MONISM, BUDDHISM, HINDUISM: THEIR PHILOSOPHY AND HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE

Buddhism and Hinduism have become fantastically popular in the Western world. In fact, we hardly read a negative word about them.

Interestingly, it is not the religion of the people of the East that has been adopted here but a monistic form of it, which asserts that there is only one reality. It is either a matter of the god within us (panentheism) or the god who is us (pantheism). This means that we too are god and the material world is just the world of illusion. If so, we should not have any attachments to this world. Instead, our goal should be to transcend this world so that we can embrace our oneness with the one reality – god.

This ideal is expressed in many ways. In the Bhagavad-Gita, Lord Krisha says:

• “You have grieved for those who deserve no grief… Neither for the living nor the dead do the wise grieve.”

Why do not the wise grieve? Because the “wise” understand that they are just grieving for the passing illusion, while the transcendent has no place for grieving. A Buddhist Doctrine communicates the same ideal:

• On desire depends attachment; on attachment depends existence; on existence depends birth; on birth depends old age and death, sorrow lamentation, misery, and despair. Thus does the entire aggregation of misery arise.

Misery and grieving are the result of attachment to this illusory world. By transcending this world, with its various attachments, grief and misery are also transcended, and that’s the goal of life.

This goal is attained through enlightenment. While the Hindus attempted to reach enlightenment through the two extremes of self-depravation and self-gratification, the Buddha taught that it was attainable through a Middle Way. In the Tripitaka, he was alleged to have preached:

• “These two extremes, monks, are not to be practiced by anyone who has gone forth from the world. What are the two? That conjoined with passions and luxury, which is low, common, vulgar, and useless; and that conjoined with self-torture, which is painful, ignoble, and useless. Avoiding these two extremes, the blessed one has gained the enlightenment of the middle path, which produces insight and knowledge, and leads to calm, to higher knowledge, to enlightenment and nirvana. What, monks is the middle path? It is the noble eightfold path…Now this is the noble truth of pain: birth is painful, old age is painful, sickness is painful, death is painful…In short the five components of life are painful…Now monks, this is the noble truth of the cause of pain: the craving that ends to rebirth, combined with pleasure and lust…”

In any event, both Hinduism and Buddhism preached a message of renunciation of the things of this world – work, commitments, enjoyments, and even family and friends. However, does such a renunciation reduce who we are as human beings?

In “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” Robert M. Pirsig’s main character, Phaedrus, studying at Benares Hindu University and spiritual searching, asks a question that changes his life:

• But one day in the classroom the professor of philosophy was blithely expounding on the illusory nature of the world for what seemed the fiftieth time and Phaedrus raised his hand and asked coldly if it was believed that the atomic bomb that had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were illusory. The professor smiled and said yes. That ended the exchange… He left the classroom, left India and gave up.

Phaedrus could not deny the great tragedy. In contrast to this understanding of life as illusion, “Jesus wept” in the midst of human suffering:

• When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. And he said, “Where have you laid him [their dead brother Lazarus]?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus wept. (John 11:33-35; ESV)

Jesus had compassion, even though this tragedy was soon reversed when Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. But isn’t compassion a part of Hinduism and Buddhism? Perhaps superficially, but monism represents a denial of our individuality and suffering. These too are part of the illusion.

In “The King of Knowledge,” a very literalistic commentary on the Bhagavad-Gita, Prabhupada, the late head of the Hare Krishna Vishnavite sect of Hinduism characteristically wrote:

• The hospital making business is being conducted by the government; it is the duty of a disciple to make hospitals whereby people can actually get rid of their material bodies, not patch them up. But for want of knowing what real spiritual activity is, we take up material activities.

Monistic thought rules against any compassion, because compassion merely reinforces the illusion of our individual personhood.

How had Hinduism affected its place of birth – India? In “The Book that Made your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization” Indian scholar and Christian convert, Vishal Mangalwadi, wrote about the negative effect of Hinduism on India:

• Our monks did not develop technical aids to improve their eyesight. They took pride in closing even perfectly good eyes in meditation. (108)

If this material world is illusory, then work and technological advancement are counter-productive:

• It is virtually impossible to find a Brahmin guru in traditional India who resembles the apostle Paul – a rabbi who made tents for a living. Brahmins said that manual work was the duty of lower castes, a result of bad karma from their previous births. Mahatma Gandhi was the first Indian leader who used a spinning wheel to try to import the Pauline work ethic into India: “No work, no food.” (109)

Their mis-identification of the problem - along with a disdain for hard work - kept India backward for centuries. Although Gandhi believed in hard work, he disdained technology:

• Gandhi’s idea that technology was evil and that a simple, natural life was morally superior came from British idealists like John Ruskin. Sensitive people like him had become critical of England’s Industrial Revolution because of the exploitation, oppression, and other evils associated with its “dark satanic mills.” Mahatma Gandhi brought this opposition to technology to India. (111)

However, it was technology - and theology that inspired it - that had saved the West. Mangalwadi gives several examples:

• The peasants’ humble wheeled plow generated the economic strength that helped save Europe from colonization by Islam. During the Middle Ages, Islamic forces were able to invade Europe almost at will. Muslims conquered southern Spain and Portugal and invaded France in the eighth century. In the ninth century, they conquered Sicily and invaded Italy, sacking Ostia and Rome in 846. By 1237, they had begun to conquer Russia. Constantinople was captured in 1453, and the battles of 1526 in Hungary and 1529 in Vienna suggested that it was merely a matter of time before the mullahs, caliphs, and sheikhs would rule cities like Rome, Vienna, and Florence. Equipped with a coulter, a horizontal share, and a moldboard, Europe’s new plow increased productivity by tilling rich, heavy, and badly drained river-bottom soil…The net result was the gradual elimination of starvation, the improved health of the people, and a strengthening of the economic foundations of the West relative to Islam. (101-102)

Monism also turns its eyes away from evil and corruption as illusory. Mangalwadi provides an illuminating example from his own country. In 1631, the monsoon failed to come. Consequently, there was a great famine. A British traveler relates the devastation he saw:

• From Surat to this place all the highway was stowed with dead people, our noses never free from the stink of them…women were seen to roast their children…a man or a woman no sooner dead but they were cut in pieces to be eaten. (112)

Mangalwadi reasons:

• My people did not starve because they were stupid, lazy, or unproductive. Instead, immorality killed them! They were taxed 80% of their produce. This left them with little and nothing to store for an emergency. The only way for the people to have any money was to join their exploiters.

Monism failed to identify evil and, consequently, was unable to confront it. Those who want to consider monism must take a look at its historical implications and not just what is currently popular in the West.

What Makes Nations Thrive while others Die?

Why do certain nations fail while others abundantly succeed? Indian scholar Vishal Mangalwadi concluded that trust based on trustworthiness was a major factor:

• Why are the Dutch or the English able to trust each other in a way that the Indians or the Egyptians cannot? What makes some cultures more honest, less corrupt, more trustworthy, and therefore more prosperous? And why is the postmodern West discarding the moral secret of its success? (Truth and Transformation: A Manifesto for Ailing Nations)

Mangalwadi became convinced that the way we believe is the way we behave and even grow the economy. He observed:

• People in the Netherlands had money to give because generation after generation was taught to work hard and give tithes and offerings to God. The Dutch made money to give to the poor in India because the Bible taught, “He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with his own hands, that he may have something to share with those in need” (Eph. 4:28).

The contrast he observed between the beliefs of his Hindu Indian and the Christian West were profound:

• Acharya-turned-Bhagwan-turned-Osho Rajneesh, who gave widespread publicity to the tantric idea of salvation through sex, summarized the Indian as well as the postmodern Western worldview in similar terms: “We have divided the world into the good and the evil. The world is not so divided. The good and the evil are our valuations [not God’s commandments]. There is no good, there is no bad. These are two aspects of one reality… The data collected by Transparency International shows that the least corrupt countries are overwhelmingly those whose soul was nurtured by the Bible.

It should be no surprise that if we do not believe in an objective right and wrong, we will begin to act in concert with this belief. Immediate gratification will inevitably triumph over moral truth. However, we might not see this transformation in the Western world because Christian habits still remain even as postmodernism and moral relativism have co-opted the Western mind.

Mangalwadi reasons that Hindu philosophy is directly related to the impoverishment of India:

• India’s religious philosophy taught that since the human soul was divine, it could not sin. In fact, our most rigorous religious philosophy teaches that everything is God. God is the only reality that exists, and therefore there is no ultimate distinction between good and evil, right and wrong.

Who would want to enter into a business deal with someone who doesn’t believe in right or wrong! Wouldn’t we rather affiliate with someone who has such a high commitment to moral truth that honesty would govern his life? The answer is plain. Therefore, Mangalwadi reasons that economy is inseparable from morality:

• Their chronic poverty proves what Adam Smith, a father of capitalism, knew: real- world economics are the result of the kind of morality you have, which in turn is a fruit of the kind of philosophy you have. For example, why have health care costs become so obscene in America that they are destroying the very culture of compassion? Insurance and pharmaceutical companies that sustain health care are blamed only because the intellectual elite can no longer calculate the economic costs of academic godlessness that separates economics from moral truth.

The relationship between morality and economy can be observed in many instances. Mangalwadi relates a revealing experience. He was experiencing frustration trying to purchase tickets from a machine on an Amsterdam tram. He asked a couple of American tourists for assistance. They responded:

• “Why do you want to get tickets?” they responded. “We’ve been riding around for a week. No one has ever come to check any tickets.”

Mangalwadi was startled more by their hardness of conscience than by their theft of service:

• Their shamelessness shocked me more than their immorality. They represented the new generation, liberated from “arbitrary” and “oppressive” religious ideas of right and wrong. University education had freed them from commandments such as “You shall not steal.”

Someone has to pay the price for sin. Eventually, the Dutch will have to hire additional personnel to collect the fares. Who pays for them? Everyone! I too have met many such travelers. They are intelligent, likeable, knowledgeable, highly educated, and even sensitive to victimization in its various forms, but they were unable to connect the dots to their own behaviors. Not a twinge of shame!

However, their conduct serves as an omen of the coming tsunami that will inevitably submerge the economy along with everything we value. It is already at our door, but no one sees it. When I talk about this coming destruction, my secular friends look at me as if I am from another planet. Instead, their hope is in this world, and it is just too difficult to question their sustaining hope. Mangalwadi also marvels at what is happening in the West:

• This good news [of the Christian faith] became the intellectual foundation of the modern West, the force that produced moral integrity, economic prosperity, and political freedom. If moral integrity is foundational to prosperity, why don’t secular experts talk about it? The reason is that the universities no longer know whether moral laws are true universal principles or mere social conventions made up to restrict our freedoms. And why don’t they know? Economists have lost the secret of the West’s success because philosophers have lost the very idea of truth. Why? The truth was lost because of an intellectual arrogance that rejected divine revelation.

I think that it is not simply the arrogance of the West but the disdain of the West towards objective moral does-and-don’ts along with the judgments they inflict for transgression. The West wants to be free from such judgments – anything that will tell them that they are wrong, anything that will cause them to feel guilty or shamed.

However, their quest for absolute freedom has made them slaves and has deprived them of their dignity as human beings. They are so intent to escape from guilt, shame, and their resulting negative self-images that they have adopted philosophies that will degrade them. They have exchanged the concept of human culpability for the belief that we are simply products of our society and upbringing, convinced that this belief will give them the freedom from their painful feelings. After all, they are just a product or result.

However, when we degrade ourselves in this manner, we pay a big price. Psychologist James Hillman observes that we can deaden our lives through the way we interpret them:

• We dull our lives by the way we conceive then… By accepting the idea that I am the effect of…hereditary and social forces, I reduce myself to a result. The more my life is accounted for by what already occurred in my chromosomes, by what my parents did or didn’t do, and by my early years now long past, the more my biography is the story of a victim. I am living a plot written by my genetic code, ancestral heredity, traumatic occasions, parental unconsciousness, societal accidents. (The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, Random House, 6)

Some even go a step further and deny freewill, opting instead for the belief that everything that we do has been predetermined by previous bio-chemical events. Therefore, they claim that we needn’t feel guilty for anything we do. They have even become evangelists for this new faith. One gentleman, with whom I have had considerable contact, leads a group entitled, “The illusion of freewill,” and insists that this belief is necessary to liberate us.

I joke, “I don’t talk to machines, even wet machines.” More seriously, it just becomes too easy to cheat your business partner, if you believe that you couldn’t have acted otherwise. In fact, it becomes too easy to give into any temptation. Without any substantial rational resistance, we become slaves to our impulses.

• The evil deeds of a wicked man ensnare him; the cords of his sin hold him fast. He will die for lack of discipline, led astray by his own great folly. (Proverbs 5:22-23)

Once we do wrong and refuse to admit it, we condemn ourselves to a never-ending pattern of rationalizations. We deny our guilt whether through denying freewill or through the many methods of “mindful” dissociation, which have never helped those nations that have practiced them.

I often ask people if we can learn any lessons from the past. Their answer is usually, “No! The situation is now different and requires a different solution.” They can anticipate my next question, “What then has made the West successful,” and skillfully avoid it. Why be encumbered by the lessons of past, if this will interfere with finding the “truth” within one’s own desires! However, according to King Solomon, they will reap the fruits of their own choices:

• Since they hated knowledge and did not choose… the LORD, since they would not accept my advice and spurned my rebuke, they will eat the fruit of their ways and be filled with the fruit of their schemes. For the waywardness of the simple will kill them, and the complacency of fools will destroy them (Proverbs 1:29-32)

Secular Morality Requires the very Thing it Rejects – Christianity!

Another Letter to an Atheist: 

I applaud your desire to live and think morally. I also agree with you that, “We just need ones [morals] that are rationally justified.” However, I don’t think that you can do this apart from a belief in a superior, transcendent Being.

For one thing, there is the observation by the skeptical philosopher David Hume that we can’t proceed logically from what “is” (science and observation) to what “should be” (moral laws). They are separated by an impassible gulf. We all see much evil in the world, but this fact doesn’t by itself dictate any moral truths. While some might propose some form of corrective intervention, others will simply conclude, “Well, it’s just the way it should be – the survival of the fittest.” Meanwhile, others will conclude that its all illusion and that we shouldn’t strengthen the illusion by treating it as if it’s real. Science cannot mediate among these conflicting opinions.

Swami Prabhupada wrote a popular commentary on the Bhagavad Gita:

·        “The hospital making business is being conducted by the government; it is the duty of a disciple to make hospitals whereby people can actually get rid of their material bodies, not patch them up. But for want of knowing what real spiritual activity is, we take up material activities.” (The King of Knowledge)

Likewise, the Self-Realization Fellowship, started by Swami Yogananda, presents this as one of their core beliefs:

·        “Then this cosmic movie, with its horrors of disease and poverty and atomic bombs will appear to us only as real as the anomalies we experience at a movie house. When we have finished seeing the motion picture, we will know that nobody was killed; nobody was suffering.”

Eastern thought is in denial about suffering and concepts of justice. However, modern secularism is the heir to the ideas of the Christian West. Instead, of being one vast illusion that must be transcended, the Bible reveals that God’s creation is “very good,” albeit fallen. It therefore can be enjoyed, valued, and upheld. Consequently, work, family and friendships are valued and upheld, while suffering and loss should elicit compassion.

I think that it’s important and honest for secularists to acknowledge this debt, as some secularists, like John D. Steinrucken, are willing to do:

·        Those who doubt the effect of religion on morality should seriously ask the question: Just what are the immutable moral laws of secularism? Be prepared to answer, if you are honest, that such laws simply do not exist! The best answer we can ever hear from secularists to this question is a hodgepodge of strained relativist talk of situational ethics. They can cite no overriding authority other than that of fashion. For the great majority in the West, it is the Judeo/Christian tradition which offers a template assuring a life of inner peace toward the world at large -- a peace which translates to a workable liberal society.           

Are you aware that your ideas are very Judeo/Christian:

• I equate what is morally good and bad with what helps and harms conscious living beings, with humans given priority since we are the most sentient of all living things.

However, as you point out, we will differ about “what helps and harms.” Even the fact that you give “humans…priority” is also a Christian idea. The Bible teaches that we are God’s glorious creation – created in His very moral and spiritual image (Gen. 1:26-27).

However, we mustn’t take this ground-zero belief for granted. Even now many secularists are assigning value based upon performance, intelligence and societal contributions.

This change will have serious consequences. There will no longer be any rational justification for “equality” and “equal rights,” simply because there is no such thing as equality in a merely physical world, where all have different abilities and intelligence and make very different kinds of contributions, some negative. And if there are assigned a negative value, shouldn’t that make them expendable?

From this perspective, it should not surprise us that every radical secular experiment has degenerated into barbarism, where the “ends justifies whatever means” is required to stay in power. And there are good reasons for this. Here are some problems that secular pragmatism will encounter if it doesn’t connect itself to the Christian faith:

1. It will lack moral absolutes, and these require a higher, transcendent, unchanging moral law. Lenin had been asked, “What is moral under the communist system.” He answered, “Whatever promotes the revolution is moral. Whatever interferes with it is immoral.” Understandably, this philosophy gave rise to the most extensive murder sprees in human history.

Without moral absolutes, we can’t even talk coherently about judgments or laws. We can’t tell our children, “It’s wrong to steal.” Instead, we must tell them, “According to our current social conventions, stealing is wrong.”

2. A sound moral or legal system cannot be founded on pragmatism alone. While selfish, pragmatic considerations can lead us to be altruistic, these can’t do so for long. While most of the time we benefit when we help others, there are many occasions when helping others will prove costly and non-pragmatic. Pragmatism can’t provide the rationale to truly sacrifice ourselves for others.

In contrast, when we understand that our reward is in heaven, we Christians are willing to sacrifice our “reward” here, at least, that’s our goal. History is replete of such examples. The Second century theologian Tertullian explained:

• “We Christians have everything in common except our wives. It is our care of the helpless, our practice of lovingkindness that brands us in the eyes of many of our opponents. ‘Look,’ they say, “how much they love one another.’”

Even the pagan Lucian (190 AD) confessed:

• “The earnestness with which people of this religion help one another in their needs is incredible. They spare themselves nothing for this end.”

3. People will live the way they believe. If they don’t believe in moral absolutes from above, they will live as if they don’t exist, by changing man-made standards to be manipulated to suit the occasion and need. Besides, if you believe that humanity is the end-all-and-be-all, this will inevitably produce arrogance.

In contrast, as the Christian draws closer to the Light, the Light exposes us for who we are and humbles us. Therefore, we dare not look down on others.

4. Fruitful society is based upon shared values. However, if our values are merely pragmatically derived from our relative situations, harmony will be impossible to attain. Reason alone will not restore social order, and where reason fails, power and coercion will fill the gap. Secular humanist Max Hocutt admits that:

• “To me [the non-existence of God] means that there is no absolute morality, that moralities are sets of social conventions devised by humans to satisfy their needs…If there were a morality written up in the sky somewhere but no God to enforce it, I see no good reason why anyone should pay it any heed.”

If people have no sufficient reason to follow the laws, the State has to provide one – fear. This helps to explain while every radical experiment in secular humanism has devolved into a harsh totalitarian state. The secularist Steinrucken acknowledges this:

·        Secularism has never offered the people a practical substitute for religion. From the time of the philosophes with their certainties in 1789, the rationally thought-through utopias of those who think themselves the elite of the world, when actually put to the test, have not merely come to naught. Attempts during those two centuries to put into practice utopian visions have caused huge sufferings. But they, the clever ones, never look back. In their conceit, they delude themselves that next time they are sure to get it right. They create justifications for their fantasies by rewriting the histories.

I know that you have a hard time with the Old Testament, but perhaps you might re-visit the New. You might not find its morality so entirely different from the morals you understandably want to promote.

Logic: A Needless Hindrance if you’re Trying to Influence

Buddhist and Hindu philosophers tend to quote from the New Testament, claiming its wisdom as their own, offering an interpretation that erroneously coincides with their own beliefs. Eckhart Tolle, Oprah’s guru, quotes liberally from the NT. Here’s one example:

• “The wisdom of this world is folly with God” [1 Cor. 3:19]. What is the wisdom of this world? The movement of thought, and meaning that is defined exclusively by thought. (A New Earth, 196)

What did Paul mean by “the wisdom of the world?” He was contrasting the “wisdom of world” with the “wisdom of the God.” He denigrates the “wisdom of the world,” claiming that this arrogant wisdom is blind and fails to acknowledge God (1 Cor. 1:20-21). However, Paul claimed that he was teaching a godly wisdom – a real wisdom - to the mature (1 Cor. 2:6).

The Bible is not opposed to wisdom, but rather an arrogant, human-based “wisdom.” Even the context, from which Tolle quotes, affirms this fact:

• Do not deceive yourselves. If any one of you thinks he is wise by the standards of this age, he should become a "fool" so that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God's sight. (1 Cor. 3:18-19)

Tolle wrongly extracts this verse from its context to argue that Paul writes against all wisdom. However, Paul writes only against an arrogant wisdom that thinks itself wise. Instead, such a man would have to humble himself so that he might really “become wise.” Consequently, it is not wisdom that is denigrated but an arrogant wisdom.

In light of the many biblical affirmations of wisdom, Tolle’s interpretation has to be rejected.

However, according to Tolle, there is absolutely no wisdom, because all “wisdom” relies on thought:

• Thinking isolates a situation or event and calls it good or bad, as if it had a separate existence. Through excessive reliance on thinking, reality becomes fragmented. This fragmentation is an illusion, but it seems very real while you are trapped in it. And yet the universe is an individualistic whole in which all things are interconnected, in which nothing exists in isolation. (196)

According to Tolle and many Eastern thinkers, reality is one, and therefore, one part can’t be separated from the rest. In essence, there are no parts but a single unity. It would be like trying to study the function of the heart by ripping it out of the body, of which it is part, to measure its functioning. Likewise, according to Tolle, our thinking is based upon studying parts in isolation – a distortion of reality.

Tolle then applies his concept of oneness to morality, claiming that we can’t make moral judgments about isolated events. We cannot say that one action is “good” and another one is “bad.”

• The deeper interconnectedness of all things and events implies that the mental labels of “good” and “bad” are ultimately illusory. They always imply a limited perspective and so are true only relatively and temporarily. (196)

In order to support his claim, he tells a story about a man who wisely refused to judge “bad” events. At the end, what had seemed to be bad turned out for good. While it is true that many things that seem to be bad really produce good, his conclusion that “good” and “bad” are “ultimately illusory” depends upon making a moral judgment – the very thing that he claims we can’t do!

Besides, if we can’t make moral judgments because of the “interconnectedness of all things,” then we also cannot make judgments about the physical world. Hence, we cannot do science!

Also, if wisdom and thought are ultimately illusory or even “true only relatively and temporarily,” then what can we make of the books he has written. They are laden with thoughts. If these thoughts are “true only relatively and temporarily,” then we shouldn’t take anything he has written seriously.

If his stance seems illogical, perhaps it is. Perhaps Tolle needs to go back to the drawing board. Meanwhile, some Eastern thinkers retort that logic is the “invention of little minds.” However, if this is so, how then can we assess any claim? I guess all that we can do is to eat, drink and be merry. But I fear that logic is required for even these elementary activities.

Medicine and Compassion Require an Adequate Rational Foundation

The way we think is the way we live. Our philosophies and worldviews are the foundation upon which we build our houses of caring, chaos, or confusion. This very apparent truth can be demonstrated in any area of human endeavor. To illustrate the causal power of our philosophies, let’s just take the area of medicine.

Indian scholar Vishal Mangalwadi states that India had pioneered a number of ancient medical advances including cataract surgery and plastic surgery. However, the study and practice of medicine had only a brief duration in India. Mangalwadi explains that medicine and even compassion lacked an adequate cognitive rationale in his India. This is partially because India’s doctors were also regarded as “gurus” who couldn’t be questioned:

• This attitude toward knowledge could not create and sustain an academic culture where peers and students could challenge, reject, and improve the medical techniques they had received. Thus, India had intellectual giants but our religious tradition failed to build academic communities. Individual genius, knowledge, and excellence in technology are insufficient to build a medical center. (The Book that Made Your World, 311)

Mangalwadi also claims that Indian religions couldn’t provide an adequate rationale for compassion – a necessary pre-condition for the practice of medicine:

• A person’s suffering was believed to be a result of her or his karma (deeds) in a previous life. In other words, suffering was cosmic justice. To interfere with cosmic justice is like breaking into a jail and setting a prisoner free. If you cut short someone’s suffering, you would actually add to his suffering because he would need to come back to complete his due quota of suffering. (312)

Although Buddhism says a lot about compassion, its message is conflicted:

• The Buddha had to renounce his own wife and son to find enlightenment. He saw attachment as a cause of suffering. Detachment, therefore, became an important religious virtue…Those whose commitment was to their own spiritual enlightenment did not have the motivation to develop a scientific medical tradition. (312)

Our ideas have wings:

• The idea that the state should pay surgeons to serve the poor came to India with the Bible. Secularism hijacked the biblical idea, but it provides only the form, not the spirit. It is possible to bring a mango plant from India and grow it in Minnesota. One might even get a few crops. But under normal circumstances, the tree will not survive and certainly not reproduce. (314)

Secularism might be able to grow a mango tree in its own soil, but will it survive? Indian medicine wasn’t able to survive in its cognitive climate. Secularism claims to promote compassion, but can its own beliefs cause it to survive?

It certainly doesn’t seem that secularism has a firm enough basis for compassion. It doesn’t have a high view of humanity. Materialism and naturalism – components of today’s secularism – regard humanity as just another animal, albeit more intelligent. However, some of us – babies, the mentally handicapped, the delusional - aren’t as intelligent as some animals. Consequently, these are becoming expendable in the West.

Besides, if we are regarded as no more than cosmically-purposeless animalistic bodies, then there remains no reason to not treat us as such. Consequently, in secular societies, there was little hesitation to exterminate dissidents and those regarded as racially inferior – a virtual caste system.

Moral relativism eliminates the possible existence of any human or inalienable rights – any basis for a Bill of Rights. Morals simply become human inventions which change and are rescinded arbitrarily at will, according to the need.

Secular multi-culturalism is born out of moral relativism. It acknowledges that we have no rock-solid basis upon which to judge other cultures or to defend our own. Therefore, in contradiction to its purported philosophy, the secular West has allowed the establishment of Shariah courts, which rule against the very rights the West has committed itself to uphold.

Such moral confusion can provide no adequate foundation for the rights that we enjoy – rights that have promoted the West.

Malcolm Muggeridge, the late British journalist and former secular humanist, observed:

• “I’ve spent a number of years in India and Africa where I found much righteous endeavor undertaken by Christians of all denominations; but I’ve never , as it happens, came across a hospital or orphanage run by the Fabian [communist] society, or a humanist leper colony.” (314)

Why not? Could it be that their philosophy/religion is inadequate for such?