A Treaty with Reality

As the Great War broke out and threatened to swallow the lives of he of his countrymen, C.S. Lewis brokered what he called a ‘treaty with reality.’ Its terms: he would fight in the war, but he would not think about it; he would draw a border in his mind, allowing the war thus far and no further. The war could have his body, but not his person. Thus he read poetry in the trenches, and wrote his own—and acquired a lifelong aversion to newspapers.

The war ended the lives of millions, and swallowed the lives of uncounted millions more. I imagine the unusual prevalence of important events generated a great deal of news: of battles won; of battles lost; of frontlines shifted; of political manoeuvres; of important people and important declarations; and on; and on. I’m sure it seemed crucially important to keep abreast of each of these, that it seemed part of one’s civic duty to be informed on all aspects of the war effort. The coronavirus pandemic often receives comparisons to war, but in this way at least the comparison is fair. Momentous events entail a grand narrative that exhausts and replaces all others; they produce a miasma of information and pseudo-information, of news and opinion which all seems like an important part of the story—and demand that all this must be paid attention to in order to keep one’s bearings in the swift current of occurrence. Momentous events make a malign conjunction with digital capitalism, which sweeps more and more people up into clicking on websites that (falsely) offer some relief from anxiety and some certainty in futurism. This new abyss gapes and swirls, and would very much like to swallow us all whole. It threatens personal oblivion: the annihilation of our private mental space.

The lie is that all of this is necessary, or essential. When the abyss swallowed me for a time (with Brexit as its bait), the countless other fellow victims I found in its belly made it seem natural for me to be there—important, even. It’s easy to forget you’re in a belly, and easy to forget the most important thing about being in a belly: getting out of it.

When a foreign legion blows the loudest, most important-sounding horn, you are not required to let them through the gates, to permit them the occupation of your territory. If we are to be people who are truly ourselves rather than repositories for events-adjacent factoids and opinions and anxieties, if we are to cultivate an inner, creative life, then a border must be drawn in the mind, and it must be policed.

The pandemic must have my body, as a matter of duty and conscience. I am required to be isolated to protect others: so be it; I will continue to uphold the law of the land in its letter and its spirit. Thus far and no further. My mind remains my own, and I refuse to be swept into the abyss. To that end I’ve sworn off looking at the news in every form, barring the spending of some time with a weekly paper. Everything important tends to filter its way through.

I hope to let only artists and experts in, who have either knowledge or perspective that is different than mine, and wider. I hope to be expanded by the composed thoughts of those who believe they are speaking a vital truth, and have cared enough about it to whisper it to me in beautiful words, in the dead of night. For the life of me, I will read.

Lewis walked under ordinary, grey Oxford skies and was caught up not by the story of successive events, but by myths that he found to be true. He found that interlacing an imaginative world with our own made bright the shards of truth that can be discovered under grey skies, by the one who looks. There is a subtle magic inherent in this world that the occupied mind finds easy to miss. There is a grander narrative than any we can find in the papers. It’s my hope that if I cease to listen to one, I will more readily discover the threads of the other.

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Update, mid-February 2021: Somewhat comically, on the very same day that I published the above, terribly optimistic post on how I was going to withdraw most of my attention from the news, Trump supporters attacked the US Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the government, prompting impeachment trials and a news cycle that has, even still, failed to end. That was a pretty good test of my continence and commitment to the above Treaty with Reality, and one which I failed a couple of times. But I think even though those events were properly newsworthy events, it’s still better to be able to read about them from tranquility, after the reactions and counter-reactions have ceased, and to refuse to give them unending free real estate in one’s head.

The Good Ship Progress

The rest of the world and I are growing apart. It’s like being a raft, drifting for a while in the pull of a great steamliner – now separated by the widening waters, watching the other cut its path ever onwards through great waves, making Progress.

For the longest while I thought we all shared a vessel, and I had only lazy half-thoughts about our bearing, presuming the wind to be in our sail. Now I realise that some are locked full ahead, and I see the watery expanse opening up between us as I become ever more sceptical about the navigatory logic which derived their setting.

In coming to discuss morality in politics and law, I hold up two hands. In one rests the idea that people are accountable to God for the extent to which they live within his definition of what is good and right. In the other, the idea that people ought not to be prevented from doing whatever on earth they want to do, so long as it doesn’t cause harm to others. You may detect a potential for discord.

Hand the First: Colours to Mast

Uncurl my fingers and peer at the idea nestling within: God is the comprehensive reality. He has brought reality into being, and ordered it. God has the only canon definition of what is good and of what is ungood, and this applies to everyone and everything.

Consider for a moment that belief in this God, the LORD, is belief in a Creator who cares about right and wrong, who is passionately committed to upholding the oppressed and the lowly, and to reversing the fortunes of the downtrodden. I believe in this God who has made firm purpose to bring about the end of all injustice and to bring low those who perpetuate oppression and wrongness. I believe in a God who has enough compassion to walk among us and be moved, and to spend himself in the service of those who need him – binding wounds, embracing the excluded, bringing satisfaction to the drifting soul. I believe in this God who gave himself to his executioners as our substitute, and who was raised from the dead to show us that there is hope for one day being gloriously, truly fixed.¹

And so, as a direct consequence, I believe in the importance of striving to improve the lives of others, to ensure just societal systems which look after those who have less, and to ensure that all people are able to live their lives as much as possible without the interpolation of harm.

Goodwill towards men is only half the picture. I believe in the importance of living however this God requires me to live, in the beauty of the morality which Jesus exemplifies, and of striving to meet his standard of what is good and just and right. That includes seeing every life as a particular, significant, sacred creation, every body as a dignified, holy space, intentionally set apart for God – to experience his presence within and without. If this is what my body is, then it matters what I do with it. I hold sex as sacred – a holy rite of marriage. I hold marriage as sacred – a holy duty of love to help us understand how Christ loves his bride, and how we should love Christ in return. I hold all life as sacred – all people as valuable, worth helping and protecting. These beliefs are core to me, even as my behaviour frequently falls far short of the standard they anticipate (thus, the Gospel).²

Hand the Second: the Liberal Yang

A moral way of living exists, and it places the same demands on me as on you.

But it’s also important for me to recognise that not everyone believes that. Many people don’t believe in my God, for one. Many people don’t believe that a universal moral legislation exists. Probably many today would stare blankly at the notion of holiness or of the sacred. A relatively negligible slice of the planetary population (i.e. the Church) agree a core morality, hold other issues with a looser grasp, and differentiate their moral formulations by nuance.

It follows, therefore, that not everyone ought to be legally/societally accountable to the moral standard I believe exists. See now centred in my second palm a liberal yang to the moral yin: if you don’t accept the demands of Jesus on your life, if you honestly don’t consider your body to be sacred, why should you be prevented from living in whatever manner you choose?

Of course, this does not negate the existence of such a transcendent moral standard, nor does it mean that one can escape the consequences of rejecting God and choosing what is unholy over what is holy. God’s Way is not morally relative. But since human law is to uphold justice for all folk alike, it ought not to enforce legal accountability on people for the beliefs of some. Living according to God’s standard ought to only be undertaken by those who have signed up to live as subjects of his Kingdom, and ought only to be enforced within the Church.

These two hands flow around each other, a yin and a yang, a horrific mixed metaphor, a perfect sphere with just a little bit of friction – causing the whole thing to judder embarrassedly every so often.

In real life, holding the yin and the yang most frequently manifests in a silent, unobserved choice to live in a way different from those around me (i.e. intoxication, sex outside of marriage). Occasionally it manifests in a vote (i.e. advocating for legally allowing people (who are outside the Church) to do what they want to do with their bodies).

Meanwhile, the Republic of Ireland holds a referendum to see its Constitution’s 8^th Amendment repealed, revoking legal provision for a foetus to be recognised as having a right to life equal to that of its mother.

Rhetoric hurtles and spatters and eats away at lampposts.

The yang judders.

The hand-sphere wobbles inelegantly.

Frictionful are the times.

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A Dichotomy of Rights

The pro-abortion rhetoric of ‘just a clump of cells’ that I was taught about in school was conspicuously absent in the ROI referendum campaign; the rhetoric of ‘an unwanted intruder in my sovereign bodily territory’ was much more common.³ If the foetus is seen as a trespasser within the sovereign territory of a person’s body, then we’re thinking in terms of a dichotomy between the preferences, goals and rights of woman and those of foetus. Where there is a dichotomy of rights, there are two sides of a story. When it comes to abortion, it seems that only one side of that story is worth talking about. It seems as though large swathes of populations decide, in a way that makes out as though it is morally obvious, that a woman’s right to autonomy is far more significant than a foetus’ right to life, that bodily autonomy is the prime moral good.

What I’m wondering: why is this crusadeable upon? How come this approach to abortion has become so obvious that it’s now a moral imperative? It seems far from obvious to me. Rather, it seems to me a bizarre subversion of typical morality, in which the right to autonomy acquires a greater emotive pull than the right to life. From whence comes the righteous zeal, the indignation, the contemptuous-obviosity which blinds large numbers of people to the complexity of a contentious moral issue?

A Complete Capacity for Self-Actualisation requires Abortion, or An Unwieldy but Functional Subheading

Here in the West, the spirit of the age whispers in our ear that a meaningful life is attained by self-actualisation through individual expression. Anything that hinders the pursuit of this goal is repressive and regressive, and ought to be cut out.

If self-actualisation is prime, it is achieved by self-assertion, and ruthlessly. If we are to be fulfilled, we need to achieve a perfect unity of what is true on the inside with what is true on the outside. We need to enact ourselves, an enterprise which is thoroughly self-oriented, and inevitably locks us in competition with one another.⁴

A particularly odious manifestation of this is in the modern relationship. Love is lost as relationships become about the continued propagation of happiness and pleasure. Once a partner fails to maintain felicity, they can be dropped, fairly.

Another is in the moral superiority of a married person ‘coming out’ as opposed to staying ‘closeted’. The logic here is that living closeted is an evil since it is an untrue representation of the self. It is superior to ‘come out’ (i.e. not just to disclose one’s orientation to one’s spouse, but to leave said spouse in pursuit of other sexual relationships) even if destruction is wrought, because to do otherwise is to live a lie. And so men tear their marriages and families apart for the sake of individual expression, sacrificing the higher good of others, their wellbeing, and communal unity for the gratification of self-oriented desires.

Boil it all for long enough, and it reduces down to this:

if x prevents me from self-actualisation,

then it is within the bounds of appropriate behaviour to ensure x is nullified

Substitute x for pregnancy and we can see how an interminable pregnancy becomes a matter of oppression.

Disallowing pregnancy termination restricts a woman’s right to self-determination in a critical domain of life, making irreversible a transformation which carries irrevocable weight and change. There is a horror in being locked into a nine-month biological morph, followed (most of the time) by a seismic and lifelong personal, social, economic, vocational, etc, shift. To restrict a woman’s right to choose abortion restricts her autonomy to make meaningful self-determinational decisions. A desire to affirm and facilitate such a capacity in law and policy follows naturally. As women have been forbidden from self-determination and autonomy in social domains since time immemorial, we feel compelled on moral grounds to affirm and fight for their right to choose in this most particular of moral subject matters.

But life is growing inside life, and it all gets complicated quickly. Decisions made about one’s own body no longer just implicate the self. The rights and desires of the self come to a hard stop against the needs of another.

This is when things start to boggle.

Usually, the morality of a liberal society is defined by a) not doing harm to others, b) ensuring all are treated fairly, and c) ensuring all are not oppressed.⁵ With abortion, c has massively overtaken and outweighed a. Concern for oppression totally eclipses concern for harm. One way this manifests is in denying harm altogether (foetuses can’t feel pain, therefore abortion is ok). The other is in the simple prioritisation of adult oppression over foetal harm (a lack of bodily autonomy for an adult is a more grievous loss than a lack of life-potential for a foetus).

The Abortional Crusade for a Self-Actualised Existence

So it becomes a matter of weighing the freedoms and autonomies that an abortion provides against the right of a foetus to be given time to develop into a significant enough life to save.

Many resolve this conflict by exalting the role of easy access to abortion to that of an essential human right. For advocates, abortion can be not just permissible, but a good in and of itself – a body-positive, feminist, throwing-off-the-shackles-of-patriarchal-oppression act. The heavy preference for self-actualisation over all other concerns is manifested in people who ‘love [their] abortion’, for whom abortion is merely a convenient measure lightheartedly taken in order to retain the job they like, avoid a responsibility they feel unready for, and to not be tied to a man they have cooled towards.⁶

In my opinion, this is how the causal relationship works – abortion is believed to be positive, and then (as a result) abortion is believed to be harmless.

In life generally, we expect our behaviour to be shaped by our beliefs. Oftentimes however, this causal relationship is reversed and our (desired/actual) behaviour moulds the content of the beliefs which (ought to) underpin them. This is, unfortunately for rationality, how our beliefs work most of the time. It’s known as motivated reasoning.⁷

When logic and argument are constrained by internal pressures to the necessity of arriving at a conclusion which enables the thinker to live the life they want to live without dissonance – this is motivated reasoning. Our embodied existence allows us to nullify any significant intellectual/moral barrier which conflicts with our chosen course of action/belief.

If I am oppressed, then that oppression suddenly becomes endowed with much more moral heft than any concern with harm to an abstract, other, not-self person. What is at stake in abortion for many people is nothing less than the meaning of life itself (i.e. self-actualisation). If pregnancy and parenthood are seen as inhibiting my self-actualisation, then there is a juggernaut of a motivation for me to arrive at a moral conclusion which not only nullifies my objections to abortion, but which affirms my choice to have an abortion as an exercise of sacred bodily autonomy.

The dichotomy of rights makes all of this easier to swallow, and simplifies abortion as a social policy. The woman is inarguably a matured life who has consciousness, feels pain, suffers, and has all the defining criteria of human. The foetus has, at least, fewer of these. Women are capable of being vocal, of organising and protesting, of becoming a political force to be reckoned with, of mobilising a moral crusade in order to legislate for the protection of their rights. Foetuses, obviously, can do none of these things. So if we have to choose between an entity to protect, it makes logic to protect the life that is obviously human in preference over the life that is ambiguously human. It’s also politically and morally expedient to shift from the question of what is true to the question of what is obvious. I suppose this is the foundation upon which has been built the unquestioned moral consensus that the rights of a woman are in all cases superior to the rights of a foetus. And when abortion is an unquestioned moral good, moral consensus becomes moral crusade. Safeguarding foetal rights means denying female rights. The dichotomy deepens.

In this situation, it’s easiest to nullify all concern for harm done to another by logicking away the existence/significance of the existence of that other. It is easy to make oppression the primary concern, and easy to brush harm good and far under the rug.

A Pact with Moral Relativism

My simple contention is that abortion is not a domain in which a right to self-determination ought to be the prime relevant concern.

The barest fact we can assert uncontroversially is that significant debate exists over whether a foetus constitutes a significant enough life to not kill. If so, then supporting a woman’s right to make a personal, subjective determination about whether or not to have an abortion is upholding a fundamentally relativist worldview, where individuals ought to choose (based on subjective, internal criteria) between facts, to decide what is real and true for themselves.

In other issues of life and death, we accept that while a person may make a judgement about the ethics of terminating the life or shortening the life-potential of another, they are held to account by a wider truth – that it may be wrong, and punishable to do so.⁸

There’s a hypocrisy in being outraged at a post-truth (conservative) political landscape, and then demanding the reification of its underpinning assumptions (truth is intrinsically personal, not external) in order to support a woman’s right to choose. We abhor the dismantling of objective truth and the dismissal of moral imperatives, but demand the inalienable right to define what is good and what is wrong on our own terms, when it comes to something closer to the bone.⁹

As someone who believes in an external moral reality, I think that promoting a choose-your-own-reality approach is reckless. I think it’s especially irresponsible in this (at-least-maybe) life and death issue. Promoting such an approach in a context in which the decision makers (women) are in situations which often provide motivation for them to decide the ethical quandary in a particular, materially favourable way is irresponsibiler still.

Just as the morality of men towards sexual coercion fluctuates when aroused¹⁰, so too may the morality of women bend when facing down massively life-changing life changes, and a path to mitigate them. This is not the controlled environment in which we would like to find ourselves when deciding what constitutes life and death.

The Crooked Path

You’ll have picked up by now that I think abortion ought not to be considered an obvious and unalienable human right, nor an unambiguous social good. One of my reasons why is that abortion-on-demand seems to stem from this preoccupation with the concerns of the self over the concerns of the other. It says, in essence, ‘My right to the life I want is greater than your right to a significant existence’.

To me, this is not a mark of social progress, but a manifestation of what is wrong with our petty species. The natural condition of people is to perceive from a prior occupation with the self, since all of our moralities are refracted first through the prism of the self.

This is opposite to the moral ideal. The good and true and right way to live is to give ourselves up for one another. The true and new human way is to lay down the self for the sake of others.

We find this beautiful, when we are in a position to be honest with the truth. Literature is full of the ache of the heart at the glimpse of the beauty of a person dying or living for the sake of another. It’s beautiful too in marriage – where we continually choose to prefer the other in all decisions, to step outside of the matrix of self-oriented decision-making, to give up career trajectories and experiences and parts of who we are to better love another person.

This is the trail blazed most beautifully by Jesus. To be God Himself, who spoke reality into existence, and then to come to live among us as a tradesman, to wash feet, to be hated and mocked and tortured and executed by the talking ape-monkeys, all because he loves us with a burning love, he delights in us, and wants to wash us clean of our filth and bring us tenderly to him. Jesus chose to act and teach and live in ways that limited himself, harmed his interests, destroyed his life, for the sake of those who hated him.¹¹

This is the peculiar glory of God. It is achingly beautiful, and that beauty is reflected in self-binding, a splendid mirror of Christ our LORD. Our fatal condition is that the massive bulk of the self utterly eclipses it.

So, yes – for the Christian this means laying down one’s life for the life of a child. And for the non-pregnant Christian, how much more should we lay down our lives for the lives of women in difficulty and crisis, and for children? This means mobilising the resources and the love of the Church to a) extend non-judgemental compassion to women, b) provide for them, help them so that they are economically, socially, emotionally, etc, capable of raising a child. The Church, I think, needs to become more feminist – by ensuring that women don’t carry all of the burden of pregnancy by reason of their biology. Let this be our response to the beauty, the glory, and the grace of our LORD.

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Liberal Yang Rising

In the spirit of not imposing minority religio-ethical beliefs, it is surely right to make provision for abortion in (at least) limited cases. In Northern Ireland, the highly particular beliefs of a non-majority prevent women from accessing abortions for reasons which aren’t ambiguously moralled (e.g. where the child will be born without an essential body part, as so is certain not to survive).

Arguing from the minimal case, if abortion at least raises significant moral concerns among a significant portion of people, societies ought to be cautious with it. We can all concede that it is at least arguable (evidenced by the existence of argument) that abortions oppose the safeguarding of vulnerable lives. In an ambiguous ethical dilemma, we surely ought to enshrine protection for these lives rather than extending more bodily autonomy to adults (in a case in which these may be mutually exclusive, and in which we are being cautious).

I think this is a pretty okay case for abortions to not be normalised as a typical healthcare procedure and so taken lightly, and for abortions to not be available on demand for any reason, despite these foundations in a God-centric worldview.

Consensus on Abortion is not Consensus on Ideology

So the questions become: is it irresponsible to liberalise abortion policy where this significant debate still persists? Oh, and does significant debate still persist?

When it comes to Ireland’s Referendum, the Yes vote was received as a moral victory for Ireland, a triumph for Progressivism’s continuing conquest over regressive, backwards attitudes.

The facts about why people voted Yes remain, as ever, under the fog of political bias. I’ve heard (from sources who believe freely available abortion is a moral imperative and a human right) that 70-something% of people voted Yes because they believed that women have a right to choose whether or not to have an abortion. I’ve also heard (from sources who believe that abortion is morally wrong) that 48% of people voted Yes because they wanted Irish women to be able to have abortions in the so-called ‘hard cases’ (i.e. rape and pregnancies in which the foetus is not likely to survive outside the womb).

Whatever the truth may be, the referendum result was taken to signify that an overwhelming majority of Irish people believed that abortion ought to be freely available to all women, for any reason. While the referendum surely demonstrated that an overwhelming majority of Irish people believed that abortion ought to be legalised, it did not demonstrate that the overwhelming majority of Irish people held to one particular moral ideology.

But anyway, a vote to legalise abortion was conflated with a vote to affirm that free access to abortion for any reason is a moral imperative and a human right. Which means, under this worldview, that a vote to legalise abortion was a referendum on whether Irish people like women, trust women, value women as part of society.¹² The Irish government embraced it in this way, as did the hashtagliberalfakenewsmedia.¹³

We have arrived, friends, at my real and true beef: the moral triumphalism at the heart of the Progress narrative.

(The ships are a metaphor)

The great steamliner I have detached myself from is the good ship Progress. On board, a story is told about the exploits of the brave heroes Science and Liberalism, who mercilessly conquer, slay and generally have done with the savage cults of Regressivism and Superstition. Our heroes are waging a successful campaign, slowly transforming the West into a better place to live, a more tolerant, individual, free society. Science and Liberalism open the minds of the people in their fair star-spangled country, who consequently become Enlightened and finally do away with their base religious thinking and all that nasty backwards moral stuff, and at last recognise that the perfection of our species is within our grasp – a powerful, relativist utopia in which everyone gets to do whatever they want and self-actualise and achieve perfect, satisfied, self-fulfilment. Every time the story is told, the people on board cheer heartily, and sing wistfully for the consolation of their Utopia.

I think the good ship Progress is not going further, farther, upwards, onwards – it’s just going. It is like, as Dostoyevsky once said, the building of a crystal palace – a hopeless, groundless dream of a pure society of perfect tolerance, perfect pluralism and unhindered individual expression. Not only is it unattainable, but it is an endeavour riddled with sin from start to finish – not because tolerance and individual expression aren’t good, but because we have made them, in service to self, the primary good. Our grandest designs are for a glorious new Babylon shaking its fist at God, built and pursued from behind the blindfold of self-absorption.

We need wisdom to recognise with the Ancients before us that humankind is blighted by an unassailable bent towards nothing good. When we put self first, toxic pride and injustice and destruction follow after.

This human condition of ours places Isles of Enchantment in the encircling seas of human capacity. Valinor exists, but the horizon has been rounded. We will not reach it by force of will, or technological might, or the spread of liberal enlightenment.

An enhanced capacity to indulge our self-orientism will neither satisfy nor heal us. It will leave us dry and empty. Self-binding love is the way that satisfies – not for its own sake, but following after the God who bound himself beautifully for us.

If Jesus had taught in our age, he might well have paraphrased himself thusly, ‘Whoever wants to save their bodily autonomy will lose it, but whoever loses their bodily autonomy for my sake will find it’.

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Note on references: Where I use scientific theories or principles, I am often applying a principle to a situation by reasoning and imagination. Please feel free to consider everything which does not have a reference attached to be opinion, or informed opinion.

References:

1: For God’s passion for justice and his demands on us for justice, see Deuteronomy 16:20, Isaiah 1:17, Amos 5, 1 John 3:17-18, James 1:27. For Jesus exemplifying this, see Isaiah 53, Luke, 11:39-42, Luke 14: 15-24. For justice as a theme running through Scripture, see The Bible Project’s video, Justice (https://tinyurl.com/y7a4svsv).

2: For God’s demand for his people to be holy, see Romans 12: 1-2, 1 Peter 1:15-16, as well as, y’know, the entirety of Hebrew Scripture.

3: I’d recommend a BBC documentary called ‘The Fight for Women’s Bodies’ (https://tinyurl.com/y7wo7fac) and subsequent article (https://tinyurl.com/y8zvkqgk) – pay attention to the language which surrounds the abortion debate. Also ‘Yes’ campaign websites are useful here (e.g. My Body My Choice, found at https://tinyurl.com/yb272q6l), though they don’t contain pictures of all of the rhetoric . Googling for posters/social media posts is a good idea.

4: For the role of self in the West and a discussion of issues surrounding post-modern culture’s interaction with the idea of God, see The Great Mystery, (McGrath, 2017).

5: See The Righteous Mind (Haidt, 2012), and accompanying website (https://www.moralfoundations.org). Also Graham, Haidt & Nosek, 2009 (https://tinyurl.com/nu6p4nm).

6: I’m referencing and quoting from Hadley Freeman’s article published in The Guardian in June 2018 (https://tinyurl.com/y8fphhyg). See also an article published in the same by Eva Wiseman (https://tinyurl.com/jgf2xlq).

7: For a chapter on motivated reasoning, see Ditto, Pizarro & Tannenbaum, 2009 (https://tinyurl.com/ya8f4kc6).

8:  For example, the illegality of euthanasia (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7698636.stm).

9: I’m talking here about the rhetoric of ‘legalising abortion is trusting women to make their own healthcare decisions’ (e.g. https://tinyurl.com/z9yvfuj).

10: For the highly troubling study in full, see Ariely & Loewenstein, 2006 (https://tinyurl.com/yaqmedwm).

11: For Jesus’ radical selflessness, see Isaiah 53, Romans 5: 6-11, Ephesians 5: 25-30, Philippians 2: 5-11, 1 John 3: 16-18.

12: For example, Fintan O’Toole’s article in The Guardian, published in May 2018 (https://tinyurl.com/yaap5gcl). Here’s a bit of a relevant quote from it, ‘Women, in the intimate circles of family and friends or in the harsh light of TV studios, said: “This is who I am. I am one of you.” And voters responded: “Yes, you are.”’

13: For example, The Guardian’s reporting on the referendum result, opening with the quote, ‘Ireland has voted by a landslide to repeal its near-total ban on abortion, an extraordinary victory for women’s rights that seals the country’s transformation from bastion of religious conservatism to one of Europe’s most tolerant democracies.’ Also Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s statement is reported within (https://tinyurl.com/y7kcd6y8).

Religious Convergence on a Transcendent God

According to the Dalai Lama, all world religions share in common “a vision of human life that transcends the boundaries of an individual’s physical existence as embodied, finite, and temporal being. A meaningful life, in all faith traditions, is one that is lived with an awareness of a supra-mundane dimension”.

While there are some quibbles to be had with that quote, I think the second part is definitely true. Since the Enlightenment took hold, the mantra of the world has been Materialism – what you see is all there is. All religions (of which I am aware) champion the spiritual realm, and aim to place people in contact with it.

What’s interesting is that the Dalai Lama’s proposition is one palatable to theists and atheists alike. Actually, it’s an argument that plays on prime atheist turf. It goes like this:

All religions are about pursuing the same thing – loosing our earthly shackles. Well sure, that’s because the supernatural is an invention purposed to offer satisfactory answers to the fundamental problem of death. The truth is that life ends, we can’t exist forever, we will die and all our works will be meaningless and forgotten. And so the human race makes comfort for itself out of the fictional offer of immortality. Religions, gods, they are man’s ancient balm for his existential angst.

This argument does some intellectual threat to my believer’s heart. Can I really believe in the objective truth of Christianity in the case of religious convergence? Wouldn’t the historic manufacture of gods be the most sensible and simple solution to this problem?

[launch probe]

Why would religions converge around certain ideas?

Assumption of the modern atheist: God doesn’t exist, therefore any convergence of religions on a given concept is informative only about the insecurities of man which require a specific supernatural balm.

Assumption of (a subdivision of) modern theists: God does exist, therefore a convergence of religions on a concept may be a strong indicator of God’s design for humans. God has designed humans to believe in a spiritual realm because it exists. God has designed humans to believe in an afterlife because it exists. The convergence of all religions around the idea of transcending this mortal life tell us that the spiritual condition of man is such that belief in the capacity to transcend this life is an accurate reflection of the spiritual reality.

“…There is some divine illumination vouchsafed to all men. The Divine light, we are told, ‘lighteneth every man.’ We should, therefore, expect to find in the imagination of great Pagan teachers and myth makers some glimpse of that theme which we believe to be the very plot of the whole cosmic: story – the theme of incarnation, death, and rebirth”.

– CS Lewis

And if there were no convergence?

To quote from a forgotten author: ‘The convergences of religions, their shared underlying dynamics and realities, are important evidence that religion is meaningful. If, at the deepest level, religions were truly different, wouldn’t that be evidence that individual religions were all just following their own made-up trajectories? The deep convergences tell us something about the validity of those truths.’

 

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Religious convergence may (to take the atheist’s point) signal a deep need at the heart of humans. Religious convergence may (to take the theist’s point) authenticate a spiritual reality of which we are aware.

More problems arise when we remember that theists are not a homogenous bunch. We complicate things by our belief in gods of varying shapes, dispositions, corporealities, and detachments. Religious convergence was first made convincing to me when reading of the comparable spiritual experiences of Buddhists and Christians – Buddhists who believe, to grossly simplify, in an impersonal ultimate reality, and Christians who believe in a God who is exceptional, distinguished among all other gods.

This God is different from the vague deity invoked at American state occasions. He is not the same as that deity of ill-definition who has created, who affirms unreservedly, and who, like a rubbed lucky coin, is appealed to for success in private, domestic, and foreign policy ventures.

The God who reveals himself to the ancient Jews, and then as Jesus of Nazareth, is a particular person with highly specific character traits. Unlike the gods of the pantheons of old, this God is defined by his constancy – He is that which He is. He is the eternal Creator and Sustainer of all things, and from this authorship comes perfect wisdom and knowledge of his Creation. This God is definitively, constantly faithful – he chooses to work tirelessly for the good of humans, at great personal cost. He is definitively, constantly just, unwilling to let the rapacious actions of humans towards each other and our world go unresolved and unpunished. He is definitively, constantly merciful, choosing to forgive and make reparations for the sins of his people. He is definitively, constantly gracious, giving the free gift of himself, of new life and a renewed creation to the undeserving who trust him. And he is definitively, constantly jealous for the sake of his people, unwilling to tolerate their running after other, inferior gods, cutting themselves off from the source of life and all things.

So here’s the rub:

The convergence of religions on a single, transcendent god is zeroly problematic if you believe in a boundariless god-concept. In this scenario, all religions can offer us their wisdom on how to relate to god, and all of them can be more or less correct, because little is at stake. The convergence of all or many spiritual traditions and religions around a small set of notions would then reveal core truths about that god.

This becomes problematic for belief in the God who features in the Scriptures. This God is unashamedly the only transcendent, ultimate reality. He is Myth become Fact. But he has a highly specific character, and so not all spiritual traditions can be equally correct in their understanding of who He is.

Christians come to know the character of their God as he has revealed it, and must stand apart and say the controversial thing, “I don’t believe in that god, rather the God I believe in is like this”.

There is no reason why Buddhists attempting to commune with the Ultimate Reality might not experience the presence of the one true God, but it is hard to imagine how they could learn about him and draw true conclusions about him. That’s why God has revealed truths about himself in tangible ways – in actions, in Scripture, and finally in a person. He wants to be known. And he has already decided on how he is to be known – through his personal incarnation, Jesus. This is intended not to make himself more exclusive, but to allow us to know him better, authoritatively, personally.

One last quote to close:

“Christian prayer is indeed far more than human instinct. We do not pray as pagans, or even atheists, calling out to an unknown God. Rather we address the one who has taken the initiative, revealed himself, and made promises to us. We don’t strain our voice toward a hypothetical supreme being with cosmic powers, but wonder of all wonders, we pray with confidence to the God we know by name. We pray not as mere theists, monotheists, or even as old-covenant saints, but as those who now know our Father in and through our Lord Jesus. It is almost too astounding to even utter: we know the one to whom we pray, not because of our raw intelligence, advanced education, or painstaking research, but because he has moved toward us, spoken in history, and made himself known to us. And so we address him as Father, and in name of Jesus, with our Bibles open, in response to what he has promised in covenant relationship with us.”

– David Mathis

 

Optimistic Nihilism: The Beautiful Myth

My response to ‘Optimistic Nihilism’, a YouTube video by the channel Kurzgesagt which espouses a philosophy of the same name. Throughout, I’m going to be discussing Optimistic Nihilism as it’s represented by Kurzgesagt; I don’t know if it enjoys an intellectual life beyond the channel. The featured image and all unlabelled quotations are taken from this video, which you can find below.

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My argument with Optimistic Nihilism is that it trades intuitive truths about God and life for an attractive humanist fantasy. Optimistic Nihilism distorts the institution of science to justify its metaphysical prejudice against a Creator. It banishes God, embraces complete ethical relativism, and so arrives at some of the worst moral teaching I have ever had the misfortune to clap eyes upon. It falls victim to unqualified faith in the unqualified hubris of the scientific-atheistic worldview in its scramble to allay the fundamental human fear that life is meaningless.

The Logical Error

Here’s Kurzgesagt’s narrative. After our accidental bursting forth into consciousness, the human race grew in knowledge and wisdom. We learnt of the incomprehensible size and scale and age of the cosmos, and we learnt that we aren’t a notable part of it. We learnt that our place in history is brief, that our lives are chance events and that our actions are inconsequential. “We learnt that the twinkling lights are not shining beautifully for us, they just are”.

Do you see the logical bait-and-switch here?

Claim: Gaining scientific knowledge about the universe allows us to infer about its design and intended purpose (or lack thereof).

Within Kurzgesagt’s argument, that sounds like this:

The universe is large and old, therefore human life is without purpose or meaning.

That’s simply not the case. Astronomical knowledge cannot equip us with any relevant insight by which to decide whether or not there is a Creator. Increased knowledge about the natural world has not conferred to us any factual information about the universe’s purpose, or ours. The function of science is to observe observable things, not to infer about non-observable realities from those observations. Learning that the stars are distant balls of gas rather than holes in the cosmic ceiling does not tell us anything about the intended purpose or design of those actual stars. We cannot infer anything new about the value of human life from learning that the universe is vast and ancient. They are unrelated variables.

It irks me that we pretend nihilism is scientific. Kurzgesagt make it seem that as humans develop intellectually, they inevitably come to reject belief in God and accept that the universe is purposeless. That’s not true.

Optimistic Nihilism wants us to believe that we are too mature to believe in God. We are to think that belief in God belongs to a less evolved people. We are to believe wholeheartedly in the human race, who through their scientific method and maturity of thought have achieved insight enough to prove that God is not real and that life is but a beautiful accident. That’s not true either.

The Rejection of Intuition

Here’s the thing. Human beings begin with deep, intuitive notions about life. We know intuitively that our lives are significant, that our actions matter, that there is a right way to live. We act as though that is self-evidently true. We passionately feel that we were made for a purpose. Something in us produces the strongest conviction that a higher reality exists, and our whole being longs to taste it. We are filled to the brim with unearthly longings. On the evidence of every story our species has ever told, we know that the universe was created by a Creator, and with purpose.

People start from a position of belief in Higher Things, and all that that entails. Optimistic Nihilism acknowledges these intuitions, and it rejects them. Kurzgesagt don’t provide a good reason for doing so: they just call God improbable and move on. Which kind of grinds my gears.

Over 70 years ago, C.S. Lewis spoke to this same issue:

“‘Evolution itself,’ [Professor D.M.S. Watson] wrote, ‘is accepted by zoologists not because it has been observed to occur or…can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible.’ Has it come to that? Does the whole vast structure of modern naturalism depend not on positive evidence but simply on an a priori metaphysical prejudice? Was it devised not to get in facts but to keep out God?”

– C.S. Lewis, ‘Is Theology Poetry?’

I understand that scientific atheists today may be unhappy with Watson’s ageing representation of them, but I think the point still stands. It all comes down to a motivated assumption of belief.

Belief in Optimistic Nihilism requires you to oust your innate beliefs, to make a logical leap where scientific evidence cannot assist. The only way to make that leap is by first having a motivation to disbelieve in God. What motivation could suffice for this? We are filled to the brim with unearthly longings, and we are devastated when we can’t find anything with which to fill them. The response of the nihilists is to flee to the fortress of scientific cynicism and call everything foolishness.

The Beautiful Myth

Listen to the narrative entire. I’ll turn again to that old master, C.S. Lewis, to give the myth its full treatment. He weaves the spell better than I ever could. Apologies for the length of the quote, but it’s important to get a sense of the grandeur of the ideas we’re throwing around here.

“The play is preceded by the most austere of all preludes: the infinite void, and matter restlessly moving to bring forth it knows not what. Then, by the millionth millionth chance – what tragic irony – the conditions at one point of space and time bubble up into that tiny fermentation which is the beginning of life. Everything seems to be against the infant hero of our drama – just as everything seems against the youngest son or ill-used stepdaughter at the opening of a fairy-tale. But life somehow wins through. With infinite suffering, against all but insuperable obstacles, it spreads, it breeds, it complicates itself, from the amoeba up to the plant, up to the reptile, up to the mammal. We glance briefly at the age of monsters. Dragons prowl the earth, devour one another, and die…As the weak, tiny spark of life began amidst the huge hostilities of the inanimate, so now again, amidst the beasts that are far larger and stronger than he, there comes forth a little naked, shivering, cowering creature, shuffling, not yet erect, promising nothing, the product of another millionth millionth chance. Yet somehow he thrives. He becomes the Cave Man with his club and his flints, muttering and growling over his enemies’ bones, dragging his screaming mate by her hair (I never could quite make out why), tearing his children to pieces in fierce jealousy till one of them is old enough to tear him, cowering before the horrible gods whom he created in his own image. But these are only growing pains. Wait till the next act. There he is becoming true Man. He learns to master Nature. Science comes and dissipates the superstitions of his infancy. More and more he becomes the controller of his own fate. Passing hastily over the present (for it is a mere nothing by the time scale we are using), you follow him on into the future. See him in the last act, though not the last scene, of this great mystery. A race of demigods now rules the planet — and perhaps more than the planet — for eugenics have made certain that only demigods will be born, and psychoanalysis that none of them shall lose or smirch his divinity, and communism that all which divinity requires shall be ready to their hands. Man has ascended his throne. Henceforward he has nothing to do but to practise virtue, to grow in wisdom, to be happy. And now, mark the final stroke of genius. If the myth stopped at that point, it might be a little pathetic. It would lack the highest grandeur of which human imagination is capable. The last scene reverses all. We have the Twilight of the Gods. All this time, silently, unceasingly, out of all reach of human power, Nature, the old enemy, has been steadily gnawing away. The sun will cool – all suns will cool – the whole universe will run down. Life (every form of life) will be banished, without hope of return, from every inch of infinite space. All ends in nothingness, and “universal darkness covers all.” The pattern of the myth thus becomes one of the noblest we can conceive.’

‘Such a world drama appeals to every part of us. The early struggles of the hero (a theme delightfully doubled, played first by life, and then by man) appeal to our generosity. His future exaltation gives scope to a reasonable optimism, for the tragic close is so very distant that you need not often think of it — we work with millions of years. And the tragic close itself just gives that irony, that grandeur, which calls forth our defiance, and without which all the rest might cloy. There is a beauty in this myth which well deserves better poetic handling than it has yet received; I hope some great genius will yet crystallise it before the incessant stream of philosophic change carries it all away. I am speaking, of course, of the beauty it has whether you believe it or not. There I can speak from experience, for I, who believe less than half of what it tells me about the past, and less than nothing of what it tells me about the future, am deeply moved when I contemplate it. “

– C.S. Lewis, ‘Is Theology Poetry?’

It’s remarkable how little this debate has changed in the last 70 years. The ‘Scientific Outlook’ of Lewis’ day is singing very much from the same hymn sheet as Kurzgesagt.

Kurzgesagt’s account of the past is compelling, and their vision of the future intoxicating. Humanity can do anything and go anywhere, limited only by the scope of our imagination and the cleverness of our hands.

Kurzgesagt’s narrative is convenient for the present. It requires no faith, content to believe in the existence of only that which the eyes can see. It requires no action, content to believe that no ultimate consequences exist. It requires no submission, content to exalt ourselves to godhood and moral authorship.

It’s far better to convince ourselves that talk of God is all childhood foolishness and fairy stories. It’s far easier to swallow the lie and lose ourselves in the fantasy of the self.

The Counter to Existential Dread

Ultimately, Optimistic Nihilism is a response to a fundamental human insecurity: that our lives are meaningless within a purposeless universe. It sedates this fear, unconventionally, by embracing that same purposelessness and meaninglessness. Death is approaching from down the tracks, inevitable, final. We have oblivion to look forward to – all of our experiences, along with all the mistakes we’ve made and bad things we’ve done, will be swept away, poured unceremoniously into the void.

From that, this:

“If our life is the only thing we get to experience, then it’s the only thing that matters. If the universe has no principles, the only principles relevant are the ones we decide on. If the universe has no purpose, then we get to dictate what its purpose is.”

“If this is our one shot at life, there is no reason to not have fun, and to live as happily as possible. Bonus points if you make the lives of other people better. More bonus points if you help build a galactic human empire. Do the things that make you feel good. You get to decide whatever this means for you.”

Take a second with me

Let it sink in

sink

in

… so

Let’s hash it out. The inevitable fact of ultimate human obliteration means we ought to adopt complete ethical relativism. The scale of the universe means each person gets total moral anonymity. Disbelief in an immortal soul or in resurrection means there are no lasting consequences for any of our actions. Disbelief in a Creator means we don’t have to submit to any kind of moral order. We become endowed with godlike authority to live by moral codes of our own devising and second-by-second revising. And unto each of us is bestowed the freedom to totally disregard the idea of moral living altogether.

Subjective Experience is king. If each of us end in obliteration, all moral progress and all moral behaviour is ultimately pointless. In fact, every pursuit is ultimately pointless. Therefore, the only thing left for us nihilists, optimistic or no, is the pursuit of our own happiness above all else. A fresh gospel for our utopia in the stars: accept yourself as you are and do things that make you happy.

Perhaps that sounds utopian to some…?

I’m not going to try to argue for the existence of the spirit or the resurrection of the body, nor the certainty of any sort of eternal consequence for our actions. I’m just going to point out that if we were to actual live out Kurzgesagt’s moral relativist vision, we would each abominate even our own ethical standards. It is so obvious a truth that I barely need to say it: “do the things that make you feel good” is terrible, terrible advice! What makes me feel good is not what is good for me. A four-year-old could tell you this. Bad advice! I repeat, bad advice! Fortunately, people don’t seem to actually live like this, by and large, checking their behaviour only against the goodness of the feeling it produces in them. It must require a great deal of concentration.

Intellectual Humility/Hubris

And so, lastly. Scientific atheism claims to know, solely by virtue of human reasoning, that God does not exist. Nihilism claims to know, solely by virtue of human philosophical insight, that there is no purpose, moral or otherwise, to the universe. Reflecting on our human frailty, isn’t it far wiser to not claim definitive knowledge of these things? Christianity, at least, does not claim to know anything based on what people alone can work out. That seems a bit more realistic to me: it doesn’t require me to decide upon the emptiness of everything on the strength of astronomy.

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While I profoundly disagree with their underpinning philosophy, I love the Kurzgesagt channel. It’s like they were tailor made for me – thoughtful commentary on interesting social/sci-fi topics, beautifully packaged. And I am a real sucker for high quality animation. Recently, their videos have carried more atheistic bias, and I would rather that were not so. And it’s downright irresponsible to preach such poor moral advice to such a massive viewership. Even still, I appreciate the time and effort they put into discussion of scientific, and now philosophical, ideas.

Also, I respect how they refused their opportunity to put down any other worldviews in their video. It is fashionable these days to be an atheist who makes fun of faith, but they didn’t. They believe that faith is the mother’s milk of the species, which we are soon to be weaned off. I believe they’re wrong. But we can still be pleasant about it. Hey, they were at least polite in their statement of God’s non-existence.

Practical Theology: the Steps of the Race

Our preachers preach Paul, exhorting us to run the race and fight the good fight. One time too many I’ve found myself at a loss trying to describe what the metaphorical steps/punches actually correspond to. I’m a Christian, I’m someone who believes and trusts in Jesus Christ. I am saved by His work on the cross and sanctified by His grace. I know I’ll be resurrected with Him. But…in the mean time, I have to walk or run or fight, right? What does that actually look like?

I think spiritual progress in the Christian life seems hard because it’s so ineffable. It would be so much easier if the life of faith consisted entirely of physical goals I could accomplish in the physical world – a complete itinerary for a godly life. Even for the heroes of our faith, living a Godward life involves downtime, mundane daily living, and that is well. Still, I think it would be encouraging for young Christians like myself to actually know what the life lived in Christ looks like – what are the fruit I should expect to see; what does it mean if x is/isn’t present in my desires or behaviour; what can I practically do to get to know God better; etc.

Caution: the content herein is entirely an expression of my own current understanding of God and the Christian life. More concerningly, it is an expression of my own personal theology, glued together piecemeal from the authors I have read and the ways I have heard the Scriptures interpreted to me – and how all this has been combined in the furnace of my heart by the passion and selective attention and resonation induced within me by the working of the Holy Spirit. This post will display my current understanding in all its intellectual weakness and frailty of heart, and all its spiritual immaturity.

Question: What comes after we know and believe?

a) Being a Christian is about being

As Christians, we already are. God has placed us in a state of conferred status. He has made us His children and heirs. He has accomplished the removal of our sins and our future perfection and our future resurrection. This is the fundamental and most important thing. If you trust Jesus for your salvation and aim to place Him as Lord over your life, all of these things are yours already – you are a Christian, you are saved. Hypothetically, you could live the rest of your life doing nothing more than this.

b) Being a Christian is about becoming

“For the glory of God, the good of others, and the satisfaction of our souls, the aim of the Christian life is our coming to share in such Christlikeness or godliness – which is ‘holiness’ rightly understood. And all our exertions of effort toward that goal are gifts of grace” – David Mathis

Christians, progressively throughout their lives, are infected with greater desire to know and enjoy God. In response, we will ideally form habitual practices which help us to do so in reflection of our commitment to our relationship with Him. Desires and motivations and actions towards these goals are all given as a gracious gift of the Holy Spirit. Every time we feel desire towards God or feel motivated to pray or to engage with the Bible in spite of our selves, a work has been produced in us by the Holy Spirit, which God delights in and is pleased with. This is how God works in us and sanctifies us. Through what we experience as acts of the will, God brings us to Himself.

Such acts of the will are only made possible by the power of God to overcome our old sinful nature. When we believed, our old sinful selves were crucified with Christ, and we were given new, Spirit-infused selves and new hearts, sealed by the blood of Jesus. All this doesn’t mean that we automatically hate all sin and don’t do it. Again from Mathis, “God progressively produces holy desires in us”.

It’s very much like the album Dear Wormwood (I enthusiastically commend The Oh Hellos to all hypothetical readers). It imagines our sinful self as an old abusive lover, with whom we once were toxically infatuated. Now, we have seen God and realised how much better He is, and how wrong our previous love was. We have broken with the old and are drawn magnetically towards the far superior love of our Lord. But the chains of misplaced love are not easily broken, and though we have been given new eyes to see and a new heart for new loves, we still have to ween ourselves off sin, to discipline ourselves (through the work of the Holy Spirit) not to return to the jagged arms of our old lover. Sin is a part of our self which has been defeated and which is in a slow death spiral which will last the remainder of our lives. One of the effects of Christ’s death on the cross was to sever the dominant influence of sin in our lives – we are no longer slaves to it, and we can now resist it by the power of God. And we can resist it more and more successfully as it shrivels more and more within us, and as our true self, reliant on the Holy Spirit for everything, grows stronger. And so we begin to love holiness more and more by God’s grace and power, and for His sake.

c) Being a Christian is about doing

“I lay it down as a simple matter of fact that no one who is careless about such things must ever expect to make much progress in sanctification. I can find no record of any eminent saint who ever neglected them” – JC Ryle

Regular prayer, immersion in the Bible, and fellowship with other believers is what Ryle is talking about. These three practices are the chief ways in which God regularly mediates His grace to us. Their regular enactment isn’t a command upon which our salvation depends, but is a discipline which deepens our love for God and broadens our knowledge of Him. The Holy Spirit produces the desire for all three in us, and as we practice them, He illuminates Christ to us – in the Bible, in prayer, and in other Christians. Increasing passion for and delight in Christ equals greater love for holiness, in total reliance on the Holy Spirit.

These practices are essential for one who wishes to take seriously his relationship with God, who wishes to know Him as well as possible, and to live a holier life as a fragrant offering to the Lord.

My point in all of this

If I could communicate one thing to every new Christian, what would I say? First, if you trust in God, believing that your efforts towards goodness are not enough, and that Jesus Christ died and rose again to bear your penalty for sin and graft you into the family tree of God, then God has saved you. Second, since you have been saved by God, He has given you the Holy Spirit to produce holiness in you by His grace alone, meaning that though you will still sin, your sinful nature is being eradicated slowly, and the you who loves God is growing stronger. Third, discipline yourselves to form habits that help you get to know God better, and the Holy Spirit will help you conquer your motivational malaise and grow towards Him.

That’s the essence of the Christian walk, I think.

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Attempt to mitigate the displeasure of my future self: I, being of sound mind and body, am unconscious of any error or omission in either content or emphasis in the above work. Nevertheless, being sensible of my defects, I acknowledge the probability that I have erred frequently. I carry the hope that my future self will view his past incompetencies with charity – for they are, after all, his.

The Search for the Sacred: Buddha or Christ?

Here follows my perspective on Christianity’s intersection with Buddhist practice – a perspective hard won by devoting much of my free time for the last while to a study of the latter.

I know what you’re thinking – Christianity and Buddhism, they’re rivals, mortal enemies, competing religious and philosophical systems, that kind of deal. Actually I’ve been getting a feel for the commonalities as well as the contrasts between the two. My studies have made me more keenly aware of some life truths which have been thrown into sharp relief by the ideological clash.

I lay my bias card face up: I am a Christian. I think Christianity is more true than Buddhism, and I’ll explain some of why below. But I’ve found that Buddhism contains valuable truths too, which I can absorb without becoming a pluralist or a syncretist.

Underlying realities; doctrinal disparities

In working my way through Paul’s letter to the Romans, I find there is a lot more common ground between the way of the Christ and the way of the Buddha than I at first thought. Paul, with palpable emotion, describes how ‘I’ am in fact two. There is the old me, bound up in sin and liking it, fixed on rebelling against God just for the literal hell of it. But when I became a Christian, a new me was born – a self who loves God and His ways and His word, and who passionately wants to do the right thing just to please Him. The Christian life, then, is an ongoing struggle between these two selves. Thanks to Jesus’ victory over sin and death on the cross, and thanks to the daily power of the Holy Spirit at work in us, it is a fight that the Christian can be utterly sure of winning. And throughout life, with the exercise of discipline by the grace of God, the Christ-like me gets stronger and more dominant, and the old man shrivels up and loses his control.

Buddhism grasps at some of the underlying realities here. The Buddha teaches that what we think of as ‘self’ is actually non-existent. He dispenses with ‘self’ as an obstructive and inaccurate philosophical concept, and Buddhist scholars down the line have favoured its replacement with a bunch of internal motivational forces working in tandem to produce the functions we typically ascribe to the self. So it’s not a direct match, but it’s getting at the idea of a civil war of the self – of viewing undesirable thoughts as not actually a part of my self, but as independent agents which can be resisted.

By faith alone: salvation or self-improvement?

Buddhism places much more focus on the importance of self-discipline than Christianity does. According to Buddhist teaching, the practice of meditation is intended to free the practitioner from the delusions which are pervasive to the human experience, and facilitate a clear view of reality. Meditative observation aims to bring freedom from craving, which is the cause of duhkha. In achieving increasing freedom from craving, the practitioner will ideally become more free to act in a way unbound by delusions or conditioning, and will become more able to live morally, in accordance with the Noble Eightfold Path.

You see, Buddhism and Christianity both make the default human assumption that the universe is founded on a moral order, that behaviour in accordance with that order is life’s purpose, and that consequences exist for those who fail to live in accordingly.

But Buddhism has less bite, I think. Buddhists have no God, and as such cannot appeal to any higher power for intervention or edification. For the Buddhist, my (not)self is all I’ve got. Reader, you will no doubt be aware that self-discipline is a tricky business. It’s hard enough to get my body to do what I want it to do, never mind my mind. How much trickier then is self-salvation? To discipline the body and mind to total moral perfection – that is the only hope laid out for us by the Buddha. Anything less than Enlightenment, and we remain trapped in the endless cycle of rebirth and suffering. It’s not exactly a realistic ask. It’s salvation for the elite, for only the cream of humanity’s crop.

The reader might begin to twig as to why I prefer the Way to the Path. I don’t think there are any plausible grounds for faith in our ability to save ourselves. When the moral bar is set at total mental discipline, never thinking an angry or bitter thought about another person, never lying, etc – then that bar is far too high for us, and our efforts are far too measly. The only reasonable solution is one which does not rest on our accomplishments, and which does not fall victim to the utter folly of offering self-improvement as salvation. In short, though your acceptance of this statement will depend upon whether you think the existence of such a God possible, the only reasonable solution to the human problem is a God who intervenes on our behalf. We require a God who lives the perfect life we could never live, who bears the consequences for our failed moral lives. A God who, miraculously, with grace too wide to comprehend, offers to switch legal records with us – our sin for His perfection. All our innumerable acts of moral carnage get deleted from the legal system, and instead, a perfectly lived life gets credited to our account. This is the only salvation, the only way that solves the problem.

And not only does it make sense, but it’s infinitely better! All you can hope for in Buddhism is maybe eventually a top-notch incarnation so you can maybe eventually be disciplined enough to maybe eventually wiggle free of a vicious cycle of duhkha-ful incarnations. If you’re a Buddhist, life is so devoid of any lasting good that all we can hope for is the chance to escape it altogether – to flee into a state of blissful non-existence. Christianity fields a better offer – a God who saves us, who does all the work for us at enormous personal expense, and who does it just so we can enjoy His presence forever, and so He can enjoy us. Rather than looking forward to a whole pile of tasty nothingness, the Christian eternity is a person who delights in us, and who is Himself the most delightful stimulus imaginable.

Christianity also makes more sense of the human experience. I mean, it’s all well and good to say that life is futile and ought to be escaped, but very seldom do you come across a person who acts as though this is true. Doesn’t it run contrary to the basic testimony of every life? We desperately crave for our lives to be validated and filled with purpose. Our friend the Buddha might tell us that this craving is the very prob, and that it is based upon, and is itself a source of, delusion. But to me, an answer which makes sense of our innate experience of life and our most deeply held desires is superior to an answer which dismisses them as illusory. I am of the school of CS Lewis who argues that desires indicate the existence of something which can fill them. It’s a choice-of-belief that you have to make: does the existence of our deepest desire for a purposeful life mean that we are a broken machine which needs to be switched off, or a vessel which can be filled – a nomad searching for his home?

Let’s talk about morals

Secular/naturalistic Buddhists argue that Buddhist practice and belief contribute to the moral life by facilitating perceptual experiences which (ideally) undermine selfish and prejudicial behaviour. Experiencing permeability and continuity between oneself and the universe in meditation degrades the evolutionary logic of selfishness. Likewise, experiencing formlessness in meditation may help people surmount group bias by transcending the group-based species perspective instilled in each of us by natural selection. And an understanding of the not-self doctrine encourages an individual to analyse their internal motivations, potentially facilitating behavioural control and allowing an individual to enact behaviour which is less selfish and less ‘groupish’.

But alas, for the rub approaches. Neither the Eightfold Path nor naturalistic meditative practice are very concerned with encouraging behaviour which has a positive impact on others, instead dealing solely with the expulsion of one’s own selfish behaviour. A valid moral tradition should encourage its adherents to act for the good of others. The Buddhist morality is instead concerned only with achieving behavioural limits through introspection, rather than with stimulating outward acts. And so it falls short of fostering meaningful moral living.

I also think that the moral logic of Buddhist doctrine is more likely to encourage morally apathetic behaviour towards others rather commitment to moral action. Believing in an illusory world which lacks a substantive essence will surely lead to apathy about the suffering of others. Believing in an impermanent reality will surely encourage the fatalist belief that nothing really matters, leading to a loss of urgency to act and advocate for social justice. Believing in a worldview which undermines the substantial existence of the self will surely lead to a loss of moral agency and lessen the felt impact of a person’s moral actions. And a cooling of the emotional affect associated with the experience of formlessness will eliminate valuable emotional motivators for moral action.

For Christians, all of creation is a (now imperfect) gift of God which will one day be perfected. Creation is to be delighted in as it reflects the Creator. For Christians, emotions can be born out of rebellion against God, but they can also be good and right and justified. Righteous anger, attachment, love – these are not sensations to seek dissociation from! Rather, they are good and godly and helpful experiences, experienced by God as a man, and even modelled in the Bible by a personified, personal God. Creation is real, it is substantial, and the events which occur in this life, including our actions towards others and our personal choices, all conspire in God’s grand providential scheme to bring human beings closer to God, or further from Him. As Lewis says, every action towards others is helping them on their way to becoming either a heavenly creature of unimaginable beauty, or a self-obsessed, sin-contorted atrocity for all eternity.

Christianity does not deny but validates fundamental aspects of the human experience like selfhood and the substantiality of the world, and as such is more likely to impel a person towards moral action. It gives real and eternal importance to our actions. It affirms peoples’ innate convictions about their personal responsibility and the meaningfulness of their actions, and so allows them to take moral action more seriously. I don’t think that anything less than this can provide a sufficient account of how people are to engage in moral action.

Some of my best friends are Buddhists

Studying Buddhism has introduced me to really useful therapeutic practices and really handy lenses through which to think about myself and the world. I have one word for you: meditation. They’re really on to something there. When my mind is running on autopilot, it tends to adopt a certain perspective – of total fraternisation with my worries and problems, of intimate attendance to loud environmental stimuli, of conjuring projections of all the potential things happening in the future. My mind is rarely a quiet place. Meditation is so helpful in slowing everything down, in quieting the mind, in stepping back from stimuli and re-prioritising mental space. And it really helps to me to remember and practically experience my unwholesome motivations and thoughts and feelings as distinct from the actual me.

On the motion

I am really valuing the resurgence of Buddhism in the Western world. On my journey across the Internet, I’ve encountered scientists and philosophers turning to mysticism and to Buddhist practice because they realise that the scientific worldview is, at core, insufficient. A materialistic positivist belief system has nothing to say about the immaterial essence of reality – it can’t help us explain it or access it. Our culture is materialistic, and so our spiritual selves are starved and cry out for something to fill the void. Enter secular Buddhism, offering up a liberal, popular spiritualism to tickle our fancies and satiate some of that hunger with some spiritual practice. It’s tolerant and inclusive – it embraces all faiths and religions, and condemns no thoughts or lifestyles (in popular Western practice, at any rate). As Gethin puts it, “Buddhism [is] the answer to the modern world’s ‘crisis of faith’: a religion devoid of belief in God and the saving power of rituals, whose truths are not accepted on the authority of scripture, but verified by direct experience”. Buddhist practice goes some way to filling man’s inner void, but it lets him hold on to all of his assumptions about his individuality and his rights. He remains his own means of salvation. And so it’s a spirituality which fails to orient the man to the source of his spirit – his Creator, the true Reality and Source of all things; God.

Alright, some of that sounded pretty negative. But this movement is actually a really positive sign. People just feel that there is more than the material – a feeling borne out by philosophical inquiry and scientific insufficiency (in eg. the problem of consciousness). So the world finds itself in need answers which are (in some sense) supermaterial, supernatural.

At heart, the resurgence of Buddhism is the story of people across the world feeling loss – the loss of something which our pseudoscientific-atheistic-internet-culture can’t account for, and won’t countenance a discussion about, and will only mock. It’s the rekindling of the recognition of the Reality behind reality. The search for the sacred is on again.