Had some more people asking about my conversion lately, finally got around to writing more about it. Link to substack article here if you want pictures etc., otherwise reposting the text below:
Been thinking about the above post from QC a lot since I’m basically exactly the type of guy he’s is calling out here. I didn’t reply initially because I felt kind of attacked or insecure, and still do a bit, but either way I think this is a great time to go into more detail with my own conversion story.
I’ve already talked about my conversion to Orthodox Christianity a bit in a previous post, which you can check out if you want more backstory / a different focus (more on my chronic pain issues):
Ultimately I convert for a variety of reasons, which I still don’t fully understand myself. A big part of it was that, as QC said, I did a ton of inner work, meditative, and psychedelic stuff for a long time. I went to a woo-woo Christian church as a kid, and was meditating and getting into Buddhism from like 13 years old onward. I was also an avowed atheist for much of that time.
Sadly Buddhism just kind of failed me. At least that’s how I saw it. I consumed soooo many books and podcasts and talks on Buddhism, spent so much time meditating and trying different techniques. I even went to a couple of Buddhist temples, but they were so alien to me culturally I basically left immediately after the service.
Looking back, I’m sure that someone who’s really into Buddhism could point out a ton of ways I didn’t try the path of the Buddha in the ‘right way’. For instance:
- I never went on a ‘serious,’ multi-day meditation retreat (though I did do a few partial day ones, some solo some with others)
- Didn’t have a formal sangha, or group of people I meditated with
- Never went and studied under an actual Buddhist teacher, got the vast majority of my instruction from the internet or books or other Buddhist dabblers who didn’t really know what they were doing
- My lifestyle throughout all of this was still quite hedonistic, was doing drugs, having casual sex, eating whatever I wanted, etc. Not practicing right action or any of the formal Buddhist moral strictures
Oftentimes I look back myself and wonder, what could have happened in my life if I managed to find the right teacher, or the right group, or even stumble into this corner of Twitter I’m in now, that actually has a lot of more grounded & mature buddhists, back before I gave up on Buddhism? I honestly don’t know.
Maybe I’d be a meditation teacher now, gallivanting around the country, no job, sleeping with hot Buddhist women (but in a totally cool, consensual, morally correct way ofc), doing DMT at cool parties in the woods, dipping to chill in a monastery whenever I want, and other things I see Buddhist teachers in the tpot/online dharma scene doing. The lifestyle certainly looks attractive, and a deep part of me still really longs for a life like that.
Regardless, it didn’t work out for me that way. The Buddhism that I encountered and that informed so much of my teenage and early adult life left me hollowed out, addicted, and broken. I had such deep issues with chronic pain, depression, and anxiety that I had to quit multiple jobs, and turned to pretty hardcore substance abuse just to numb the suffering.
I saw Buddhism and spirituality as a lifeboat, a rope thrown down that could save me from my pain and my struggles. That’s what the Buddha promised, after all! An end to suffering! But it never worked for me. I beat my head against the wall of Buddhist meditation and teachings and therapy and emotional work for over a decade, and while I would find temporary relief here and there, overall I felt I was going nowhere with it.
Encountering Christ
Christ Appears to Mary Magdalene on Easter Morning (Noli me tangere), by Peter Paul Rubens & Jan Brueghel the Younger
That’s when Christ came into my life.
It wasn’t something I actively looked for. Just happened to have a couple of friends I had really admired pop back into my life and mention hey, maybe Christianity is cooler than you think. Some of them encountered Christian teachings through AA and recovery, some had always been Christians, I just never knew it before because we hadn’t talked about it.
Either way, I took a hard look at my life, and realized I hadn’t given Christ a fair shake. I had a bachelor’s degree in history at this point, so I knew a bunch about Christ and Christianity from a sort of dry, objective, historical perspective. I had even read the New Testament a couple of times. But I had never taken the ideas seriously. I had never actually gone and looked at Christ, what He said, what He did, with anything close to an open mind.
As part of the therapy and emotional work I was doing, I realized I had a huge chip on my shoulder when it came to Christ, and had for most of my life.
You see, when I was eight years old, my dad had a stroke.
I got sent to the neighbor’s house while he and my mom went to the hospital, some of those evangelical Protestants who talk a big game about being godly and everything, but ultimately were completely uninformed assholes in real life. I stayed up all night pacing around, not knowing if my dad was going to live or die.
My neighbor woke up from me pacing around, grumpily said “if you just pray hard enough, God will save your dad, don’t worry,” and went back to sleep. So of course as an anxious kid with OCD tendencies, I prayed nonstop all night. I pleaded and bargained and begged God with every ounce of my being, telling Him I would do whatever He wanted if he just saved my dad.
As you might have guessed, it didn’t work, and the next day I woke up to find my father gone.
I’m sure for my neighbor, this comment was a relatively minor thing. She was annoyed, tired, this kid just got foisted on her and she needed sleep. She was a single mom, after all, and had her own worries I had no idea about. But still, her throwaway advice that night completely changed the trajectory of my life. From the next morning onward, I decided that I hated God. If He even existed, He must have been so unspeakably evil that the world was completely fucked. It was easier to just think He didn’t exist, and that the universe was a bunch of atoms randomly bumping into one another. It was in vogue at the time, after all.
Anyway, all this to say, when Buddhism failed to fix my problems, I was desperate enough to examine the chip on my shoulder. As I started poking at Christianity, I got more and more interested and surprised. I began to realize just how ridiculously deeply Christianity informed everything in our culture, from morals to random references in songs and movies to the names of cities and towns.
I devoured Jordan Peterson’s early lectures on Genesis, feeling an incredible tsunami of insight while listening to them, that I failed to get even after hours of vipassana meditation. Talking to more seriously intellectual Christians, I found out about Girard, and read a book by one of his students, Violence Unveiled, that blew my mind even harder about the impact of Christ on humanity, on history.
Then I reconnected with another friend, who I hadn’t spoken to in years. He happened to be Orthodox. We chatted a lot and slowly rekindled our friendship, mostly talking about Christianity. He had fallen away from the faith in college and early adulthood, and was coming back to it at the same time I was learning about it really for the first time.
Somewhere in all this, I also did some more psychedelics, and spent some weekends camping solo wilderness in the mountains, far away from civilization and any other campers. I had some experiences with Christ that caused me to question my materialist assumptions, and which I won’t recount more deeply here.
Converting to Orthodoxy
Later on, my Orthodox friend invited me to his church, for a Divine Liturgy. The first time I saw it, I was overwhelmed. He sat next to me and was explaining how the Liturgy was largely the same as the one they practiced in 300 AD, giving me all the little tidbits of symbolism and tradition. Told me about how people would reach out to touch the priest’s robe during the Grand Entrance, calling back to the woman in the Gospel who was healed by touching Christ’s garment.
I was overwhelmed. Half of it was in Greek, and I barely knew what was going on. But I knew there was something special there, something beautiful.
A few weeks went by, maybe a month or two, I don’t remember. I continued learning about Christianity and Orthodoxy, and went to another Divine Liturgy. My buddy either wasn’t there, or showed up late, so I sat by myself in the back, with a view right into the altar, looking at the crucified Christ hanging under the giant icon of the Theotokos.
It’s hard to explain what happened during that service, but something broke open in me. I remember looking at Christ, willing Him to talk to me, to become more real, to help me, to save me. And then the tears came. For some reason, in the midst of hundreds of people I had never met, in a weird church service that was half in a different language, I started crying. Tears poured out of my eyes nonstop for well over an hour. I wasn’t sobbing hysterically, just silently crying, trying not to draw attention to myself.
I had never cried like that before in my life, and never have since. I cried for so long, staying after the service, that one of the parish council members had to come and gently shoo me out of the sanctuary, as they were locking up the church.
I remember being shocked afterwards that I had been able to cry at all. I rarely cried, even when I wanted to. And I had horrible social anxiety, so crying in public like that was extremely out of character. But for some reason, I finally felt safe enough to let out the pain I had carried since I was a youth. To start to thaw the walls around my heart that had kept me from really connecting with other people my entire life.
From there, I was hooked. It still took me years to convert formally to Orthodoxy. A lot of conversations with my priest going over my doubts, and him explaining that faith was an action, not a propositional belief. That the Resurrection, the Trinity, and other core Christian teachings were Holy Mysteries, something to be approached with the heart, not with the intellect.
And here I remain, in the church, and I feel like I belong. Not because I’m an upstanding Christian, or because I deeply believe Christ was the Son of God with an intense zeal, or anything like that. But because I was, and still am, sick.
I think that, whether it’s true of ‘Real Buddhism’ or not, when I was a Buddhist I was hoping to fix myself. I was sitting there acting as if I had the power, the tools, the skill and ability to look at who I was as a person, fiddle around with my mind, and set everything in the right place. Make myself whole, perfect enlightened.
Coming to Christ was a different story. It was more about acknowledging that I am sick, and I need saving. That I can’t do it on my own, I can’t get anywhere on my own. That I need someone else, something else, to pull me out of the hole I had dug myself into.
It’s not easy. I’m not married and settled down (yet) so to go back to the original quoted tweet from QC, it’s really not a ‘relief’ in that sense. I still have tons of doubts and questions, I still look at Buddhism and other ethical systems and wonder, think about what they say, and how it compares to Christianity.
But I have been healed, in a real way. I’m sick, but on the mend, and obviously trending in the right direction. At least from my perspective. And that’s enough for me, for now. I pray it continues to be enough, and that I get to stay with Him for the rest of my days, and for life everlasting.
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Notes -
You do know that there are other viable hypotheses besides Buddhism and Christianity? This isn't only directed at you, but I do wonder what went astray that there's so much unabashed religiosity in my rat-adjacent fora.
Rat-adjacent communities are surprisingly full of cults. Zizians, the people freaking out over Roko’s Basilisk, down to Big Yud himself cultivating a cult-ish vibe. If you lean left, aligned artificial superintelligence will grant you eternal life, whereas if you lean right, Jesus will.
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Nothing "went astray". There is no conflict at all between rational thinking and being religious.
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As I’ve asked fellow rats before, it’s a good question worth investigating. I was an atheist for many years myself. You may find yourself surprised like I was.
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The most recent instance of Atheism ate itself.
Can you explain what you mean by that? It seems a pretty consistent world-view to me.
Atheism was coalescing into an actual social movement through the 90s and 2000s. This was based on an ideology that promoted skepticism, rationality and hard-nosed truth-telling, with little regard for other peoples' sacred cows. That social movement destroyed itself over Social Justice ideology in ~2014. The way it came down, and what happened afterward, discredited the movement's claims for a lot of people, whether or not they continued not believing in God. Briefly, it turned out that for a lot of Atheists, skepticism and rationality do not appear to be maintainable at anything approaching a population level, and possibly not even at an individual level either. For a lot of Atheists, the hard-nosed truth telling was just outgroup bias, and was decommissioned when it came time to be hard-nosed against claims or groups considered the in-group. Enough Atheists did care about these principles to fight over the changes, and the community was destroyed both in terms of social cohesion and in terms of ideological plausibility. When you are informed one day that an Atheist must "Listen and Believe" and that it's unacceptable to draw a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed, either you can make that jump or you can't, and enough could make the jump that those who couldn't were forced to reassess some of their basic assumptions.
You aren't wrong, but as someone who was there (and is still bitter over it) and is still an atheist, I'd point out that you are speaking specifically of atheism as a movement - that "New Atheism" fell apart does not discredit atheism as a belief system. Not believing in any gods or metaphysical components of the universe does not require being wedded or opposed to SJ ideology.
Atheism is merely the belief that there are no gods. It doesn’t necessitate any “belief system” beyond that.
I try not to get hung up on debates over whether or not "atheism is a religion." I agree that literally atheism is simply a lack of belief, but in practice most atheists do have a set of beliefs or models of the universe that could be fairly said to constitute a belief system.
I agree, but that points to the content of other beliefs. You could say metaphysical naturalism in its omnipresent postulate of natural causation, implies a rejection of anything supernatural, so facts that follow from it imply atheism. Heinlein once made that observation and his quote on the matter always rings in my mind, “Supernatural is a null word.”
It also gets hazy because I’ve seen people say agnostics don’t really exist because there are no agnostics that believe in a God and atheism doesn’t concern itself with the reason why someone doesn’t believe; and so they get annoyed at “fence sitter” positions and demand you take a side. Agnostic is a valid category however because it doesn’t take a position on either side.
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That's insightful. Thanks.
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I'm seeing you get some criticism from others so I wanted to say thank you for sharing this. I enjoyed this and your post on chronic pain. Christ be with you!
Ahh thanks my friend. I appreciate ya! Yeah I figure I'll get flack I often do when writing about religion online, but hey that's just how it goes.
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This is one of the worst texts I have read on this forum in a while. I suppose you are speculating that it will appeal to the Christians here, who may disengage their critical thinking because you claim to be one of them now.
The Buddha didn't fail you. You failed yourself. You didn't follow the dhamma in accordance with the dhamma.
You cherry-picked the convenient parts while dabbling and consorting with other dabblers. You didn't engage in some of the most important parts (teacher, sangha, abstaining from drugs) and you engaged non-diligently with the meditation practice.
I’m surprised you’re so mad, where is your equanimity my friend? Usually we get along.
I didn’t write this to appeal to anyone in particular, I wrote this because it is my experience, and a lot of people have asked me questions about it. On Twitter I actually tend to interact with more Buddhists than Christians, and get along with them better.
I wasn’t trying to attack the Buddha or Buddhism - I thought I made it perfectly clear, as you point out, that I failed to engage with Buddhism properly. I’m not sure why it makes you so angry? It’s not as if I said anywhere in the article “Buddhism sucks and the Buddha is evil.” I tried quite hard to avoid that language, as I don’t think it’s true in the slightest. I have a lot of fondness for the Buddha and his teachings.
Sure the title is a bit spicy, but hey it’s the age we live in!
If you actually read the article without such a strong emotional response, I’d be curious for your thoughts and your take on western Buddhism, and how young people might get such bad misapprehensions of what the Buddha taught.
While I think Buddhism in general has useful lessons in reducing suffering even for an atheist, I don't understand at all how western, secular Buddhism can be logically sound without being a suicide cult.
If you accept dukkha, samudaya and nirodha, but you don't believe in the Right View, in the tenets of karma or rebirth, it seems immediately clear that that instead of the Eighfold Path, the much more efficient method to achieving nirodha is the Singlefold Path of a bullet into your skull.
I always thought especially after reading the early texts of Zen practitioners, that Buddhism seemed like a very nihilistic religion to me. Wouldn’t be too surprising considering that if you’ve ever read Japanese literature, it’s incredibly fatalistic.
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They can believe in/see rebirth happening constantly within this lifetime without believing in literal rebirth after the death of their physical body.
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I wasn't mad, just shooting from the hip somewhat; being harsh but honest. 😤
The title is the single biggest provocative element. It's just a bit silly and misleading.
I think it has a lot to do with how trash information sells well while the actual quality information is more hidden away and gets fewer eyes.
Like in all other fields, the dabblers are larger in number than the serious practitioners. Charlatans and grifters abound, and lots of people lack the discernment and good sense to avoid them.
Trash spirituality sells well in western societies. Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche (controversial as he was) had a great term to describe it when he called it “spiritual materialism.” Zizek also funnily referred to it in the modern day as “spiritual hedonism.”
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Yeah, part of why I opted for a more provocative title, heh. Also I just thought it would be fun.
I think a huge part of the issue is that the initial proselytizers of Buddhism to the West were, uhh, perhaps not the best examples. Folks like D.T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, and other teachers who had various moral failures when coming over. Perhaps it selected for people who didn't have the real good stuff, or whatever.
Either way, seems to me like Westernized Buddhism has been a pretty botched move so far, though there are bright spots. Then again, it's not like the West in general has done good at keeping our own religious traditions to the righteous road. In general modernity seems to have a lot of difficulty working with the ancient wisdom traditions.
One distinction I’ve always drawn is between religiously driven piety, of which there is very little in the modern world; and in particular the west; and moral indolence, which is secular, hollowed out and the sort of complacent decency most people live by.
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Agreed. The section on the problems with Buddhism is extremely undeveloped compared to the rest of the essay and basically amounts to complaining that the author didn't experience any spiritual progress with Buddhism without actually seriously trying to make spiritual progress with Buddhism. No shit dawg.
Sigh. See my response to TowardsPanna. I have written quite a lot about my problems with western buddhism, and thought I was beyond clear in the article that I didn’t take it seriously. Not sure why you two are taking so much umbrage at that fact.
https://www.themotte.org/post/3699/when-the-buddha-failed-me/435516?context=8#context
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So, have you found out why Christ didn't save your father?
Sorry for phrasing it so callously, but since it was an important pivotal point for you, how do you approach this event now, after your conversion?
Good question. Do I have a satisfying answer for why people die and why death exists in the first place? Not really. Ultimately I have come to accept that it was my dad's time to go, though. That death exists in the world for some reason beyond my ken.
The official church answer of course is that it's because Adam and Even chose sin, and so death entered the world. I find that unpersuasive, given that God had to have known that this was at least a possible outcome when He created them. So I choose to believe that whatever happens after this mortal existence, in the fullness of Eternity, is worth it. I try my best to trust Him. Perhaps we'll all be reunited in our current bodies in a plane of Paradise; perhaps there will be something even stranger and harder to fathom that happens after death. Either way, I'm slowly coming to trust more and more that God is truly good, and wouldn't allow an evil like death unless there was a greater goodness it necessitated.
I have to admit I find theodicies appealing to skeptical theism abhorrent, and personally I've never managed to get over the problem of evil.
Why should man do anything good, why should man do anything at all, if human moral intuition is meaningless and the most profane acts can be justified under an unfalsifiable appeal to the greater good?
Rats and ants may not understand the motions of men, but neither should rats and ants have any reason to worship men except for the last argument of kings, the threat of pure brute force and violence.
If God's vision is that children should die screaming in unimaginable pain and that the Ichneumonidae should eat caterpillars from the inside out, then frankly in the footsteps of Ivan Karamazov, I don't want anything offered to me by such a god.
The Problem of Evil was one that I never thought was a strong of an objection as people thought it was. Perhaps if I lived through something like the Holocaust I’d feel the weight of it a lot more. Some have made the argument that evil proves the existence of God because if God exists, namely some things are truly evil; whereas these terms are meaningless in His absence.
Because the prudential value and moral value that would otherwise be in conflict with each other become harmonized by the Christian religious life. Under theism, you can consistently make choices that go against your self-interest and sacrifice both self-interest and prudence for the sake of morality. In the end this too is also a selfish desire, because the only fundamental motive for this behavior is that you’ll get it all multiplied back to you in the end. So in the long-term none of this is really self-sacrifice at all; because God makes it be the case that unless you act morally, your self-interest won’t actually be furthered.
Sure, but the point I'm trying to make here is that moral epistemology becomes incoherent, if you abrogate omnibenevolence as understood by human moral intuition. If the meaningless suffering that pervades the world is all part of His plan, then there is no reason to morally privilege doing anything over, say, kicking as many puppies as possible. For all I know that kid drowning to death over there is all just part of the plan, and He instead wants me to kick the shit out of more puppies instead of saving the kid.
Maybe skeptical theists can bite that bullet, but it's not a bullet that I feel capable of accepting myself.
I’m pretty sure the “all according to plan,” really only makes sense if you’re a Calvinist or otherwise believe in the doctrine of predestination. Most other denominations outside of that believe in Molinism or some doctrine of middle knowledge. God may “know everything,” but that doesn’t mean that He foreknows everything. Doctrines like Skeptical Theism thrive off the ignorance of knowing what counter factual futures could look like.
Reminds me of the Craig-Bradley debate years ago.
My understanding of calvinism vs middle knowledge doctrines was that the main difference is that Calvinism treats free will as compatibilist while Molinism treats free will as libertarian.
Under either doctrine God must still have foreknowledge of children being born with genetic defects that kill them a few days out of the womb and foreknowledge of those destined to die during natural disasters; otherwise how could He be omniscient?
I know ‘some’ Calvinist’s are compatibilists but certainly not all of them.
Your analogy also misunderstands the difference between knowledge and foreknowledge. Those aren’t incompatible with God knowing all possibilities in the same way Special Relativity in physics has all physical events sit statically in space-time with the past and future being illusions, despite the 2nd law of thermodynamics producing the source of all the directional time asymmetries in the universe.
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Yeah the problem of evil is notoriously the biggest challenge to any conception of a good God. I definitely agree. That's why I said I haven't found a convincing argument against it, and I don't know if it's even possible. Evil is pretty brutal.
I really just never saw the force of it.
Depending on the formulation, I’ve felt some accounts of it were more persuasive. The best way the argument was put to me wasn’t about the existence of evil, but its origin. We as Catholics believe that evil actually exists. We don’t believe that God is evil and at some point, He is all there was. So then it becomes a conundrum to explain how we got to this state if He isn’t responsible for it.
The way Aquinas dealt with this was by the exposition that “sin” and “evil” are products of disorderly desire within the creatively will and so it’s a privation. Will’s are properly oriented toward God. When our will is directed towards ‘other’ goods that take us away from our purpose, that directs us towards the paths of evil.
This might work for man's inhumanity to man, but it's a hard sell for e.g. children getting leukemia.
If we’re talking about the differences between natural and moral evils then I agree, the explanation of the former is less adequate in making sense of the latter.
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I’ve never understood why god would create beings that are so primed to want things that we end up describing as evil.
We’re not really just here as neutral choosers with free will. Take drugs for example, we’re literally designed at a neurological level to become hopelessly addicted to heroin if we touch the stuff.
That seems quite cruel to do to a being as its designer. We could easily be designed such that there aren’t a bunch of substances lying around that induce extraordinary pleasure and then horrific dependence.
Similarly, a lot of evil that people do is a result of how their brains are wired. Pedophiles for example, to a large extent seem to be wired in such a way that they derive pleasure from that, with the best outcome that they just never act on this desire that’s to an extent built into their neurobiology. Why would you make someone like that, and if you cared for the beings you designed, however it is that the mistake entered into them, wouldn’t it be so much kinder to just remove the mistake that somehow got into their brains on your watch? Both for the sufferers and for anyone they may end up harming or abusing?
Instead religion seems to treat it like a willpower problem. One with eternal consequences. Yet reality seems to repeatedly indicate that it’s not really a willpower thing, more often it’s some form of brain problem that leads to a large fraction of evil. Like the guy who developed a brain tumor and started having constant violent urges until he shot up a bunch of people at a university, and left a note saying please study my brain I just know something wrong happened to it. Or the guy who took the metal stake though his brain and lost all self control and self inhibition.
Materialist models seem to explain a lot of this quite well. Someone has some form of perversion, or is even just gay, well it looks like the function of the brain that generates objects of sexual desire just happened to develop on the wrong object in this case. Or this guy suddenly started having violent urges all the time, oh look, there’s a tumor pressing on the part of his brain relating to aggression.
But if we’re in a Christian worldview… how horrific is it that the stakes of this guys eternal soul were decided by a tumor and that god tested him like that, or that the pedophile or addict is burdened with constantly needing to resist what seems to be a fault in the architecture of their brains, as if in many cases the evil was designed into them from the start or came about in their very biology in some cases through no fault of their own.
But on the other hand, without temptation and difficulty, there is no significance to you choosing good. If you're already primed to be good, you just get the archetypical Shin Megami Tensei-style Heaven Ending, where it's all just perfectly ordered and even if people have free will in some technical sense, it's never meaningfully realized, why should anyone ever deviate from acting good?
Sometimes I imagine a God akin to an ultra-superhuman R. Scott Bakker, who, disillusioned with the problem of free will in his own reality with the existing beings, tries to create a world populated with beings that have true free will. After millions, maybe trillions, experiments, he thinks he has been successful. But how do you even measure such a thing as free will? How do you prove it? If it can be measured, it stands to reason that it's a result of exactly the kind of physical processes that do not allow for true free will. Giving these beings temptations, but also giving them the capacity for empathy and reason to understand good and bad, and then seeing how they behave is at least not entirely nonsensical. This neatly solves the problem of evil as well, as long the evil is caused by humans in some sense; God can't intervene, or else he would fuck up the experiment. Maybe being corrected and lectured by literally God will bring most people in line. Maybe learning that any evil will be corrected anyway causes people to behave like shit. Maybe just simply showing yourself and proving the existence of hell will cause even sociopaths to be nice, purely for their own sake. Either way, it's not a true free choice for good, as opposed to bad, anymore.
But then again, I do not believe our actual universe as we understand it allows for free will, unfortunately, so there's that. Of course, this style of god would be a lot more morally ambiguous than the christian conception, possibly even evil by some moral systems.
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Why must God be subject to our conception of good and evil? Humans think of pain and suffering and death as “evil”, but why must God? Maybe He has purposes and intentions that we could not possibly fathom.
Humans like to feel like we are at the top of the chain when it comes to the complexity and depth of our emotions, but it’s possible that God sees our grief, our suffering, our deaths, the same we see the pain and death of animals. We have pets we love and want only the best for, but from their perspective, we do unexplainable actions that cause them pain, like taking them to a bad place where a stranger pokes them with sharp painful objects.
We also intentionally and unintentionally kill and let die countless living, sentient, feeling animals each with their own personalities, and apart from a minority of vegans (who still can’t escape killing pests if they want to have any crops left to eat) most of us don’t care, and don’t even see it as a blemish in our moral worth.
Rats are intelligent, social creatures with a personality, capable of affection (ask anyone with a pet rat). Who cries for the billions of rats living short miserable and dying in horrible pain every year? If you don’t, then why do you expect God to?
God is not subjection to our conception of good and evil. I agree, He is so far beyond us we can't possibly understand it.
There's a great video here on twitter talking about how a superaligned AI would not do things we like, showing people holding down a struggling seal and cutting a plastic net off of it's neck. I think God's relationship to us might be at least somewhat similar.
That being said, I expect God to care because, you know, of Christ. The fact that God told us He cares, directly, and gave His life for us.
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I can't help but be reminded of my favorite formulation of this general viewpoint and quote it directly here, where a believer is directly addressing the doubts of a doubter:
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Most prominent monotheistic religions say He is infinitely better than us, in all aspects which would include caring for lesser things.
If he isn't, one might suspect he isn't perfect in general, and that all spirals down to simply assuming he isn't there.
I believe omnibenelovence is an interpretation added by later theologians. God, going by the Bible, and the reality of the world, can cause suffering when He musts.
God being perfect does not have to match our 21st century morality, centred on avoiding causing suffering at all costs. God can be perfect in His wrath, vengeance and glory, when he destroys cities and brings forth pestilence.
Yeah all of the omni stuff is.... not exactly fully supported historically from what I've read. Or at least, the words didn't mean the same thing that we think they mean now.
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Many such clauses.
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*Yoda voice: Believe, or believe not. There is no choose.
Disagree with this framing of belief. It’s certainly more of an action than a proposition though, and something you can work on.
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I am Buddhist, though Chinese Pure Land, which seems to be different from what you practiced, and I’m praying for your protection.
Thank you! Yeah as I mention in the post, I know that I did not necessarily do the 'correct' Buddhist path. Also though, Pure Land seems quite different from most Western Buddhism anyway. From what I have heard it's much more deity focused and less uhhh personal enlightenment.
Can’t speak to Chinese Pure Land but I know Tibetan Buddhism is much heavier on the supernaturalism and metaphysics than Theravada Buddhism is.
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