1998: Back when I considered Zen Buddhism - Part 4 - End of Series
In which Teófilo brings this part of his story to a close.
Looking down into the atheism void
I didn't become an atheist. But I must say that becoming an atheist today is easier than becoming a Christian believer. That's because the prospective atheist enjoys the support of academic elites. They also enjoy the support of the media and of various talking heads.
Embracing atheism involves the conscious choice to deny the existence of God. Atheists say "of every god" but they mean the God of monotheists. They mean the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They mean the God revealed in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. He is the God they deny the most due to His moral demands.
Post-Modern Psychologists reinforce the atheistic rejection of moral codes based upon God. What was once deviancy and perversity in people psychologists now disregard as amoral mental states.
Atheists assert that only the mass of society can judge the moral permissibility of what was seen before as deviant and unacceptable. This, society does according to its own arbitrary definitions of antisocial acts. Convinced, militant atheists support anything that help undermines the traditional moral order.
That believers' behaviors gravitate against God's moral codes makes the denial easy too. Nothing works better to discredit God than an avowed believer’s depravity.
"No God, no devil, no problem!" - is a popular atheistic slogan. The fact that God is beyond empirical proof is also helpful to atheists. "Where's the proof!" - they ask. No answer will suffice as they move the goalposts of proof away each time. Hence, dialectical engagements between believers and militant atheists are useless. As atheists will accept nothing but empirical evidence, they hold the rhetorical advantage.
Once a seeker begins to play in the atheist's ballpark, the God-denial game becomes easy to win in their favor.
Thank God this didn't happen to me.
Love pulled me back
At the risk of sounding sentimental, I'll say that love pulled me back from the abyss of atheism. At the time I thought that my life's arc would've been senseless had I embraced atheism. I mean love in all its dimensions of agape, philos, and eros.
My life up to that moment would've been nonsense had I embraced atheism. The love of my Mamá Ana, my first and second conversions, standing up to Mom's many hates, and my love for Mercie—none of it would have meant anything. Since we’d defined our conjugal love in terms of God himself being Love, had I denied God I would’ve undermined our marriage’s very foundation.
Moreover, in loving and being loved I’d come to understand I had a soul. Had I denied the transcendent nature love I would have lost my being for others.
I realized that love goes beyond everything. Reducing it to a bundle of neurons firing in our brains takes away our humanity. I refuse to confine love into our encephalic meat computer.
I concede this is, in part, a subjective, aesthetic stance. What that means is that I find ugly the reduction of love to matter, to interacting chemicals in one’s head. But what is objective about the self-giving nature of love is its effects on others.
People who open themselves to another’s love experience a positive change. They earn in turn an increase in their own capacity to love. The giving and receiving multiplies the effect. We become a finite illustration of what the Triune God is in his eternal nature.
The ultimate transcendent love must be God himself (cfr. 1 John 4:8). If love had pulled me back from the abyss, it only meant that the God who is Love did so himself.
After overcoming the vertigo and the urge to jump and being pulled back by God, I stepped away from the abyss of atheism.
The fork on the road: Buddhism vs. Theism
Atheism and its accompanying materialism don't serve Buddhism well. Recall that its cosmology and its promised, ultimate state of bliss are beyond matter. Empirical positivism are useless in these realms.
Many Western Buddhists believe they've created a "Buddhism without beliefs." Yet, this robs Buddhism from its promise of Ultimate Reality, its “end game.” However, Buddhists living in a normative tradition shrug before the secularizing claim. They see this as unimportant. That’s because a future rebirth will clarify Buddhism for the skeptics. They'll land in a better position to try again and achieve enlightenment.
Thus, I found myself back facing the fork on the road. Should I "go Buddhist" or remain a theist of some sort?
Since love had pulled me back, and love was God, it followed I wasn't cut to be a Buddhist. Recall that ego lies at the center of Judaeo-Christian revelation: I Am that I Am (cfr. Exodus 3:14). A succinct personal consciousness endowed with infinite intellect and will created everything. Creation itself is a reality outside of the Creator, not confounded within Him. This creation God endowed with an existence separate from Himself. He also made it good, not a mere illusion. He also made human beings good, separate from Himself and from each other (cfr. Genesis 1:1-27). Only love could move one to the other, this love being God Himself.
God is a loser in Buddhism
Buddhist teaching doesn't deny the existence of a deity in the Judaeo-Christian mould. But it calls Him ignorant and an impostor:
"...A third time, the monk said to the Great Brahma, 'Friend, I didn't ask you if you were Brahma, the Great Brahma, the Conqueror, the Unconquered, the All-Seeing, All-Powerful, the Sovereign Lord, the Maker, Creator, Chief, Appointer and Ruler, Father of All That Have Been and Shall Be. I asked you where these four great elements — the earth property, the liquid property, the fire property, and the wind property — cease without remainder.'
"Then the Great Brahma, taking the monk by the arm and leading him off to one side, said to him, 'These gods of the retinue of Brahma believe, "There is nothing that the Great Brahma does not know. There is nothing that the Great Brahma does not see. There is nothing of which the Great Brahma is unaware. There is nothing that the Great Brahma has not realized." That is why I did not say in their presence that I, too, don't know where the four great elements... cease without remainder. So you have acted wrongly, acted incorrectly, in bypassing the Blessed One in search of an answer to this question elsewhere. Go right back to the Blessed One and, on arrival, ask him this question. However he answers it, you should take it to heart' (Kevatta (Kevaddha) Sutta)
In the sutta or teaching above, a monk queries the Hindu deities about the ultimate end of the elements - earth, wind, water, and fire. The deities are unable to answer the question, referring the questioner to the "Great Brahma” or Supreme Deity. “Brahma” is the closest notion Hinduism has to a single, supreme deity.
When the monk engages Brahma, the Supreme Deity evades the question three times by referring to his own titles. Note how these titles reminds us a lot of God's own attributes: Conqueror, the Unconquered, the All-Seeing, All-Powerful, the Sovereign Lord, the Maker, Creator, Chief, Appointer and Ruler, Father of All That Have Been and Shall Be. But, once out of the hearing of the other devas, the Great Brahma concedes he knows not the answer. The supreme deity chides the monk for not having asked the question from the Buddha in the first place. Only the Buddha could answer the monk's questions. The Great Brahma then sent the monk away.
The Great Brahma is thus a name of derision, because he's weak and ignorant in reality. He lives attached to his good name and illusory attributes. His mendacity belies the grandiosity of his self-styled titles. In fact, he tells the inquirer that the Buddha surpasses the Great Brahma himself. He who claims to be the ...Conqueror, the Unconquered, the All-Seeing, All-Powerful, the Sovereign Lord, the Maker, Creator, Chief, Appointer and Ruler, Father of All That Have Been and Shall Be is in fact a lesser being than the Buddha.
And what about the role of love in Buddhism? Buddha's metta isn't God's agape. Agape love is foreign to Buddhist cosmology.
It was clear I had to make a decision. I had to make my mind before the fork in the road. Intuition - grace? - was telling me what to do. but I remained paralyzed.
Two things would get me moving. One was Mercie, and the other would be someone's death before I knew he had died. Let me tell you how I got there.