I am comfortable with the atheist & agnostic labels and enjoy philosophical discussions. My wife prefers to avoid controversial topics like these. She has her doubts about the gods of religious texts but is reluctant to explore the views of atheism, agnosticism and philosophy because it is Taboo. In effect, she is unconfident in her beliefs, more insecure and lacks some passions for life. This appears to be cognitive dissonance at its best.
Recently we heard her grandmother, who is in failing health, intrigued by the idea of reincarnation as an afterlife. My wife has expressed a subtle interest in Buddhism. I think a major issue with letting go of religious faith is the feeling that you loose an afterlife. I can’t explain the silliness of this bootstrapping, using rationality and philosophical terms, but I think I have a better opportunity of giving my wife confidence in her beliefs, security & motivation if I introduce her to some of the Buddhist teachings. Even if she has to be a closet Buddhist.
A few of you have commented on your experience with this philosophy before. I would like to get some comments on your personal relationship with Atheism & Buddhism, as well as, the methods you would recommend to introduce a couple noobies to this metanarrative. The hardest part for me is goign to be putting a restraint on my passions for philosophy and applying patience to our exposure so that I don’t over do it, and turn her off. So I think patience may be an aspect I can get from the experience.
Hmmm, not sure how I can be of help. The major argument, of course, is that it might make us happy if we were to be reincarnated, but the fact that something makes us happy is no argument that it is true. (It would make me happy to have peace in the Middle East, but it just ain’t so ...)
Buddhism comes in many forms. Some of them are less religious in their outlook, and more a sort of philosophical psychology. Others involve more esoteric and supernatural elements. There’s also a lot of New Age nonsense that gets mixed in with Buddhism.
At any rate one can be a Buddhist and be pretty close to a complete naturalist, if you simply believe that life is suffering, and that the route to end suffering is to decrease your attachments. (Taken to its logical conclusion, however, this will lead you to a monastic lifestyle).
There is nothing naturally theistic about the earlier forms of Buddhism; it’s all about human psychology. However most forms of practiced Buddhism involve belief in gods, demons, and supernatural powers, as well as an all-encompassing Buddha-Nature, that’s something roughly akin to a universal mind that suffuses the universe. The complexities here are really too detailed to go into in a short post. If you want to know more, ask away or I can direct you to various websites, etc.
The question is what part of Buddhism it is that interests your wife. If it’s the psychological insights, she can get that without any of the supernatural baggage. If it’s the reincarnation and karma, well, that’s also shared by other forms of Asian religion including Hinduism. One can believe in reincarnation and karma without believing in God or gods, of course. Most Buddhists seem to think of karma as a sort of natural property that inheres in actions. It doesn’t require a judge or lawgiver to carry out the rewards and punishments. The problem for a naturalist, of course, is that there is no evidence whatever that reincarnation occurs or that karma is real. Indeed, all we know about the mind is that it is a product of the brain, and dies when the brain dies.
While I do appreciate much Buddhist philosophy, in the final analysis I couldn’t accept even the earliest forms of it because they all seemed to me to assume the existence of reincarnation and karma, and these simply do not occur, to the best of our knowledge.
Why don’t you just make something up, retrospy? I wouldn’t do this to a child, but I’ve lied to an adult who had asked me what my uncle “saw” when he was clinically dead. I don’t see any harm in this. I personally see it as a waste of time dedicating hours of your free time to some bogus myth just because you’re afraid of death.
I agree that many aspects of Buddhism are grounded in myth, just as many religions are. When you are “in the know” this is an obvious distinction. When you are looking at the dilemma from the perspective of someone not “in the know” you can recognize the obstacles that stand in the way of their consciousness raising. In this situation my wife has built up a self defense mechanism to deal with cognitive dissonance and function in a religious society. That defense mechanism is to run from philosophy, extra thinking and all the topics put on the religious taboo list. I take issue with this defense mechanism because it acts as a leash to her confidence and passions.
My goal of introducing Buddhism into our lives was its role in a stair step method away from these taboo issues. It starts with closet thinking and personal investigations. Then you have a framework for confidence to grow. When your confidence reaches a certain level, you are willing to stand up and make self expressions. Not everyone can quite smoking cold turkey.
Maybe I should broaden the topic to all methods that assist individuals with raising their consciousness to taboo topics. In my case, I see an opportunity, based on her expression of interest and inquiry toward Buddhism, for a potentially atheistic world view that can open the doors to other kinds of broad critical thinking. I would prefer to focus on those topics that have naturalistic groundings as well. For instance I think there is plenty of research on the concept of Karma in evolution. I would wait to make this natural case until she was comfortable with the idea of Karma existing without a creator.
More specifically I was looking for information on the afterlife. I like Buddhism because it meets my goals half way. It offers a comforting afterlife view, but it doesn’t require a creator. I have not heard of a creator myth that doesn’t have an afterlife, so I can’t take that half way approach. I’m thinking of talking to the local UU minister to find out when he does a talk on this topic, renting movies that deconstruct these taboos, getting books on Buddhism etc. all over a long period of time. Suggestions are appreciated.
For instance, when I was younger, my mother was still trying to convince me to be a Christian Scientists by giving me articles linking “the force” to Christian Science. Lucky for me, I knew that Star Wars was fiction and that just reinforced my decision. But if I do my homework I should be able to find aspects of the Buddhist metanarrative myth that have naturalistic groundings that I can focus on.
My own experience with Buddhism is less formal than Doug’s. I started by reading The Monk and The Philosopher, and The Accidental Buddhist, both of which were fun, light introductions to the ideas of Buddhism that aren’t especially scary to the atheist/agnostic. The Best Buddhist Writing series published by the Shambala Sun also has lots of brief essays from both Buddhist teachers and ordinary folks, many of which touch on the relationship of their practice to issues of life and death. I simply ignore the supernaturalist elements when I run across them and focus on what seems like the useful stuff, and there are some forms of Buddhism that are ok with that, though there are others that are more dogmatic.
I have read a number of texts that focus of the afterlife in a very clearly religious/supernaturalist way (e.g. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying), and I tend not to find these very helpful. I especially find the Tibetan authors too obsessed with lineage, hierarchy, and tradition for my tastes, and not as conducive to independant thought and exploration. And I find the whole idea of reincarnation not really any more compelling than Heavan or Asgard myself. But I really enjoy Thich Nhat Hanh for the practical psychology aspect of Buddhist teaching, and Zen has some good stuff, though it too can be a bit formal and hyperobscure sometimes.
If you’re looking for a way to introduce your wife to introspection, or a way of thinking about life and death that might be comforting without being supernaturalist, some kinds of Buddhism might be helpful. But the ideas of releasing all attachments and recognizing the lack of any self or real intrinsic existence to people or objects are very foreign to people raised in a Christian culture, and the idea of acceptance can easily be misunderstood as passivity and hopelessness. I haven’t found that the family and friends I’ve shared my Buddhist discoveries with have found them nearly as helpful or applicable to their lives as I have. Each to his own, but it’s always hard to know whether what you offer will be helpful, or how they will interpret it.
While I do appreciate much Buddhist philosophy, in the final analysis I couldn’t accept even the earliest forms of it because they all seemed to me to assume the existence of reincarnation and karma, and these simply do not occur, to the best of our knowledge.
Hmmm.. There is a heavy discussion in certain Buddhist circles about reincarnation. At least is reincarnation without a surviving identitiy (soul) a rather empty form of reincarnation. The most ‘worldly view’ on Buddhism I read is von Stephen Batchelor: ‘Buddhism without believes’ or ‘Living with the devil’. But OK, he is criticised a lot by ‘hard core’ buddhists, that say his approach is just too ‘pro scientific’.
I once heard a very interesting, historical interpretation of the reincarnation thing in Buddhism. In the time Buddha was active (about 600 BC), reincarnation was a fact for the people in India (just a few exceptions: e.g. there were materialists in those days (trying to show that the soul has no weight)). So Buddha was forced to integrate it in his philosophy. But he made a ‘no-soul’ reinarnation of it…
But of course, this is also just an interpretation, but at least there are buddhist scholars who have a pretty naturalistic world view. Hey, I once heard Zen master explaining what freedom is: it was quite close to the compabalistic view on freedom and determinism.
Well, I’ll certainly grant you that there are some westerners of a naturalistic mindset who may well consider themselves Buddhist and reject reincarnation. But in the same way there are some liberal “Christians” who reject the divinity of Christ. OK. Not sure what belonging to that religion means, then.
Buddha rejected the notion of a substantial soul. In its place he suggested, basically, a causally interrelated stream of mental states. In this he was pretty close to Hume in the western tradition. To say that a person was reincarnated was not, for a Buddhist, to claim that the same substantial soul was associated with a different body. Of course not. It was to say that the causally interrelated series of mental states that ended in one body caused the first mental state in a different body that was being born. It is thus the same causal “stream”.
I am also a non-theistic person who is definitely not a buddhist, but I have interests in certain eastern philosophical ideas that relate to buddhism. I also don’t feel that my skeptical mindset has been the least bit corrupted by my inquiries into buddhism. If your wife is interested in buddhism, why not encourage her to explore that interest? After all, she’s not being pulled away from you by some sort of sect, is she? If you are not also interested, then you don’t have to pursue the matter with her. And you don’t have to restrain your philosophical passions to allow her to pursue her own inquiries. Being honest about what you really think in situations that warrant you expressing yourself seems to me like it should be enough.
Forgot one thing (it was already late in the evening yesterday): according to my source, karma and reincarnation in ancient, hindu India was experienced as a kind of rigid machinery (with moral dimensions). Buddhism was a psychology how you can live happy with that, even be free.
In traditional Buddhism everything is thought to be a aggregate of 5 elements (skandas), also the ‘soul’. When you die, the elements go apart, and the soul does not exist anymore. Only the ‘impetus’ still exists, and causes a new mind into existence.
I think it is this what makes buddhism so attractive (also to me): it presents a way to live in the machine. It is not quite the same machine as in ancient India (today we have fields and particles, non-moral). But there is a lot in buddhist psychology that can be transposed to a modern world view.
BTW, Stephen Batchelor thinks he keeps more to oldest buddhist texts, than a lot of ‘official’ buddhists do. Of course, there are border problems.
Forgot one thing (it was already late in the evening yesterday): according to my source, karma and reincarnation in ancient, hindu India was experienced as a kind of rigid machinery (with moral dimensions). Buddhism was a psychology how you can live happy with that, even be free.
Well, it’s the same machinery in Buddhism and Hinduism, speaking generally. That is, there is still reincarnation and there is still Karma, with very clear moral dimensions. The difference is that standardly Hindus believe in an immortal soul (Atman), which is either identical to or separate from Brahman which is sort of like a deity figure or world-soul. Buddhists don’t. (At least the early ones didn’t. Some latter-day Mahayana Buddhists seem to believe in a Buddha Nature that sounds an awful lot like Brahman).
GdB - 21 January 2008 12:53 AM
In traditional Buddhism everything is thought to be a aggregate of 5 elements (skandas), also the ‘soul’. When you die, the elements go apart, and the soul does not exist anymore. Only the ‘impetus’ still exists, and causes a new mind into existence.
Well, it’s the “impetus” which makes the reincarnated person the same person as the person who died. So long as you preserve personal identity, that’s really all that matters, at least as far as I’m concerned. That is, however you describe it, this sort of thing doesn’t happen.
I am not sure you can say that Karma is a moral law.
Karma is a cause and effect law, like the law of cause and effect, which pertains to morality and society in general. The idea is that, the seeds we plant now, have consequences either in the near future or perhaps in the distant future. The conditions in with we live now are ‘largely’ dictated by chance, but also by how we have lived our lives.
Now, acknowledging karma doesn’t mean one sees an act as bad or good, so really there are no moral judgments. Rather, it means you acknowledge that doing a certain type of act tends to cultivate that type of act later on. It doesn’t mean, because you’re bad you have some mystical bad stuff growing in your closet, it means because you stole a car, and broke a law, there is a chance you will have to go to jail.
I know a lot of people get hung up on the idea of karma. That it is some concrete, unalienable law, or they wonder what a child has done to deserve rape, or cancer. But karma doesn’t really address those issues. It has long been established and accepted that there are greater forces to which our lives bend and sway then just our actions allow or cause. That a man kills 1000 people doesn’t mean some bad thing WILL happen to him, only that that action generates LIKE possibilities, either in resentment, legal issues and so on.
The idea of reincarnation is an interesting one. First there is rebirth, which is different from reincarnation altogether. Rebirth is a process by which we are constantly renewed. For example, Sartre’s notion that a man who commits a crime then lives a life doing good deeds is no longer fundementally the same man. We are children, we are teens, we are grown ups, we are elderly, we die. All are delineations for something (life) that we see as constant and linear, which, possibly is not. Another example is a river. If you stand in the river, it is the river. You look and see the water as being the same thing, but at any time, the river you stand in, the place you occupy in the river, is never the same from one moment into the next. Life, like the river, changes from moment to moment, it is never the same, only our idea that it is the same, that we are the same, remains.
Reincarnation deals with the physical transference of energy and matter into other things. There is a concept in Buddhism of inter-codependency. That is, nothing in this life exists as a separate, disconnected thing. For Doug to exist, Doug needs water, and food, and sunshine.. and for those things to exist they need X and so on and so on. Now when a person dies, this thing that we are, returns to all the things it was. The water in us becomes water, the carbon, carbon and so on until it is all broken down. Now when something else is born, when things are right, they too, will use whatever we were for themselves. So in effect, we are all our ancestors, the stars, and the earth. Everything is inter-woven and everything is potentially the same.
That is the basest explanation of it. Now some traditions believe an imprint of the mind can be carried over and transmitted. Not every sect of Buddhism believes this, and honestly, I would have to take the same stance as Harris, in that it is suspect, but some research should be done into it to falsify the matter, since it CAN be falsified. After all, what is more probable, that the energy with in us can carry over and affect another living organism, or that there is a special place no one can see where souls are collected?
Now I know there is mysticism in Buddhism, or at least apparent mysticism and some people who practice it bring to it some new age ideas. But I think overall Buddhism is by far one of the most rational religions, so much so a lot of people just call it a philosophy. One can easily be an atheist and a Buddhist, just as one can be an atheist and secular humanist.
I’m not at all knowledgeable about Buddhism, so I’ve avoided posting here, however, I do have a question. Hope this isn’t too far off topic. As I understand it, people who generate negative karma during their life will come back as a less evolved form until they make up for their transgressions. People who are really bad will probably come back as insects. Well, since there are trillions of insects and only about six or seven billion people, does that mean that there were trillions of bad people before?
I’m not at all knowledgeable about Buddhism, so I’ve avoided posting here, however, I do have a question. Hope this isn’t too far off topic. As I understand it, people who generate negative karma during their life will come back as a less evolved form until they make up for their transgressions. People who are really bad will probably come back as insects. Well, since there are trillions of insects and only about six or seven billion people, does that mean that there were trillions of bad people before?
The traditional Buddhist pantheon basically takes off where Hinduism left off. That is, Buddhists believe in an enormous universe of other worlds, basically infinite space, and a large number of “heavens” and “hells” with gods and demons that populate them.
Now, this is a quasi-naturalist picture in the following sense: none of the gods and demons are immortal. They all die, they just have very long lifespans. If you do certain sorts of good things you may be reborn as a powerful human or in a heaven (= a world where things are somewhat better than earth) or as a godlike figure (basically some form of superhuman). If you do something bad you may be reborn as a non-rational animal or as a devil, or as someone in hell (= a word where things are somewhat worse than on earth).
Buddhists and Hindus don’t believe in everlasting hells or heavens as in the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic theology, though, so you are never anywhere permanently.
So one might argue that while there are trillions of insects, perhaps there are trillions of people on other worlds. Or it might simply be that most souls haven’t behaved particularly well ...
Goodthink, I do understand that you’re trying to give a sort of modern/naturalist interpretation of Buddhist teachings. And I do agree with you that Buddhism is one of the more rationalist religions. But Karma is intended to be a moral law, with moral consequences. If you do something immoral, you are punished by the natural law of karma. If you do something moral, you are rewarded. And Buddhists do have sophisticated moral theories about what will help and what won’t. That’s the Noble Eightfold Path. The prime way to become enlightened is to live a moral life so that you can be reborn in that BEST of all bodies, which is a body of a human that can enter a Buddhist monastery. (Gods may be more powerful, but only humans can become enlightened, for Buddhists). Then when you are in a human life, the prime way to become enlightened is by the Noble Eightfold Path.
Similarly with reincarnation ... yes, one can give a quasi-naturalist interpretation of it, talking in sort of vague, hand-waving ways about ‘energies’ and so on. But that’s really not what you find in any Buddhist texts. For them, reincarnation is reincarnation: it is the standard way that the effects of karma get dealt to you. It’s the same moral agent who’s born as who died before, otherwise the karmic effects would be totally useless.
So karma and reincarnation are really two sides of the same coin, both in Buddhist and in Hindu thought.
OK, I’ve got it. There are many inhabited worlds, but all the bad “people” who end up as insects probably don’t do so on their worlds, bur rather contribute to our insect population. I don’t think I like the idea of being the universe’s dumping place for bad karma beings.
Varjyana is not all of Buddhism. What’s more the concepts of devas and gods and heavens and hells are such that it’s overly easy to mis-understand what is being said. In Varjyana, devas and gods and the whole pantheon of beings one would call demonic or angelic are basically vices or virtues materialized so that one can focus better on them, and focus on freeing oneself from them. Varjyana is supposed to be the quickest path (rumoured to be 10 years or so ) to enlightenment, but it requires a trained teacher and one cannot just read the texts. Likewise, sutras that detail how one can gain karma are also such that the meaning isn’t apparent, and people are easily misled by them. For example, the bathhouse sutra. If you read the bathhouse sutra you’d think you can gain karma by bathing monks, however the entire text is a metaphor for living a certain way as shown by the Bodhidharma.
Likewise, hells though portrayed as physical places, where things happen, are really constructs of our own minds. For as many minds have existed there have been as many hells, and heavens. Again, the Varjyana’s and some others portray them as physical places. As practice continues the concepts melt away. There is a Koan precisely about this, A warrior seeks out a monk and demands that the monk tell him the meaning and nature of heaven and hell. The monk stands up, slaps the warrior, spits on him and yells, “What you? You could never understand anything so sublime as the meaning of heaven or hell!” The warrior draws his sword and in anger is about to strie the monk when the monk says, “That, that is hell” the Warrior is enlightened and falls to the ground, “Please forgive me master” he says, “I should never have drawn my sword in anger.” The monk placed his hand on the warrior, “And that” said the monk, “Is heaven”.
Which really brings up the last point, Buddha’s don’t make karma. Buddha’s still act in the world, but how and why they act is different. There is a precept about drinking. But Buddha’s don’t follow precepts. The law of karma, again, isn’t moral, doesn’t cast judgment on actions as moral or immoral. Things either cultivate awareness, or foster more delusion. The 8-fold path, and 4 noble truths, are about ending suffering, and the suffering of others, not about right and wrong.
