This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Copyright © 2008 Nathan Foster, some rights reserved.
Many of us have adopted some form of religion. To some, it's automatic — we choose the religion of our parents, probably because that's what we're familiar with. This religion can become a subject of hot debate; whether we choose a particular religion over another could become the object of some of the most intense hatred that the human experience has to offer. Some people are defensive about their religion. Some people choose religions easily. I made that mistake. It took a wild experience of mine — in the form of a dream — to really examine what religion I should choose, why I should choose it, and the results of the choice.
Religion can have a great impact on our lives; it changes who we are, how we do things, and how we view our world. It is by no means a simple choice, even if for some people it is an easy one. In my owpinion, it is a choice worth examining thoroughly and in great detail, which is what I plan to do here on the page. Questioning faith may seem a sin to some, but I believe skepticism, when used correctly, can put a solid foundation on your beliefs so they can guide your life in a more meaningful way.
I had been a Buddhist for almost ten years before The Dream. I wasn't a very fervent Buddhist until very near to that dream; sometime in October 2007 I began dedicated daily practice. I had fully decided that I was going to become enlightened in this very lifetime. Then, in November, came The Dream that rocked the foundations of my faith to the very core.
The Dream went as follows: I was meditating, in my bed, trying to keep from falling asleep. Then a beautiful figure appeared to me. The figure was so beautiful that I decided to make a gesture of unity with it; I put my arm around it and pulled it abreast to my left side. Then, the figure kissed me. In the next section of the dream, I was again lying in my bed, when a dog that looked exactly like my dog Pearly came up to me and began licking my hand. But the dog said, "But I'm not actually Pearly." I asked, "Who are you then?" The dog responded, "Satan!" I then tried unsuccessfully to protect myself from the dog; I could not move it off of me. In the next section of the dream, I felt a terrible burning sensation along with a descending sensation. Then I felt the great arm of a sweaty beast on my head and along my back, sticking to my skin as it pulled away in a sickly version of what could be called a "pet." I said to myself aloud, "I've gone to hell and become Nathan's pet!" I actually meant "Satan's pet," and I was whipped for my mistake — whipped so hard that my soul jumped out of its position, forward a ways, in a way which I'm sure would have been, if not for the fact it was only a dream, excruciatingly painful. Then I woke up.
Now when I woke up, I questioned whether the dream was a force of good or evil. But as I was waking up, I heard a voice — or imagined a voice — saying to me, "I was trying to help you." So the dream was a force of good, I reasoned, something designed to help me. Since the beast that pet me was not found in Buddhist texts, I assumed I had gone to Christian hell, and decided to pray for guidance. When I prayed, I assumed a technique that is much like child's make-believe: I asked God the question, and more or less imagined the answer, so I actually received an answer. This may not be the best technique for praying, but it was the only one I had that had any hope of receiving an answer. I asked what I should do, and the answer came to me: "I think you should stick with Tibetan Buddhism." So, there was no problem; I would gain an interest in Christianity, but stick with Tibetan Buddhism as my main spiritual practice.
But as I continued with the practice, I became more and more worried that I might be losing favor with God. Then I heard more voices, shedding tears and saying to me, "we implore you to go back to Christianity." So I lay in my bed, considering; and I decided to pray again. "Should I go back to Christianity?" I asked. The response came, "no more Buddhism." That frightened me as much as anything in my life ever had. I loved Buddhism; I had poured so much into that religion, and, I feel, received so much benefit, and now I might have to give it up. So the stage was set: I now had to choose one or the other. (Although, as you'll see later, this choice was more flexible than I had originally thought.)
Now when I approached my spiritual teacher about the problem, he said "we don't have (a) historical conflict between Buddhism and Christianity." He felt my mind had become more black-and-white than necessary, and that I could pray to both Jesus and Buddha if I wanted. But what he didn't mention was the question of God. The reason I found Buddhism and Christianity to clash concerns the belief in an all powerful God — the creator of all life and the universe — present in Christianity and conspicuously absent in Buddhism. If God and heaven exist, then enlightenment is not the ultimate goal — the goal is heaven, unity with the one God. And so working on enlightenment may be futile at best in the quest for ultimate happiness. But if God didn't exist, and I chose Christianity, I would risk losing out on my ultimate happiness, which could in this case only be found by gaining enlightenment.
So I decided if I'm going to have to choose a religion, I'd better have a pretty solid basis on which to make my choice, since nothing less than my eternal soul was at stake. I decided to found my decision on reason and logic, and to take a very deep and thorough look at both religions. The fruits of this search I will document here on the page. So first off, does God exist?
There are a few contradictions involving the Christian God in particular, which might indicate that the notion of God as purported by the Bible does not exist. According to the Bible, Earth is approximately 6,000 years old; and Man and all creatures were created by God individually. Yet we know through carbon dating and other methods that the Earth is far older, and the universe is even older than that. We also know through the theory of Darwinism that creatures take millions of years to evolve, and so it is impossible for the diversity of creatures we see today to have evolved so quickly since the time of the great flood and Noah's ark.
These contradictions could be cleared up by making a couple of assumptions: perhaps, when God created the world, he decided to integrate all living beings into the framework of genetics so as they appear to have originated from each other. It is also possible that God worked extra hard to create diversity, in this same genetically integrating manner, after the flood. Therefore these contradictions ultimately carry little weight.
Another way of looking to see if God exists is by observing reality. I decided to look deeply into the nature of reality, and see if I could find any evidence of God, the eternal creator of all that is. When looking into matter, no matter how deeply I looked, I could find no such evidence. This does not, to be sure, prove that God absolutely does not exist; it only shows that if God created the universe, he left no clear mark on it to prove that he did. Because of this, everything seems to be quite set apart from God and provides no evidence for or against his existence. If God loves us so much and wants us to return to him, why did he not leave any form of direct contact with God behind, so we as his children can see him and love him and return to him?
But this argument is cleared up by the assumption that God didn't want to force people to believe in him. That is, it might be argued that if there were any evidence that God exists, one might find it impossible to deny his existence, thus being forced into such a belief. Still, this leaves the predicament that there is no evidence of God's existence in the world. If there is no evidence that he exists, is it not risky to stake the future of one's eternal soul on the assumption that he does? Also, what progress is to be made in returning to Him if no clear pathway to him is evidenced? One might say, "the way to return to God is through prayer and attending church." But this does not lead to a direct experience with God outside of the subjective area of one's own mind. Therefore, there is no way an objective experience of God can come about unless some true evidence of His existence is procured. And in fact, I believe no objective experience of God has been experienced.
Some evidence supporting this assertion comes from my observation that the only times I thought I might have seen or talked to God was when I had already formed a projection of him in my own mind. This to me signifies that God could be more a projection of mind than anything else. If we only see God when we want to, and there is no evidence of his external existence, why not assume He is part of the mind? However, this assertion, while possibly valid, leaves us little to go on regarding the postmortem status of our eternal soul, if we have one.
Here's another contradiction, assuming God exists. God is supposed to be good — perhaps the ultimate good. But he created Lucifer, and the world including all its evils. How can evil come from ultimate good? Perhaps it might be some sort of accident that evil exists. But if this is true, then God cannot be all-powerful, because the nature of an accident implies that something happened which God did not intend — in other words, some force acted outside of God's control. I see no immediate way to clear up this paradox, except perhaps to assert that God's power is relative; that is, He has power over the world, but the world also has power over itself. In this model, God and the world exist separately, and influence each other to some degree. This is evidenced by the book of Genesis: "The Lord saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain" (Genesis 6:5-6). If the Lord can be grieved, he must be somehow affected by the world. The Lord also changes his mind: "Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it. The Lord smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: 'Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done'" (Genesis 8:20-21).
Thus Christians have little reason to despair; all the factual contradictions, as well as the logical ones, can be easily cleared up by making a few assumptions. What we're left with is this: God, if he exists, is thoroughly detached from the world, leaving behind no evidence of his existence; and so the experience of him is thoroughly subjective.
This does pretty much nothing to clear up my conundrum regarding the choice between Christianity and Buddhism. I have absolutely no evidence to show whether or not I will go to hell if I choose Buddhism, although if I choose Christianity, I may not reach enlightenment, and thus risk returning to the sometimes unbearable suffering which Buddhism purports to be a reality of existence. Thus I'm forced to weigh an unsubstantiated risk against another unsubstantiated risk. And I'm forced to make this decision based on theories and conjectures — not evidence. But there is one thing we haven't investigated yet: the question of death and the eternal soul. After all, if the soul can be shown not to exist, I have no reason to be concerned.
To determine whether we have a soul, let's first examine what we are. It's clear to me that the most scientifically reasonable basis of who we are resides in the molecules of our body. Clearly, molecules have come into a specific organization that gives rise to consciousness. The most obvious observable quality of this construction is consciousness itself — as Descartes discovered in his Meditations on First Philosophy, the single observation that is the most resilient to skepticism is the fact that the "I" exists. The question is, in what manner does the "I" exist? Is it eternal, or does it disappear with the body?
If the "I" disappears with the body, it seems clear to me that it would be produced solely by the molecules which make up the body, and not imputed in any way upon these molecules. The "soul" in this case is some quality that arises given the specific organization of molecules, much like light coming from a computer monitor is caused by the specific organization of the wires and liquid crystal (assuming, of course, that the monitor is a liquid crystal display.) The problem with this analogy is that computer monitors, as far as we can tell, do not have I-am-ness. A computer monitor cannot wake up and tell you how it is feeling that day. Human beings can do this, and it is clear from my experience that this I-am-ness is continuous throughout life.
Now here's why I believe in the soul. A person, as I've already stated, has I-am-ness at least from birth until death. This I-am-ness is continuous. It even survives in continuity given conditions where the I-am-ness is not present; for example, you are who you are before and after losing consciousness either when you go to sleep or if you've taken anesthetics and so on. If consciousness, if me-ness, survives even conditions when the molecules of the body do not give rise to it, then it must survive death, since death is nothing more or less than another set of conditions where the molecules of the body do not give rise to me-ness — like passing out or going to sleep.
Now the Buddhist philosophy is that this I-am-ness is beginningless and endless — it has imputed itself on countless physical organizations of molecules since time without beginning. The Christian philosophy has it that this I-am-ness came from God and will return to God in heaven, or descend to hell. Both philosophies purport that I-am-ness is indestructible, and I see no reason to believe this is not the case.1
Now here is the crux this investigation: which religion should one choose, given all the available reasoning?
Actually, I think there is a compromise to be reached. The Bible tells us not to make idols of the Lord. It also tells us that when his true name is known, it will mean the end of the world. The Bible also tells us that if we look upon God's face, we shall die. I believe this is because you aren't meant to understand God, but instead, as the Bible also tells us, to imitate him. So my quest heretofore is completely wrongheaded — I should not have been focusing on God, but rather on Jesus. Jesus is the mediator; he gives us the truth about God in a way that we don't destroy ourselves. After all, this is the core of what my spiritual teacher said to me; he told me to think of Jesus as an incarnation of Buddha. So the two religions are really not at odds at all, they just look at different aspects of reality. God represents a paradox of the universe; that it is factually unknowable, yet to the wise, completely knowable. He is also a living being; and I believe this, because I think conscious thought created the universe.
But I cannot give the answers, I can only seek the truth, to the extent that it can be sought, and give the answers I feel are appropriate. So will I be eternally damned? My wisdom seems to fluctuate between yes and no, and this is a sign that I am still spiritually undeveloped. So I will leave the question hanging, and for anyone reading, I hope I have been a vessel for spiritual understanding.
Upon further studying Buddhism, I have come to the knowledge that Buddhism actually denies this view that "I-am-ness" is indestructible, per se. Buddhism purports reconditioning, rebirth. It purports the existence of mind-streams. Yet, this mind-stream is dharma, and "all dhammas (dharmas) are without self" (Dharmapada, Chapter 20 verse 7). One may get the false impression by reading my words (admittedly a clumsy interpretation) that there is a permanent, everlasting self that transmigrates from birth to birth. According to Buddhism, this is not the case. Nothing is permanent. Nothing exists separately. All existence is conditioned. And conditioned existence gives rise to conditioned existence, from beginningless time to endless future; this is why Buddhism teaches reincarnation.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Copyright © 2008 Nathan Foster, some rights reserved.