Some Thoughts On Buddhism and Christianity (Part 1)

From a podcast listener:

Pat,

I find your show fascinating and am enjoying it immensely. I too am a businessman, athlete, and faith is the key to my life (and everyone’s life).

My oldest son is going through a lot of questioning and searching which is awesome because he is seeking truth.

He has engaged with Buddhism and right now, he is feeling that it is the truth. 

I have heard you describe your faith journey and point out that buddhism has some fundamental incoherencies. Could you provide your thoughts as to what these are and any context you could wrap around those incoherencies, or point me to resources that could help?

I do appreciate your time and encourage you to continue your work. It is impacting lives.

…

My Response:

It’s true. As I was coming out of my nihilistic rut, Buddhism, along with other forms of eastern spirituality, had great appeal to me. They were edgy and they were different. They were the kinds of religions that my grandparents didn’t know about or wanted nothing to do with. There were probably a hundred psychological reasons why I was attracted to Buddhism (or Taoism, etc), but mostly I liked that they gave me something to do. They taught me how to meditate. And – perhaps like your son – I experienced enormous utility in this. My anxiety levels came down and I began to see life a lot more clearly. This is why I think many people say Buddhism is true: because Buddhism is useful. And Buddhism is useful, especially for any person who suffers with a frequently agitated mind.

As for why I left Buddhism, the easy answer is because I don’t think Buddhism is true (at least not “all the way true”), even if it’s useful. I believe Christianity is true. And while Buddhism helped with a lot of my worry issues, the various spiritual teachers I was reading and consulting with couldn’t give me satisfactory, philosophical answers to these major life questions.

With respect to God, for example – a question I obviously had immense interest in – Buddhist teachers were (and still are) all over the place. Some talk of notions of inter-being (perhaps making them pantheistic), and others will say that we cannot know anything about God. The latter sentence is a straightforward contradiction: to say we cannot know anything about God, is, of course, to know at least one thing about God. Statements like that undercut themselves. They are hard to take seriously. As for pantheism, I believe there are strong arguments against it – in fact, nearly all the argument for God’s existence and attributes from natural theology result in a moral monotheism; a God that is radically distinct from – but ontologically necessary to sustain – all that He creates. If your son is curious, and enjoys intellectual pursuit, he may want to start with a book like Feser’s 5 Proofs or Spitzer’s New Proofs. More specifically on Christianity, The Light of Christ.

Another thing that bothered me about Buddhism was how much detachment was emphasized. Clearly this is a useful approach to many things in life, like some of those habits mentioned above. Not being attached to money, fame, glory, power, honor, Netflix; all good advice there. But a lot of Buddhism goes farther than that. I once heard a story – not sure if it’s true, but it illustrates a certain point—of a woman living in a Buddhist monastery being taught the importance of detachment from all things, only to sneak out every night to see her children, who she couldn’t detach from. The point (whether this story is true or false) is we can conceive of situations where detachment would seem to be the wrong choice, morally speaking.

So I would hold that attachment itself is not a bad thing. We should be attached to at least some things—particularly loving others and loving God. It’s right attachment, not no attachment. And that is something Christianity affirms, that a lot of Buddhism (though I can’t speak for all of Buddhism; it comes in many flavors) does not. Christianity says the world and creation are good but fallen, and will someday be redeemed: so hold onto your relationships and love people, because all will be righted in the end. Buddhism sees the world as something to escape from, including relationships; it is all illusion, according to many Buddhists. All this, of course, is self-defeating. How are we to know what is illusion from what isn’t if we can’t trust our basic everyday, sense experiences?

In short, I suppose it was somewhere between the incompleteness or inconsistency of the Buddhist perspective (either with respect to God, morality, etc) and my continued study of natural theology and ethics that caused me to seriously consider the Abrahamic traditions. At this point, I would probably focus less on critiques of Buddhism (which, it should be said, I have great respect for) and more on the case for Christianity. And I would simply want to say that the case for Christianity being true – both philosophically and historically – is so overpoweringly convincing, it effectively overrules the possibility of other religions. (As you probably know, I have a lot of podcast episodes on this. But for your son, I’d recommend starting here, here, here, and here.)

But here’s something else your son might find interesting. It was by listening to a Buddhist perspective on Jesus that I eventually picked up a New Testament. Like other religions, Buddhist’s have many things to say about Christ, almost all of them unique, curious, and wrong. They tend to make Jesus into an enlightened guru, and this, again, has a certain appeal, until you take a serious, historical investigation into the matter. Then you quickly see how preposterous the notion is. This is what got me. I went into the New Testament thinking I would be reading about some guy preaching enlightenment; something of an Eckhart Tolle of the olden days. Rather, what I read was much more radical than that—not to mention, Jewish. Christ – and it is flabbergasting how many people forget this – was a Jew. He affirmed the Old Testament and the God of Israel. He claimed to be the Messiah. There is nothing even remotely Buddhist about any of that, or Hindu, Taoist, or whatever. One really must cast about for certain, individual, cherry-pickable lines from the New Testament and quilt them together in a very contrived way to make Jesus into anything other than he was: a man, deeply Jewish, who claimed to be God.

Perhaps Lewis highlighted these facts best in Mere Christianity, when he says,

“Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time. Now let us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language, meant the Being outside the world, who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.

One part of the claim tends to slip past us unnoticed because we have heard it so often that we no longer see what it amounts to. I mean the claim to forgive sins: any sins. Now unless the speaker is God, this is really so preposterous as to be comic. We can all understand how a man forgives offences against himself. You tread on my toes and I forgive you, you steal my money and I forgive you. But what should we make of a man, himself unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that he forgave you for treading on other men’s toes and stealing other men’s money? Asinine fatuity is the kindest description we should give of his conduct. Yet this is what Jesus did. He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offences. This makes sense only if He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin. In the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivalled by any other character in history.

Yet (and this is the strange, significant thing) even His enemies, when they read the Gospels, do not usually get the impression of silliness and conceit. Still less do unprejudiced readers. Christ says that He is “humble and meek” and we believe Him; not noticing that, if He were merely a man, humility and meekness are the very last characteristics we could attribute to some of His sayings.

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

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– Pat