Killing the Buddha

Howard of W. Bloomfield, MI, writes, with regard to Mary Valle’s “The Cock Crows“:

Mary dismisses Rice saying: “she’s out of Catholicism and I’m in and out every day. And aren’t all Catholics in and out?”

No. Some of us got out and stayed out. I was a Catholic until I decided I didn’t think Jesus could be born of a virgin, die and rise again, as part of a suicide mission, as a scapegoat, to have my sins forgiven. Then there’s the Transubstantiation. It’s all a Mystery. The greater mystery to me is why any Catholic “stays in.” Maybe the reason is, as Mill suggested: “not because they think it’s true but because they wouldn’t know what to do without it.”

In regard to Mary Valle’s essay “The Cock Crows,” Darrell from California writes:

I am not Catholic and I am a Jew who has been in and now out of organized religion. Organized religion with its financial needs for buildings and paid professionals, its rationalizations for history and present conduct, and the people in it choosing in very degrees to numb themselves to these realities, is for many of us a difficult to impossible place to take the God/spiritual aspect seriously and enjoyably. I think Ann Rice left the organized religion aspects of Christianity so that unencumbered and unfettered, she could embrace the God/spiritual aspects of her religion. This is my case. And projection or not, I think it is the case of many people. I understand the line is thin. There are many people on the other side who have the same frustration and angst. I think they tend to be more community/group oriented people who get more out of the social interaction and social structure that any church, synagogue, or other provides. And that is enough to keep them in. For myself! anyway, as a loner generally, the social structure of religion neither defuses nor negates the alienating power of the religious structures doings. It in fact, makes me feel more different and left out.

To which Mary Valle responds thusly:

1. ”Darrell, I feel ya?”
2. “Darrell, I, too, feel the chafe of institutions. But sometimes it’s nice to participate in arcane rituals with other people.”

This enchanting letter comes from Graham Jones in the UK (or the moon), just in time to help spread the word about Friday’s death event at New York’s Rubin Museum:

Looking back from the moon, it’s easy to see the little humans always getting stuck.
I was a human once but I seem to have grown out of it, I’ve become something else since I’ve been on the moon. It’s damn tough here but things I don’t care about any more are religion, politics or any kind of arguing or squabbling. We all have the food and warmth we need so I suppose we don’t have to fight over things but all that thinking and wondering has kind of gone altogether.
I’m not worried about death either, that’s all gone as well. I don’t believe in death anymore. I don’t think I ever did but because humans go on about it so much I got indoctrinated. I know bodies die or change and move on to different forms but I don’t see why that should be the end. When you live here you can’t imagine things ending forever, it’s an indulgent sort of thinking. This is the thing that humans have got wrong, they become self indulgent and obsessed with themselves. You can’t here, you see from Gods eye but there is no God, there’s just this. You realise that this thing that humans think is God is just this. We have it here all the time. It’s no big deal.
The problem with the human view is that because they are so obsessed with themselves they worry all the time about death which isn’t even real. If they could just relax they’d realise that their worry about death makes them worry about life.
Also they don’t realise that their body is not really them. Their bodies pull them down and make them think that when it dies they die. Up here we can see that this is nonsense, it doesn’t make sense. Also now, I don’t have to get dragged into all this or any particular way of thinking. I seem to be free of it all, great!
Sometimes on earth humans go up mountains and get to see some of this but mostly because they’re surrounded by each other all the time they can’t get free of themselves and their ideas. Even if someone does get a bit free they get thought of as mad and then ignored or made fun of or killed.
This is why from up here we feel sadness for them. I’m glad I came here because being able to see what’s true is such a relief.

Vladimir Lipovetsky M.D. from Los Angeles writes in about Robert Jensen’s “The Struggle for the (Possible) Soul of David Eagleman“:

The trouble with many articles that explore applications and limitations of neuroscience through the prism of the neuroscientist is that they come up against the same limitations over and over again for dozens of years. Neuroscientists by virtue of their focus overlook minute details that the flow of internal experience is actually composed of. In a sense they are building the pier on the beach and can’t even see the ocean. The very impressive sophistication of imaging the brain, knowing various circuits, and consequences of their failures, belies a simple fact that they have no way of even hypothesizing why I am writing this or how the writer of the piece came up with it, or what is meaning, and what is imagination. The field cannot study the phenomena that would begin to answer the question of what may or may not be mind, or soul, or consciousness, or personhood. And yet, the public is endlessly fascinated by the opinions of neuroscientists on these matters with the naivete that is similar to that of a talib inquiring about the will of God from a mullah. I am writing this not as an opponent of neuroscience, but rather as a physician and a student of it, who recognizes the enormous value of this undertaking and its inordinate present day shortsightedness.

Jenean McBrearty offers a response to JoAnn Wypijewski’s “Outside a Tea Party“:

While in graduate school in the 1980s, I was often alone in empty halls after undergrads had left. One day I saw suited young black men along a stairwell, and heard doings upstairs. It was a meeting of The Nation of Islam. Being a sociology major, I was intrigued.

Outside the lecture hall was a table attended by white tuniced and scarved young women serving slices of what looked like gingerbread, guarded by more tie & coated men.

Though I was white, I was allowed into the hall and heard a representative of Elijah Mohammed deliver a speech against white devils, and the need for black people to separate themselves from them and the jews who, I was informed, were responsible for every ill on earth. (They did not have George Bush to blame for everything at the time.)

Unike New Black Panthers, these black folks did not bar my path holding weapons, or try to  intimidate me. They gave me a copy of their newspaper and were very polite. But not friendly, of course.

I had never thought of myself as a white devil. And I was familiar with the Nation of Islam because my duaghters Godparents are black and I lived in a black neighborhood when she was born. Like Jehovah’s Witnesses, Islamic prosletyzers regularly made the rounds there. these folks didn’t know that, however, and seemed scared to make their racism evident when they came face to face with a white devil.

It seems the Tea Party folks are as equally well behaved which speaks well of their upbringing even if one does not agree with their politics. To my knowledge, no one has ever been harmed by these people—but then, one would imagine people who have tea in their monicker rather than panthers or nation are probably not violent even if they espouse racial purity.

I’ve never understood just why one has to show ones brotherhood by bearing children with others of another race, but I guess, sex being as important to folks, having sex with people of another race does display a certain dedication to one’s belief system. I understand why people want their children and grandchildren to look and act just like themselves. It is some physical evidence of immortality not provided by invisible deity belief systems.

I also understand why groups who do look and act like each other (the Amish, for example) and keep themselves separate from other groups claim our interest and fuel our admiration whether we admit it or not.

Which is why, I guess, Obama has meetings with Farahkan.

Um, well, that explains it. (The Obama/Farrakhan meetings are apparently a “long-debunked canard,” according even to LGF.)

It also should probably be pointed out that nobody is proposing that people be required to mate with people of other ostensible “races”—we hope. What the opponents of white supremacy long for is simply a world in which people are not stigmatized and hated for doing so.

Your turn: Tea Party vs. Nation of Islam. Go!

Deborah Lipp from New York writes in about Eric Scott’s recent essay,
“Lughnasadh“:

I can’t thank you enough for this. As one of those Pagan parents who dragged The Kid to rituals and Pagan festivals, I am moved to near tears by how our children grow.

Today my son is a young man who has begun teaching at festivals. Today we continue to raise children in our ways, and at a festival last week, one of our adults was pregnant, two more arrived with their toddler twins. We hand them little wooden athames and little toddler-sized robes and we wonder about the future.

I have done some informal surveys of the children of Pagan parents; children like Eric who were raised in a Pagan manner. My very unscientific results suggest about 50% of such children become Pagan; the rest appear to be agnostic or atheist. I haven’t personally met any Christians or Jews who were raised Pagans, but I’m sure they must be out there.

I think 50% is a very satisfying number, especially when young people like Eric are among them.

What do you think? What does it take to pass on an uncommon faith?

Paul R. Mazur, MD, MPH, from Northport, Maine, writes in with a letter about Mary Valle’s weekend essay about cancer-ward poetry, “Doggerel Fails Me“:

Courageous bit of writing by Mary Valle. Cancers, and a good many other chronic diseases, of necessity bring one up against awesome realities. I admire those who give access to the full range of understanding and all their feelings when confronting the possibilities of death and the hard work of dying. Saccharine poetry is one of the masks of denial—a negation of our common humanity. Thanks for telling it like it is!

In another letter about the same essay, Sara adds:

Reading that poem reminds me of my manic depression. It sucks everything out of you. There are so many people who don’t get it. It has this stigma of “just get over it… pray more… get out more… find something you love and do it and you’ll feel better.” You do lose vigor and friends and jobs and everything you love and it all comes back to “it must be me.”

I know people who’ve gone through cancer treatment and they try to keep their spirits up and they try (key word: try) so hard to stay cheerful and happy and up and hopeful around people because they want to give that word of “It’s gone and the doctors have no idea what happened!” to everyone. Otherwise, why were THEY praying? What good did it do? Wasn’t that the point? To avoid dying? To get cured?

People try to find things to say to get morale back up. But sometimes just saying, “Man, you must feel terrible. This really sucks. Let me help you.” Or “I have no idea what to say,” and keeping your mouth silent is the best thing in the world. We don’t mind at all. Just being present is fantastic.

We too have no idea what to say. Do you?

Garrett Baer’s interview with Stephen Prothero, “Vive la Différence,” was featured today on Andrew Sullivan’s wildly popular blog at The Atlantic, The Daily Dish. Sullivan’s advertisement of “a quieter atheism” brought a handful of letter-writers our way. Michael Salem of the well-named Media, Pennsylvania, came with compliments:

Thank you for your interview with Stephen Prothero, I linked to it from Andrew Sullivan’s blog and enjoyed the perspective immensely.  It could not have been more timely as well – having been a non-practicing Orthodox Christian these past few years and watching Bill Maher’s Religulous last night, the interview with Mr. Prothero complimented it perfectly.

Thank you again, you just earned another reader of your blog.  Continue exploring.

Louis Mahern in Indianapolis was a bit less welcoming of Prothero’s remarks, and adds a nice bit of natural theology to boot:

I don’t believe in God or an afterlife.  However, I do not call myself an “atheist”  Atheist says what I don’t believe in.  In this trope I am also an “Afairyist” or an “Agoblinist.” I suppose the better term would be “Rationalist.” I am not militant in my beliefs. I could care less what others believe.  It does offer me some private amusement thought when I heard them thank Jesus for saving them from the tornado for which he would be personally responsible.

We’ll be sure to ask KtB associate editor Quince Mountain about that; in the middle of a horse-and-buggy trip through South Dakota, he ran into a tornado with a gaggle of fundamentalist, Quiverfull teenage girls. “I cannot believe how completely chill and competent they were,” he wrote.

Before the Sullivan mention, Jon Johanning in Philly had this to say:

As an atheist, I appreciate Prof. Prothero’s concern about the mistakes atheists are making, but I consider religious people who give us all this kind advice as basically concern trolls. They don’t take the advice we give them, so it’s no surprise we pay little attention to theirs.

As for trying to separate the religion-atheism controversy from politics, religions (at least those stemming from the ancient Middle East) have always been intensely political. The Israelites’ religion was to a large extent about conquering Canaan, Christianity was about taking over the Roman Empire, and the case of Islam is equally obvious.

So, then, does that mean atheism is out to conquer something?

In a letter responding to Alexander Zaitchik’s “Brother Beck Presents,” Jenean McBrearty offers a defense of Glenn Beck’s tear dots:

While some, mostly elites, frown on public displays of emotion except in the service of “social justice” and charity—how many tears did we see displayed by those seeking money for Katrina, Haiti, Mid-east civilians killed in the war, etc.? —others do not.

There is nothing inherently wrong with patriotism, religious faith, repentance, redemption, and the physical evidence of deep emotional trauma. Indeed, without tears we, as biological, entitles would hard pressed to carry around grief, shame and empathy. Unrelieved stress is the “stuff” of heart disease, stroke, and high blood pressure. People need to “let off steam,” “let it all hang out” (just ask an aging hippie!) and “let go and let God” or we’d explode.

I suspect that what KtBlog is actually angry, sad, afraid of in Glenn Beck is the political spectrum he represents, not the theatrics of which he is rightfully accused. After all, people listen to Beck, and he is not “ignorant.” His programs are conducted more like college lectures, and a good college lecturer knows the value of reaching students via emotions as well as intellect. That’s where people “live” and where real education begins. Hence the term “hearts and minds” of a successful military campaign.

We did, after all, recently publish another piece on tears, that time in a positive light. So it appears we’re not against tears per se. Perhaps something else is afoot. Perhaps, in fact, the article was taking issue with Beck for something that goes a bit deeper.

Anyway, after a few stray remarks about “global socialism,” Jenean continues:

But then, I’m old enough to remember Jimmy Swaggart’s teary apology for his indiscretions with a prostitute—he set the bar for politicians, athletes, serial killers, and film stars everywhere. Only the most crass offenders (like Clinton and Blumenthal) refuse to give remorse its due. Publicized misdeeds or tragedy demand evidence of internal states of regret or sadness—or awe. Sociology 101.

Yes, Glenn Beck and Jimmy Swaggart… it actually seems like a pretty good comparison in a number of ways.

And if Glenn Beck is Jenean’s image of a “college lecturer,” we shudder at what she was learning in “Sociology 101.”

Yesterday arrived this somewhat inexplicable letter of loose threads, which somehow, in its entirety, seems like the best tribute to Dennis Hopper, who died last week, that we could offer.

From: Nancy Langenwalter
Location: Location of what? Wichita Kansas
Subject: About “Hallejuha ”

This has been an interesting morning for me after hopping on the computer early. Well,for starters, checked out my messages, went through the whole set of Beer Posters, leaving quips as I went carefully through each set. Read some messages, checked to see if the Poem I posted was still alive and well…it was….for Memorial Day.
Having done those activities,I decided to do some reading of the Huffington Post. Though I had heard about Dennis Hopper’s death last night, I hadn’t read much about him, nor did I remember the many marvelous things he did in his lifetime. Had a grand time reading all the information available . What a brilliant mind and colorful, to say the least, man we had in our horizon for a long time. those who would dishonor this man can not possibly understand the mind of this brilliant star, that did not last as long as I wish it had. But far be it from me to question, or fight about it. He lived his life as best he could. And we can only approve.

A wonderful note came in from Kansas City yesterday:

The story “Hrafspa” by Eric Scott moved me to tears.  Master Mikal was friend for many, many years.  This is the kind of memorial of which he would he approve.  The fact that Aldhiem found himself questioning the legend of Master Mikal that he’d created for himself would have made Mikal happy.  He liked to encourage people to grow.

Tim Mercer
Master Mellitus of Rouncivale in the SCA [Society for Creative Anachronism]

Mr. or Ms. “Anonymous” from Brooklyn wrote in today with a comment that goes very much to the heart of what we do and strive for:

Having subscribed to your blog for the past few months, I’ve always been curious why the magazine has the title that it does.  At first, I thought that the content of this magazine would be an intellectual companion to the work of something like Diana Eck’s excellent Pluralism Project, a broader examination of religious life in the West, but rather than dry academic prose, the essays and insights here would be more nuanced, sometimes biting, often more complex. What I didn’t expect was a magazine that mentions the Buddha, and even includes a provocative koan from the Zen tradition, yet whose essays almost exclusively concern Christianity.

Sure, it’s a mostly Christian country, and many of the authors of the pieces are in the US.  Articles about Lent and crosses in Houston can be expected from a magazine about Christianity in America, but it’s a misrepresentation to call such a magazine “Killing the Buddha”, isn’t it?  I suspect that there’s something that titillates about the title, the multiculturalism it conveys, that may be appealing to your target demographic, which I assume to be educated, white and Christian.

But for those of us who are not in those groups, the title is simply misleading.

Thank you, A.

For starters, what has always drawn us to the title is not as much its origin as its meaning (see the Manifesto for a refresher on that). It happens to come from Buddhism, but what it means to us is an attitude that could apply to anything, just as Mother Jones doesn’t necessarily have to have an article about mothers in every issue.

That said, we do believe that we have a responsibility to reflect more of the diversity of religious cultures around the world, and even close to home as well. It’s important that you call us out on that, and we get letters of this kind relatively often, so we know diversity of coverage matters to our readers. The last few months, it is true, have been highly Christianity-centered (with a bit of Judaism and this week’s piece on paganism mixed in). And we do think that our coverage of Christian traditions is of a kind you won’t find elsewhere. The only excuse we can give is that our writers tend to have Christianity on their minds, and we focus on publishing the best writing we can get more than on ensuring all traditions are appropriately represented, as a project like Eck’s must.

Your point is well taken, and we thank you for reading. Keep an eye out for quite a bit of material on Indian religions coming out in the next few weeks. Submit an essay to our contest with the Himalayan-oriented Rubin Museum. And we’ll keep trying, with your help, to kill our “educated, white and Christian” Buddhas.

Kevin Hill, of Ada, Ohio wrote in about Jeff’s “Clouds, When Determined by Context”:

It is interesting to see Senator Ralph Flanders mentioned in Jeff Sharlet’s article as if he were some kind of irrational, fundamentalist boob.  In fact, Flanders was a complicated, contradictory figure.  While a conservative and a fundamentalist, Flanders is most famous for being the Senator who introduced the 1954 motion to censure Joe McCarthy.  He was also a friend of organized labor and and firmly believed in international engagement with the developing countreies as well as supporting negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament.

I would prefer Ralph Flanders, despite some of his kooky beliefs, to almost any Republican Senator in today’s Senate.

A passage from Jeff’s book, The Family, pages 199-201, may be relevant here:

Nineteen fifty-four was also the year that several Fellowship brothers steered Joe McCarthy off the national stage. It was a matter of politics, not ideology; Tailgunner Joe—raw, red-nosed, thick-browed, uncouth, uncontrolled, hungering Joe—made anticommunism look low-class.

[…]

[T]he man who first wrote the resolution to censure [McCarthy] was [Senator Frank] Carlson’s predecessor as president of the Fellowship, Sena-tor Ralph E. Flanders of Vermont. Flanders was a genteel Republican, an engineer, an industrialist, a banker. His wife collected New England folk songs. Smooth-domed and whiskered, his spectacles slipping down his nose and his pipe in hand, he looked like a professor and was sometimes mistaken for a liberal. But his record was as right-wing as many of the Senate’s more outspoken firebrands. In 1954, the year he moved to censure McCarthy, he revived an old fundamentalist favorite: an amendment to the Constitution that would have rewritten the United States’ founding document to declare, “This nation devoutly recognizes the authority and law of Jesus Christ.” And yet, because of his resolution against raving McCarthy, he is remembered as a sane man in paranoid times, footnoted in histories of the Cold War as one who stood up for common sense.

Only the radical journalist I. F. Stone perceived otherwise. Flanders, he wrote in 1954, did not challenge McCarthy’s paranoia but rather his effectiveness in its promulgation. “To doubt the power of the devil, to question the existence of witches,” Stone wrote following Flanders’s ostensibly heroic gesture, is

to read oneself out of respectable society, brand oneself a heretic, to incur suspicion of being oneself in league with the powers of evil. So all the fighters against McCarthyism are impelled to adopt its premises … The country is in a bad way indeed when as feeble and hysterical a speech [as Flanders’] is hailed as an attack on McCarthyism. Flanders talked of “a crisis in the age-long warfare between God and the Devil for the souls of men.” He spoke of Italy “as ready to fall into Communist hands,” of Britain “nibbling at the drugged bait of trade profits.” There are passages of sheer fantasy, like this one: “Let us look to the South. In Latin America, there are … spreading infections of communism. Whole countries are being taken over.”

Jeff adds, also:

As to Flanders as a friend of labor, I’d like to hear more about that. It’s true that he opposed Taft-Hartley, the labor-killing legislation that changed the course of the nation, but as I understand it his opposition was rooted in animosity toward Republican leader Taft, who stood in the way of the Cold War internationalism that Flanders and the Fellowship championed. His hatred of labor was surely not as deep as that of Taft’s; but “a friend”? That seems a stretch.

We report; you decide.

Letters still coming in about Stephen Prothero’s piece Why I Am Not A Mystic. This from Kevin in Colorado:

Stephen Prothero’s reflections “Why I’m not a Mystic” are beautiful. Thanks to him and to KTB for sharing them.

And from Martin Olson ( martin-olson.com)

Odd coincidence. I’ve lived in a place like that.  I know a girl like that. I was just thinking similar thoughts about the challenging silences and how I feel about them when I saw it all written out in your article, right down to eating wild cranberries and picking her up in Boston.  The coincidence aside, compliments to Mr. Prothero on his evocative writing which cleared some dead brush from my mind.

Martin didn’t stop there. About Killing the Buddha in general, he added:

here’s some feedback: your site is one of the best i’ve seen and the content is unique and valuable to the great unwashed masses who cringe and shrug a lot at the lack of questions being asked throughout history.

i’m sorry i won’t be giving you money; the writing on your site is brilliant, so i will spread the word to others who perhaps will.

nice job. thanks for inspiring sanity in your readers

best wishes,
martin olson

Thanks, Martin. The accolades are appreciated and perhaps someone out there (you?) feels the same but is indeed in a position to donate. In case you missed the earlier announcement, KtB is now officially a nonprofit organization. Here’s how it works. You write us a check (or use PayPal, etc.). We send you a tax-deductible receipt to keep Uncle Sam from taking more money next year. And you continue to get religion writing that is “unique, valuable, and…brilliant.” Thanks, Martin and everyone, for reading.

“Rick,” one of the pseudonymous “non-believing” pastors discussed in Daniel Silliman’s “Faithful Apostasy,” wrote in to cheer Dan on for his fierce response to the original report by Dan Dennett and Linda LaScola:

Thank you Dan for saying better what I’ve been working on for awhile as a response to Dan Dennett, since I was one of the five he described as “non-believers” in his article. I said that I would be willing to own the label of “different believer” instead; that is, “different” from a literalist and a believer in supernatural theism which seem to be the definitions he mostly uses when he attributes atheism to anyone not in that rather narrow ballpark. In addition I wrote a couple of responses to Linda and Dennett stating that I did not feel trapped or closeted and they graciously acknowledged this in a footnote to the article which was re-published in the online journal Evolutionary Psychology, which I appreciated.

Keep those parishioners on their toes, “Rick”!

Lesmee Bridgeman wrote to us with a question we have no idea how to answer:

If it often rains when you are with a certain person, is it a good or bad omen?

Any of y’all experts in nonsense want to take a crack at an answer in the comments below?

Joseph Arechavala of Camden, NJ, makes a point about the ethics of drawing attention to Fred Phelps’ madness, as Josh Garrett-Davis did in his recent piece in KtB.

It’s fairly obvious, even to a layman like me, that Mr. Phelps has a serious mental illness. I believe he will switch eventually from verbally violent tirades to physical violence. In the end, he’ll be convicted of assault or some similar felony, and spend a long time in jail.

Why the press—any press—pays attention to this man and his followers is beyond my understanding. It only gives him the attention he craves.

For us, the answer is pretty simple: we loved Josh’s essay.

Charles, of Carmel, NY, takes eloquent exception to how Arthur Goldwag celebrates Anne Hutchinson’s heresy:

Hutchinson may be a beacon of freedom, but in her own mind she was a narrow, self-righteous Calvinist, and would have been a dictator in her own church. Her eponymous memorial, the Hutchinson Parkway north of New York City, justifies its name by periodically narrowing from three lanes to two, becoming a choked artery even during non-rush hours.