IN THE PAST I've said here that an argument I got into with some American Buddhists was a decisive event in my adult conversion to Christianity. I had been a somewhat serious student of Buddhism, Theravada Buddhism, having read a large number of its enormous number of scriptures and not a little of the even vaster commentary on them. I was and still am impressed with the quite modern phenomenon of engaged Buddhism, Buddhism of social engagement and good works and with the criticism of that by more orthodox Buddhists of a number of sects as introducing foreign concepts not part of the original scriptures, though those in engaged Buddhism have found some support in stories such as the Buddha's reaction to his followers neglecting a monk who was suffering from what is generally interpreted as dysentery.
In the argument I noted that Buddhism was largely lacking in that it didn't seem to engage in the Jewish conception of justice much, something I've come to see as a fatal flaw in any religion or philosophy or ideology. The Buddhists I argued with told me that justice was a worldly delusion, making a number of arguments dismissing the concept. I suspect that all of those I was arguing with were affluent, college-credentialed, white people, some men though I know there were women involved in the online-argument. I wondered how much of injustice they'd experienced on their way to enlightenment and told them that if they were deprived of justice they would very much note its absence from their lives. If they were unimpressed by that I guess it makes my point.
That argument forced me to go farther than I'd expected I was going at the time because it was the beginning of a number of things, including the thinking that led me to realize the role that human choice had in both what we choose to believe and what we choose to believe we know and that belief and knowledge aren't two separate realms of thought separated by a hard barrier but are intimately intertwined. If there is something that may well be a delusion it's the idea that there is knowledge that is not dependent on beliefs chosen. I have noted how Bertrand Russell experienced that when his older brother broke the terrible news to him that Euclidean geometry required the acceptance of axioms that could not be proved or else they couldn't go on, Russell noted that he made the choice to believe them so they could go on, he said even before then his attraction to geometry was that it was a means of proving things and he wanted to prove them. I don't think that's a situation that has changed in the subsequent 138 or so years since that happened, nor in the period since the Elements of Geometry were first published. I doubt there ever will be a proof of what you need to believe in order to go on. If that's true for the imaginary figures of geometry, it's even more true for the more complex issues of human experience.
In noting that all humanly invented ideologies, etc. were imperfect, would be found wanting and would be left behind in history and culture, I would have left out the struggle for justice as elucidated in the Jewish tradition and the further development of that in the Christian conception of love. Those have proven to be an enduring feature of society and if not in society then in the lives of individual people. There is never and has never been anything old about the resistance to injustice, there has never been anything that spoils in unselfish love. Where those two things have been removed from the realm of what is considered, whether for mere expediency and efficiency as in the sciences and modern academic culture, or through a desire to be relieved of having to sacrifice from them - AND THERE IS NO GETTING PAST THE FACT THAT TO DO THOSE COSTS YOU SOMETHING - such as has been true of virtually every if not every modern ideology that got traction and won a wide following, often with the support of academics who became habituated to ignoring such considerations through their professional activities and social milieu or through those who sought power and plunder in the more gangster attractive fields of politics and, with supreme irony, the civil law.
The extent to which Christian, Jewish, Islamic sects and denominations and cults lay aside the imperative for Justice and Love, the equality that those demand, the democracy that results from their actual practice is the extent to which no matter how orthodox or established or respectable they are, they are hypocrites and corrupt vessels of something that merely goes by the name. The entire Trump "evangelicals" phenomenon, the Orthodox Jewish support for Trump, the Catholic Trump supporters are an extreme case of such people who, no matter how embedded they are in the official churches they belong to are apostates from the Jewish and Christian faiths, the only things that are sound and good in those so-called religions, the thing that Jesus said was eternal in The Law and in prophesy.
The entire story of salvation which will be recited at the Easter Vigil Mass a week from last night is all about that, though dealing with aspects of life in all their complications, the presence of those issues isn't always apparent at first. But it is there just as Exodus and the cry of the slaves under attack from Pharaoh and the response to that is behind the entire monotheistic tradition, no matter how much even the so-deemed pious and faithful so often want to bury that.
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