Church of the Churchless

Truth is religion's weakness, no matter what Ross Douthat says in "Believe"

I've finished reading Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. He failed to make his case with me, because I'm still not religious.

Not surprisingly, there were few discussions of truth in the book. This is religion's glaring weakness, no matter what faith appeals to you. The key question, how do we know it is true?, can't be answered persuasively by any religion, notably including Christianity (Douthat is proudly Catholic).

So Douthat recommends what he calls "true'ish" belief. Basically this means that if you believe in some sort of divinity inhabiting some sort of supernatural realm, you're closer to the truth about reality than if you're a godless materialist like me.

He writes:

Now suppose that, in fact, the truest religion in the world is not Protestant Christianity but Sunni Islam. Obviously the optimal scenario for you would have been to discover this fact and become a Muslim... So are you worse off, in your relationship to Islam's great truth, as a practicing Christian than a religiously agnostic homeless agnostic?

Surely not. As a Methodist you are arguably worshipping the same God as an observant Muslim, through the mediation of a figure, Jesus, who is revered in Islam as a great prophet, following a moral code that has a great deal in common with Islamic morality, and expecting a second coming that mirrors the hope many Muslims place in the coming of the messianic Mahdi.

They have true belief, but you have at least true-ish belief; you have taken a large step toward the fullness of truth, even if you aren't all the way to where you ought to be. 

Now suppose that not Islam but Buddhism, a different and more distant faith, is actually the truest path.  As a Methodist you have less in common with an observant Buddhist than you do with a pious Muslim -- but still more in common, most likely, than you would if you practiced no faith at all.

Good try. But the key word in the passage above is right at the beginning, "Now suppose...". We have to suppose that some religion is the truest in the world because there's no demonstrable evidence that any religion is true. 

Douthat stains throughout his book, and especially in the final chapters, to make a case for Christianity being the truest religion. He doesn't succeed in this -- unless you're already a devout Christian -- because all his signs of Christian truth are indirect, such as the popularity of Christianity both soon after the supposed life and death of Christ and in today's world.

Belief in a flat earth also used to be highly popular, along with the belief that the Sun revolves around a stationary Earth. Truth isn't a matter of popularity but of solid evidence. 

In his final chapter, where Douthat explains why he's a Christian, he examines the question of truth more directly, though still not persuasively. 

But isn't all this talking around an essential question, which is whether I think the tradition I've ended up practicing is actually true? Not just true enough, not just pointing toward God, not just generally accurate in its description of the nature of God or the cosmos, but true in its most important claims about reality?

Douthat says that this includes: monotheism, a diversity of supernatural beings, sacramental grace, the goodness of creation, Jesus being born by a virgin, Jesus dying on a cross and rising again on the third day.

He then raises what he considers the strongest empirical challenge to his beliefs: "the tension we have regarding spiritual experience and the specifics of any single faith tradition." Douthat offers mystical experiences as an example of this.

It's also clearly the case that the kinds of mystical experiences that people expect somehow shape the experiences they have. As noted previously, there are more reports of past lives being recalled in countries with a strong belief in reincarnation, more encounters with Krishna in India and Jesus in Indiana, more encounters with ghosts in cultures that believe strongly in ancestral spirits (as in Japan after the tsunami), and so on. And then there are various encounters, like what we see with the UFO phenomenon, that don't necessarily fit with any theology at all.

So how does Douthat explain why people who believe in different religions have mystical experiences that fit with their beliefs? Seemingly if there was an objective truth sitting out there in some supernatural realm, mystical experiences would be much more similar than they actually are.

His response is weak. First he says that some Christian writers consider that non-Christian mystical experiences constitute a deception, a demonic attempt to drive people away from Christian orthodoxy. Then Douthat says:

I do think specific spiritual snares exist, but as ever I am skeptical that God would allow pervasive deception of the kind that would have to be invoked if all non-Christian mystical encounters were traps or misdirections. 

Instead, I think the orthodox Christian (or any believer in the specific truth of a particular religion) has to assume both that the divine meets us where we are, even using the imagery and symbolism of other faiths, and also that there is a little more mystery to the supernatural realm than even a theological system founded on divine revelation can completely capture.

Probably this makes sense to some people. It doesn't to me. Douthat just sounds like someone who desperately wants to make a strong case for religious belief in the absence of strong evidence that any religion, including his own, is objectively true. 

His book is a valiant effort to do this, but in the end, it fails. Which to me demonstrates the weakness of religion and the strength of science, along with other approaches to learning the truth about reality that rely on facts, reason, and a willingness to admit that a hypothesis could be wrong.

"Brainwashing" ignores the fact that everything alters the mind

I'm old enough to remember when brainwashing was a more commonly used word than it is now. An article by Nikhil Krishnan in the April 7 issue of The New Yorker, "It's Always the Other Side That's Been Brainwashed," reminded me of this.

During the Korean War, American prisoners of war were subjected to brainwashing by Chinese authorities in a sometimes successful attempt to make the prisoners believe that the values of their country were less desirable than communism. 

In 1962, my freshman year in high school, a fictional movie about this was released, The Manchurian Candidate. 

The plot centers on Korean War veteran Raymond Shaw, part of a prominent political family. Shaw is brainwashed by communists after his Army platoon is captured. He returns to civilian life in the United States, where he becomes an unwitting assassin in an international communist conspiracy. The group, which includes representatives of the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union, plans to assassinate the presidential nominee of an American political party, with the death leading to the overthrow of the U.S. government.

That's a dramatic, though rather unlikely in reality, example of brainwashing. But the article does a good job of explaining why this term is difficult to clearly define, since mind control is ubiquitous, and often we don't realize how our mind is being shaped by outside forces.

There was outrage when it was revealed that Facebook researchers were tinkering with users’ emotions—making tiny tweaks to their feeds in what Lemov calls “massive-scale emotional engineering.”

But she notes that the backlash didn’t stop the researchers from running these experiments; it just made them more reticent about their results. One researcher on the project said that the response amounted to people thinking, “You can’t mess with my emotions. It’s like messing with me. It’s mind control.”

And, in a sense, it is mind control. But that phrase, much like “brainwashing,” runs into a tricky question: Isn’t everything that shapes our thoughts, desires, or feelings a form of mind control?

Lurking behind our unease is a fantasy of total, unshackled cognitive freedom. Any deviation from that ideal gets labelled as manipulation. If we cling to that standard, then, sure, we’re all brainwashed. But the standard is an absurdity. It’s obvious that our minds are shaped by the world we live in, including what others say. This isn’t what we have in mind when we talk about mind control.

Instead, Krishnan argues that what we mean by being free of brainwashing is not to be subject to the will of another. Yet here too, there is a continuum of mind control, not a sharp divide between brainwashing and freely chosen beliefs.

There’s another irony here. Much of what Wills came to believe when he lived in China—that socialism is superior to capitalism, that the United States is an imperialist power run by a class of kleptocratic oligarchs—is shared by many young people today who were subjected to nothing more traumatic than a typical liberal-arts education. Their professors would, of course, balk at the implication that they’ve brainwashed their students, but that’s exactly what their critics in the conservative media have long been accusing them of.

It’s a familiar pattern in our polarized age. The right accuses the left of using the institutions it dominates—the federal bureaucracy, nonprofits, universities, Hollywood, and “legacy” media—to brainwash the public. The left, in turn, levels the same charge against the right, pointing to talk radio, partisan television networks, and manosphere podcasts. (Each side condemns the other’s social-media activity.) Naturally, no one admits to doing what they denounce in their opponents. But that’s to be expected: persuasion is what we do; brainwashing is what they do.

The same implies in the realm of religious belief versus atheism, the absence of such belief.

Believers in God decry the power of secular humanism to turn people, including children educated in godless schools, away from the righteous path of traditional religion. Meanwhile, atheists see religiosity imposed on society through lots of means, including the slogan In God We Trust on our money and national holidays, Easter and Christmas, being celebrations of the dominant religion, Christianity.

I found the end of Krishnan's article to be a wise perspective on the complexity of belief. While I'm prone to being judgmental toward people who don't share my political or religious views (progressive and atheist), in my more reasonable moments I see them as having as little choice in their beliefs as I have in mine. Seemingly, we're all trying to do the right thing, even though some are better at this than others. It's just damn hard to take this apparent fact to heart.

Krishnan writes:

Although beliefs can be badges—tribal markers chosen less for their empirical accuracy than for what they signal about us—plenty of people do buy into outlandish factual views. It’s not a cope, or a flex; it’s what they take to be reality. How about them?

There’s a well-meaning, if patronizing, ethical impulse behind our propensity to blame brainwashing for others’ convictions, whether they’re expressions of allegiance, hard factual commitments, or something in between. Labelling people as brainwashed casts them as one of the damned—lost souls whom we, as saviors, must redeem. Yet it might be our own savior complexes that we need to shed.

The philosopher Karl Popper, writing in 1960, suggested that the temptation to attribute misguided beliefs to sinister manipulation came from a mistaken assumption: that “truth is manifest.” If the truth were manifest, it would follow that the failure to grasp it must reflect “the work of powers conspiring to keep us in ignorance, to poison our minds by filling them with falsehood.”

But, even when confronted with a world of people holding views we find baffling, why assume that they’re victims of a grand conspiracy—or victims at all? Perhaps truth isn’t so obvious. Uncovering it demands effort and a bit of luck.

Other people will take different things to be true because their paths—owing to differences in diligence or chance—diverged from ours. That conspiracy-minded cousin isn’t necessarily a casualty of mind control; he may simply have wandered down intellectual rabbit holes where evidence matters less than belonging.

To depict him as a victim of manipulation grants him an unearned absolution. The most disturbing possibility isn’t that millions have been brainwashed. It’s that they haven’t.

"The White Lotus" show raises question about Buddhist truth

First, unrelated to the primary subject of this post I wanted to mention a You Tube channel, No Nonsense Spirituality, that someone recently pointed out to me via an email, as he liked this woman's style. It's worth a look, based on my quick browsing of some videos. Here's what's said about a Welcome video:

Welcome to No-Nonsense Spirituality! If you're feeling lost in a world filled with competing beliefs and overwhelming choices, you’re not alone. In this video, Brit Hartley, an atheist spiritual director with advanced theological training, guides you through the process of deconstructing your beliefs about God, faith, and meaning. You’ll discover practical tools from the science of well-being and wisdom traditions that can help you create a life worth living, even in the face of uncertainty and nihilism. Here, you don't need to subscribe to any faith or dogma—just an open mind and a desire for authenticity. Join Brit every Monday as you explore how to navigate the challenges of life without the need for spiritual crutches, empowering you to rise above the harsh truths of reality.

Now, on to a discussion of what the third season of HBO's The White Lotus, which is set in Thailand, has to say about Buddhist truth. In short, not much. I say this because there isn't a single Buddhist truth, just as there isn't a single Christian truth, or a single truth about any other religion, mystical pursuit, or spiritual path.

In the appendix to his book, Why Buddhism is True, Robert Wright says:

While I was writing this book, I didn't have in mind the title Why Buddhism is True. But after I finished writing it I realized that the book did amount to an argument for the validity of what I consider the core ideas of Buddhism -- or, at least, the core ideas of the "naturalistic" side of Buddhism, the side that "Western" Buddhism is mainly concerned with.

Today New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote an opinion piece, "How the 'White Lotus' ran aground." Douthat is a devoted Christian who wrote a book that I've criticized in several posts, Believe: Why Everybody Should Be Religious. So it isn't surprising that I found his opinion piece annoying.

For one thing, my wife and I heartily enjoyed the third season of The White Lotus, considering it the best, while Douthat started off his piece with:

Crashing waves and flying spray have been the most consistent visual motifs in Mike White’s HBO hit “The White Lotus,” which just wrapped up its third (and by general agreement, weakest) season with a bloody denouement at the Thailand outpost of its titular resort.

Well, the Rotten Tomatoes site says that Season 1 got 90% positive critic reviews, while Season 2 got 94% and Season 3 86%. So calling Season 3 weakest, by general agreement, is a bit of a stretch. Leaving that aside, Douthat doesn't like the Buddhist philosophy in Season 3.

And midway through the season we received a direct interpretation of what that watery imagery is supposed to represent from the lips of Luang Por Teera, a Buddhist monk and an ajaan, or teacher, with whom the daughter of one of the wealthy hotel-going families hopes to study.

Queried by the young woman’s father, Tim Ratliff, a North Carolina businessman who is contemplating suicide — indeed, murder-suicide — after discovering that he may be ruined and even headed to prison, about what awaits us after death, the monk answers: “When you are born you are like a single drop of water, flying upward, separated from the one giant consciousness. You get older, you descend back down, you die, you land back into the water, become one with the ocean again. No more separated, no more suffering. One consciousness. Death is a happy return, like coming home.”

When I heard the Buddhist teacher say this in one of the final episodes, it sounded fine to me. After all, this is a freaking HBO show, not a Buddhist scripture. I don't expect realism from a show designed to entertain, not to inform.

However, Douthat wants people to believe in the traditional teachings of one of the major world religions, not some watered-down version. So he doesn't like that the Buddhist monk in The White Lotus talked about merging with one consciousness after death, while traditional Buddhism speaks of karma causing people to be reborn in some form depending on one's mixture of virtues and vices.

Douthat cites an article by Matthew Gindin, who used to be a Buddhist monastic, called "The Buddha in 'The White Lotus." Gindin makes some valid points about the show not being in line with traditional Theravada Buddhist teachings, but again, this is entertainment, not a class in Buddhist orthodoxy. And Gindin ends his piece with a fairly positive view of The White Lotus.

If I knew nothing about Buddhism watching The White Lotus, I would come away with the idea that it is a peaceful religion that promotes stilling the mind, non-violence, and acceptance of life as it is, and whose meditation teachings are commensurate with the pop-mindfulness stuff one can hear in any yoga class or meditation app. I would also believe that it promotes spirit above form, and detachment from self, and that it promises that all beings come from one universal consciousness to which they will return at death in a peaceful homecoming. Not the worst presentation of Theravada Buddhism, to be sure, but far from a wholly accurate one. 

When it comes to the plot, however, the show delivers Buddhist insights in spades, serving up hefty doses of teaching about the perils of violence, along with the poisonous nature of greed, hatred, and delusion and the chaotic consequences of killing, stealing, lying, unethical sex, and intoxicants. The show might not be true to Thai Buddhism, but it’s true to life. 

Good enough for me. And good enough for Robert Wright, the author of Why Buddhism is True.

The point is that when we speak casually of a scientific theory being "true," what we mean, strictly speaking, is that it has substantial corroborating evidence in its favor and has not yet encountered firm evidence that is incompatible with it. That's what the title of this book means in referring to core Buddhist ideas as "true."

...But I certainly think the core of Buddhism's assessment of the human condition -- its basic view of why people suffer and why they make other people suffer and, more broadly, its conception of certain basic aspects of how the mind works and of how we can change how our minds work -- warrants enough confidence to get the label that the title of this book gives it.

Wright then lists twelve Buddhist truths. None of them involve karma or rebirth.

This is all there is, says David Chapman. But what is, is extraordinary.

David Chapman is a really interesting guy. I've followed his writings on Buddhism, artificial intelligence, and other subjects for quite a few years. Meaningness is his main web site, and well worth a look. Chapman describes his form of Buddhism this way:

I am, somewhat reluctantly, a Buddhist. Of an odd sort: “the opposite of whatever you’d expect” comes close. That sort of Buddhism shares central themes with Meaningness. I explain it elsewhere:

• • A window has recently opened for Buddhist innovations that can address new cultural, social, and personal problems. Vividness explores possible futures, based on Buddhism’s history and its interactions with the modern–and postmodern—world.

  • Buddhism for Vampires is a playful, yet deadly serious, look at the dark side of Buddhism. We are all monsters, but we can embrace our monstrosity while retaining our human nobility. We can allow each to transform the other, so we become cheerful, kind, useful monsters who are also overpowering, unpredictable, and dangerous heroes.

"About David Chapman" on the Meaningness home page shows his impressive background.

I did a PhD in artificial intelligence at MIT. My undergraduate degree was in math. I’ve also studied cognitive science, biochemistry, Old English and Ancient Greek literature. None of that qualifies me to write Meaningness, but it may explain a certain STEM-ish orientation, decorated with occasional literary jokes. The closest thing I’ve written to an autobiography explains how I became a fictional character in Ken Wilber’s philosophical novel about artificial intelligence.

I have founded, managed, grown, and sold a successful biotech informatics company. That may explain a certain practical orientation, and lack of interest in philosophical theories that depend on the world being very unlike the way it appears.

That last comment helps explain the essay from Chapman that appeared in my email inbox a few days ago. I liked it a lot, so have copied it in below. Chapman has a substack with the usual subscription levels, free versus paid. I'm on the free level currently, but am considering going to paid.

Here's David Chapman's essay about finding another option to (1) considering this isn't the real world, and (2) considering that this real world is meaningless and ordinary. Chapman argues that this world actually is extraordinary. The essay is a transcript of a video he made, which explains how it starts out.

This is it!

We’re actually here. I’m here in this room you can see behind me maybe, if you’re watching, not listening. You can hear my voice. I’m in a place. I’m in this world.

You’re in a place. You’re in a room, you’re out walking, you’re driving in a car, and you can see what place you’re in. We are in the actual world.

There are people of a religious or philosophical bent, they say, no, this isn’t the real world. We’re not really here. Everything we see is an illusion. Or, this is a garbage world. We’re stuck here, but the real world is somewhere else. It is quite different and it is much better.

The “real world” might be somewhat unimaginable. We can have some fantasies about it, but what we do know, they say, is that it is perfect!

This is a vision that is attractive when it seems like this world is no damn good. The message that this is a garbage world then becomes really attractive, and we want a way of escape to some other, better world.

So this is an idea that is just absolutely part of our basic way of being, and we’re imaginatively living in some fantasy land a lot of the time. We’re not actually willing to admit that we are here.

The only reason for thinking that there might be some better world is the sense that life couldn’t be so unfair that we’re stuck here in a world that is completely meaningless, worthless. It is dust and ashes. It’s garbage.

The idea that there is some other better world is obviously false. And so there’s a way of reacting to that, which is to say, yeah, we have to face up to the fact that this is all there is. “Is this all there is? Yeah. This is all there is. So I guess we have to make the best of it.”

This leads to a kind of brutal materialism, in which we imagine, okay, the world is actually meaningless, but we evolved to like some things and dislike some other things. And so, we haven’t actually got any choice here. All we can do is try to get as much of the stuff we like as possible, and accumulate it and consume it. And try to get rid of as much of the bad stuff. This isn’t even hedonism. I mean, hedonism would be better than this! This is a grind. Hedonism is a kind of carefree enjoyment of sensory pleasure where you can get it. This kind of materialistic outlook is actually joyless.

So this fantasy that there’s a better world leads to the fantasy that this world is meaningless and ordinary; and that all that is possible is engaging with it in an ordinary way. It’s like: Birth, school, work, death! Birth, school, work, death! Birth, school, work, death! Is that all there is? “Yeah, that’s all there is,” this materialist view says.

And that’s completely wrong. Because the world isn’t ordinary. The world is absolutely extraordinary. The actual world, not this imaginary fantasy world. The actual world is incredible. It is just amazingly beautiful. If you look around wherever you are. There’s colors, there’s shapes, there’s things happening.

There’s plants growing here, and there’s these books that are such incredible colors! And we don’t want to see that, because the extraordinariness is threatening. It could be overwhelming. The beauty is overwhelming. The possibility of joy is overwhelming because it can be taken away at any moment.

And the horror, the amount of absolute terror and suffering that is going on in the world, we just don’t want to deal with any of that. It’s just too much. And so we unsee it. And we know yes, flowers are beautiful. Okay, yes, everybody knows that. And yes, you can look at flowers and they’re nice.

And we also know there’s horrific wars going on with people being bombed and mutilated and dying in the street and living in absolute terror. And that’s somewhere else. “Let’s be in the ordinary world because the extraordinary world is too much to deal with.” So we narrow our scope of vision to what’s immediately on our plate...

Taxes are due tomorrow, we’d better stick to taxes. There’s nothing more ordinary than taxes, let’s face it. “And that’s life.”

So we shut out the actual world and live in a different fantasy world, not the fantasy world of the perfected philosophical utopia, or religious enlightenment or something. We live in the fantasy world of ordinariness. It is possible to start poking holes in the cloak of unseeing we put in front of the world, and to let a little light in, so that suddenly the intense red and blue of these books shows up as something remarkable and not just, “oh yes, that’s a book.”

Then we don’t have to live in the ordinary world. We can live in the actual world, which is extraordinary.

In the comments on this video and essay, I noticed a reply from Chapman to someone's comment that many people who are materialists find joy in life. Chapman responded that he was using materialism in the sense of materialistic, not as believing that matter is the sole reality.

Ah, I think the ambiguity of the word "materialism" may cause a misunderstanding here. (This is a problem with the "radio sermonette" format: there isn't time to be careful about clarifying terms to avoid possible misinterpretations.)

Here I meant "materialism" in the sense of "he's so materialistic." It's the stance that only the sorts of purposes we share with other apes are meaningful: safety, sex, power, status, territory, physical pleasures.

The other meaning is the metaphysical claim that matter is the only thing that exists. These are logically distinct and dissimilar. There's some sort of correlation or emotional connection, though.

I wrote about "materialism" in the relevant sense here (and elsewhere): https://meaningness.com/materialism

Nirvana basically is reducing our habitual reactivity

Nirvana is a word that often conjures up visions of an otherworldly paradise, sort of like heaven.

But the literal meaning in Sanskrit is "blown out," as in blowing out a candle -- which points to the extinguishing of passions that lead to suffering, as desires are endless and so cause us to continually chase them, much as the proverbial donkey drawn to walk fast in an effort to get the carrot dangled in front of the animal's face that grabs its attention but is impossible to reach, though the donkey doesn't know this.

In Robert Wright's book, Why Buddhism is True, there's a chapter ("Nirvana in a Nutshell") that describes nirvana in a pleasingly clear fashion without delving into supernatural mumbo-jumbo like the dissolution of karmic bonds that keep a being reincarnating in various life forms.

Here's how Wright arrives at his basic notion of nirvana being the lessening of our habitual reactivity to things we like and don't like.

In ancient terms, nirvana is often described with a word that is commonly translated as "the unconditioned."... The conditioned, in Buddhist terminology, can be thought of as roughly synonymous with "the caused."

Which makes sense. After all, when we talk about the conditions that give rise to something -- the conditions that lead water to boil or rain to fall or the crime rate to rise -- we're basically saying these conditions are involved in the causal chain that led to that something. Things that are conditioned in the Buddhist sense are things that are subject to causes.

Now, obviously it is impossible to free ourselves from causes. And this isn't what Buddhism seeks. Instead, the goal is something more subtle: reducing the bondage of tanha, or craving. 

We crave the pleasant feelings and crave to escape the unpleasant feelings. Let's freeze frame right here, because this is where the action is. Here is how Bhikkhu Bodhi put it in a series of lectures he recorded in 1981: 

It is here in the space between feeling and craving that the battle will be fought which will determine whether bondage will continue indefinitely into the future or whether it will be replaced by enlightenment and liberation. For if instead of yielding to craving, to the driving thirst for pleasure, if a person contemplates with mindfulness and awareness the nature of feelings and understands these feelings as they are, then that person can prevent craving from crystallizing and solidifying.

This is where we start to segue from the exotic to the naturalistic. The liberation that Bhikkhu Bodhi is talking about is, in the first instance, a liberation from perpetual rebirth, a liberation that will fully kick in at the end of this life cycle. 

But it is also liberation in the here and now, liberation from the suffering tanha brings -- liberation from the craving to capture pleasant feelings and escape unpleasant feelings, liberation from the persistent desire for things to be different than they are.

...The main point is that whichever kind of nirvana you're focused on, the mechanics for getting there centrally involve mindfulness meditation cultivating an awareness of your feelings that fundamentally changes your relationship to them.

Regardless of how exotic or practical your aspirations -- whether you believe in a cycle of rebirth and want to escape it, or just want to attain complete liberation in the here and now, or just hope to find partial liberation in the here and now -- the essential tool for liberation is the same.

I'm good with partial liberation in the here and now. As I said in my previous post, I'm always going to be flawed, imperfect, confused, unsure what's best to do. But if I can lessen the degree to which I'm under the sway of unpleasant and unhelpful emotions, hey, give me a ticket for the Nirvana Train and I'll see if it can take me to a more desirable psychological place.

Wright speaks of going on a meditation retreat that made him feel like he was living in a zone of enchantment.

No, that's not the same as entering a zone that is magically impervious to causation. I was still reacting at least somewhat reflexively to the causes impinging on me. Still, one source of this enchantment, I think, was that I was spending less time reacting, less time having my buttons pushed, and more time observing -- which, as a bonus, allowed for more thoughtful responses to things. I assume living in the unconditioned would be great, but living in the less conditioned can be pretty great, too.

So how do we get to that less conditioned state? Wright says this near the end of his nirvana chapter.

You could say that enlightenment in the Buddhist sense has something in common with enlightenment in the Western scientific sense: it involves becoming more aware of what causes what.

All of this flies in the face of stereotype. Mindfulness meditation is often thought of as warm and fuzzy and, in a way, anti-rational. It is said to be about "getting in touch with your feelings" and "not making judgments." And, yes, it does involve those things.

It can let you experience your feelings -- anger, love, sorrow, joy -- with new sensitivity, seeing their texture, even feeling their texture, as never before. And the reason this is possible is that you are, in a sense, not making judgments -- that is, you are not mindlessly labeling your feelings as bad or good, not fleeing from them or rushing to embrace them. So you can stay close to them yet not be lost in them; you can pay attention to what they actually feel like.

Still, you do this not in oder to abandon your rational faculties but rather to engage them: you can now subject your feelings to a kind of reasoned analysis that will let you judiciously decide which ones are good guiding lights.

So what "not making judgments" ultimately means is not letting your feelings make judgments for you. And what "getting in touch with your feelings" ultimately means is not being so oblivious to them that you get pushed around by them. And all of this means informing your responses to the world with the clearest possible view of the world.

Underlying this whole endeavor is a highly mechanistic conception of how the mind works. The idea is to finely sense the workings of the machine and use that understanding to rewire it, to subvert its programming, to radically alter its response to the causes, the conditions, impinging on it.

Doing this doesn't let you enter "the unconditioned" in the strict sense; it doesn't let you literally escape the realm of cause and effect. Then again, airplanes don't literally defy the law of gravity. But they still fly.

I enjoy Buddhism's Pure Land tradition, but I don't believe in it

Is it possible to enjoy a religious tradition without believing in it? Absolutely. In a sense that's what Christmas is like for many people. You don't have to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin and is God's beloved son to like the Christmas season.

All that's needed is to keep the parts of Christmas you can accept, and reject the parts you can't accept. Same goes with any religion. 

That's how I explain my enjoyment of the Pure Land tradition of Buddhism, which I mainly know about from reading Taitetsu Unno's book, "River of Fire, River of Water." I've written a couple of previous posts about the book: "Descend into the valley of life, rather than climb the mountaintop," and "Compassion, like other good qualities, is in us, not the cosmos."

What spurred me to pick up the book again today was something Zen Master Henry Shukman alluded to in one of his talks that I listen to on my iPhone's The Way app. Shukman said that frequently we get glimpses of awakening (in the Buddhist sense) as we go about our everyday activities, not during meditation.

In other words, some insight bubbles away in an unconscious corner of our brain, then boils over and makes an appearance in our conscious awareness.

My mini, or micro, awakening occurred last night as my wife and I were watching an episode in the new season of Hacks, a comedy series on Netflix that also contains quite a bit of drama. Ava Daniels, one of the lead characters, was going through her usual trials and tribulations, trying to make sense of a life that often seems nonsensical.

Suddenly I was struck by a realization that wasn't a thought or a feeling, but seemed more like a message from one part of me to another part of me. It didn't arrive in the form of words. However I can try to express it in words: Stop continually trying to improve yourself; accept that you're always going to be flawed, imperfect, confused, unsure what's best to do -- just like Ava.

A weight seemed to life from my psyche. I felt a sense of relief. Later, as I was heading off to bed, I was drawn to retrieve "River of Fire, River of Water" from a bookcase. I read a few pages before going to sleep and re-read more of the book this morning.

Part of the message of the Pure Land tradition of Shin Buddhism fits with my realization. Here's some examples (recitative nembutsu refers to the practice of reciting "namu-amida-butsu," which means "I entrust myself to Amida Buddha"):

As the world became increasingly unstable and chaotic, traditional  Buddhism, supported by the privileged classes, became increasingly irrelevant to the times [12th century], and the demand for a new religiosity to meet the spiritual needs of the age became intense.

The void was filled by the newly established Pure Land teaching of recitative nembutsu. It met the spiritual hunger of the people and attracted a mass following. For those who had been excluded from the Buddhist path, it was the saving grace.

Those who had been excluded were fishermen and hunters who made a living by violating the principle of noninjury, peasants who were considered "bad," lowly and ignorant, women of all classes because of their defilements, and monks and nuns who had broken the monastic precepts.

...The new school stood out in many ways from the traditions that preceded it, particularly in the way that it could be integrated into common, everyday life. Shin Buddhism makes no sharp distinction between clergy and laity as far as the possibility of enlightenment is concerned. Everyone, regardless of differences in age, class, gender, profession, or moral culpability, would attain Buddhahood by the working of great compassion.

How the working of great compassion comes about is one place where Pure Land Buddhism and I part company. Shin Buddhism embraces supernaturalism when it comes to the Primal Vow that makes Buddhahood attainable. 

The transformation of bits of rubble into gold is due solely to the working of the Primal Vow. Originating in the mythic past, the bodhisattva by the name of Dharmakara identified with the pains of all living beings and attempted to find solutions to human suffering. Expending countless eons of time in suprahuman resolve, reflection, and praxis, Dharmakara fulfilled the Primal Vow to save all beings.

This resulted in the attainment of Buddhahood known as Amida, the Buddha of Immeasurable Light and Life. This drama of salvation is contained in the Name, namu-amida-butsu, which resounds throughout the universe.

Well, one thought that obviously comes to mind is how it is that the historical Buddha, who lived in what is now India not all that long ago, relates to this Dharmakara guy (or gal, maybe?) who supposedly preceded the historical Buddha by a lot, "countless eons of time."

Leaving this quibble aside, I don't believe that the compassion embodied in the Primal Vow resides in the universe. The way I look upon compassion, as I laid out in a previous post about this book, is that it is a feature of the human mind -- which is how I was able to feel a sense of compassion toward my decidedly flawed self last night, realizing that it is absolutely fine if I remain as imperfect as I am now.

I wrote:

I don't believe that repeating Namu Amida Butsu causes countless Buddhas to rejoice in and protect the person reciting those words. However, this mantra, as with any mantra, has an effect upon the person speaking it.

Thus if we find that a mantra produces some good quality in us, this is  wonderful. We just shouldn't believe that the quality entered into us from the outside, from some corner of the cosmos. 

For example, Unno says in his book, "To bring about such a transformation is the sole purpose of the Primal Vow of Amida, the working of great compassion that courses through the universe."

When I read those words, I thought about disease, hurricanes, tsunamis, birth defects, and all the other nasty stuff that seems incompatible with a compassion that courses through the universe. Then it struck me that compassion isn't out there. It is in here.

Within us. 

Almost everybody is compassionate. Not all the time. Not to everyone deserving of it. But at least to some people, to some living beings, some of the time. Which  naturally includes ourself, for compassion begins with self-compassion.

And we can learn to become more compassionate through a variety of means, including Buddhist practices.

Thus we shouldn't be led astray by the familiar habit of believing that a feeling we have is produced by an external force. When I was a member of a guru-centered religious organization, people would return from seeing the guru and say, "He made me feel so wonderful."

No, he didn't.

The proof of this is that other people can see the guru and feel nothing, or even a negative emotion. Likewise, a movie doesn't make us cry, or laugh, or scared. Our own mind produces those sensations, stimulated by the movie. Someone else may feel no sadness, humor, or fear from the same movie.

That's why I'm confident that the universe doesn't have compassion coursing through it. Our mind can, though. And if repeating Namu Amida Butsu makes us feel more compassionate, or more relaxed, or happier, that's a wonderful thing. 

By the way, I frequently recite namu amida butsu. It's become my favorite mantra. I tried to explain why in a 2021 post. 

Classical Indian philosophy makes little sense to me

Well, I gave it a try. Today Google News, in its Picks For You section, presented me with a link to an Aeon article, "By the light of brahman: Ideas from classical Indian philosophy help illuminate the enigmas of selfhood, consciousness and the nature of reality."

I decided to read the article, albeit quickly, because I hoped it would live up to the title by illuminating those enigmas.

I did learn something: that classical Indian philosophy makes little sense to me. Of course, since this philosophy is the foundation of Hinduism, it isn't surprising that atheist me would find little to like in all the talk about Brahman and Atman (basically, God and soul). 

However, since I resonate with Buddhism, another philosophy that originated in India, I thought that maybe, just maybe, Vedic Hinduism would have something interesting to say about our modern attempts to understand the nature of selfhood, consciousness, and the nature of reality.

Perhaps this article does a poor job at that goal, but my first somewhat superficial reading of it left me unimpressed. Again, though, I'm unimpressed with every religion. (For me, but not for many others, Buddhism is much more of a philosophy than a religion.)

The way I see it, Vedic Hinduism is inherently metaphysical and supernatural, while philosophical Buddhism is inherently psychological and natural. This makes it much easier for me to relate to Buddhism, since often I can recognize how my mind works in its teachings.

On the other hand, the whole Brahman and Atman thing is difficult for me to find any practical use for, or relevance to my everyday life. The article says:

Naciketas presses Yama for clarity about the nature of the relationship between brahman and the world of experienced reality. Yama says that the way to think of consciousness is that it is the thing that ‘illuminates’ and that allows for all mental phenomena. Consciousness, in turn, is itself illuminated by brahman – the one and only source of all illumination. Without brahman there would be no light of consciousness and therefore no experience, no knowledge, no perception. ‘Him alone, as he shines, do all things reflect; this whole world radiates with his light.’

There is only one reality, brahman, which takes myriad illusory forms, but like fire it is both an individual flame and a blaze. This one reality is both the transcendental brahman and the immanent ātman. Everything else is fleeting, illusory, sprung from ignorance. Consciousness is illumination. As the light of a blazing lamp brightens a dark room, so consciousness lights up life.

So while Buddhism, along with modern neuroscience, has a lot to say about the contents of consciousness, and to a lesser degree about the nature of consciousness itself, Vedic Hinduism considers that the consciousness we all experience flows from the universal consciousness of Brahman -- which makes the foundation of consciousness into something supernatural, even though the human brain sure seems to be why we're conscious, and the brain is physical.

I've read quite a few books that make a strong case for how philosophical Buddhism is compatible with modern neuroscience. It's difficult for me to imagine how this would be possible with Vedic Hinduism, as it is decidedly other-worldly.

In fact, this world is considered to be an illusion, for reasons that seem spurious.

For a flavour of the kind of things classical Indian philosophers thought about, we will begin with a bird’s eye view of a few notions from classical Indian philosophy, with the caveat that every idea described below has been hotly debated for hundreds of years.

Central to Indian philosophy is the idea of illusion. Here, there is a distinction between temporal and presentational notions of illusion. The first holds that whatever is not permanent in time, or else beyond time, is thereby an illusion. Of the various schools of Indian philosophy, Buddhism and Advaita Vedānta agree in accepting this account. The second notion holds that whatever is presented to a subject of experience as other than how it is, is an illusion. This notion derives from the school of Nyāya, its early proponents from the 1st millennium and the work of the 14th-century philosopher Gaṅgeśa, considered to be the founder of the New Nyāya movement.

With talk about illusion, of course, comes talk about reality. And here the classical Indian philosophers made a number of fine distinctions. For our purposes, three are of note: conventional reality, apparent reality, and ultimate reality. Conventional reality just means everyday reality, one that is based on the pragmatics of everyday life under societal conventions and laws. Think of money, or the game of chess. Apparent reality is the notion of a reality that depends on our sensory organs of perception and the machinations of the mind: what we see is a tree and not an aggregate of organic molecules. Finally, ultimate reality is the notion that there is an underlying or hidden substratum to the world. Advaita Vedānta, for example, holds that brahman is identical with this ultimate reality.

I don't agree that Buddhism views whatever is not permanent in time is an illusion. Quite the opposite, in fact. Emptiness is a key Buddhist concept, one I've written quite a bit about. In this post, I included quotes from a book about Buddhist emptiness. 

We exist contingently, interdependently. We exist, but only in dependence on our ancestors, our body parts, our food, air, and water, and the other members of our society. We could not and do not exist otherwise. Devoid of any independent or substantial nature, our existence is possible only because it is far less rigid, less concrete, than what we imagine it to be.

...Rather than seeing things as they are, we superimpose upon ourselves -- and on things around us -- a false existence, a self-existence or essential reality that actually does not exist at all. In the Buddhist philosophy explained here, the ultimate truth is the sheer absence, the lack, of any such essence.

This is emptiness (stong pa nyid, shunyata). While this may sound bleak, disappointing, or frightening, it is the very nature of reality. And it is reality -- not fantasy -- that is our final hope and our refuge. The path to freedom from needless misery, for ourselves and others, is through profound realization of this fundamental reality.

...The Tibetan and Sanskrit words that we translate as "emptiness" do, in fact, literally mean "emptiness." They refer specifically to some sort of lack or absence in things. But it is not a lack of meaning or hope or existence. 

It is the lack of the exaggerated and distorted kind of existence that we have projected onto things and onto ourselves. It is the absence of a false essential nature with which we have unconsciously invested everything. It can be quite frightening as we start to have doubts about this "heavy duty" kind of reality. We will feel that things cannot exist at all if they do not exist in the solid way we are accustomed to seeing them.

Vedic Hinduism has an opposite view of reality from Buddhism. It's much less scientific and much more supernatural. The notions of Brahman and Atman presuppose an essential nature to both the cosmos and ourselves. God and soul are viewed as self-sufficient, eternal, indestructible. 

As the quotation above says, the "empty" view of Buddhism can be frightening to people who want to believe that they existed before they were born and will continue to exist after they die. But reality doesn't care how we humans feel about it, for it simply is what it is.

And I'm pretty sure that classical Indian philosophy doesn't reflect the nature of reality, but of the minds of ancient philosophers who fashioned some entertaining theology which, unfortunately, doesn't say much to scientifically-minded people today.

I love this Zen saying, though it's difficult for me to grasp

I've been reading, and enjoying, Zen literature since my college days about 56 years ago. That explains how I was able to write a blog post in 2005 called "The Supreme Doctrine," thirty-six years overdue. 

“The Supreme Doctrine: Psychological Studies in Zen Thought” is one of my favorite books. When I checked it out from the San Jose Public Library while I was a San Jose State University student, I couldn’t bear to return it.

It’s now thirty-six years overdue. I’m pretty sure I paid the library the $1.65 replacement cost. That’s a heck of a lot cheaper than 5 cents a day, times 365 days, times 36 years, which is what I would have owed by now.

This is the only library book I’ve ever kept permanently. I brought it on our Maui vacation (where my wife and I are now) because I haven’t re-read it for a long time, and I was curious to see if what attracted me so strongly to “The Supreme Doctrine” when I was twenty-one still was a spiritual magnet for me at the age of fifty-six.

It is.

Now, at the age of 76, I'm still attracted to Zen. Currently I'm making my through a lengthy series of guided meditations by Zen Master Henry Shukman via his "The Way" app on my iPhone. It takes about nine months to traverse Shukman's Way and I'm enjoying the journey.

A few days ago I was listening to a guided meditation and was struck so powerfully by something Shukman said that I had to pause the app, grab a pen, and write down his words.

Let your self become the whole of your awareness with nothing left out.

Wow. I wasn't sure what to make of this saying. I just knew that it appealed to me, a lot. The context of Shukman's guided meditation was, I recall, about how the "self" isn't something to be discarded. Rather, it is to be clearly understood. 

In an introductory video to this stage of The Way, Shukman told a story about how he was sitting on a tropical beach, watching sunlight sparkle on dancing waves, when he suddenly felt there was no difference between the sparkling sunlight and his awareness of the ocean scene. 

In other words, he'd had a nondual experience where the usual sharp distinction between an observing subject and an observed object markedly diminishes, maybe even disappearing entirely. So that is one approach to looking upon the saying I like so much. 

Which for me is a fresh way of looking upon mindfulness. 

Let your self... These words point to relaxed ease. No need for effort or control. Simply let your self, however you view "self," do something that seems to be amazingly easy.

Let your self become the whole of your awareness... "Seems" is the operative word, because most of us have a conception of our selfhood that goes beyond awareness -- though I suspect Shukman would say that a conception has to be part of awareness or it doesn't exist for us. So in that case, the whole of our awareness is the same as our self. Thoughts, emotions, perceptions, all that stuff is synonymous with our self. Which is always changing, since awareness is always changing.

Let your self become the whole of your awareness with nothing left out. Ah, with nothing left out. Those four words are the most difficult for me to grasp. For one thing, how do I know that I haven't left out part of the whole of my awareness? 

The only way I know something exists is to be aware of it. As noted above, what I'm not aware of doesn't exist for me. I can know that I've left something out of my grocery shopping if it was on my list and didn't make it into the bags that I carried into our kitchen this afternoon. But I don't have a list of the contents of my awareness.

So that's makes me wonder if it is even possible to leave something out of the whole of my awareness. In that case, whatever I'm aware of is the whole of my awareness. If I miss a fly on the wall, that's left out of my awareness. But this doesn't matter. What matters from a Zen standpoint is that my self has become the whole of my awareness.

And that I don't consciously exclude something I'm aware of. Like, I'm angry, but since I view myself as a spiritual person who doesn't get angry (I'm speaking hypothetically here, obviously), I'm going to leave out my anger, or minimize it, from my awareness.

Again, we get into tricky philosophical ground here, because as I've been saying, it's difficult for me to envision how I could leave something out of my awareness. That strikes me as being akin to being told by someone, "Don't think of an elephant!" When I try, I'm still thinking of an elephant, albeit the absence of one.

My suspicion, and I could be totally wrong here, is that when Shukman says with nothing left out, he's pointing toward the sort of nonjudgmental awareness that is a hallmark of mindfulness. Life is full of both pain and pleasure, lies and truthfulness, sorrow and joy -- many pairs of opposites. It's natural to focus on the positive and exclude the negative, but this doesn't lead to wholeness.

Anyway, I enjoy repeating Let your self become the whole of your awareness with nothing left out a few times as I'm lying in bed, heading off to sleep. Maybe someday the meaning of those words will become clearer to me. However, if this doesn't happen, I still enjoy what Zen Master Shukman said.

Stock market drop shows peril of following a cult leader, Trump

Here in the United States the big news since last Wednesday afternoon, when President Trump unveiled his so-called "reciprocal" tariffs on most countries, has been the precipitous weekly drop in the stock market, almost all of which occurred on the two trading days after Trump's announcement (which occurred after the stock market had closed on Wednesday).

The Dow has lost 7.2%, the NASDAQ 7.8%, the S&P 500 7.8%. Stock market futures are down 2.5% to 3.9% at the moment, presaging another steep decline tomorrow, Monday.

I've lived through big stock market drops before. Two fairly recent ones come to mind. In 2001 there was a crash after the 9/11 attacks. In 2008 there was a crash after risky speculation in the housing market. But this crash is different.

It is being caused not by any crisis to hit the United States, but by the failings of a single person: Donald Trump. He loves to talk about how "tariffs" is his favorite word. Problem is, Trump either doesn't have the faintest idea how tariffs work, or chooses to ignore what he knows about them. 

Either way, at the moment Trump is singlehandedly causing a global financial crisis by imposing massive "reciprocal" tariffs that actually have nothing to do with the level of tariffs imposed by other countries on United States imports. I wrote a blog post about this, "Not a surprise: Trump's tariffs are based on lies."

There's a lesson here.

It is exceedingly dangerous for either a nation or an individual to put their faith in a cult leader, whether the cult is religious or political. Things never end well when this happens. One reason is that cult leaders -- which naturally includes Trump, because few members of his Republican Party challenge his authority or even disagree with him -- have a vastly inflated sense of their own competence.

I haven't come across a single reputable economist who endorses how Trump is conducting his tariffs crusade. Economists agree that while tariffs may be justified if carefully tailored to achieve certain specific ends, what Trump is doing is economic malpractice.

One noted American economist, Lawrence Summers, has said that Trump's tariff policies are the economic equivalent of creationism: a crackpot idea that has no evidence backing it up.

It's pathetic to hear members of the Trump administration try to justify Trump's tariffs, which include placing a 46% "reciprocal" tariff on imports from Vietnam even though Vietnam has only a 9% tariff on United States imports. Almost always those members of the Cult of Trump spout blather like, "Trump is a great businessman who knows more about tariffs than anyone in the history of the world, so we all should trust he knows what he's doing and that things will work out fine."

There are many problems with Trump. On clear display now is his inability to even listen to expert advice, much less follow that advice. Trump has surrounded himself with True MAGA Believers who refuse to criticize or correct their Dear Leader. As is the case with so many of Trump's policies, he wrongly considers that his personal intuition is a better guide than solid evidence and expert knowledge.

Well, we're going to see how that works out. I predict, very poorly. Trump is adept at fooling people, but he isn't able to fool reality -- which includes how the stock market performs in response to the Trump tariffs. Investors have their own political views, and many voted for Trump. But they primarily are interested in making money.

Currently stock market investors are saying to Trump, your tariffs are bad for the United States and they're bad for the world; what you've done has markedly increased the chance for a recession, and we're pricing that dismal prospect into what we're willing to pay for stocks.

If somebody isn't interested in facts, evidence, and the expertise of others, don't trust them in the realm of either politics or religion. Authoritarians and cult leaders don't want people to think for themselves. They want blind faith, not open-eyed knowledge.

I'm pleased that I recognized Trump's failings early on and never considered voting for him. Unfortunately, enough people ignored Trump's weaknesses to put him back in the White House. Now this country and the world is paying the price for Americans failing to say No to a cult leader in the 2024 election.

Some scholars view the Gospels, and Jesus, as familiar stories about demigods

For me, the Abrahamic religions -- Christianity, Judaism, Islam -- are the most difficult both to read and to understand. The Bible's Old and New Testaments, along with the Koran, just don't appeal to me. There's no coherent philosophy or even theology that is readily apparent. 

Obviously observant Christians, Jews, and Muslims find much inspiration in their holy books. But when I've read them, they seem boring and poorly organized. Which isn't to say that Buddhist, Hindu, and Taoist writings are exemplars of clear writing. They aren't. 

However, while I have to work at it, these Eastern religions (or philosophies) make more sense to me than the Abrahamic religions. Even if I don't agree with some teaching, at least I can get a general sense of what Buddhism, Hinduism, or Taoism is all about. 

That's tougher to do with the Bible, a book that I've never wanted to read straight through because it strikes me as largely being a collection of stories rather than a description of the theological foundation for Christianity and Judaism.

An article by Adam Gopnik in the March 31, 2025 issue of The New Yorker, "Do You Know Jesus? Why the Gospel stories won't stay dead and buried,"  helped me to understand why I feel this way. (Online title is "We're Still Not Done With Jesus.")

I've shared some excerpts from the article that I found particularly interesting.

Gopnik starts off by talking about a new book by Princeton professor emeritus Elaine Pagels, "Miracles and Wonder." In the passage below, Gopnik discusses the conflict between Biblical scholars who believe that Jesus actually existed, though stories about him may be fictional, and scholars who view the Bible as simply a collection of tales about one of the supposed demigods who were commonplace in the Mediterranean region back then.

The interpretive approach that Pagels represents is skeptical—nothing happened quite as related—but inclined to accept that something happened, in something like the sequence suggested. A scholarly paradigm that has shone in recent years shifts the focus: the Gospels are now seen as literary constructions from the start.

There were no rips in the fabric of memory, in this view, because there were no memories to mend—no foundational oral tradition beneath the narratives, only a lattice of tropes. The Gospel authors, far from being community leaders preserving oral sayings for largely illiterate followers, were highly literate members of a small, erudite upper crust, distant in experience, attitude, and geography from any Galilean peasant preachers. Their writings bear all the marks of that sharp-elbowed circle and none of the gentle gatherings of group memory.

Indeed, the Gospels don’t even present themselves as history, the way other chronicles of the time did. “Whether one considers the collection of early Christian gospels, the various apostolic acta, the assortment of apocalypses, or the burgeoning stock of hagiographa,” Richard C. Miller argues in his 2015 study, “Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity,” the reader finds “nothing deserving of the genus ‘historiography.’ ” The early Christian gospels show “no visible weighing of sources, no apology for the all-too-common occurrence of the supernatural, no endeavor to distinguish such accounts and conventions from analogous fictive narratives in classical literature.”

From this perspective, the familiar elements of the Nativity—the stable, the shepherds, the Magi—were not meant to paper over the embarrassment at Jesus’ illegitimacy. Rather, they were simply the stories you told because that’s what the birth narratives of demigods were like. The tomb was not found empty because of local confusion or an effort to suppress the fate of a corpse; it was empty because an empty tomb was a standard signifier of divinity. Miller catalogues many comparable instances. The Gospel portrayals of Jesus, he concludes, offer nothing that couldn’t be found within the well-worn conventions of the Mediterranean demigod tradition.

The passage below interested me because Christianity often portrays itself as a religion born from suffering and persecution. Poor us, goes the refrain, we were almost crushed out of existence in the early years of our faith. 

Well, maybe not. There's reason to believe that actually Greek, or Hellenistic, culture was much more tolerant than Christianity was. Having written a book about Plotinus, a 3rd century Neoplatonist Greek philosopher, I can attest that Plotinus was deeply committed to reasoned discourse rather than rigid dogmatic assertions.

That Christianity spread across the world is an extraordinary fact of history. But we should resist the idea that it did so because of some inherent theological inevitability. The consequence of Constantine’s adoption of the faith was less a grand design than a lucky break; Roman emperors mostly had the life spans of gnats, and Constantine happened to avoid assassination. Christianity’s rise should be no more astonishing than that of Mormonism, a Christian heresy with obviously fabricated origins. People seek faith, and faith, by its nature, demands the embrace of what reason resists.

And the placid and ecumenical urge, so appealing in more serene moments, can land differently in our own. Christianity, Catherine Nixey insists, largely invented religious intolerance and the persecution of dissenters. Hellenistic culture was imperfectly tolerant; the Christian one perfectly intolerant. Constantine, adopting the faith as an expansive gesture, was shocked by the vengeful fervor of his new adherents.

Nor was Christian intolerance simply a response to persecution, the Notre Dame professor Candida Moss contends in “The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom” (2013). Her book, as the title suggests, attempts to dismantle the idea of Christianity as a faith forged in suffering. She argues, instead, that it constructed a cult of victimhood while stamping out dissent and violently opposing any pluralism of thought.

Christianity, often so powerful in causes of human equality—Martin Luther King, Jr., after all, led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference until the day he died—has a bad record when it comes to authoritarianism, too often being it. (Even now, we see among conservative intellectuals how once well-meaning Catholic communalism can collapse into Trumpite acquiescence.)

Lastly, as is the case with virtually every New Yorker article, the writing is marvelous. Gopnik is good all the way through, but the last three paragraphs of his piece were especially well done. I certainly agree that pagan humanism produces anxiety through its embrace of uncertainty, and "anxiety is always drawn toward the reassurance of authority." 

We see that today in the slavish devotion of Trump's MAGA acolytes, and it was on full display in the early years of Christianity.

What is missing from the discussion today, perhaps, are the pagan opponents of early Christianity. From Celsus to the Emperor Julian, they responded at length to Christian claims, yet their works are now almost entirely lost, known to us only in the fragments that their adversaries saw fit to preserve for the purpose of refutation. It would be as if all that remained of Daniel Dennett’s work were one of those “Ben Shapiro Pwns Atheist!” videos.

As Stephen Greenblatt reminded readers in his Lucretian adventure, “The Swerve,” some of these largely vanished thinkers, especially those at the Epicurean edge, seem to have already grasped what remains a core truth: the world is material and values are made by us, often shaped through poetic myths and transcendent metaphors. The humanism they championed was always plural—there are many plausible ways to live. But, in its refusal of certainty, their humanism also produced enormous anxiety, and anxiety is always drawn toward the reassurance of authority.

The authority always fails. The anxiety reasserts itself. A new, amended authority emerges. In the interstices of such authority, the atoms we are made of will, by chance or by purpose, form and fix into new patterns—some of them beautiful, some not, with the shapes of faith both grotesque to our cooler judgments and inspiring to our warmest imaginations. We who are made of matter must somehow find a way both to recognize this mystery and not to mind it, too much.