Fallenness: The Buddhists (and others) have it All Wrong

Can America recover this time?  Such evil uprisings of the Marxist ideology* that has been growing in the universities since the sixties at least have occurred before and eventually die out as some semblance of normality resumes for a while.  But each new phase of "normal" is really undermined at its core by the irrationality that is just waiting for another opportunity to burst out and destroy and kill everything good.  

This time around it's more virulent than ever as the usual forces of restraint are compromised and intimidated into ineffectiveness and some of them have even joined with the forces of destruction.  

What's going to happen now?  I pray pray pray for reason to return, but it's possible that God may have reached the point where he is going to let it all play out, and woe to all of us if that is the case.  If we are really approaching the Rapture, to be followed by the Day of the Lord which will be the final pouring out of God's wrath against an evil world, this may be a foretaste, or a preliminary phasing-in of that coming Great Tribulation period.  If not I shudder to think how much worse it could get before that happens.

It's the way sheer evil is being justified that is the worst of all of this.  Evil will always rise up, rampages of vandals and looters and murderers can always happen in a fallen world, but they are usually confronted by forces of good and this time those forces are weakened and silenced and treated as if they are the evil.  How can we survive this?

----

This is a fallen world.  It is taken for normal by most people, even by Christians who should know better.  In a fallen world good is always undermined to some extent by evil.  We are all sinners, "there is no one good, no not one" says the scripture.   This is why we need a Savior, this is why Jesus came.  But the devil is highly intelligent and knows how to work on the sinful human soul so that we justify ourselves at the expense of others and at the expense of the entire fabric of security that protects all of us. 

I was pondering this as I listened recently to some teaching by the Tibetan Buddhist nun Robina Courtin at You Tube.  I got very interested in her teaching on karma, seeing how it is similar to the workings of God's Law as taught in the Bible.  They teach four precepts that are almost identical to four of the Ten Commandments for instance:  don't steal, don't lie, don't commit wrongful sex, don't murder, to which she adds don't misuse speech which is treated as more of a subcategory in the Bible rather than a separate commandment.  That is, speech can be a vehicle for all the other sins. 

It was the Buddhist teaching against killing that got me thinking about fallenness and how Buddhists have no clue about that.   They treat it as an evil thing to kill anything at all, insects, even bacteria.  E coli?  Apparently so.   

In a fallen world this blanket rejection of all killing is dangerous.  It may be that in the Kingdom of God it would make sense.  That is it would make sense in the ideal world where all living creatures are in harmony without doing any harm to each other.  That is biblically when the lion lies down with the lamg and the child can play int he viper's den without being hurt, when weapons of war have been turned into tools for constructive purposes and so on.

But in this fallen world, no.  Nature in this world is "red in tooth and claw," killing and eating each other, or in the case of insects and bacteria causing disease and death.

The biblical revelation tells us that when our first parents disobeyed God they lost their original idyllic world in which all forms of life lived in harmony, and from that point on death entered the universe.  We are told this in the New Testament, in ……………    Death entered as God said it would and since then we've been governed by the rule that says "the wages of sin is death."  Sin brought death and it continues to bring death, death in many forms including diseases and threat from predatory animals and injury by the environment.  Childbearing became painful and even life-threatening for women, the earth grew thorns and thistles and made growing food arduous.  Weather is both a blessing and a threat.

In fact that is a way of saying something about the nature of the sin that brought it all on:  eating of the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil."  Adam and Eve had known no evil until then, but their disobedience made it known through experience from then on.  In a world of both good and evil we are subject to the rising up of evil when good is demonized as it is now in this current rampaging of rioting and arson and vandalism, when the police are treated as the bad guys and the criminals as the good guys.

Back to the Buddhist teaching against all killing again, you have to restrain ALL threats by living things and that may mean killing them.  You can die of the diseases carried by rats and insects, so letting them live makes no sense in such a world as the one we live in now.  This is also why the death penalty is necessary, so that even killing human beings who kill other human beings is righteous in this world.

According to Robina Courtin the Buddha learned about everything by looking into his own mind.  He learned about the cause and effect of karma, which is how our actions produce consequences, bad actions producing suffering.  It can be described in fairly simple terms as receiving the same kind of treatment you mete out to others.  Jesus tells us we will reap what we sow which says something very similar.  Ending suffering by learning to stop producing bad karma is apparently a major goal of the Buddhist practice of watching the mind, as I understand it.

Apparently Buddha did not discover a Creator God through his meditations.  He did confirm the ancient Hindu teaching of reincarnation though.  The Buddhist view is that there is no beginning or end to anything, reality is beginningless and endless.  So every living thing just keeps getting recycled throughout aeons of time, the goal of each to reach the cessation of karma (I think).  Which raises the question wouldn't there be an end when absolutely every living thing has reached that point?   If everything is beginningless then no new living beings are being brought into existence so ultimately all of them should eventually make it to the goal of ending suffering and the cycles of reincarnation would be at an end.

It may be a legitimate question but it's a rabbit trail I allowed myself to pursue for the moment, but I have another question I'd like to ask and that's how the Buddha explains death?  Why is there death at all?  Why is there a portion of existence lived by each creature in a physical body, from which the usual exit is through death?  Perhaps there is a Buddhist answer but it doesn't seem to be a very important part of the teaching if so.  

By observing his mind there is very little the Buddha discovered that is similar to the Biblical revelation though there is the similarity between the four precepts and four of the Ten Commandments.   owever, I do think there is a  general similarity between the idea of karma as the Law that Runs the Universe and the Law of God which we'd describe in the same terms.   So it seems to me the Buddha was able to observe God's Law in operation in his own mind, however imperfectly.  The suffering that is caused by bad actions is in the Biblical frame of reference God's judgment against our sins.

-------------------
*  Why do I say this is an uprising of the Marxist ideology?  I'll do a separate post about that I think.  

To be continued.