Did you see this op-ed from the New York Times? The Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, wants everyone to know that we can all get along. (Thanks to Henry’s Trashcan for the tip.)
WHEN I was a boy in Tibet, I felt that my own Buddhist religion must be the best — and that other faiths were somehow inferior. Now I see how naïve I was, and how dangerous the extremes of religious intolerance can be today.
… Granted, every religion has a sense of exclusivity as part of its core identity. Even so, I believe there is genuine potential for mutual understanding. While preserving faith toward one’s own tradition, one can respect, admire and appreciate other traditions.
That’s right! Gyatso primarily discusses Christianity, Judaism, and Islam — basically saying that we shouldn’t focus so much on the fact that Christians quote Jesus as saying, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me,” and that Muslims chant, “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet,” and that Jews believe that God told Moses, “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before Me.” It’s no big thing, guys! We all have so much in common.
What do we have in common? According to this op-ed, we all believe in the importance of compassion. And that’s a fair point, I suppose — but it says nothing about the worth of those religions.
Gyatso cites Jesus’ “miracle of the loaves and fishes, his healing and his teaching” as inspirations to him even though he is not Christian. If he means that they are inspirational to him in the same way that reading good novels like The Wizard of Earthsea or Jitterbug Perfume is inspirational to me, then okay. I don’t have to think a text is true in order to find the story in it nice and even uplifting. I hope he’s not trying to say that he believes Jesus actually performed miracles and healed people magically. (It would be very weird if he thought the Gospels were all true while being very prominently not a “believer” in them. But I don’t think that’s the case.) I wonder if he thinks Christians are being compassionate when they use this same holy text to justify violence and hatred around the world.
He goes on to recall “the rabbi in the Netherlands who told me about the Holocaust with such intensity that we were both in tears.” Newsflash: the Holocaust is part of history, not part of Judaism. (11 million people were murdered, which means 5 million non-Jews, though the Jews were obviously the largest single group targeted.) Anyone could make you cry talking about the Holocaust, because it was really freaking sad. Then, to illustrate how Judaism promotes compassion, he cites Leviticus. Yes, Leviticus includes “love your neighbor as yourself,” but it also includes divine prohibitions against planting two different crops in the same field, wearing blended fabrics, and trimming your beard or sideburns. It sentences lots of people to death including homosexuals, adulterers, and children who talk back to their parents. Even if you don’t endorse any of those behaviors, the death penalty seems like a bit of an uncompassionate overreaction, wouldn’t you say?
I don’t doubt that most Muslims value compassion as well. Gyatso is correct when he says that they refer to Allah as “Compassionate and Merciful.” The Qu’ran in 2:256 says, “There is no compulsion in religion.” But in the very next verse, it says that nonbelievers will burn in hell as punishment. Either these folks have not heard of the concept of a deterrent, or they have no short-term memory. The Qur’an has a lot to say on whether people are truly free to believe whatever they want, and most of it does not point to “yes.” How compassionate is a commandment to “slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush”?
Look. Every religion says a lot of different things. Most of those things are extremely implausible; many of those things are downright repugnant. Every so often, just about every religion will hit on some basic principles of civility that are pretty good regardless of the era in which you live. This does not mean that people of all religions have so much learn from each other, or that all religions are getting at some deeper fundamental truth of the universe. They disagree on nearly every detail aside from those basic principles of civility. All it means is that the people making up these religions all tend to think we should be nice to one another. You don’t have to be religious to be compassionate and understand the value of compassion. If nobody was religious, we might have avoided some of the most egregious examples of uncompassionate behavior in history.
For all this talk of tolerance, you might have thought the Dalai Lama would have a single kind word for nonbelievers. Instead, all we get is one shout-out in a list of ways people are intolerant — right between the laws against burqas and minarets in Europe, and the Middle East where “the flames of war are fanned” by suicide bombers and terrorist training camps, Gyatso writes, “Radical atheists issue blanket condemnations of those who hold to religious beliefs.”
Seriously… if you really want to talk about condemnation, how about the people who actually damn nonbelievers to an eternity in Hell? That gets to the heart of what condemnation means. All we say is that we think they’re wrong. The one good thing he mentions from religions is valued equally if not more so by the nonreligious — since we don’t have any of those pesky, contradictory passages of scripture that tell us to hate and kill people different from us while being “compassionate.”
TaiChi on 
