Q: Why do Jews, Christians, and Muslims fight so much?

A: Ah, yes. Another straightforward question with a lengthy, complicated historical answer. So, for once, I’ll cut right to the chase and speak from the heart.

When this post drops, we will be right in the middle of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, which begins a ten-day-long period of fasting and repentance, ending with Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. I find this significant, because this year was one of the rare years where all three religious holy weeks aligned, for the second year in a row:

This alignment of Passover, Ramadan, and Easter only happens about once a generation (roughly every thirty years). For it to happen twice in ours ought to have been a call to brotherhood and peace.

Instead, this happened:

Honestly, this is nothing new. No one should be shocked. No one should be surprised.

…but it breaks my heart. It absolutely crushes me.

The thing is… we are the only monotheistic traditions on the planet. We invented it. And we can’t get along. We have thousands of years of strife, bloodshed, betrayal, and mistreatment that keep getting in our way. It’s the world’s longest, biggest, worst family feud ever.

It really is. We’re all brothers, arguing over our relationship with the Father and coming to blows over which one of us the Father favors and loves more.

It’s not a good look, guys. It convinces no one.

And I realize I haven’t said anything new, yet, but bear with me for a little bit more, because there’s something that needs saying.

To get there, I want to rewind two thousand years to the time of Christ, and the eve of His crucifixion during Passover week. As I do this, though, I want to make something very clear: I am not about to open old wounds and point fingers. That’s not my aim.

I want reconciliation. I want my family reunited. I want my brothers back. That’s what I want.

So stay with me, as we jump back in time.

Innocent Man on Death Row

In that Passover week two thousand years ago, Israel was a nation on edge. The Romans were occupying them and forcing their presence on the people, and tensions were boiling over. There were those who wanted to fight (Zealots), those who wanted to passively resist (Pharisees), pragmatic survivalists (Sadducees), and those who were escaping into esoteric spiritual practices (Essenes). Each of them had their own idea of what the Messiah would be and what that Messianic deliverance would look like.

Jesus walked into the middle of that and delivered none of the above. Instead, what He did was create a portable Judaism that could survive the imminent destruction of the Temple and the Diaspora of the Jews, so that worship of the one true God would continue. He did it by stripping Judaism back to its core and focusing on each individual’s personal relationship with the Father.

…but tensions being what they were, the Jewish authorities were too afraid that His efforts would look like sedition against Caesar and bring the full weight of Imperial Rome down on them. Plus the Pharisees just couldn’t abide how much Jesus discarded, in stripping the traditions back.

We know how that turned out. Before this goes any further though, I want to clarify something.

Nobody else would have made any different choices, had they been in the Jewish leadership’s shoes. Nobody. Not you. Not me. No one.

Jesus had to die. He had to. There was no avoiding it. My sins put him there. Yours did. We would’ve chosen to execute Him, because “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

Did you know that’s literally the justification the Sanhedrin used?

So. I would’ve put Jesus to death. You would’ve done it. Anyone would’ve done it, to avoid a genocidal massacre.

The point is that the Jews do not deserve the blame for crucifying Jesus. They never did. It was unavoidable.

He. Had. To die. It’s the whole point of why He came.

…but, let’s consider something.

What if the Jewish authorities had repented, after the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D.? What if that was their wake-up call?

What if they’d said, “Man, Jesus tried to warn us. Our first prophet in 400 years, and once again, we didn’t listen.”

What if they’d then turned to Rome and said, “Hey, those followers of The Way? The ‘Chrestians‘? They’re actually ours. They’re following a prophet in the tradition of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Zechariah. They’re a fifth branch of Judaism, but they didn’t and don’t have anything to do with the Zealots. They deserve the protection of the Roman Empire, just like our Pharisees and Sadducees.”

Consider that for a moment. Assuming that Rome believed them, how might that have changed things?

For starters, it would’ve meant that the Roman Persecution of the Early Church wouldn’t have happened. It would’ve also meant that there would’ve been no animosity between Diaspora Jews and Christians.

…but there’s something else.

Covenant Theology

When you get right down to it, doctrinally, what Jews, Christians, and Muslims all argue over, more than anything else, is a branch of theology called Soteriology. That is, we all disagree on what you have to do to be “saved”.

Kids, arguing over Daddy’s favor.

…but here’s the thing: God works in covenants, or contracts. And something that’s made clear in the Christian New Testament is that the Jewish covenant is the root (original) covenant that Christians are grafted into. If God’s covenant with the Jews is not valid, then neither is the Christians’.

So… if the Jews had claimed the Christians, before Rome, they would have been recognizing that grafting. This would have set a precedent.

It would have made a difference when, six hundred years later, an illiterate merchant-turned-poet from the tribes of Ishmael turned up and spoke to Jewish and Christian leadership, claiming to be yet another new grafting in that same covenant. We would have listened, because this had happened before.

Then, we may have even said, “Wait… you can’t read? You learned all this by listening? Would you like to learn how to read, so we can show you where those stories you overheard came from?”

Instead, we mocked him. We ridiculed Mohammed, his reaction to this became enshrined in the Qur’An, and he changed the Holy City in his faith from Jerusalem to Mecca.

How much conflict could have been avoided, had it gone the other way?

At the very least? Charles Martel, The Crusades, The Ottoman Empire, The Holocaust, The Six Days’ War, and even the bombing of Nagasaki would probably not have happened, for one very simple reason:

The three brothers of the Abrahamic faiths stood united in solidarity.

I want to be clear about what I’m talking about, here. I’m not talking about Ecumenism. I’m not suggesting that we would all be one faith. Rather, that we each recognized that we have our own vertical relationship with God, and we trust and respect that.

Specifically, the Jews and Christians would trust that Mohammed was a prophet to the descendants of Ishmael, brokering a covenant of the one true God to them. Muslims and Jews would trust that Jesus did the same to Gentiles. And Christians and Muslims would recognize that all of these are grafted into the root covenant God made with the Jews through Moses.

The covenants do not have to be identical. Mine doesn’t have to look like yours. Yours doesn’t have to look like mine. Nor does either of ours replace the other. But we trust that it’s there, that we each want to serve the one true God, and trust Him to work out the points where we differ.

How would that change our attitude towards each other?

Repentance and Atonement

Rosh Hashanah is a time of repentance. Repentance is not only sorrow, but also mourning. Mourning for what is broken, damaged, or lost.

I was made keenly aware of the magnitude of what has been lost, when I happened upon this 1987 quote by Emil Fackenheim:

On the part of Christians, how can there be an honest dialogue with Jews so long as they are sure in advance that the Jewish truth about to be heard has already been heard and superseded? […] There simply can be no dialogue worthy of the name unless Christians accept—nay, treasure—the fact that Jews through the two millennia of Christianity have had an agenda of their own. There can be no Jewish-Christian dialogue worthy of the name unless one Christian activity is abandoned, missions to the Jews. It must be abandoned, moreover, not as a temporary strategy but in principle, as a bimillennial theological mistake. The cost of that mistake in Christian love and Jewish blood one hesitates to contemplate.

Indeed. It is terrible to think about.

I mourn for the broken relationship between the three brothers of our faiths. I mourn for all that could have been, and weep for two millennia of strife, bloodshed, and violence between us.

We have done terrible things to each other. When does it stop?

When do we look around and ask ourselves if this is the legacy and world we want to leave to our children and grandchildren?

When do we lay down arms and say, “Enough; the cycle stops with me”?

We don’t have to keep fighting each other.

…but to make it stick, we all have to do it together. We all have to repent. We all have to mourn. We all have to beg each other’s forgiveness.

Imagine what we could have, if we did. Imagine a Palestine that was safe to visit. Imagine the numbers of travelers that would come to knowledge of our God through any of three pathways.

Imagine the three Abrahamic faiths joining hands, bent on the work of strengthening the community of humankind by changing hearts and repairing the world.

Imagine that, instead of this year’s strife, this was instead the norm:

Maybe if we work on it in our lifetimes, then the next time Ramadan, Passover, and Easter overlap, our children will be able to worship together, under one roof.

That would be real atonement. It’s worth working towards, don’t you think?

‘Til next time.

Q: What don’t toxic religious authorities want you to know?

A: According to Jim Palmer, there’s fourteen things. I’ll pause here while you read them, then tackle them in order myself.

Ready? Let’s get started.

1. True. Toxic religion is rooted in fear. However, Grace casts that out with perfect love, freeing us from fear. Some variant of the phrase “fear not” occurs 365 times in the Tanakh/OT and NT, combined.
2. Also true. Outside of scholarship and training, clergy have no innate authority, in the sense that they cannot directly control your vertical, private relationship with God.
3. Meh. More often, humans hold sacred what they enjoy. You can tell what a person holds sacred by how much time they spend doing that thing.
4. False. Most religious traditions in the ancient world were actually political propaganda. The Tanakh/OT was intended to put the lie to these myths, by telling the Truth. It is when we stop seeing David (to name but one example) as a historical human person with flaws and start mythologizing him that we begin misunderstanding the purpose of the accounts of his life. It is one thing to romanticize his conflict with Goliath as a tale about the little guy standing up to an insurmountable foe, but this approach quickly proves problematic when used to interpret how he forced his former wife, Michal, to leave her new husband and marry him after he took the throne. The moral lesson there is difficult to glean if David is a moral exemplar and a mythic figure; but if David is a historical human being, it’s easy to say that he messed up and made a mistake, because that’s what humans do.
5. Prayer isn’t about “bribing God”. It’s about embracing the Eternal perspective, through a moral lens. It’s learning and practicing to step outside yourself and your own limited, selfish POV, to hold yourself to account, and to notice and intervene in the plight of others. It is a recalibration of the human filters of perception to God’s, while accepting that we will never fully be able to do so.
6. If anything humans know about God is a projection of the human psyche, mirroring human values, explain the concept of the Trinity. Because it seems to me that the Trinity is just weird enough to be something no one would want to make up (witness all the discarded attempts to jettison it, throughout Church history), but also be exactly the kind of weirdness you’d expect of beings with n dimensions encountering beings of higher dimensions and trying to explain the experience (e.g. A. Square’s experience with the Sphere in Flatland).
7. The idea that people are born “One Race” is actually a very Biblical concept that was key to challenging the political dogma and propaganda of the Imperial Cult, in ancient times. Most human beings throughout history have not believed this, defaulting instead to some form of Tribalism. This means Palmer is in a moral minority that includes the Judeo-Christian tradition. I’m curious if he thinks that this moral value has any authority, given the views he expressed in his second point.
8. False. Theology is the rational articulation of the spiritual (read: empathetic and emotional) insight gained during prayer and during contemplation of the moral values expressed in Scripture, and their implications for and applications to our daily lives. To say that this is justifying an a priori belief is misleading, on par with claiming that explaining why embezzlement is wrong is justifying a bias against stealing.
9. Depends on the religion. All of them have something of value, but not all of them are True. Not all of them have equal value to the others, either, but not all of them are wholly false. All of them make useful observations; all of them also have blindspots.
10. True. Yet, there is something that “nullifies our human potential to act out of ego, greed, fear, hostility, and hatred”, as you put it. It’s Grace, the doctrine that originated with Christianity and has since spread to other religions, for the better.
11. “Integrating the shadow side” of humanity would be just as large a mistake as throwing up our hands at the Internet’s ransomware epidemic and integrating those trojans into the TCP/IP stack. Human beings perform selfish actions, but that is not our identity. You are responsible for what you do, but what you do does not define you. You can change, but only if you differentiate the one from the other. Furthermore, “freeing yourself from all narratives” is itself a narrative: that of the liberated captive (a narrative that Christianity itself employs). So it seems to me that you are not “freeing” anyone from a narrative so much as redirecting an existing one. Again, given the views you expressed in your second point, what gives you the right to do so?
12. True. Correct theology, on its own, fixes nothing. But theology is like plumbing: the pipes have to be joined and sealed correctly, or the water sweeps everything away. But it’s the Water that nourishes, not the pipes. To mistake the latter for the former is to succumb to Idolatry.
13. True. Participation in worship services does not work out to membership in the Invisible Church. “You will know they are Christians by their love” (i.e. not by their fervent worship), after all.
14. Patently and historically false. This historically leads to hedonism, because individuals left to their own devices, free of outside influence, invariably gravitate towards gratifying their own appetites. This slowly devolves into addiction as the individual builds up a tolerance for the biochemical rewards of the neurotransmitters in their brain, and consequently seeks ever more pleasure from satisfying their appetites as they chase ever-increasing “hits” of dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. In order to both circumvent this and for ethics and morality to actually work, accountability has to be in play. This means individuals have to answer to an external observer of their life and decisions. You get to choose who that is (and by no means does it have to be a professional religious figure), but it has to be someone other than yourself, or you are unaccountable, and your ethics and morals are, at the very least, suspect. You cannot be an objective observer of your own life. You have to entrust that role to another. Period.

Now, having responded to all of that, I have a question for Jim Palmer. Given that he has gone on-record as saying that two events shattered his faith… namely, one of his parishoners beating their spouse and a bereaved mother whose child was not resurrected through prayer… I have to ask…

How would the 14 points you listed have helped them?

Because if that’s what broke your faith, and this is where you landed, how would your new perspective allow you to help them where your Christian faith was thrown into crisis?

How does “you are capable of guiding your own spiritual path from the inside out and don’t need to be told what to do” help people deal with domestic abuse and child bereavement better?

How does this watered-down, SBNR, third-rate Tony Robbins speechifying help anyone, in the long term?

I think it’s a fair question.

…because, Jim, here’s the thing: these 14 points don’t have a lot to say about Christianity, or even religion as a whole, really. They do, however, say a lot about you. And for someone like you, with your former position, and your former role in the Church, to express views that seem like they were gleaned, not from the Bible, but from the Golden Book of Bible Stories or a similar collection, with views on prayer that seem straight out of the Arabian Nights, well…

I hate to say it, Jim, but maybe it’s better that you left the Church. Maybe you were the kind of pastor Gilbert Tennent warned us about, because frankly? You did a lot of damage.

And still are. At least now, though, you’re honest about it. It’s out in the open. That’s for the better.

It doesn’t let you off the hook, though, because you’re still doing the same thing. Still using the same techniques, except now, you’re actively subverting whatever value Grace might effect.

I don’t find that honorable. I don’t see an exponential jump in your moral clarity or insight. I just see the same Enabling Mechanisms that humans have clung to since the exit from Eden, regurgitated and repackaged for a religiously illiterate and resistant Age.

Because, if you’re going to present Christianity as something inadequate that you’ve left behind, then whatever you’re advocating now as being “better” is going to have to at least be something new, if not a quantum leap forward.

And this isn’t that.

Sorry.

That’s all I got on this, everyone.

‘Til next time.

Q: Is Agnosticism the only real option?

A: John Horgan seems to think so. One of his opinion pieces at Scientific American (which is behind a paywall, but can be read in full here) argues exactly that, claiming that a “careful examination” of the options will inexorably lead honest inquirers to Agnosticism. And not a dogmatic Agnosticism, either, but rather a mere inescapable uncertainty.

While I generally like John Horgan’s writing (and also appreciate the care with which he rebuffs the militant Atheism of Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, and Harris), I have to take issue with him, here, simply because I question some of the things he takes for granted.

Let’s get started.

The Problem of Evil

As many before him have, Horgan presents the Problem of Evil as a sufficient rebuttal to whether or not God exists:

“If God loves us and is omnipotent,” Horgan wonders, “why is life so horrific for so many people?”

This is a problem I have dealt with elsewhere on this blog, but to recap, I will simply ask: “How much intervention in human suffering is required for God to be considered ‘morally good’?”

This is not a facetious question, but an earnest one. Consider: if God knows all that was, all that is, and all that may be… does He have a moral obligation to prevent all events, words, and thoughts that lead to suffering of any kind?

Or, more simply, would you consider God “morally good” if He used His omnipotence to delete human thoughts that would lead to human suffering in their future?

Where does the respect for His creatures’ personhood factor into this scenario?

Horgan tries to handwave this concern aside by dealing with it in the form of free will, which he uses the late Steven Weinberg’s work to rebut. But this is a misdirect, because human free will has nothing whatsoever to do with the question of whether God is moral and ethical. God is His own person, as are we.

So, the question hangs in the air: could God prevent all suffering before it happens and still be considered “good”?

And the answer, as every comic book fan knows, is “no”.

This answer makes atheists squirm, for two reasons:

1. Nobody likes the thought of mind control.
2. Nobody wants to experience pain.

…and I can’t really say I blame them, on either count!

But here’s the thing that the Problem of Evil glosses over: nobody has a right to a pain-free life.

Nobody.

Moreover, as I’ve also noted elsewhere on this blog, the experience of pain is what informs and develops our human sense of compassion. You literally cannot be compassionate if you have never experienced any pain or suffering yourself.

…and as I pointed out then, would a “good” God have a moral obligation to prompt us into developing compassion (i.e. by allowing us to experience pain in the hopes that we will transform it into compassion)?

(This question also makes nonbelievers squirm.)

The point I am making is that the Problem of Evil is an argument so compressed as to be basically unintelligible. It simply does not follow that a loving, omnipotent God would give each of us the most pleasurably enjoyable life we can imagine. Nor does it follow that because we don’t have that, clearly God doesn’t exist.

No omnipotent deity is under any moral obligation to “helicopter parent” each and every one of us, sheltering us from any and all potential sources of discomfort. In fact, to do so would actually spoil us.

The Problem of Evil, as presented, rarely distinguishes between discomfort that is necessary for personal growth and character development, and true suffering.

The Moral Obligation of Love

Nevertheless, there is an inordinate amount of human suffering in this world and this life. It is tragic. It is heartbreaking. It is enough to completely shatter people.

…but most of it cannot be attributed to “acts of God”. Most of it… by far the lion’s share of it… is the product of human selfishness and greed.

Just ask Helen Keller, who lost her sight and hearing at nineteen months old and grew up to be an activist for the rights of the disabled. In her research as an activist, she found that blindness is frequently and primarily an ailment of the economically disenfranchised.

Income disparity causes it. This is a human problem.

The point is that if you are studying the Problem of Evil as a science-minded individual, you must do your due diligence and control for human influence on human suffering. Otherwise you misattribute human evil to God.

Second, even apparent “acts of God” frequently serve to mask human indifference. For example, if someone were struck by lightning, that would appear to be an act of God. But even so, questions need to be asked. For example, why was that person exposed to the elements?

Even the classic Atheist conundrum involving the “Eye Worm of Africa”, a parasite that supposedly only incubates in eye tissue and causes children to go blind, is in fact treatable with Ivermectin (unlike COVID-19) and other modern medicines. Treatment not only kills the parasite, but if administered soon enough, also prevents blindness.

Far from being the final nail in the coffin God was buried in (as Sir David Attenborough would have you believe), this actually begs the question of why we allow human beings to be afflicted with blindness when we have the power to prevent it!

God is not morally culpable for human apathy.

We are.

It is this inescapably profound point that all of Christianity hangs upon, from the Fall to the necessity of the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection. Any objections to the ethics of the Christian God must not only grapple with and come to terms with this point, but also the fact that the Christian God went above and beyond by experiencing the sum total of human suffering on the Cross. Past, present, and future.

The sheer magnitude of what that means cannot be overstated or contemplated deeply enough, but at a bare minimum, what it means is that human suffering matters deeply to God, even when other humans are profoundly indifferent to it.

…or are using it to score points in a philosophically-minded religious debate instead of using their power and influence to bring it to an end.

(Is that “too real”?)

Circling Back

To recap: it is a hard truth that there is a certain amount of discomfort that each of us must undergo to develop compassion and character. It is neither a mark against God’s character or His existence that this is the case.

There is also an overabundance of injustice in the world, directly attributable to preventable human causes. It is a mark against humanity’s character that we allow this to occur.

However, this begs two questions that frequently go unaddressed: if there is a universal Moral Imperative that we use to intuit that injustice, what is it? And how did we come by that knowledge?

Because at the end of the day, the real problem I have with John Horgan’s carefully examined Agnosticism isn’t any of the points he made. It’s the simple fact that resolving to remain uncertain is, ultimately, indecisiveness. And I find that to be indistinguishable from the apathetic indifference that condemns a child to blindness from river parasites by withholding existing, cheap medications from him.

In order to be morally indignant, you must act on injustice. Otherwise it’s a sham. You’re feigning outrage.

To be clear, I don’t think Horgan is feigning anything. I simply think he hasn’t given enough thought to the overlap between his Morality & Ethics and his Epistemology.

Because when he does, he will not only find a Cross-shaped hole in his worldview, but also fertile enough soil for Grace to take root and flower.

‘Til next time.

Q: Is Easter a culturally reappropriated holiday?

A: Yes? No.

Kinda.

This is going to take some unpacking. Let’s start with the name.

…By Any Other Name

Nobody really knows where the name “Easter” ultimately came from. Now, there is a German word “Ostern” that seems to be the root of our English word. The Venerable Bede traced this back to the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostrae, who has a puzzling connection with egg-laying hares (which is where the Easter Bunny traditions came from). But Eostrae herself is obscure, with very few parallels in other mythological traditions and folklore.

Etymologically, her name probably is a corruption of Astarte, or Ishtar, a fertility goddess who had been worshiped for about five thousand years, and whose cult eventually reached the British Isles during Roman times.

The fertility cult’s biggest celebration was during the Spring Equinox, which normally falls on March 19-21 each year in the Northern Hemisphere. This was not only a celebration but also a societal synchronization: as “fertility celebrations” would ensure that children would get conceived in Springtime, allowing the populace to work through Summer and Harvest, and deliver their children during the Winter months when people are indoors anyway.

It is this particular point that causes the most chafing, among Wiccans and Neopagans who claim that Christianity appropriated their holiday and even their symbolism and then sucked all the fun out of it.

…but it is also this particular point that provides the strongest evidence that Christian “Easter” is not appropriated from elsewhere. Because if it were, it should always fall on the Northern Hemisphere’s Spring Equinox.

It doesn’t. In fact, in 2023 it’s on April 9.

Why is that?

Execution on Passover

Chances are, if you go into most Protestant churches on Easter Sunday and look at the bulletin, you’re as likely to see that service called “Resurrection Sunday” as “Easter”. Because that’s the Sunday that Christians celebrate as the one that Jesus Christ rose from the dead.

Why that Sunday? Because Jesus ate the Last Supper with his Disciples during the Feast of Unleavened Bread, or Passover. (The meal He ate with them was probably an early version of the seder, as well, with the dipped morsel probably having its corollary in the karpas.)

Passover is a Jewish holiday commemorating the night that the Angel of Death passed through Egypt as the final of the Ten Plagues, delivering them from slavery in Egyptian exile. That event reset the Hebrew calendar. That month became its first month, and the commemoration kicked off on the fifteenth of that month and ran for a week.

The month was originally named Aviv, but after the Babylonian Exile, they adopted the Babylonian names and it became Nisan. Both are used interchangeably in the Tanakh/Old Testament. In both cases, the timeframe is the same, in that Passover roughly falls between March 26 and April 25, in our calendar. It never happens before or on the first day of Spring (i.e. it never falls on the Spring Equinox).

So why does it move around?

Because the Hebrew calendar uses lunar months of 29-30 days. This adds up to 354 days in the year, prompting them to add an additional month seven times over every nineteen years, in a formula called the Metonic Cycle.

As you might guess, this causes dates to move around a bit. So that explains why Passover moves around. But because the Jewish calendar is pegged to the moon, it means that the 15th of Nisan always falls on a full moon.

Quick-witted readers will immediately note, however, that Easter/Resurrection Sunday and Passover do not always coincide, however. So, what’s up with that?

Children of the Watch

Early on, Christianity considered itself a variant of Judaism, as this overlap between Resurrection Sunday and Passover illustrates. Its followers were not originally called “Christians”. That came later, and was originally a bit of an insult.

Christians were originally called The Way, within Judaism. And since followers of The Way worshiped a risen Jesus as King, this caused no end of political problems for Jewish leadership, who were eager not to become identified with the Zealots and be charged with sedition and treason against the Roman Emperor, Caesar.

After nearly four centuries of this, the First Nicene Council established a separate date for Easter, on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the Spring Equinox. That way, Passover and Easter don’t fall on the exact same day.

Since this, too, is based on the lunar cycle, Easter/Resurrection Sunday jumps around.

…but because neither our Gregorian Calendar nor the Metonic Cycle are truly accurate to the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, they drift apart from each other by about one day for every 200 years. This means that around 15% of the time, the two holidays happen about a month apart.

Regardless, the fact that the two holidays’ dates are intertwined so intricately points to neither one of them being based on older polytheistic traditions. Meaning…

The name and the pop culture traditions that we associate with Easter might be reappropriated, but both Jews and Christians would have good reason to celebrate Passover and Resurrection Sunday on their own, without those things.

And since we aren’t an agrarian society needing to schedule our conceptions and births around the harvest anymore, the whole point of Astarte’s Fertility Cult seems a bit moot in the modern day. So what’s the point in being upset over losing those things?

‘Til next time.

Q: What about mindfulness?

A: Oh boy. I have very mixed feelings about Mindfulness.

In a nutshell, though, I feel like Mindfulness is to Buddhism what Prosperity Theology is to what Jesus actually taught. That’s not a compliment.

Let’s unpack that.

Pro$perity

There’s a verse in the Tanakh/Old Testament, written by the prophet Jeremiah,

For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.

And, while this may be very comforting on the face of it, the book of Jeremiah as a whole is not. Neither is its follow-up, Lamentations. Yet there is a whole movement that has latched on to this verse and others like it, using them as Biblical justification for materialism and greed. It doesn’t take a huge stretch of the imagination to see why this was so appealing to capitalistic American consumers.

This is false. This is wrong. In some high-profile cases, this is even criminal.

The problem is not what Jeremiah was actually writing (which didn’t have anything to do with Capitalism). The problem is that individuals in the present day have Quote Mined something that feels good and turned it into an Enabling Mechanism for their own problematic behavior.

That is what the Mindfulness movement does to Buddhism.

Here’s how.

Be Here Now

Mindfulness is an outgrowth of the Secular Buddhism movement spearheaded in the United States by individuals like John Kabat-Zinn, Jack Kornfield, and Stephen Batchelor. While it pretends to be a sincere attempt to get back to the teachings of Gautama Sakyamuni (the Buddha), Secular Buddhism is in reality a revisionist approach to Buddhism itself. (As Karen Armstrong once pointed out, no Reformation is a true “return to the roots”, but is always a revisionist take.)

With that in mind, it should be noted that Mindfulness is not itself directly connected to Secular Buddhism, but is itself a revision of the same. So Mindfulness is two steps removed from Buddhism.

This two-step removal means it is even further divorced from Buddhist values, which is something that both critics and scientific studies have pointed out.

Two different studies have shown that mindfulness meditation alone can both remove any sense of guilt and make you selfish. Neither of which are particularly helpful. This happens because, as Ronald Purser wrote in The Guardian,

Mindfulness is nothing more than basic concentration training. Although derived from Buddhism, it’s been stripped of the teachings on ethics that accompanied it, as well as the liberating aim of dissolving attachment to a false sense of self while enacting compassion for all other beings.

In other words, meditation was developed in the immersive environment of specific values, and in a different environment stressing other values, it does not have the same effect.

On that note, another paper explored meditation’s tendency to dredge up uncomfortable or unwanted life experiences. Willoughby Britton, the director of the clinical and affective neuroscience laboratory at Brown University, and her colleague Jared Lindahl, a visiting professor of religious studies, pointed this out in their 2017 paper interviewing 60 Western Buddhist practitioners, most of whom had accumulated in excess of 10,000 hours of lifetime meditative experience. From these, Britton and Lindahl documented feelings of anxiety and fear, involuntary twitching, insomnia, a sense of complete detachment from one’s emotions, hypersensitivity to light or sound, distortion in time and space, nausea, hallucinations, irritability, and the re-experiencing of past traumas. The associated levels of distress and impairment ranged from “mild and transient to severe and lasting”.

Britton is critical of the app-based Mindfulness movement, such as Headspace and Calm, calling it, “the new frontier of completely unsupervised meditation in mass quantities,” and warning against using meditation as a silver-bullet panacea like a generic multivitamin. 

“I don’t see that the programs or the apps or people who are teaching it are taking responsibility for these people,” Britton said, “If they’re calling me, then they’re not getting the help they need from the people who are teaching them.”

Another Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist, Miles Neale, has pointed out that mindfulness meditation is “a feeding frenzy of spiritual practices that provide immediate nutrition but no long-term sustenance”, coining the term “McMindfulness”, to indicate its actual value.

The big problem, as Ronald Purser pointed out in the Guardian article linked to above, is how Mindfulness is actually “a tool of self-discipline, disguised as self-help. Instead of setting practitioners free, it helps them adjust to the very conditions that caused their problems. A truly revolutionary movement would seek to overturn this dysfunctional system, but mindfulness only serves to reinforce its destructive logic.”

David Forbes elaborated further on this in an interview with Vox:

In mindfulness, you focus on your breathing and you’re noticing your thoughts as they come and go. What I’m suggesting is that we expand on this and begin to identify where those thoughts are coming from.

How are we conditioned by certain troublesome patterns rooted in dominant society? What are the forces or structures perpetuating those patterns? In this way, we’re using our attention to really pay attention to the sources of our unhappiness and then the next step to work to overturn those sources.

That last bit, working to overturn the sources of our unhappiness, is something that, as I’ve pointed out before, Buddhism itself has benefited from, by being in close proximity to Christianity.

But… maybe that complacency is the whole point, in Western society. We tend to substitute consumerism for actual quality of life.

Prosperity Buddhism

It’s ironic that, having promoted and sold the Moore’s Law-driven ubiquity of technology contributing to our mental distress, Silicon Valley is now promoting technology fasts and mindfulness, as a way to adjust. This is not done with our best interests in mind. It is not even done with their best interests in mind.

It is an elitist status symbol, a dog whistle of luxuriant living, something on the order of bragging on how close your free NBA seats got you to the floor and the half-court line.

And, much like the televangelists on “the Old Time Gospel hour, stealing money from the sick”, they’re advertising this to you to con you into spending more of your money. Jack Dorsey, Gwyneth Paltrow, Orlando Bloom, Katy Perry, Jared Leto… they’re all doing this because it ultimately makes them money. It is a $10 billion dollar industry in the US alone.

I’m not saying that Buddhism is a con. I want to make that clear. I want to draw a sharp, bright dividing line, between the Buddhist values like ahimsa and nonviolence, and the feel-no-guilt-about-consumerism of “McMindfulness”.

I’m sure devout Buddhist practitioners and monks are just as nauseated and repulsed by this corruption of what they believe, as I am about Prosperity Theology. This is not what the Buddha meant. Not in the slightest.

Practicing Mindfulness might make you feel more spiritual, but spirituality and faith is a discipline for a reason. There’s ethics involved. There’s personal sacrifice. And at the core, there’s selflessness. Practiced, intentional selflessness.

Not consumerism.

And to be perfectly blunt, if someone’s trying to convince you that consumerism is harmless and okay, you should reach for your pocketbook to make sure it’s still there. Because they always have an ulterior motive.

‘Til next time.

Q: What about dissociative identity disorder?

A: I’m an avid fan of the Cinema Therapy channel, on YouTube. I think it’s fantastic. I think Jono and Alan are doing a wonderful job. They’re helping a lot of people, and #CryingWithAlan is probably the most non-toxically masculine thing to happen on the Internet since it began.

…but I was watching a couple of their videos, and something Jono said struck me.

When I saw that I just went, “Huh.” Because the implication in Jono’s statement there, was that, ultimately, the reason for new personalities emerging in a DID system is due to trauma.

And… that. That, I think, is problematic. But not why you probably think I do.

To unravel why, we’re going to need to detour into technology first.

It’s Not A Bug, It’s A Feature

I don’t know what kind of device you’re reading this post on, but chances are, you’re reading it on a device that allows for different users. On a Windows-based machine, the option to switch to a different user is on the Login screen, and it looks something like this in Windows 10:

You can see there, in the bottom left, two different user accounts. Each of them has their own set of rights and privileges. Their own file structure, their own userland, their own settings, everything.

Let’s just say this PC is a person, all right? In that case, these two different user logins are actually different personalities. They have different preferences (settings), different memories (files), and different habits (apps and scheduled tasks).

Would you say the ability to create a new user on the PC is down to malware infection or hardware damage?

No. You wouldn’t. It would be incorrect to say so.

Then why in the name of all that is good and holy would you or anyone in charge of putting together the DSM ever dare suggest that this psychological phenomenon is down to trauma? Correlation does not imply causation.

It’s a feature, not a bug. It is a built-in capability of the human brain that automatically triggers during psychological trauma, but is not itself an actual product of that trauma.

AND… Buddhists have been utilizing this capability for millennia.

I’m serious.

Notice That

Before we go any further, I want to state openly that I am not implying that Buddhist teachings inflict trauma. Or that their religion is one built on exploiting mental illness. Neither of those things are even remotely true.

However, one of the things Buddhist disciplines confer on an individual is the ability to distance the self from the emotions and thoughts that arise within us. Buddhist practice teaches individuals to notice the emotion or thought, allow it to rise, and allow it to drift off.

It takes practice, but in later stages, the practitioner develops the ability to the point that they no longer think of themselves as experiencing the emotion or thought. If a Buddhist practitioner named Kevin were experiencing anger, he would develop the habit of thinking about himself in the third person: “Kevin is getting angry. Why is Kevin angry?”

Or, in a more mundane scenario as he walks down the street, he thinks, “There goes Kevin, walking down the street.”

This is what psychologists relying on the DSM would call classic dissociation. But it’s what Buddhist-inspired mindfulness advocates call, “distanced self-talk“.

And what it is doing is what it has always done: it is creating a new user in the brain, distanced from the one who experienced the trauma, so that the person can be objective and get a handle on themselves.

It is a benign, helpful, religious application of the feature in the human brain that we associate with DID, simply because under trauma, this feature gets utilized by instinct. But over thousands of years, Buddhists have developed safe, reproducible techniques and procedures for making use of it.

It is not a product of trauma. Neither is Buddhism.

I could end it on that note…..  buuuuut, I have one more bone to pick with Jono, sadly.

Neurons That Fire Together…

Later on that week, I watched Cinema Therapy’s excellent video on DisneyPlus’s Moon Knight series (which is itself excellent), and something else Jono said caught my attention.

…and again, I just went, “Huh.” Because it seems to me that, once again, this is problematic.

Before we delve into that, though, I want to say that the way society looks at DID systems is primarily fueled by misunderstanding and fear. They have been played as the villains in so many horror tropes, and this has led to a lot of uncompassionate and hateful treatment.

No one has the right to force another human being to do anything. Ever.

…but if you are a DID system with alters who emerged as a result of trauma, you’re going to run into a problem. That problem is simply this.

Your alters are a trauma response.

That’s it. That’s the problem.

See, neurons that fire together, wire together. That’s Hebb’s Rule. Meaning that if your brain has developed the habit of creating whole new personalities in response to trauma, then that’s… how it’s going to handle trauma. And on a long enough timeline, if you don’t reverse that course, the login screen of your brain is not going to look like the one above, but probably more like this:

You don’t control what trauma comes your way. You don’t directly control how your neurons wire themselves together, either. The only thing you can control is how you train yourself to respond in lesser crises.

And the thing to think about is this: if the reason that the alters emerged in the first place was to protect the person, then how is it going to protect everyone if a new alter emerges during a genuine crisis? Would that strain the system? Put it in danger? How would you account for that?

The only way to reverse any trauma response is to take the opposite path and build the habit going the other way. In this case, it would mean ultimately reducing the number of alters by “merging down”.

And again, this is not something that anyone should ever force another to decide. Not even a psychologist. I’m not even instructing any DID systems that they must do this. This would be something for the individual alters in a system to discuss among themselves.

This line of thought will probably make DID systems uneasy to think about. A lot of them have been through a lot of flawed psychology that would have forced them to revert to their birth personality. Similar to reparative therapy.

That’s cruel. That doesn’t work. And that’s not my purpose, here.

The thing is, though, all of the alters… they’re you. All of them. Every single one of them. None of them aren’t you. They’re the individuals you could’ve been, would’ve been, may have been… given the physical range of the capabilities of the body you were born with, and the upbringing and life experiences you could’ve had. They might only differ from each other simply by being compartmentalized.

Alters are… a kaleidoscope of you. And although the people you grew up with, the family you had, they might want you to “go back” to who you were before, the reality is that it’s not that straightforward.

Dao and Duan

Human beings are not literal computers. Consciousness is not literally an Operating System. So alters are not literally like different user accounts. I’m using these illustrations as pictures to help us grasp some concepts that are, largely, hidden from us.

But the thing about merging down into one personality, which psychology calls integration, is that a lot of the time, it really comes down to which one has been in control the most. You see, in some ways, alters are less like different user accounts and more like the personality equivalent of conjoined birth.

There was a set of conjoined twins that were born, and when the doctors began the process of surgically separating them, they had to make some very pragmatic decisions. Like, which one gets both legs? While our natural, human sense of equity would try to parcel the body out fairly so that each twin would be balanced, the reality is that there was a dominant twin, whose neurons were more wired into certain limbs than the other.

So, the surgeons gave that twin more of the limbs than the other one, because she had a better chance of making use of them after being separated.

It’s like that for DID systems and their alters. The alter that has been dominant the most is the one that has the most experience, the most memories, etc. This alter may not be the one you were born with. That might be difficult for your loved ones to accept. That’s okay.

They’re still you, though. Again, all of your alters are.

The point is less that you “go back” to who you were before the trauma, than it is that you would choose an alter as a sturdy foundation to begin from, and then start incorporating the other alters’ experiences and memories into that one.

This process would be less like Oscar Isaac and James McAvoy, and more like what happened to Goldie Hawn’s character, Joanna Stayton, in Overboard. She lost her memory. She became a new person with a new life. Then when she got her memories back, they got filtered through the new person. She didn’t like who she’d been before, and went around making amends. Her family didn’t care for this, because her family was awful:

I realize that this is a fictionalized example, as well, but the point I’m trying to make is that it’s less about “going back” than it is about deciding who you want to be, and choosing someone to become the sole filter for all your alters’ experiences, moving forward.

Because Joanna didn’t “go back”. She became someone new, and integrated her old self through the filter of who she’d developed into while she had amnesia.

To any DID systems reading this, I’m not saying you should try to “merge down” or, Heaven forbid, “discard” your alters because they’re dangerous or even inconvenient. They’re all you.

What I am saying is that your brain has built an automatic response for dealing with trauma, and this is something that all of you are responsible for. I’m saying you should all confer among you to consider whether leaving this acquired trauma response untouched is really in all of your best interests.

Whatever you decide, that’s your call. No one has the right to force you to become anyone or anything you don’t want to be, and anyone who loves you will honor and respect that decision.

If they don’t, and anyone tries to force you, get them out of your life.

Should you decide that it is in your best interests, however, Buddhism will help. Tremendously. In ways that Christianity can’t, and modern psychology is only just beginning to discover.

Read that again.

I’ll unpack it further.

Buddhism has spent centuries and millennia perfecting control over the same features of the human brain that trauma caused to give rise to alters, in you. Christianity does not understand these things. There is nothing in the Bible that helps with this other than an obscure, unclear statement by Jesus that paints a fear-based picture, due to its context. You don’t need that. Buddhism can help you where Christianity would just have superstition and fear.

And that’s coming from one who was raised a devout Christian.

Again, I’m not telling anyone, especially not any DID systems, what they ought to do (well, except maybe for the people writing the DSM). I’m just presenting options.

No matter what, if you are a DID system with alters that emerged during trauma… for what it’s worth, I’m sorry. You should never have had to go through what you did. I’m glad you’re still with us, no matter what.

I hope you are too.

‘Til next time.

Q: What about reincarnation?

A: As I said last time, Buddhist practices come with demonstrable health benefits. Some Buddhist teachings, though, just seem incredible.

Reincarnation is one of those teachings that beggars belief. There doesn’t seem to be any scientific evidence for it. It also seems to fly in the face of Buddhist teaching about personhood, as previously noted.

However… there might be something to it.

Before we get into that, though, let’s consider something the Dalai Lama once said:

If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.”

It’s to his credit (and really, Buddhism’s as well) that he accepts and invites this kind of rigorous testing of his belief system.

However, while Gautama Sakyamuni, the Buddha, cautioned his followers not to be taken in by street magic disguised as miracles, he was also well aware that making use of meditation would develop skillsets and insight that most did not possess and would appear to be “miraculous”.

For example…

Observing the Quantum

Quantum phenomena is extremely small. It is movement and behavior that happens at or below the atomic level of matter. Yet, modern scientific experiments seem to indicate that human senses have the ability to detect these!

Naturally, these experiments have their detractors. “If humans have always had these abilities,” skeptics ask, “why are they only now being discovered?”

As it turns out, there are whole sets of human cultures that have known about the human ability to perceive quantum phenomena for centuries. These cultures all had one thing in common.

They practiced meditation.

In particular, practitioners of a particular kind of observational meditation had procedures within their tradition that developed their ability to see in the least amount of light possible. They used completely dark, virtually light-proof chambers, which we now know produces scotopic vision. Under these conditions, practitioners were able to fine-tune their vision to the point that they could tell the difference between true light and either phosphenes or biophotons.

That kind of attention to detail is just about unheard-of, even in the modern world and is just the kind of borderline-paranormal power that the Buddha was aware of.

Eventually, word got around that meditation conferred a supreme level of concentration on an individual. One of the most well-known historical applications of this was the development of Rinzai Zen by Japanese Samurai.

No-Mind

In about the fifth century BCE, a monk named Bodhidharma made his way from India to China, teaching both Buddhist doctrine and meditation techniques. Eventually, as Andrew Abele’s excellent two–part series for Black Belt Magazine documents, his teachings made their way into the Japanese warrior class, who were seeking a way of disciplining the mind so that their battle skills could be moved into the level of instinct.

When you’re fighting with a three-foot-long portable razor blade, rational thought becomes a liability. Pausing to think, even for an instant, can be a deadly mistake.

What the samurai found was that Zen meditation allowed them to do exactly what they needed. It allowed them to move their highly-disciplined, honed physical skills into their unconscious mind.

Basically, it allowed them to turn reflexes into instinct. And the result?

It wasn’t a coincidence that the Japanese Samurai became one of the most fearsome, disciplined, and also moral and spiritual fighting forces in all of human history.

So, meditation grants people extraordinary attentiveness. It also allows practitioners to import learned skills into their instincts.

The question is, once that link is forged between the conscious and the unconscious mind, how deep does it go? And is it two-way?

Childhood’s End

For a while now, researchers have puzzled over why children’s memories made before the age of five tend to disappear, or at the very least, “fade”. Numerous mechanisms have been suggested for this. For starters, the brain is still developing and growing and critical memory-storage structures aren’t operational. For another, humans seem to encode memories differently after learning how to talk.

But the data… the “files”, if you will, are still there. And they are not the only ones that might be there.

“Read the man’s RNA, doctor.”

You see, experiments with sea snails have verified that memories are encoded onto RNA. Scientists were able to transfer memories from one snail to another by injecting them with that RNA.

Next, those same RNA fragments were shown to travel from worms’ neurons to their reproductive germ cells, meaning that memories can be passed from parent to child, up to 25 generations into the future! And this affects their offspring’s ability to forage!

Not only that, but experiments with fruit flies have shown that their offspring adopt egg-laying behavior that their parents developed for avoiding parasitic wasps, even when the offspring never encountered those wasps themselves.

Finally, Emory University experiments with mice demonstrated that fear of a specific smell can be passed along from parent to child, through the chromosomes.

So, the brain encodes memories. The neurons write them into RNA. The RNA travels to germ cells. The reproductive germ cells incorporate that RNA into the 23 pairs of chromosomes it passes along to the offspring. And the offspring has a set of memories that not only affect its behavior, but also that it didn’t live through.

This whole situation is much more like Frank Herbert’s concept of Other Memory in his Dune novels, but having said that… let’s just pause and think for a minute.

Meditation and the Pre-Scientific Mind

Let’s say you’re a Hindu, Buddhist, or Jain practitioner, circa 3000 years ago. You’re practicing meditation one evening. You’re plumbing the depths of your memories. You trace back through your earliest memories and recover everything up to the moment of being born.

Is this scientifically possible? Sure. You’d just have to teach your mind to decrypt and understand whatever method it had used to form those memories, prior to age 5.

Then, having mastered that technique, you decide to dig deeper. And your body finds a whole bunch of new memories, encoded in its RNA and passed along through germ cells, and starts decrypting those.

Remember, this is 3000 years ago. Germ theory isn’t even a thing. Neither is soap.

What do you make of all of these memories that suddenly come flooding into your mind? You’re in possession of them. So… they must be yours, right? That means you must have lived several lifetimes.

And thus, reincarnation was discovered. Or invented. However you want to look at it.

The point is that without a scientific understanding of heredity, memory, germ theory, neurology, and a whole host of other concepts, the idea of reincarnation is a completely natural conclusion to reach, especially when the phenomenon in question is repeatable and testable.

And lest anyone think that I am accusing Buddhists of deception or trickery, I would like to point out that this same process of hereditary memory and behavior pretty much confirms the Christian doctrine of Original Sin.

Christians didn’t know about the scientific underpinnings our doctrine any more than Buddhists did. We just documented a repeated phenomenon in human psychology and behavior, the same as they did.

The point that I’m trying to make is… don’t be dismissive of another’s culture, faith, or traditions, just because it doesn’t use your jargon or concepts. There’s enough gaps in human perception for us all to benefit from one another and fill those gaps when we learn from each other.

Because, at the end of the day, the point of both reincarnation and Original Sin is simply that your individual actions affect both the lives of those around you, and your offspring. Sit with that for a bit and then ask yourself this:

How am I impacting others? What do I want my legacy to be?

‘Til next time.

Q: Do the blind spots prevent Buddhist practices from being helpful?

A: Absolutely not. They don’t even mean that Buddhist practices are “wrong”! There are a wide variety of studies that show how Buddhist practices are beneficial, especially in recent years. We’ll get to those presently.

For now, though, let’s look at some concepts that are a little more mundane.

What It’s Like

The device you’re using to browse this page has a couple of different modes lurking beneath its user-friendly interface. One of these modes is defragmentation, and it has to do with storage.

As you save data to your device, it doesn’t all wind up in one location on the device’s internal storage. It’s best to think of any given file as… more of a box of items. When you get a new file, you have to fit the new box of items into your device’s “storage chest”. The storage chest itself may not have enough space to just shove the whole box in there, so your device scatters the box’s contents, putting them in wherever they’ll fit.

You might guess that this slows things down a good bit, when it comes time to use that data. This is why your device defragments itself regularly, especially on modern OSes (unless you’re using a solid-state storage media, but that’s neither here nor there). Older OSes didn’t do anyone that favor, so users had to go digging for the tool:

(It’s quite a lot faster than that, these days, but that graphic is still a really good visualization for what your PC is doing.)

Another of these modes is a little deeper in your device, and it can take a couple of different forms, depending on who made it. Basically, though, as your device is booting up, you can hold down one or more keys on the keyboard and call up a diagnostic mode that allows you to test various parts of your PC.

This is what it looks like on a Dell laptop:

On the left-hand side, you see all the different devices connected to the PC. The diagnostic tests each of them in order, to see if they’re working. If any aren’t, the diagnostic will kick up an error message.

Even if you yourself have never used these modes or tools, you can see why they’re necessary and useful. They allow access to the device on a deeper level than everyday usage, permitting preventative maintenance.

What It Does

Buddhist practices are pretty much the same thing for the human brain and its OS, that we call “consciousness”. In particular, meditation and Buddhist practices do many of the same things as the above tools do for PCs. To wit:

• fMRI scans of meditating monks have indicated that, during meditation, their brains slip into a mode halfway between two modes normally associated with daydreaming and deep sleep. This allows the brain to do the things normally associated with brainstorming and REM sleep, like moving experiences from working memory to long-term storage (i.e. defragmenting your memories).
• The brain’s resilience and plasticity increases, the more the practitioner meditates. The activity in the front part of the brain shifts towards the left side, increasing compassion.
• The connection between the thalamus and the default mode network grows stronger, building attention spans and self-regulation.
• Activity in the front part of the brain ramps up. Meanwhile, parts of the brain concerned with spatial orientation go quiet, but areas involved with brain-body coordination activate, impacting the immune and endocrine systems and other areas connected to physical well-being.
• The total effect of all of this can shave literal years off of the brain’s age. In one case, a monk who had meditated extensively from the age of 9 onward had a brain that was eight years younger than his calendar age.

Now, not everyone has the luxury to devote 60,000 hours to meditation, even over the course of a single lifetime, but the point is that these practices have a real, tangible, demonstrably positive effect.

And, on the subject of this post, all of these things are basic human things that function in much the same way for your body as the defragmentation and diagnostic mode routines of your device does for it.

So, then, why did I seem to be indicating that Buddhism was “wrong” at the end of my previous two posts?

What It Doesn’t Do

I would like to underscore, again, that I have nothing but respect for Buddhist monks and practitioners. I mean no disrespect and I have no intention to insult anyone’s culture or belief system.

However, it seems to me that the… “marketing” or PR for this training in conscious human defragmentation and diagnostic modes is a little off. Because all of this training, while good, can only sort and organize what’s actually there. It can’t actually… fix… anything.

To illustrate this, I’d point to the nearly uncountable number of times I’ve gotten calls from individuals complaining about their devices “running slow”, even though they’ve defragged their hard drives, run system cleanup, and put their PC through the diagnostic mode already. It didn’t help.

The problem was that those methods and tools, while good and necessary in themselves, couldn’t fix what had gone wrong. The problem was they had malware on their machine. They needed antivirus. They needed vulnerabilities patched with system updates.

They needed values from outside the system (A/V definitions, updates) to correct the errors and prevent them from happening again.

This is a problem for Buddhism.

Under Buddhism, there is no Higher Power to reach to, for those “updates”. Zen Buddhism even classifies differentiation between software and malware as a human-invented category (through illustrations like Katsumoto’s search for the perfect cherry blossom, in The Last Samurai).

So, while Buddhist techniques are effective and useful and even good, they don’t do everything that you need, as an individual. They don’t even do everything they claim.

Because… they can’t function as a moral compass (antivirus suite) or convict the conscience to spur personal change (system updates).

These shortcomings don’t mean Buddhism is in error, it just means it’s not complete, in itself. You need something more. This is why Christianity has had a positive impact on Buddhism, spurring it to humanitarian action.

…but we’ll get more into that in another post, in the near future.

‘Til next time.

Q: How does the Buddhist view of Reality lead to blind spots?

A: You’re talking about something I said last time. Here’s the statement in question:

I believe that the Source of all Reality is, ultimately, Personal. I believe that if you don’t hold to that, it leads to fundamental, far-reaching, even crippling blind spots.

I was talking about the fundamental difference in perspectives between Christianity and Buddhism. Ultimately, Christianity believes the Source of all Reality is a Person, whereas Buddhism believes it is not. There’s a lot to unpack, in that difference.

…but before we get started, I want to pause here. While the remainder of this post will be analyzing some essential differences between Christian and Buddhist philosophy, I want to stress two things:

1. Take my observations with a grain of salt. I am not a Buddhist, so my perspective on it is that of an outsider.
2. I bear no animosity towards practicing Buddhists, and my comments should not be misconstrued as such. My aim is simply to highlight the contrast between Christian and Buddhist tenets and traditions, whether those are historical or philosophical.

Let’s begin.

There Is No “I”

The simplest starting point for a Western mind to begin its acquaintance with Buddhism is by comparing Siddhartha Gautama to Martin Luther. In much the same way as Luther dramatically took a stand against the Roman Catholic church in the sixteenth century BCE, upending Christianity in the process, so too did Gautama upend millennia of religious tradition through his formulation of The Middle Way. Buddhism is, thus, “Protestant” Hinduism. It is Hinduism stripped down, freed from its geographical and cultural ties, and made portable.

The thing is that Gautama accomplished this in the strangest of ways, to a Westerner. He didn’t do it by nailing Ninety-Five Objections to current religious practice to a church door.

He did it by denying the idea of individual personhood.

I’m serious.

In Hinduism, individual souls are fragments of the Soul of the Cosmos that must ultimately find their way back to it and be reabsorbed. In Buddhism, individual souls do not, properly speaking, “exist”. Instead, what you think of as your inner person, consciousness, or soul is merely an illusion, created by the overlapping of three aspects of physical existence.

It is the stated goal of Buddhism to disabuse practitioners of this illusion, which it claims is the source of all suffering. Buddhism seeks to accomplish freedom from suffering by eliminating desire, or “cravings“. It’s kind of hard to have cravings if “you” don’t really exist, right?

From this it follows rather naturally that desires are also illusions, and this leads into our first blind spot, which is easier to illustrate than explain.

Cherry Blossoms

In the 2003 movie The Last Samurai, Tom Cruise’s Nathan Algren has a conversation with Ken Watanabe’s Katsumoto:

“The perfect [cherry] blossom is a rare thing,” Katsumoto begins, by way of greeting. “You could spend your life looking for one, and it would not be a wasted life.”

This sets up the frame for a later scene, where Katsumoto lies dying on a battlefield, in Algren’s arms. He catches a glimpse of a cherry blossom tree in bloom:

“Perfect,” he says. “They are all perfect.”

The filmmaker is implying that, as he passes, Katsumoto is having an enlightening experience. He is realizing that his ideas of right and wrong, good and evil, perfect and flawed, are just his own illusions. That nature does not actually make bad things, it just makes things that do not conform to his ideas of what ought to be.

Katsumoto’s desire to find a perfect cherry blossom was thus, an illusion. The perfection he was seeking was actually a mere rarity, and natural perfection was around him the entire time.

This is the point that Edward Zwick, the filmmaker, was driving home.

I do not agree with this. I believe this is a grave error, for the simple reason that it makes a mockery of human justice.

For, if all human categories and desires are merely illusion, up to and including right and wrong, then justice becomes impossible. (This is actually the point of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, which Edward Zwick remade as Courage Under Fire.) Without justice, society becomes impossible.

This is a terrible blind spot to introduce into a culture. But it leads directly to a second, intimately-related blind spot, which is, once again, easier to illustrate than explain:

Love, or Enlightenment?

In Ang Lee’s 2000 film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the main character Li Mu Bai is poisoned late in the third act. As he succumbs to the toxin, the following scene transpires between himself and the widowed wife of his best friend:

“I’ll drift next to you every day as a ghost,” Li Mu Bai says, “just to be with you. Even if I was banished to the darkest place, my love will keep me from being a lonely spirit.”

In doing this, he rejects the enlightenment Katsumoto attained, because Li Mu Bai considers the connection to Shu Lien more important.

This is an important choice to highlight. You cannot have it both ways. If the personhood of human beings is truly an illusion, then so too are the relationships we create. Not only Justice, but also Love both become illusory human inventions to transcend and discard.

Again, and with the utmost respect to those who have spent millennia rigorously plumbing the depths of the human mind, I do not believe or hold to this. I believe it is a dangerous, rogue element to go about introducing into human society.

For if our relationships and even our persons are simply illusions or cravings, what then is the point of existence?

The Buddhist answer is that we are simply to consciously extinguish appetites and cravings, one after another, gaining ever more conscious control over ourselves, until at last we can calmly, gently extinguish our own mortal flame, of our own choice.

I find this a hollow answer, for two reasons.

One, just because you couch your defiance of the universe in the most controlled and politest of ways does not make it any less of a defiance.

Two, if the whole point of Buddhism is to eliminate suffering, merely eliminating (the desires of) those who thirst for Justice and Love will not actually fill the void that causes that thirst. It simply eliminates demand for that nutrient. They are not the same thing.

Or, as C.S. Lewis once said,

If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.

It is my sincerest conviction that this is the case, and that the human desire and quest for Justice and Love (among other things) is rooted in our desire and thirst for Eternity, which cannot ever be fully satisfied in This Life. Denying and destroying this thirst not only blinds us but robs us of our drive to grow, connect, and thrive in healthy, mutually-beneficial ways.

The trick, ultimately, is not to eliminate that thirst, but to make sure it is focused on the right goal. But this is only possible if there is a “right goal” to aim towards, in the first place.

Wrapping Up

All of the above being said, these two points of difference should not be construed as cause for quarreling between Buddhists and Christians. To counter the above, Buddhists could also list a plethora of blind spots caused by Institutional Christianity, and they would be on-target with ninety-nine percent of them.

Furthermore, as indicated at the close of the last post, Buddhist adherents have done a stellar job of awakening others to their own spiritual needs. The volume of experience, mentorship, documentation, and training they have provided, especially in recent years since the COVID-19 quarantine, cannot be overestimated. Whatever other points of difference there are between Christianity and Buddhism are minor, in comparison with that.

I have said before and still maintain that it is better to be spiritually (psychologically, religiously) awake and aware of your own needs, than it is to be blinded to that. I still hold to that. Whatever it takes to wake you up, it is ultimately a good thing, because it means you are on a journey of self-discovery.

For, as the sages once said,

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

‘Til next time.

Q: Why defend Christianity? What about Buddhism?

A: These questions highlight a serious oversight on my part. I’ll address them in order.

Let’s dig deeper.

“Big Faith”

Last week, I made the connection between Evangelicalism and Big Pharma. This was not merely an aside. I deeply believe that Institutional Religion of any kind is the equivalent of Big Pharma: a necessary and worthwhile endeavor that has rotted at the root by wilfully poisoning its principles.

One might even call this phenomenon “Big Faith”.

Any faith can go bad. Even unbelief and skepticism can go bad. (Try arguing that Gordon Gekko believed in anything, for example.)

…but, there’s a moment in the BBC’s re-imagining of Alexander Dumas’ The Three Musketeers that is both germane and illustrative of individual faith’s primary value.

Aramis, the most religious character, is captured. His captor discovers his Bible and taunts him with it, saying something like, “Where is your God’s protection now?”

Aramis looks at him evenly. “That cannot protect you from others. Only from yourself.”

That is the point of real faith, grounded and rooted in individual convictions and beliefs. It provides a routine that turns the mind’s eye inward and makes it aware of its own hubris, struggles, and addictions, while also then turning it outward to embrace and assist others in their plight.

This is something that Positive Psychologists (not to be confused with Norman Vincent Peale‘s vapid philosophy) are learning and experimentally verifying:

In the above video (which I highly recommend watching in its entirety; it’s informative and hilarious), Shawn Achor lists five things that change your brain and push it away from toxic, self-destructive behaviors:

1. Find 3 things each day to be grateful for.
2. Write them down.
3. Exercise, so your brain knows your body matters.
4. Meditate for calming, focus, attentiveness, and re-centering.
5. Perpetrate random acts of kindness.

This is literally the personal devotional method I was taught, growing up in a Christian church. I was taught to follow a daily method, using the acronym ACTS:

A – Adoration, praising God for the blessings you’ve received. (Achor’s #1.)
C – Confession, owning your mistakes and where you’ve hurt others. (Achor’s #4.)
T – Thanksgiving, acknowledging that you are forgiven before God (also Achor’s #4), so that…
S – Supplication, you can make requests for others and yourself. (Achor’s #5, because you are turning your attention to others so that you can perform random acts of kindness.)

We were taught to put all of these things into a Prayer Journal (Achor’s #2), so we could track how God had answered our prayers. So the only part of Achor’s method that wasn’t built into my upbringing was the third item on Achor’s list, Exercise.

You don’t have to believe that God Himself answered my prayers. I just want to highlight how Achor has scientifically and experimentally verified the religious practices of my upbringing. The fact that I’ve found it to work in my own life is why I defend “Christianity”. Or, more specifically, Biblically-grounded personal faith.

My own personal faith is a lot closer to Jesuism (not to be confused either with Jesuits or the teachings of The Family) than Christianity, though. By and large, I consider “Christianity” to be the Big Faith variant of a more elemental personal faith. “Christianity” is Institutional Religion, and its perspective is… not always the Bible’s. Evangelicalism is an offshoot of that, and leans even more into toxic social trends and culture. All of which are things I’ve indicated before, on this blog.

All the above being said, let’s move on.

Before we tackle the second question, though, something needs saying, for emphasis.

Good Without God

You might have noticed that Shawn Achor didn’t say anything about Christianity. That’s because his method doesn’t require a religious underpinning. However, that method itself is prevalent in multiple religions.

The religion is not the point, though. The point is the development of personal values, accountability, and compassion. Training the mind to create a filter that scans for positive things and also opportunities to create positive spaces and heal negative, destructive ones.

Now for the the second question. What about Buddhism, indeed.

Let’s (Not) Get Personal?

Of the five major religions (Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism), only the latter two have transcended their local cultural and geographical origins to become fully portable belief systems, practicable from anywhere, with a truly global appeal.

There’s a reason for this, but it’s beyond the scope of this post. For this topic, it’s worth noting that Buddhism and Christianity are in alignment on quite a lot, but fundamentally they differ only on one specific topic.

Science maintains that Ultimate Reality is physical and also capable of being known by and through human perspectives, senses, and reason. Buddhism and Christianity both disagree with this. To both Buddhists and Christians, Ultimate Reality transcends the human point of view and capacity to understand. No matter how deeply a human digs or how precisely they describe their experience, Reality will be at least one level beyond that.

And, for both Buddhists and Christians, only a personal experience with that Reality will prove illuminating. When the experience happens, it defies all categories, logic, and language to describe. Because Reality is bigger than humanity.

The difference between Buddhist and Christian perspectives is simply this: Buddhists believe that Reality is nonpersonal, while Christians believe it is personal. Christians believe that the ultimate Source of Reality has Its own will, Its own likes and dislikes, and can communicate, so that It can speak for itself and is both capable of having a relationship and being rationally known.

Buddhists do not believe this. In fact, they believe pursuing these kinds of questions is a distraction.

If this all seems a little abstract to you, think back to the Star Wars prequels. Obi-Wan’s master, Qui-Gon Jinn, wielded a green lightsaber, while most of the others used blue ones. This is because Jinn believed in the “Living Force“, while most of the rest of the Jedi believed in the “Cosmic Force“. Jinn believed the Force had a will; the other, blue-lightsaber-wielding Jedi believed it was an impersonal feature of the universe, like gravity or electricity.

Jinn had a Western, Christian view of the Force; the other Jedi were Buddhist in outlook.

So, with regard to the question of why I support Christianity over Buddhism, it comes down to that single differing perspective. I believe that the Source of all Reality is, ultimately, Personal. I believe that if you don’t hold to that, it leads to fundamental, far-reaching, even crippling blind spots.

…but I also hasten to add that it is also my belief that it is better to be a Buddhist with a personal spiritual practice than it is to be a nonbelieving, self-indulging Gordon Gekko-type parasite. It is easy to demonstrate the benefits and quality-of-life improvements that Buddhism confers on its practitioners, especially in recent years.

Now for a question for you: if you are an nonbeliever, do you have a part of your daily routine that trains your mind to form the habits Shawn Achor advised, in his TEDx talk? If not, do you feel like that’s a worthwhile pursuit?

It’s possible for you to be good without God. But it can’t just be a theoretical possibility. You have to take the time to practice it.

…and much like your health becomes entirely your responsibility once you reject Big Pharma, your spiritual (psychological, mental, etc.) health becomes entirely your responsibility once you reject Big Faith.

So how are you taking charge of that and developing yourself into a better person than you were yesterday?

Think about it.

‘Til next time.