[Buddha-l] Confession

[Richard P. Hayes]

Erik Hoogcarspel wrote about Stephen Batchelor:
\begin{quote}
I'm sure that Stephen is a nice guy and a good friend, but I think he's
a lousy philosopher. After ignoring the absurdity of karma and
reincarnation for many years, he finally decided to come clean with
them. Actually his confession should be not about his lack of belief but
about his faintheartedness during all that time. The word 'confession'
indicates that Stephen still has not freed himself of Christian biases
and thinks he has been naughty, while among philosophers telling others
about your thoughts is considered a gift
\end{quote}

It's true that Stephen is a gentle and compassionate person. He would
not mind being found deficient as a philosopher, since he readily
acknowledges that he is not a philosopher at all. He sees himself as
(in his own words) "a theologian without the theos." The biggest
influences on his thinking and his way of writing have been Augustine
of Hippo, Paul Tillich, Śāntideva and Kusan Sunim.

Bathcelor does not say he has been influenced by David Hume, but I can
feel the ghost of the character named Philo in Hume's Dialogues
Concerning Natural Religion lurking near Stephen's keyboard. Philo,
you'll recall, said that since all the religions have a certain amount
of internal consistency but not a single one of them can withstand the
rigors of an intellectually honest inquiry, the only reasonable thing
to do is to suspend judgment on most religious matters. Batchelor has
come to feel that the Buddhist doctrines of karma and rebirth do not
stand up to critical inquiry, but that Buddhism is nevertheless of
more value than anything else he knows about in giving good advice to
carefully thinking people.

Batchelor explains that he is not using the word "confession" as an
admission of sin and a request for forgiveness, but rather in the
sense of a statement of convictions. He explains that he calls his
latest book "Confession of a Buddhist atheist" and not "confessions"
precisely because he is stating his convictions as a Buddhist and not
because he is revealing lurid details about his life. His confession
is not to be confused with what one reads in magazines about Hollywood
falling stars or what a priest hears in a claustrophobic box from a
sweating teenager.

I personally don't find it helpful to lump karma and rebirth together
and to dismiss both of them as Stephen Batchelor does. Rebirth seems
completely untenable to me, because I'm a materialist. Rebirth just
doesn't fit in with my other prejudices, and since my prejudices have
not yet given me any reason to abandon them in favor of other
prejudices, I see no need to welcome dogmas that do not play nicely
with my other convictions.

Karma, however, is another matter. That seems to me to be nothing but
a shorthand way of acknowledging that everything one does has
consequences for future sentient beings. Whether my present stupidity
brings pain to me or to someone else makes no difference at all to me;
all that matters is that it brings pain to someone and therefore
should somehow be discarded. Interestingly enough, I have read that
that is precisely what Batchelor says. So he does not seem to deny the
referent of the word "karma," but he does not much like using the word
itself. That, it seems to me, is purely a matter of taste in which
glossary one feels most comfortable using. And matters of vocabularic
taste, I think, are perfectly harmless.

Richard Hayes