On Hinduism, Buddhism, and the Non-uniqueness of Christianity

There are millions of devout Hindus more moved by the story of Krishna in the Hindu holy book, The Bhagavad Gita, than by the story of Jesus. As one Indian Catholic priest candidly told a British journalist, “Although my family had been Christians for generations and I had been through the full rigors of a Jesuit training, I still, in my heart of hearts, feel closer to the God Krishna than to Jesus.” (In Indian courts of law, people swear with their hand on The Bhagavad Gita not the Bible, and there are even popular Indian books with titles like, The Bhagavada Gita for Executives by V. Ramanathan.)

There are also millions of devout Buddhists more moved by stories of the Buddha and his disciples than by stories of Jesus and his. Anagarika Dharmapala, a nineteenth century Buddhist, commented, “The Nazarene carpenter had no sublime teachings to offer, and understandably so, because his parables not only reveal a limited mind, but they also impart immoral lessons and impractical ethics…The few illiterate fishermen of Galilee followed him as he promised to make them judges to rule over Israel [appealing to relatively ‘base’ desires according to Buddhist teachings - ED.].” To such Buddhists, “Jesus is a spiritual dwarf before Buddha, the spiritual giant.”

Oddly enough, one version of the Buddhaʼs life that reached Europe from India underwent subtle changes along the way, until the Buddha became a Christian saint! According to that version the “prince” who “lived in India” was named “Josaphat,” and he was a “Great Renouncer.” Research into the origins of “Saint Josaphat,” revealed that the Latin name, “Josaphat,” was based on an earlier version of the story in which the Greek name “Ioasaph” was used, which came from the Arabic “Yudasaf,” which came from the Manichee “Bodisaf,” which came from “Bodhisattva” in the original story of the Buddha. (A “Bodhisattva” is a person who achieves great spiritual enlightenment yet remains on earth to help others.) Thus the Buddha came to be included in Butlerʼs Lives of the Saints.

Also, some of the earliest Jesuit missionaries to China, who read the Far Eastern book of wisdom, the Tao Te Ching, returned to Rome and requested that that book be added to the Bible, because it contained teachings on non-violence, love and humility that paralleled and preceded Jesusʼ teachings by hundreds of years. (Many of those parallels are commented on in The Tao of Jesus: An Exercise in Inter-Traditional Understanding by Joseph A. Loya, O.S.A, Wan-Li Ho, and Chang-Shin Jih.)

Eastern religions also feature stories of miracles and visions, along with stories of saintly Hindus and Buddhists who died beautifully and serenely. In some cases a sweet flowery odor is said to have come from their corpses. In another case a corpse allegedly turned into flowers at death. All in all, the stories rival those of Catholic saints and their miracles. In fact, “sainthood” is a phenomenon common to all the worldʼs religions. Needless to say, reading about Hinduism and Buddhism in books written by Christian apologists is no substitute for reading books written by Hindus and Buddhists. A tour of any large bookstore can provide plenty of interesting titles by both Hindu and Buddhist authors.

C.S. Lewisʼs lifefriend, Bede Griffiths, who was mentioned in Lewisʼs autobiography, Surprised by Joy, was one of Lewisʼs pupils at Oxford and converted to Christianity about the same year Lewis did. Afterwards they “kept up a copious correspondence.” Griffiths became a Catholic monk and far surpassed Lewis in his ability to perceive a similar spiritual center lying at the heart of all the worldʼs major faiths. Griffiths far outlived Lewis and died at eighty-six years of age while living in a Christian-Hindu ashram that he, Griffiths, had founded in India. The titles of his published works illustrate his mystic universalist approach to knowing God, beginning with his autobiography, The Golden String, and followed by The Marriage of East and West, Return to the Center, River of Compassion, The Cosmic Revelation: The Hindu Way to God, and his final work, The New Creation in Christ.

Dom Bede Griffithʼs obituary in the National Catholic Reporter (May 1993), by Tim McCarthy, stated:

As late as 1990, Griffiths was forced to defend Eastern spirituality against the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faithʼs (CDFʼs) December 1989 response to the challenge of Buddhist and Hindu spirituality.

Discussing the CDFʼs warning that certain forms of Eastern prayer tempt people to try to overcome the necessary distance between creator and creature, God and humankind, Griffiths wrote in The National Catholic Reporter, “As if God in Christ had not already overcome that distance and united us with him in the closest bonds. St. Paul says, ‘You who were far off, he has brought near-not kept distant-in the blood of Christ.’ Jesus himself totally denies any such distance, ‘I am the vine,’ he says, ‘you are the branches.’ How can the branches be ‘distant’ from the vine?”…

We must “never in any way seek to place ourselves on the same level as the object of our contemplation,” the CDF document insisted. “Of course, we donʼt seek to place ourselves on the same level,” Griffiths countered. “It is God who has already placed us there. Jesus says, ‘I have not called you servants, but friends.’ And to show what such friendship means, he prays for his disciples, ‘that they may be one, as thou, Father in me and I in thee, that they may be one in us.’”

In a letter published in the National Catholic Reporter, beneath the headline, “Vatican Letter Disguises Wisdom of East Religions,” (May 11, 1990), Griffiths drew attention to several Christian movements in ages past that endorsed mystical prayer, then added, “This is not to say that Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian mystics all have the same experience. But it is to recognize an analogy between them and to look upon the Hindu and Buddhist experience as something of supreme significance, not to be lightly dismissed by a Christian as of no importance.”

Also interesting is the fact that the 1996 winner of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion was Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ (which also subsidizes Josh McDowell Ministries!). But the very next year the winner was a Hindu, Shastri Athavale, whose spiritual and social activism was inspired by the The Bhagavad Gita. Athavale has inspired hundreds of thousands of people to spend two weeks or more visiting Indiaʼs poorest villages where they seek to advance the self-respect and economic condition of those they visit. For more than four decades Athavale has taught that service to God is incomplete without service to humanity.

There are even what one might call “fundamentalist” Hindus, like the one who asked Joseph Campbell, “What do scholars think of the Vedas [the most ancient Hindu holy books]?” Campbell answered, “The dating of the Vedas has been reduced to 1500 to 1000 B.C., and there have been found in India itself the remains of an earlier civilization than the Vedic.” “Yes,” said the Indian gentleman, “I know; but as an orthodox Hindu I cannot believe that there is anything in the universe earlier than the Vedas.”

Itʼs obvious that the study of the worldʼs holy books by historical, archeological and literary scholars continues to provoke tension and discomfort in “Vedic believing” Hindus, “Koran believing” Moslems, and “Bible believing” Christians (like McDowell). So there is nothing “unique” about “Bible believing” Christians in that respect.

See Also 9 Myths About Hinduism Debunked (here)

Nature contains a limited number of “odd survivors,” including a few phyla with only a handful of living members. Do Intelligent Design proponents have an explanation for such data?

Maybe an Intelligent Design proponent can explain why we need 33-40 phyla when merely 9 of those phyla constitute about 95% of all animal life? The remaining 26-31 phyla have fewer than about 2,000 known members—the rarest with just three members (Cycliophora: odd sacs represented by Symbion pandora), two members (Xenoturbellida: strange flatworm) or one species (Micrognathozoa: tiny jawed animal, and Placozoa, an animal that resembles a multicellular amoeba). Most are simple marine organisms, often referred to as worms or nanoplankton.

Also, how about an Intelligent Design proponent explaining why, among multi-cellular organisms, beetles and mites proliferate so much, producing hundreds of thousands of species, while other phyla produce far fewer? The number of species of mites might even reach 1 million according to some estimates, as more beetles and mites continue being discovered all the time.

About Phyla

13 phyla of multi-cellular animals appear during the Cambrian Explosion.

But…

20 phyla of multi-cellular animals appear AFTER the Cambrian. Neither is the number of phyla into which all the worldʼs species can be divided agreed upon among systematicists. Under the most frequently used classification scheme there are 38 animal phyla, but some systematicists claim there are between 35 and 40 phyla. Three new phyla were discovered in the last century, the most recent in 1993.

See also this post on living fossils.

Intelligent Design or Trial and Error? Some Data to Consider

Let's look at the I.D. proposal versus trial and error when it comes to sperm and whether you as an individual were personally designed. It doesn't look like you were. Neither does it look like the species of which you are a part was individually or personally the product of design, since we are merely one of several large-brained mammalian species, and all of them have loads of extinct cousins that we have found in the fossil record.

Here's the data. Many sperm are deformed, i.e., two heads, two tails, squiggly tails, heads that are too large or two small, etc. In the average ejaculate, there are 200 million sperm, talk about a roll of the biological dice that made “you.” Only about half of the sperm that are ejaculated make it to the egg (and they don't reach the egg by their own power, but they slide en masse up the fallopian tube via peristaltic waves, so it's not like some sperm are being chosen individually to reach the egg), the rest doodle around in circles. And all but one sperm dies. Some sperm have just the male compliment of genes, some the female compliment. (The male-producing-sperm tend to be faster on average, but the female-producing-sperm tend to be stronger on average, so it's a stalemate in the sperm gender competition to fertilize the egg, again, it's anyone's race.)

That raises the question, were you “designed?” personally, individually? Based on a study of sperm it doesn't seem so. You are the result of trivial differences between hundreds of millions of dead sperm, purely statistical odds.

Therefore, it does not seem valid to hold the belief that the whole cosmos was arranged just so that [insert your name here] could arise.

And if not you personally, then what about the species of which you are a member? Was the whole cosmos arranged so that “humans” could arise?

Humans constitute one of a few, very few, extremely large-brained mammalian species which include countless extinct cousin species of cetacea (whales, dolphins), elephants, ancient apes, upright hominids that all died like those hundreds of millions of sperm.

Paleontologists have discovered that before the earliest upright hominids arose, the world was covered with ape species, the majority of which went extinct. Likewise with cetacea. Paleontologists have found some fuller fossils of early cetacea but there's plenty of evidence that the fuller skeletons are a mere drop in the bucket of all the species of cetacea that used to exist. There are many other whale bones in Eocene rocks of Pakistan and India. Mostly they are teeth—the rock surrenders a few skulls as well — but even teeth clearly show that their owners were not clones of Pakicetus or the other better-known whales, but evidence of countless cousin species that are now extinct.

The current species of humanity known as Homo sapiens is a tremendous latecomer to the cosmic scene, having only recently arisen during the slimmest margin of cosmic time, and we only recently discovered that we live on the quaking surface of a rock flying through space with countless other rocks flying around, and explosive energies, both in space and beneath our feet, energies constantly mixing and swirling around, again, statistically allowing for life to arise in very small regions of the cosmos, and probably only for limited amounts of time due to the explosive swirling nature of the cosmos. And that life continues via death and reproduction. Life does not appear to be a particularly stable phenomena, though some single-celled forms have a better chance of surviving than more complex multi-cellular forms.

It is probable, given the fact that planets with life are so small and energies and matter keep swirling round and filling most of the cosmos, that the human species will become extinct in future.

Can the human species survive for billions of years like the stars, or a hundred billion years like black holes? And if we do, what will those far flung descendants of today's humans be like? Will they still closely resemble our species today? Maybe present day humanity is just another stepping stone to some far flung future species, and no single species was “designed” to be as it is, but the cosmos is always in process, all species are always in process?

Maybe present day humanity will diversify over the billions of years that follow, filling niches on different planets, and that may be followed by extinction events on those separate planets, again a trial and error and whittling process. Who knows what future version of humanity will be the last one standing?

Or imagine our newcomer species dying out tomorrow or merely a million years from now, in which case there will still be stars with billions of years ahead of them in which to shine, and black holes with a hundred billion years ahead of them in which to suck, but there will no longer be any humans to gaze at them. Seems possible, even probable.

Humanity might even might be superseded by some other biological organism or machine we happen to create. Imagine that we invent a sensory apparatus capable of acquiring information via a learning program, then that learns how to upgrade itself faster than humans can upgrade it, so it evolves faster than we can even imagine it evolving, and it surpasses humanity. In that case carbon-based life forms will have been superseded by something we gave birth to, and humanity will simply have been a stepping stone in the process toward newer entities. See also the online essay, “Why We Believe in a Designer”.

So, the “Design” in the above case would be a never ending process of change, including the possibility of extinction at every level of such changes. It looks like trial and error to me.