IF MY MEMORY IS CORRECT when I heard an interview with the biologist Rupert Sheldrake a few years back, I transcribed this passage from it because it struck me as so relevant to my experience of conversion to the Hebrew based monotheistic tradition.
I then took a job in India,. In 1974 I became the principal plant physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute in Hyderabad in India.
So, I lived in India for about seven years, partly because I was so intrigued by oriental philosophy, and the last thing I expected was being drawn back towards a Christian path, I thought I’d left that far behind me. But the longer I was in India, the more I realized that a great deal about my own nature and being was shaped by my Christian background.
For example, I had a conversation with one of my Hindu colleagues, this was in the evening after work and he said, “Why do you do what you do?” and I said, “Well, I want to help poor farmers and I want to help poor people lead a better life by improving cropping systems and breeding better crops,” and I said, “What about you?” He said, “For me it’s a job, it’s a good job.” I said, “But what about helping people?” He said, “If people are poor, that is their problem, it is their karma, that is from their previous life. That is not your problem. Your problem is to look after your own spiritual development,” he said.
Then, I realized so much of Southern Buddhism, Theravada Buddhism and Hinduism is about following your spiritual path that basically leads to vertical takeoff for those who follow it. The rest of the world is a hopeless place with waves of reincarnation and samsara and karmic bondage, things are basically getting worse, according to their world view and will continue to do so, and the only thing an individual can do is get off.
Then, I realized that in the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions, there’s a very different dimension, it’s much more about community, about, we’re in this together, and this very strong sense of interlinking with a community, rather than just an individual quest. It made me realize I was much deeper in the Christian tradition than I’d thought.
For me it was arguing for the reality of justice with some online Buddhists early in my online life. I said justice was not only real it was one of the most central moral realities with the most obviously real consequences which real People experience and can understand in real life. They said it was a mere illusion to be left behind on their quest for personal enlightenment. I bet them that if they were victims of serious injustice in their lives, instead of being affluent and comfortable, they would have no problem understanding injustice made very real in their own, personal experience instead of impersonal theory.
While there is much in Buddhism I respect, various moral positions, non-harming, telling the truth, etc. their very useful and impressive study of meditation,* that lack of a teaching of the consequential moral commandment to do justice and its extension into universal love which is active and not passive, not theoretical but actively required within the teachings of the Buddha seems to me to be a seriously fatal defect. There are Buddhists who do those things but the extent to which they have to leave the body of the doctrines of Buddhism to do it would be interesting to hear from them.
Buddhism American Style, the kind that can contain the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Sheryl Sandberg, myriads of TV hucksters and online gurus, the kind that can contain the pedophile Alan Ginsberg and the scads of degenerate cult leaders in this or that North American Buddhist money making racket is as much of a scandal as the allegedly Christian, Jewish and Islamic criminal cults and gangster operations that the rest of it gets tarred with. What you bring up.
That's, to a large extent, just another of the manifestations of the grotesquely stupid way that the slave-owner - financiers who wrote the Constitution saddled us with things like the enforced stupidity of judges and "justices" and prosecutors pretending that they couldn't tell the difference between someone trying to practice the charity to the poorest among us morally required by The Law, The Prophets, The Gospels and Epistles and, I understand, The Qu'ran and a bunch of obvious hucksters on the make. No doubt our experience of life under the Constitution without that absurd requirement to pretend to not be able to see the difference between what saints do and what con-men and gangsters do in the name of religion would be far different than what we've got with it but I can't help but thinking it would be worth seeing what kind of injustices not playing pretend that way produces instead of the clear injustices that playing pretend like the judges and "justices" do produces.
The Gospel of Jesus, the Epistles of Paul, James, etc. are always there with the warning of what happens if you don't feed the hungry, clothe the naked, treat the sick, treat the prisoner with loving regard instead of brutal indifference and violence, hoarding money while a poor person dies of poverty right in front of you, etc.
Joe Manchin, if he really wants to be a Christian instead of merely professing to be one would not be able to have said the things about the poor people of his state that he did, though that kind of thing is so endemic to Christianity, especially in the most conservative regions of the United States, that it is explainable how it has gotten such a bad reputation. Though if he is not just lying about being a Catholic, being a Christian, he has certainly heard all of that when the Gospel is read during mass. You could say exactly the same thing about every, single member of the Republican Party who profess Christianity and, The Law containing the same teachings, those who profess Judaism.
Krysten Sinema, as an atheist, her hypocrisy and duplicity, her grifting as she tells the poor of her state and the nation to fuck off, that's not inconsistent with atheism which rejects any metaphysical basis of morality.
There are members of the Democratic Caucus in the Congress, House and Senate, who either profess Buddhism or who do not specify any religious belief who are better at following the Gospel of Jesus in their political careers and, I would bet, personal lives than the large majority of those who profess Christianity. Where they get it from, I don't know but I see the presence of it in how they vote, what they do, what they say, the passion with which some of them say it and I have no doubt that they deserve to have whatever their ideological basis for it respected.
* I have found combining some of the Buddhist method with the substance of the monotheistic tradition was better than the typically presented practice of concentrating on some banal physical experience. I found that as futile as merely reciting the rosary without any real thought, something I figured out when nasty old Jansenist Fr. D gave me some enormous penance for the kind of naughtiness I got up to as a young kid.
I never say the rosary, the command to say it given by alleged Marian apparitions is one of the things that makes my sense of a fake go up. That and her obsession with things like the lengths of girl's skirts instead of feeding the starving and clothing and housing those without those things, the kinds of things that she sang in the Magnificat.
