Expert: Joe McSorley - 7/20/2004

Question
-------------------------
Followup To
Question -
-------------------------
Followup To
Question -
Hi Joe,
    First off thank you so much for answering my questions. I was wondering what Buddhists say about the beginning of time? It seems pretty logical to say that the beginning of time can only exist with God being present. The first piece of matter ever created cant just pop out of nonexistance, according to the laws of cause and effect. But with God, one who can do anything, it makes sense then that He exists forever because of that ability. I just wanted to know the Buddhist view on it. Also, the buddhist way of life is awesome in regards to how they treat everything but without a God a buddhist could kill anything if it makes him happy because they is no reason for him not to.Is that right or no? One more thing it seems to me that buddhists deny the self so i would think someone whos life is painful would feel happier getting a fast acting disease and become nonexistant then to live because to live is to suffer and as a buddhists good and evil are concepts of man so doing that to yourself isnt good or bad. I really like the buddhist "religion" but im really convinced their is a God so i dont think its possible for me to take Buddhism up. Thanks for the help Joe,
Barrett
Answer -
Hi Barrett,
  You are starting off with a lot of assumptions not the least of which is your view of Buddhism which doesn't reflect the philosophy at all as I know it. Also, I don't understand why you think you might have to take Buddhism up; it is not a religion of conversion.
   Next you have to ask what time is, you just cannot assume some definition for it. You perceive time from your consciousness but is there time, in this sense, of and by itself?  Relativity happens with the big bang and with it the relativistic concept of time. Space and time arise together in this theory. Your idea of creation is very like the Jesuit idea of First Cause.  In their paradigm everything must have a first cause, all of nature, so God must be the first cause of everything, including time.  I had this argument with the head of St. Joseph's University theology department.  Given that everything must have a first cause and to use your words, “they can't just pop out of non-existence” then God, too, must have a first cause and can't just pop into being.  If you are like the Jesuits you will now make an exception for God in this equation and thus destroy your own logic. For some reason God gets a ‘Get out of Logic' free card while the rest of the Universe doesn't.  Why is God exempt from the laws of cause and effect? I can just as easily proclaim that Nature exists always, would you except that?  Why isn't that logical? If there is nothing else in the Universe what then defines God?  Why can't Nature/Universe exist forever, is it  because the Theists say so?  I hope your argument is stronger than this.
  There is a deeper problem here and that is the idea of non-existence as something that is independent from existence.  How can you have one without the other?  Aren't they mutually defining and creating?  In the Buddhist idea the universe is ever-creating/ever-destroying and not one without the other.   If God is the Supreme Being then he must be opposed to Supreme Non-Being and therefore can be negated.  There cannot be being without the antithesis of non-being so the concept of a God just being a being is problematic because he can then 'not be'.
  I have no idea where you get the idea that a Buddhist can ‘kill anything that makes them happy'.   Even at its most mundane level Buddhism is known for compassion to all sentient beings, not just human, and given the law of karma, cause and effect, a Buddhist believes they cannot escape their actions without consequence.  In this sense a Buddhist must be responsible to all things in life and be compassionate.  In the Judeo/Christian sense you can wreak havoc upon nature and have no consequences, and worse, you can murder and war and just say your sorry and be forgiven.  Where is there sense or justice here?  And as far as killing and making yourself happy it was the all-loving God of the Old Testament that killed the first born male babies of the Egyptians.  This is the act of a compassionate Deity to kill innocents?  Could this in any way be justified today?  There are absolutely none of these problems in Buddhism as it demands compassion to all.  Deeper than this is that Buddhism sees all Nature as one so what you do to any other you do to yourself.  If you see the world as yourself you will treat it with respect.  In Theism the idea is that you will be punished for doing bad and not because you love all, punishment is the motive you don't do it and not because you have some deeper respect for life.  So you might want to kill but you don't because you'll get caught but in the Buddhist sense you just don't want to kill, period.
  As far as a Buddhist escaping pain and ‘becoming non-existent', that too, does not reflect Buddhism at either the folk religion level or at its deepest.  How can one become non-existent?  Becoming is the act of being, to be coming, to bring forth, so you can't ‘become non-existent'.  At the folk end of it Buddhists believe that they will reincarnate and have a go at it again.  Anything left undone in this life must be accounted for in the next while at the deeper end, life and death are inseparable and it's contingent upon the individual to awaken beyond this dualism.  So, no matter what, you can't escape the consequence of your actions.
  Good and evil are concepts of humans and not part of nature but the estrangement from nature.  Where isn't the concept from man's mind?  If you read the Old Testament there are many admonishings of good and evil, like stoning your wife if she's not a virgin on her wedding day, you think some God came up with this?  If you read the Bible or the Koran without all of the influence and bias you've been taught but read them like historical testaments you will find chronicles of war, horror, pettiness and deceit dictated by a ‘loving' God.  Christians excuse it with God's covenant or some other contrivance but the fact is the ‘God' of the Bible was anything but compassionate or all-loving and I find that most people will spend forever making excuses for God rather than going beyond it all.   Another problem is that the incarnation of evil itself is Lucifer but God created Lucifer full knowing what he would become. This is handed off to free will as an excuse but if you create some killer animal, full knowing what it would do later, wouldn't you be liable?  If you let it lose in your garden with your children wouldn't you go to jail? God created Lucifer full knowing what he would do to his children.  My dad may or may not have been the best in the world but he was a whole lot better than that.  He protected his children and didn't allow snakes in our garden.  Buddhism does not have such myths to defend.  It's silly stuff when you get right down to it. I am just as hard on the myths of Eastern religion as I am with the West.  If you really want to come to some religious fulfillment you have to be brutally honest and critical so you get beyond all of the fluff. The concepts of good and evil are human based no matter where they exist and change over time.  Zen Buddhism seeks to break the bond of cause and effect and to see true reality and not some contrived philosophy or tradition.  It strives to go beyond man's concepts and to see the Universe on its own terms.
   
  I hope his helped you in some way.
         Joe

Joe,
Believe me Joe i appreciate this and im glad you could answer my questions. One problem. The idea of nature being forever can be see AS God himself. The idea of an all powerful being is that he can do whatever. Therefor he can be and not be, he can have a form and not a form, he can give free will and predetermine the same person. We only use 10% of our brains, maybe if we figured out how to use all of it we could comprehend this but for now theirs no way. By the way your right i am assumming alot so correct me please if i make a mistake. ABout a buddhists "killing whatever" i ddint mean it to say anything bad but merely as an example, buddhists believe in following no teaching, correct? If thats so then the 4 noble truths, etc. dont apply, i can steal, lie, if it makes me happy. Without God their seems to be no nessicity to do anything let alone live. Karma, how does that work? I dont remeber anything from past lives, even if it is subconscious, people who are depressed could find that as a way to make them happy, to not exist anymore. About nonexistance and reincarnation and karma. It seems to me you believe this from blinf faith, just as i belive in a good God blindly. People say you cant belive in God because it cant be proven that he exists. Whats strange is, how come those people tell someone who is blind that the sun exists. The blind man relies on others to tell him the truth. But things such as God and no God cannot be revealed by anyone but God Himself. You can say well i believe what is more logical, and explain it but our senses are imperfect if their were two people on earth millions of years ago they would say the sun is a disk in the sky, not bigger then the earth for sure. It turns out the sun is HUGE, and when they relied only on their senses they turned out to be wrong. Im not saying your wrong im merely saying somethings cannot be 100% accurate. Im not Christian but let me defend them because no matter what, Jesus was a great man.....or God? hahahah maybe, but you speak of Christianity and all its faults but what it seems is that you if you want to be brutally honest then what if their is a God, it is possible, and he contradicts Himself in the bible just to make us argue about Him, the reality would be (in that scenarion) that those contradictions don't matter. The main question is, is their a God or no God? If theirs God then anything is possible because of his complexing infinite power. If their is no God, their also is anything possible because who knows maybe nature itself has a heaven in store for us. If that is the case i would go ahead and say the infinite ever chaning nature is God, God doesnt have to be a being. Could you not say that as a buddhist?, that the infinite time and ever changing reality is God Him/it/herself? Any thing God does in the bible(i believe God is one and the same in all religions,even buddhism,strangely enough follows the exact path Christianity and Hinduism do) is not ours to judge, if it is true that those are acts of God.You know God works in mysterious ways. Thank you Joe, Barrett
Answer -
  You stated, “The main question is, is their a God or no God?” you should have said that in your first letter because this is not a question about Zen and I would have declined the answer for it's unanswerable.  The Zen approach to this question is ‘who wants to know if there's a God'?  This is the crux of it in Zen.  If you want to discuss any ideas of God after this please write someone who is dedicated to this issue.
 About 20 years ago I was at a seminar conducted by the theologian John Hicks.  After he presented his idea of God and what he thought God to be people started to ask questions and to point out problems with his thought.  Every time someone would comment he would pause and say, ‘ well, God's that too'.  His definition was no definition at all but this ever- changing idea to meet challenges.  You are doing the same thing.  God is a ‘he', eternal nature, maker of good and evil and being and non-being at the same time but what is the precedent in theological thought for this?  Is this just something to design as you go along?  Are you throwing out the entire Judeo/Christian tradition when you do this to suit your argument?  It becomes a very circular game that goes on forever when you do this.  Your God also likes to have contradictions to get people arguing.  When a human does that we have names for them.  If God is nature then why do you need to call him God, why isn't there just nature?  I don't care about defending or defeating an idea of God, that's for you to do, not me.  It's very problematic and you have not presented any compelling argument just a nebulous swirl of ideas.  If you need to believe in a God, that's fine.  
 As far as believing anything you want that has it's own baggage.    A problem with faith/believing is that while one who believes one thing expects others to respect his faith but rarely do they give this respect to others faiths.  If what I believe is right simply because I believe it to be right then how can I criticize another's faith?  That would give them the ground to criticize my faith.  It's a circular argument, I know, but it is the problem that faith based religions do have.  Just because we believe it doesn't make it a reality.  Many children believe in Santa Claus but that does not make him real.  You can believe anything you want but it's just a contrivance of the limited human mind.
   Why is it you need God to be good?  You can't be good for its own merit?  There isn't goodness in your heart that seeks to be harmonious and kind?  Why do you need a God for this?  If God created everything he created evil too so you need a God for that too.  He must be both good and evil.  Stealing and lying only make you feel good if you are a psychopath and not in touch with your true self or harmonious with nature.  If they make you happy then you intrinsically have a problem.
  I still don't know where you are getting your ideas of Buddhism but I suggest you study it somewhere because they are way off line.  Buddhists follow teachings to reach their own awakening.  The teachings are a stepping-stone and not the end all.
  Karma is cause and effect. The term originally comes from Jainism and meant “ reaction to action”.  What that meant was that our minds stir up or react to outside stimulus and that it is a false view of the world.  The idea was to keep the mind still and to see things without creating thoughts, to see things directly. Karma has since come to mean causation in regards to reincarnation but that is not a very good understanding of it.  What karma really means is simply cause and effect.  If you hang out with thugs you will eventually end up in trouble, if you eat the wrong foods you will eventually get sick.  It tries to explain the causal relationship between things whether it be pure physics or mental states; there is still a cause and effect.   Most of us follow the same thought patterns over and over, do things the same way but expect different results.  We ignore our karma by doing so.  If you have been raised in an exceptionally disruptive household you will have learned to do things and to reason in a faulty manner.  It is the cause and effect of one's upbringing.  What one needs to do is to recognize their karma, what ever that be, and break through it, to free oneself from the confines of their own egotistical view of reality and to see a more complete reality.  So you do good in Buddhism to avoid the bad effects of doing bad.  This is for its own merit and not because you believe God is watching you.
   Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity are far from being the same and believing the same thing.  I have no idea what you have read or studied to believe this but its wrong.  I've heard these kinds of statements before but they are indefensible at their core.  Go to a Christian convention and tell them this and see their reaction or go to a Jewish one and tell them history doesn't matter and see what response you get.  Here is your quote “(i believe God is one and the same in all religions,even buddhism,strangely enough follows the exact path Christianity and Hinduism do)”.  Where can Buddhism follow the exact path of Christianity when there is no belief in Christ in Buddhism?  This is an indefensible statement.
 Christianity is fundamentally based on several dogmas.  Some of them are: the divinity of Christ, the death and resurrection of Christ, Christ as savior to humanity, God as father and separate from man his creation, man is fallen from God and that's his sin, faith in God is essential and redemption is only through the Christ and or the Father.  Now Buddhism: it is atheistic, the problem is man's ignorance, man and nature are equal, redemption/enlightenment can only come through one's own effort, Buddha is the same as any other man and life and death ultimately are non-dual.  I cannot see how people can integrate these two systems. One is a religion based in faith in a Supreme Being and the other is an attempt to have an existential and thoroughgoing experience whereby one's essential foundation of self is overturned and awakened to a new way of ‘seeing'.  There are many appealing aspects to Buddhism that many Christians try to incorporate but you cannot grasp the marrow of Zen while hanging onto a belief system that is based on the duality of man and God.
    Barrett I think the bottom line here is that you want to defend theism and find God.  This is fine but do that and don't mask it in other arguments.  You can call God whatever you like if it pleases you and defend the idea anyway you like.  My job here is to explain Zen and not God.  If you want to argue the existence of God write to an atheist.  Why do you need to do this?  What fire or doubt burns within you that you need to engage in this discussion?  If you fully believed in, or knew there was a God, you would not need to engage in this type of behavior.  What is the root of your agitation over this that you need to discuss this with me?  These are rhetorical questions so don't answer them to me, you will, however, eventually need to answer them to yourself to have peace of mind.
      Take care,
         Joe
Joe,
hahah thanks again for the response, and you are right this is a circular argument. But i also think we are completely misunderstanding each other. --First off the biggest idea that i didn't seem to get across to you was the idea of the underlying relationship between alot of major religions. I meant not the definition of God, but their main ideas. Is it not true that all three teach the Golden Rule,one which covers almost everything in regards to how we live, Love thy neighbor as thyself?
-Secondly, my statements about God aren't trying to defend him, it probaly seems like that,but rather im saying that if God exists then we can't explain him or understand him. You said "why can't it just be nature then" i would respond, it could! Your point on "who wants to know if theirs a God" was excellent.Is that like the question of trying to explian a color to a blind person? Its true their is color, but to the blind man it simply can't be understood so its no use trying to understand it.
-What else, you are right about the religions critizing other faiths, no one should be criticizing anyones beliefs.
-I didn't mean to put out the message that i dont want to do good, i absolutely do and not for fear of God, im just saying that sometimes i really believe doing something bad will make me happy. Who honestly doesnt think that way sometime in their life? Im only 16 though so im ignorant to what makes me truly happy and what doesn't. An example: I know someone who is going to France to do volunteer work and i know that they would be happier sitting at home, skateboarding all day, so why should he go?
-Last point, i cant grasp how buddhism explains how we reincarnate, if we dont remember any past lives. If we only exist for 70 years and thats it, i mean our feelings, our conscience, our personality, essentially ourselves, some who suffers to the max could feel that dying is better then living.
-Joe i made 5 points and straight up, they are 1)The golden rule exists in 3 religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity 2)im not defending God but rather saying its possible that God exists, but if he does he is so unconcievable that we cant even explain him and never will. 3)Criticizing others for anything is wrong because we all seek what we think will bring us true happiness 4)I want to do good, i dont want evil to bring about happiness, for no reason other than the fact that i dont want it to. If it does, which i truly don't think it does, then ill have to live with that but until i find out then im going to follow the golden rule. 5)Buddhist idea of reincarnation, is it ME who is going into another life?
Joe i really dont want you to keepp answering these question so i wont respond again, please correct me on every mistake i have made and i thank you so much for your time. I think the big thing was i didnt grasp the fact that you belive their is a possibility that their is a God.Im sorry if i offended you about anything or misinterpreted you. Again i await you response eagerly and i tell you this is it, no more after this :) hahah, Barrett  

Answer
Hi Barrett,
 You might be 16 and not know what makes you happy but that doesn't matter because most people at any age don't know what makes them happy.  It is this idea of not knowing who we really are that is the problem.  How can you know what makes you happy when you don't know who you are to make happy?
  As far as reincarnation goes I find it unworkable and don't believe in it.  Only some sects of Buddhism believe in it, Zen does not.
  I understand your comparison of the religions at the surface level but at their essence they are very different.  Let me give you an example; 2 liquids, both clear, both used for thirst, both enjoyable and both consumed by humans. Now you see they are similar and think they must ultimately do the same thing. On their surface they are very similar but in essence they are completely different because one is water and the other is vodka.  So you can compare almost anything on the superficial level and say they are aiming at the same thing but at their depth they may be totally different.  The goal in Western religion is to go to heaven and be rewarded in a human fashion but in the East it's to overcome ignorance and to realize that your idea of yourself was an illusion and that you are an expression of the Universe.  These are two entirely different concepts.  To really develop your intellect you need to probe deeper than you do, though you are doing well for your young age.
  Evil can't bring about happiness.  It only brings a temporary illusion of happiness.
  Lastly on the reincarnation issue here's how Zen handles it: who is it that was born in this life and is going to die?  Answer this and you don't have to worry about reincarnation at all.  You can't answer this by belief but have to do it in a very real sense.  
  And finally: read, read, read and question everything to its core and you'll do well.  Don't be complacent!
  Take care,
        Joe