I'll preface this by saying that I know next to nothing about the Tiger Woods scandal. I'm kind of good with that. Recent and anomalous fannish obsession aside, for the most part I really don't care about celebrity news and tend to know even the barest details about things like the fact there even is a Tiger Woods scandal a) under protest and b) only because of media saturation. So I'm not even sure how the Buddhism versus Christianity discussion really fits into the whole thing other than somebody on Fox News using the scandal as a reason to try to argue Christianity is better.
What does interest me is the discussion that it has spurred from Barbara O'Brien that showed up on my IJ flist this morning, in which she points out that Fox News' Brit Hume has one point correct: Buddhism doesn't offer a path to redemption for the simple reason that it doesn't have a concept of sin. The concepts just don't fit. This is a nice change from what I often see in interfaith conversations, which tends to boil down to, "We're all doing the same thing just with different words." That annoys me for a number of reasons when I see it. Words matter. And differences in belief matter, otherwise there wouldn't be multiple religions. At the very least, there is a profound difference in believing there is only one true God while others are false, believing in multiple non-omnipotent non-omniscient Gods, and believing in no Gods at all. That last is the reason I'd never make a good Buddhist, after all. I'm just not wired for non-theistic religion.
Now, not having a concept of sin or redemption in the Christian sense doesn't mean Buddhism has nothing to say about how to live a good and moral life. O'Brien did a pretty decent job trying to explain that over on About.com. Somehow, though, it seems that some have decided that article boils down to saying the Fox News commentator was right. Erm, that's a rather radical interpretation of the text. O'Brien's response to that tries once again to explain that the whole conversation is becoming a comparison of apples and oranges. One of my favorite bits in it is this: "But Christians -- westerners generally, in fact -- carry around in their heads a conceptual framework of what religion is supposed to be that doesn't apply to Buddhism. (This is one reason so many people argue that Buddhism is not a religion; I say it is, and the framework is flawed.) So to say that Christianity is superior to Buddhism because it offers redemption and Buddhism doesn't is a bit like saying birds are superior to horses because they have feathers and horses don't. It's nonsensical."
Refreshing. I'd like to see more of that in public interfaith discussion, the recognition that different religions are, in fact, different, preferably followed with a commitment to get along with one another regardless of faith or lack thereof.
What does interest me is the discussion that it has spurred from Barbara O'Brien that showed up on my IJ flist this morning, in which she points out that Fox News' Brit Hume has one point correct: Buddhism doesn't offer a path to redemption for the simple reason that it doesn't have a concept of sin. The concepts just don't fit. This is a nice change from what I often see in interfaith conversations, which tends to boil down to, "We're all doing the same thing just with different words." That annoys me for a number of reasons when I see it. Words matter. And differences in belief matter, otherwise there wouldn't be multiple religions. At the very least, there is a profound difference in believing there is only one true God while others are false, believing in multiple non-omnipotent non-omniscient Gods, and believing in no Gods at all. That last is the reason I'd never make a good Buddhist, after all. I'm just not wired for non-theistic religion.
Now, not having a concept of sin or redemption in the Christian sense doesn't mean Buddhism has nothing to say about how to live a good and moral life. O'Brien did a pretty decent job trying to explain that over on About.com. Somehow, though, it seems that some have decided that article boils down to saying the Fox News commentator was right. Erm, that's a rather radical interpretation of the text. O'Brien's response to that tries once again to explain that the whole conversation is becoming a comparison of apples and oranges. One of my favorite bits in it is this: "But Christians -- westerners generally, in fact -- carry around in their heads a conceptual framework of what religion is supposed to be that doesn't apply to Buddhism. (This is one reason so many people argue that Buddhism is not a religion; I say it is, and the framework is flawed.) So to say that Christianity is superior to Buddhism because it offers redemption and Buddhism doesn't is a bit like saying birds are superior to horses because they have feathers and horses don't. It's nonsensical."
Refreshing. I'd like to see more of that in public interfaith discussion, the recognition that different religions are, in fact, different, preferably followed with a commitment to get along with one another regardless of faith or lack thereof.
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