SOMEWHERE IN WHAT HE SAID about the Global Ethic effort that the late and beloved Hans Kung was engaged in, in the promotion of "The Golden Rule" he said that there had been a natural desire to include a mention of God as the source of that universal rule for human conduct but that if they did that they would be excluding the Buddhists. In my years of perhaps too informal study of Buddhism, I had noticed that though the claim of Theravada Buddhists* was that they didn't deal with the concept of a Creator God, for everything they said about The Dharma, it certainly looked like they did rather consistently have a Creator God, either in The Dharma or whatever it was that they thought made The Dharma real or function with something like what materialist physics likes to posit as a law of everything (not that they're close to having one of those articulated nor that there is any reasonable reason to believe they ever will have one of those). I think that Buddhism really does have a Creator God, a belief in a self, a belief in an enduring soul and the imposition of consequences for behavior (karma), they just don't like to talk about them in the same terms that most other people do.
If they are right not to as opposed to those of us, the majority of humanity who do talk about them in terms of a humanly comprehensible Person, I don't think there is any strong evidence. I do know that there are consequences in terms of their own thinking and belief. For me, as I've mentioned, the breaking point came over the Jewish conception of justice, which I regretted seemed to be missing from just about all of Buddhist thinking (though I wouldn't think as much action) and that that was a serious problem for it as an adequate system. The Buddhists I discussed that with tried to assure me that justice was merely an illusion, they didn't succeed in that. I assured them that if they were the victims of injustice they would certainly notice the absence of justice no matter how much their faith maintained it was a mere illusion.
The desire of Hans Kung and his colleagues to want to be inclusive of such a large number of people and an old, venerable and far from invaluable religious tradition seems honorable but I don't agree with them on that if their goals were to change human behavior to save ourselves and our biosphere for ourselves and the posterity of life on Earth.
I value being all inclusive of those who feel and believe other than I do but not enough to pretend that there won't be serious consequences for not pointing that out. If Buddhists are offended, well, no one seems to seriously mind it when serious Christians are so offended, or Jews. But I won't get back into what the late Bishop John Shelby Spong did in that regard just now.
I look on it from that and see no reason to believe that absent a widespread belief in consequences for not, in our behavior, following The Golden Rule and other hardly novel articulations of moral law, as opposed to the mere profession of an abstract belief in them, we may as well not bother trying to save ourselves.
I see nothing in human history or behavior to think that without a belief that God, beyond any human self-deceptive finagling, making those moral laws real in our lives and that there are real and guaranteed, immediate or eventual consequences for violating them, that asserting those morals or, if you will, "ethics" will make the slightest difference in real life.
It is hard enough to get people who claim to believe not only in the Jewish principle of justice but also in its extension in Christianity to universal love to even start to act like they didn't believe in their opposites - the history of Christianity is as much a sorry documentation of our falling short of that as the kings of Israel and Judah and The People falling short of the Mosaic Law/ If anything there is every reason to hope for a far stronger belief that The Golden Rule, the warning of the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, the commandment to love not only our neighbor but also our enemies and those who persecute us, etc. and the guarantee of consequences if we don't follow those than to water them down to doing that only if we feel like it. If there is anything obvious in the conduct of human life is that very, very few of us will "feel like it" and even some of those not enough to do it consistently and universally. Some of those who could be most charming and even hospitable to a select few have no problem being cruel, merciless and murderous to other people at the very same time. The gentility of the gentry was a point of pride with them, "Southern hospitality," the courtesy of the affluent to people of their own class even as they meted out the most evil of exploitative violence on many others. The reported strong friendship between Ruth Bader Ginsburg with one of her cruelest colleagues, Antonin Scalia, the reverence shown for the Supreme Court as it does some of the most evil things in American government, all of those are fuel for my skepticism that anything except a real and effective belief that those anti-Darwinian laws of morality are real because God makes them real and consequential will make them a reality in human conduct and action.
Anyone who believes any secular system can do that believes on the basis of having no evidence that that has ever or will ever get it done. It's hard enough to believe in that possibility when you do believe that God makes them real, without that, anyone who believes materialist-atheist-scientistic-secularism can could believe anything.
The biggest problem with Christians is that they don't act out what they claim to believe nearly often enough. Their belief in what they profess and its consequences is not strong enough to overcome their natural selfishness and greed. If there is something that nature gives us, it is the very thing that is leading us to perdition.
If they did act out of The Golden Rule, the other Commandments set out by Jesus, theirs would be the most well thought of thing, religion, ideology, in human life. That it is not so considered is one of those durable and guaranteed consequences of not doing what they preach. There are a few Christians who did better at that, when they are known for that, they are well thought of. Though most would rather accumulate junk and money and power just like everyone else.
* I think the gods of Mahayana Buddhism are mis-called, being more like lesser supernatural creatures in other mythologies, personifications of human traits and things observed. Which is one way to think of them.
I would like to go into how none of us can possibly have anything like a full conception of God and even an imaginary collective conception of all of human beings together (which is merely imaginary) couldn't come up with one.
The atheists in the audience shouldn't feel smug about that, current science, physics, cosmology is full to the top of such things, mathematics is constructed of such stuff. There is not a single mathematical object which is fully known in full, not even the number 1, not to mention 2.
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