Expert: Joe McSorley - 11/19/2005

Question
I came back to Christ exactly a year ago after twenty two years of being away from Christ. I had lost my faith as a missionary during the ministry and then I didn't follow Christ exclusively for twenty two years. Then, on Nov. 20th last year I gave my life back to Christ. A year later, however, after really giving it a solid try, I'm finding myself not able to believe any more because it simply asks me to accept too much on faith. Virgins don't have babies, miracles don't happen nowadays, prayer doesn't really get answered, people really don't get healed, and the righteous do indeed suffer even though there are thousands of verses saying they won't. I'd love to believe this message but it simply doesn't add up. Not to speak of the fact that I have been totally celibate for an entire year which is very hard for a good looking 53 year old, and I ain't gettin' any younger. I can do it, I do it way better than most Christians, and that doesn't add up as well. So I'm at the threshold of becoming a Buddhist and leaving the Christian faith and let me say, that if there is indeed an enemy, perhaps this is his tactic. I'm a super evangelist, I have the gift of talking to anybody, anywhere, anytime, about anything, I love to preach, I love to teach, I love to minister to others, and I have been doing so ever since I came back. But I don't want to mislead anybody, and I'd rather teach people to meditate, since I know that works, rather than accept something that doesn't make sense, and which down the road can hurt them, and don't tell me people don't get hurt in church. We both know they do. What do you have to say to my questions? What answers do you have that you think would/could keep me from taking this step?
The ball is in your court. As a Christian, if somebody wrote a letter to me like this, I would know what to say. My arguments don't work anymore, however, and that's why I'm asking you.
I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Cordially,
Rico
...and, people follow a religion or religious belief because it makes most sense of the reality we all experience. How does the Buddhist path fit life better than other paths? Just curious. It appeals to me but it does leave some holes that Christianity, for example, fills...like where do we go after death, why are there evil people...the problem of evil...what is this life all about, and things like that.

Answer
Hi Rico,
  Let me first say that I am not here to convert anyone to Buddhism or anything else.  Conversion is not a part of Buddhism nor is faith, at least in Zen.  Many people have come to Zen or similar outlooks and paths due to the collapse of a faith based system. I fully understand your predicament and I also appreciate the courage it takes to realize that what you believe, and have believed for a long time, just does not hold up to any scrutiny.  It is said that the best cure for blind faith in the Bible is to actually read the Bible with a clear mind.  It is a very problematic book that preachers spend a lifetime putting a spin on.  This is the problem with any faith-based system.  Here's how I look at any of them.  
Faith is not a part of Buddhism like it is in the Western and Middle Eastern religions.  Faith is contingent upon self-reflection and the mental process.  This means it's something that you conjure up and hold up to believe in, it is not self-sustaining.  It is a choice you make to believe one system over another for whatever reason you think is sound at the time.  When someone questions your faith you hand it off as a mystery or something the uninitiated has not grasped yet.  If one is not exposed to a faith or belief system one does not spontaneously come upon it out of nowhere.  If one is raised in the Jewish, Christian or Islamic faith that is what one generally believes.  It is an accident of birth on which faith many of us will follow.  For others it is something we are taught or learn about later and it makes sense to us but all of it is contingent upon being taught the faith.  What was there before religion and before man?  If you were never exposed to any religious teaching could you come to a religious experience?  Is there a religious awakening that is prior to faith?  Is there a religious experience that transcends all faiths or an experience that is trans-historical and trans-cultural?  I would say that there is but it is neither chauvinistic nor anthropomorphic, it is beyond normal human consciousness.  Many in history have come to a religious or existential awareness that was beyond their faith and generally when they expressed this were then ostracized by their faiths for blasphemy or heresy.  It is the awareness of self as an expression of the Universe and the Universe as self.  Meister Eckhardt may have experienced this when he proclaimed “I think the thoughts of God before creation” or Chuang tzu when he said, “ Heaven, earth and I arise simultaneously”.  There is a thread of this type of experience throughout history.  There is no hierarchy here; control or rule and only the individual can come to this on their own.
   A problem that I see with faith is that while one who believes expects others to respect his faith 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.  What does matter is true religious experience.  If a native who had never been exposed to a religion comes to a religious awakening shouldn't he then see the religion that is supposed to be true.  Shouldn't he see ‘Jesus' or ‘Allah' or Krishna?  Has this ever happened that an isolated tribe has a belief in a faith they have never been exposed to?  Not to my knowledge although there are these terribly anecdotal stories of missionaries coming to tribes and being told that ‘they knew this already' only to find they had been approached years earlier by different missionaries.  So you don't find someone coming to this type of experience but you do find those that have come to the trans- historical/cultural experience with no knowledge of other cultures.  These experiences are recorded in Islam, Christianity, Taoism, Buddhism, Shamanism and many other traditions and the experience flies in the face of the system the individual has been raised in.  In a sense all that have been taught and believed in crumbles yet a new and greater inexpressible awareness blossoms beyond tradition, scriptures and dogma.
     Buddhism is not a matter of faith but a matter of realizing what the historical Buddha realized.  It is to see that our minds, as they are, miss the point and do not see reality.  Rather than project some ideal or faith what you must first ask is ‘who is it that needs this faith, who is it that was born and dies, who am I before birth?'  There is an assumption when we say “I am” and that is that we know who it is that says this but in reality we do not.  This idea of self as separate and distinct from all else is a creation of our minds and not true reality.  It is how we identify ourselves but in only seeing ourselves we miss the universe.  Zen is just a way of trying to overcome the ignorance of the mind and not to place some new system in it.  If I come to you and say, Rico, who are you, who is it that is driven by this religious quest? What will you answer?  I am me, a soul, and other descriptions?  But they are just descriptions of the thing and not the thing itself.  We know that we are but not who we are.  Being ignorant of who we are and our connection to all in nature we do self destructive and evil things.  If we realized self and other as the same we would not do anything to harm another.  The first Truth of Buddhism is that ‘Life is suffering' and you already see that.  The second is that ‘ignorance is the cause'.  It's not that we offended God but that we don't see reality.  In our blind wandering we do many things in an attempt to satisfy ourselves but nothing works.  This is because we don't know who it is that wants to be satisfied.
  You are right about choosing things that make sense and are familiar to us.  We try to make ‘sense' of things and grab on to whatever fills this need.  It's a pattern in human behavior.   I see this all the time when someone leaves a religion.  They tend to look for a similar structure in another religion and don't realize it.  So they find something that rings familiar with them but if they were as critical with this as they were with their old religion they would never follow it.   I am amazed how people swap one system for another when they are both as problematic.  If they were in a dogmatic form of Christianity they will find a dogmatic form of Buddhism to follow.  It's all the same at that level.  Zen Buddhism is not a thing but a way or technique to overcome the ignorance of the mind.  So there is no thing called Zen; it is an attempt to stop the machinations of the mind in order to ‘see things as they are'.  
 As far as answering questions as to the meaning of life or what happens after death, Christianity doesn't really have an answer, it's just faith and conjecture because you don't ‘know' it; you just believe what they tell you.   You can't prove it because you have to die to realize it and then it's too late.  So you can say anything you want about an afterlife because it can't be challenged. When something makes no sense then they say it's a mystery but you can say this about any faith-based conundrum to escape facing the problem. Do you really think we're evil because Eve bit an apple?  Is it evil to create something, knowingly and willingly that will wreck havoc on humanity?  If you knowingly do this isn't it a sin and evil?  Yet, God, created Lucifer full knowing what he'd do, he also let him into the garden!  It's a wonder women never trust our judgment!  So God created the evil that bedevils mankind fully knowing what would happen when he created Satan. There are tons of Biblical problems like this and it's what happens when you try to stick reality in a jar.  Do not eat the fruit of the tree because it gives you knowledge of good and evil.  Okay, so I don't have the knowledge of good and evil how can I make that judgment not to eat the fruit?  It's one conundrum among many.  Not to mention that an all-loving God loves to have small animals slaughtered as sacrifice to him and has killed countless innocent babies in floods, fires and the slaughter of the first-born males.
   To come to a deep religious awakening one has to have the foundations of their reality collapse so they can see in a much deeper way.  It's not a matter of now meditating instead of praying, but to stop the mind's creation of the world and see the world as it is.  Meditation is a way to do this but only if done properly.  From this standpoint the historical Buddha is nothing but an example of what someone went through to get this but there are many ways to do this, none easy.  So what path?  No path since a path you follow is one contrived by the mind.  Again, it is not my desire to convert you or anyone else to Buddhism but I would like you to continue this critical thought process you have embarked on that delves you deeper into reality.  When you realize that all these systems are mere mental constructs then your eye will begin to open to the problem of human consciousness.  When this is realized you can begin to overcome it.   The human mind itself, as it is, is the problem here, so it doesn't matter what you believe, they all miss the point.  
  This is not something you can proselytize about, it's like shouting ‘ there's air, breath it!' when everyone is standing in it not seeing it.  Whenever someone is preaching to me I am never sure if they are trying to convince me or their self of what they are saying.  If you suddenly see the world in color and no one else does what can you do?  They don't see it and it's in front of their eyes.  Believing it's in color doesn't do it.  They must practice to gain the eye to see it but few want to do that.  There is great appeal for Christianity because it removes the blame and accountability from the individual. Jesus died for our sins and the devil made me do it.  In Buddhism it is self-created and self overcome with no other way out.  We are fully accountable for our actions.  Imagine if we all took this to heart how the world would change.  We couldn't blame the problems in the Middle East on our ancestors, on God choosing or not choosing people, on Adam and Eve or the devil.  We just have to take our own lives in accountability and be 100% liable for them, here and now.
Rico, know who you are, here and now and your questions will be answered.
 I hope this has helped you.  Take care,
          Joe