Embedded Files
( - previous issue - )
Apologia Report 13:31
August 14, 2008
Subject: The uncertainty of Western spirituality
In this issue:
BUDDHISM - the case for Buddha's rejection of a Creator God
CULTURE - outstanding cynical appraisals of generic spirituality
-------
BUDDHISM
"The Buddha on the So-Called Creator-God" by Narada Mahathera, "...one of the well-known Theravada monks of Sri Lanka in the twentieth century..." [1], and author of The Buddha and His Teachings [5] -- "In the Tripitaka [Buddhist canon of scripture] there is absolutely no reference whatever to the existence of a God. ... Buddha never admitted the existence of a Creator whether in the form of a force or a being.
"Despite the fact that the Buddha placed no supernatural God over man, some scholars assert that the Buddha was characteristically silent on this important controversial question." Mahathera proceeds to dispel this notion with just a handful of references "which clearly indicate the viewpoint of the Buddha towards the concept of a Creator God."
Mahathera saves the strongest citation for last. It comes from an ancient Buddhist text known as the Mahabodhi Jataka (No. 528):
"If there exists some Lord all powerful to fullfil
"In every creature bliss or woe, and action good or ill;
"That Lord is stained with sin.
"Man does but work his will."
Parabola, Sum '08, pp80-82.
---
CULTURE
Publisher Michael Horton wrote an article for the same issue of Modern Reformation that we focused on so strongly last week [2]. And while we didn't find his take on present day Gnosticism worth mentioning, Horton did include two very significant references relating to Western culture's spiritual uncertainty.
From the first one we pass on just a brief quotation. Writing for Entertainment Weekly (Oct 7 '94, n.p. [3]), Jeff Gordinier's brief assessment, "On a Ka-Ching & a Prayer: In the Wake of 'Gump,' the Entertainment Industry Gets Spiritual and the Profits Are Heaven-Sent," still resonates in 2008: "Seekers of the day are apt to peel away the tough theological stuff and pluck out the most dulcet elements of faith, coming up with a soothing sampler of Judeo-Christian imagery (monks and angels, sans the righteous anger and guilt), Eastern meditation, self-help lingo, a vaguely conservative craving for 'virtue,' and a loopy New Age pursuit of 'peace.' This happy free-for-all, appealing to Baptists and stargazers alike, comes off more like Forrest Gump's ubiquitous 'boxa choclits' than like any real system of belief. You never know what you're gonna get." The entire essay is just as insightful.
Then there is "Hot Air Gods" by Curtis White (Harper's, Dec Õ07, pp13-15 [4]). White and Gordinier both unintentionally chronicle the discordant extremes of our culture's struggle to make sense of life on its own terms, looking everywhere other than the Creator's revelation. White puts it this way: "What we require of belief is not that it make sense but that it be sincere. ... Clearly, this is not the spirituality of a centralized orthodoxy. ... This sincerity is surely one part ardor, but it is also a warning. It says, 'I've invested a lot of emotional energy in this belief, and in a way I've staked the credibility of my life on it. So if you ridicule it, you can expect a fight.'
"There is an obvious problem with this form of spirituality: it takes place in isolation. Each of us sits at our computer terminal tapping out our convictions. ...
"Consequently, it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that our truest belief is the credo of heresy itself. It is heresy without an orthodoxy. It is heresy as an orthodoxy. ...
"A book is a sales unit. What's in the book is content, which is a matter of utter indifference to the people who are responsible for moving product. Our religious content soon becomes indistinguishable from our financial content and our entertainment content and our sports content, just as the sections of your local newspaper attest. In short, belief becomes a culture-commodity. We shop among competing options for belief. ...
"[E]ach of the little affirmations of personal belief that are so common in our culture are unwitting confessions of despair. But it is exactly this despair that dares not speak its name, dares not confess itself.
"To speak this way of American belief - since no one speaks this way about American belief - is to suggest that we are strangers to ourselves. ...
"Belief of every kind and cult, self-indulgence and self-aggrandizement of every degree, all flourish. And yet God is abandoned. For first and foremost, 'the Lord is a God of justice' (Isaiah 30:18). And that is the problem that we ought to have at heart: our richness of belief masks a culture that is grotesquely unjust. ...
"Shall we turn against pluralism and relativism in the name of obedience to a single authority? I don't think so. ... The innocence that allowed us to come as children to a singular faith, to faith as a revealed Truth, was always a dangerous innocence. But a freedom to believe that is nothing more than freedom in an abyss is no less dangerous....
"A more positive way of looking at the situation I have described is to say that through the concept of religious freedom, American political culture has succeeded in mediating the competing claims of true religion and idolatry. If it has not purged the hatred from this distinction, it has at least prohibited most of the violence. And if there is wisdom in this, it is less the wisdom of benevolence than the pragmatism of imperial policing. Our culture is, as economists put it, a 'disciplined pluralism.'"
White satirically observes that "capitalism has successfully obscured ... the fact that the competition it prizes is not just between business entities internal to it but between capitalism as such and all other possible systems of value. ...
"This is a form of wishful and magical thinking no stranger than the belief that a statue of the Madonna can cry.
"The reality that this magical thinking obscures is complex and exists on at least two levels. First, there is the level of culture war itself. Culture war for us is a domestic version of the Cold War, in which every insider is also an outsider and all neighbors are potential enemies. The tragedy of American culture in this regard has been its failure to provide what religious scholar Jan Assmann calls 'intercultural translation': the capacity to translate my beliefs into your beliefs and vice versa. ...
"The second reality that needs to be addressed is what one might call the Logos or essential structure of capitalism as a system of values." As White sees it, this system has degenerated into "the creed of "cost/benefit analysis" presided over with loving-kindness by accountants and legions of liability lawyers.
"What's called for, then, is an enormous project of translation on two fronts. First, the translation that must take place between groups of believers, and second, the translation that will transform capitalism from a state of nature to an ethical system that must defend its values in, if you'll forgive me this phrase, a competing market of values. ...
"To borrow again from the work of Jan Assmann, the process of translation tends toward the abolition of what he calls the 'Mosaic distinction': the opposition of the idolatrous and the true." White concludes with a final note of the despair which he referred to earlier. Ultimate meaning will be found in the "Market God."
--------
Sources, Digital:
1 - <http://tinyurl.com/6k7xrq>
2 - <http://tinyurl.com/6djms2>
3 - <http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,303938,00.html>
4 - <http://tinyurl.com/682asg>
-------
Sources, Monographs:
5 - The Buddha and His Teachings, by Narada Mahathera (Jaico, 2006, paperback, 518 pages) <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/8179926176/apologiareport>
-------
( - next issue - )
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse