, or better yet, whatever I happen to decide on any given day, depending on the state of my digestion, or the difficult financial crunch in which I may find myself?
Don
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1 comment:
Don,
No problem on the delay in answers. I myself was a little too busy for a while to give you a properly thought-out reply.
To start with a latter point, I want to assure you I am not angry at Christians (I read “My-Road-Back” several months ago). I feel occasional twinges of anger at the collective members of a certain religious group nowadays, but it’s not Christians. When I referred to irritating habits, I was thinking of certain childraising customs, but those are neither universal among nor exclusive to Christians. And on the topic of things that are neither universal among nor exclusive to Christians, you won’t hear me accuse Christians of hypocrisy. That is a tired cliché.
I always chafed at the concept of original sin, but not being a particularly deep thinker, was only able to put a finger on it thanks to Ayn Rand. Let me get back to your reply, in the order of your points.
You must have heard the expression before, “Read your Bible. It’ll scare the hell out of you!” The *constant* fearmongering, the stories of deathbed conversions, which admittedly may be overemphasized in the materials presented to children, the handwaving over the fate awaiting those who lived without ever having the chance to hear the Biblical message, and the injustice that I mentioned in my previous comment was what convinced me that there was something essential missing. The “handwaving” was basically, “We need to trust in the mercy and wisdom of God, who will judge those who never had the chance to hear the Christian message on the basis of what they could have known.” This loophole made sense to me, and still does. If I tried to apply it to myself and what I knew, though, the Sunday school teacher immediately went back to the fearmongering. “Well, *you*’ve heard of it, now, so you have no excuse!”
Moving on, your point about faith being in actions rather than feelings, is commonly made among my sect of Buddhists. (See www.sgi-usa.org if you are curious, especially www.sgi.org/buddhism/buddhism.html)
I guess I confused you with my “anthropormorphic characterization of the universe”. I was attempting to use Christian terminology for “how the universe works”. What I have always believed, with or without the existence of God, is that there is a law of justice. I see karma as the manifestation of that. Why is a conscious Being necessary for a moral law of justice to function, any more than it is for the law of gravity to function? All that said, I certainly never believed in a purely material universe.
As for the origin of the universe, the stock answer in my sect is, that is a question for science, not for religion. Go ahead and consider that “weaseling out”. It is not a question I worry about; I assume that the universe was always here. There may well have been a Big Bang 15 billion years ago; very well, what was the thing that “banged”, and why did it hold together until that precise moment? That’s the scientific version of “If God created the world, then who created God?” I look at those questions as scientists and theologians chasing their own tails. I’m interested in what faith can do for me here and now.
I do my prayers in the morning and evening because I’m a better person for it. I’m happier (-chuckle- though that can be hard to tell; I am generally morose at the moral and political degeneration of this society and expect very hard times for us in a few years), more considerate, more productive, and smarter. This practice is a tremendous blessing.
A comment on your final paragraph; the above is an answer to your final question. You asked where Gautama derived his sense of what was right. Let me go into a bit of theology. Our term for it is his “Buddha nature” or “the world of Buddhahood”. Tien Tai, the great scholar who wrote annotations of the Lotus Sutra, identified ten “worlds” that describe the basic life-conditions: Hell, Hunger, Animality, Anger, Peace, Rapture, Learning, Realization, Bodhisattva and Buddhahood. The lower six worlds are characterized by a dependence of the person’s life condition on the conditions in his environment, while the upper four worlds are more self-determined. To describe the less self-explanatory names, “Realization” means the life-condition of a creator and “Bodhisattva” means the life-condition of a person dedicated to action to save others. “Buddhahood” means the life-condition characterized by wisdom, compassion, dedication and action. All of us spend most of our lives in one of these worlds, our basic life-condition, but can manifest any of these worlds at any moment. Our sense of right and wrong is innate within us and derives from our Buddha nature.
DaninCorbett
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