[Buddha-l] Political incorrectness towards Buddhism?

[Richard Hayes]

On Tuesday 10 October 2006 04:32, Stefan Detrez wrote:

> on the market there are plenty of books trashing the monotheist religions.

Sam Harris is doing a wonderful job. Of course, this has been going on for 
some time. Adam Smith reports that when David Hume was dying, Hume said that 
his only regret in dying was that he would not live to see the planet rid of 
that silly superstition, Christianity. I don't know why he singled out 
Christianity; I can think of no religion that is not a great deal more silly 
superstition than carefully reasoned rejection thereof---even Buddhism comes 
up sadly deficient on that score.

Let me take a breath and see whether I've failed to offend anyone yet.

> My overall impression is that we do a lot of 'clean' talk on Buddhism,
> avoiding harsh criticisms.

That's the most stupid goddamn idiotic observation I've seen expressed here, 
and the competition for stupidity is pretty steep on buddha-l.

> Any of you bumped into a website, or rather, books of politically incorrect
> nature on Buddhism?

No, but I'm all for turning buddha-l back into what it used to be before all 
those wimpy speech-precept preachers started chastising everyone who didn't 
meet their standards of feigned humility. Let her rip, everyone!

Let me say a few ugly things about some Christians, just to get the ball 
rolling

This past weekend my lovely femme et moi celebrated her 60th birthday by going 
to a Benedictine monastery in one of the most beautiful parts of New Mexico. 
We loved the setting. The beautiful autumn colors and the clear waters of the 
Pecos River and the birds singing in the marshlands nested in the valleys 
between majestic mountains restored our souls, as did the Quaker reading 
materials we took along with us. But we also went to all the religious 
services of the Benedictine monks and retreatants. Talk about dead religion! 
It was just plumb awful.

First of all, there was not a single hint of any kind of spontaneity. At every 
one of the six services a day, all they do is read stuff aloud and chant off 
key. Even during "silent" meals they have some guy reading in a perfect 
monotone from an arid history of the Benedictine order. It was almost dry 
enough to evaporate my bowl of soup.

The material they happened to be reading during religious services when we 
were there were all these god-awful bloodthirsty psalms about destroying the 
enemies of Zion, taking over neighboring territories, praying that the women 
of the enemies all become barren and that their babies be dashed to bloody 
pulps on the rocks. All I could think was "Thank God most of these monks are 
half asleep, so they can't take in all these ghastly cries for brutality and 
terrorism that somehow got classified as the word of God."

At one of the services, the Benedictine abbot explained that we were 
celebrating a special mass to the Blessed Virgin Mary to commemorate some key 
battle in the crusades in which the Christians had been victorious over a 
bunch of Muslims. He then said that there would never be peace in the world 
until people learned to adore both Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary. That 
mass was very inspiring indeed! It included a reading from the Gospel of 
Matthew in which Jesus makes it clear that anyone who gets divorced and then 
remarries is committing adultery. (My wife and I left the chapel holding 
hands, celebrating our careers as serial adulterers.)

We were planning to stay for the Sunday mass, but we reached the saturation 
point before then. So on Sunday we escaped the monks and raced to Santa Fe to 
attend the Quaker meeting there. 

At the Quaker meeting, several people stood up to speak of generosity they had 
received from Masons and Shriners. One woman had just returned from a Shriner 
hospital where her child had been treated for three months at no cost to the 
family; she also mentioned that her sister belongs to an evangelical 
megachurch and had  said: "Be careful with those Shriners! They worship the 
deviil, you know!" (I always wondered what they kept under those funny hats.)

One man stood up after the Quaker meeting for worship and said that he found 
it interesting that the entire country is buzzing with outrage that a 
Republican Senator sent some sexually explicit e-mails to minors working for 
the Senate, and what a trivial offense that is when measured against the 
massive abuse of minors being done every day as George W. Bush sends young 
men and women to die in unnecessary wars in which tens of thousands of Iraqi 
women and children are dying. (Naturally, I clucked my tongue disapprovingly 
at this outburst of fixed anti-US, and perhaps even anti-Semitic, 
distortionalization.)

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes