The differences between Tibetan Buddhists living in exile in India and militant Buddhist monks persecuting the Muslim minority known as the Rohingya, in neighboring Myanmar, has everything to do with the political cultures of those countries and almost nothing to do with Buddhism itself.
.. No religion exists in a vacuum. On the contrary, every faith is rooted in the soil in which it is planted. It is a fallacy to believe that people of faith derive their values primarily from their Scriptures. The opposite is true. People of faith insert their values into their Scriptures, reading them through the lens of their own cultural, ethnic, nationalistic and even political perspectives.
After all, scripture is meaningless without interpretation. Scripture requires a person to confront and interpret it in order for it to have any meaning. And the very act of interpreting a scripture necessarily involves bringing to it one’s own perspectives and prejudices.
Can Wanting to Believe Make Us Believers?
In the past religion has confronted a variety of scientific challenges, from the rediscovery of ancient scientific systems like Aristotle’s in the 12th and 13th centuries, to Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton in the 16th and 17th centuries, to Darwin in the 19th and beyond. These discoveries have forced religion to adapt in various ways, but those contemporary advocates of religion who are, in my opinion, the most sophisticated don’t feel that they have to oppose science in order to keep their faith.
.. For Mersenne and his contemporaries, the idea of the atheist was terrifying. Many thought that, without the threat of divine punishment, there was no reason for people to act morally. Establishing the rationality of belief in God had high stakes for them.
.. It is important to remember that Pascal’s wager it isn’t an argument for the truth of the proposition that God exists, but an argument for why we should want to believe that God exists: It only tells us that it is to our advantage to believe, and in this way makes us want to believe, but it doesn’t give us any reasons to think that God actually exists. In a way, I’m already convinced that I shouldwant to believe. But there is a step from there to actual belief, and that’s a step I cannot personally negotiate. Pascal tells us, roughly, that we should adopt the life of the believer and eventually the belief will come. And maybe it will. But that seems too much like self-deception to me.
.. But what worries me more than what God might think is the possibility that I may corrupt my soul by deceiving myself into believing something, just because I want it to be true. For a philosopher, that’s a kind of damnation in this life.
Ranking Churches: Where Does God Appear Most Frequently
“It’s one of the real black marks on the history of higher education that an entire industry that’s supposedly populated by the best minds in the country—theoretical physicists, writers, critics—is bamboozled by a third-rate news magazine.” He shook his head in disgust. “They do almost a parody of real research,” he continued. “I joke that the next thing they’ll do is rank churches. You know, ‘Where does God appear most frequently? How big are the pews?’ ”
Bono Bites Back
What’s uninteresting about that is that we are such an easy target, from the word go, because we perform from our own point of view. I sing about the way I see things. Some people write songs about the way characters see things. Some artists perform with a wink. That’s just not the way with U2. When people perform from their gut — when John Lennon sang a song called “Mother” — that was not a hip thing to do. He was exposing himself. It’s performers like that I admire…. If you’re going to spend your whole life worrying about dropping your guard and exposing yourself, worrying that working with a gospel choir might look like imperialism, that would be dumb.
.. OK, so you want to design a great rock ‘n’ roll group? So, you’re gonna choose guys from Ireland, right? (laughs) No, you’re not. You’re gonna choose people who talk about religion and politics? No, you’re not. I mean, we’re a fluke. Rock ‘n’ roll bands are about giving people what they want.
.. But sex is a much subtler thing than that. Today you’ll find the exact same girl in the Coca-Cola ads and the rock videos. That’s not rebellious anymore. It sells products. And it is a product. That kind of overt or camped-up sexuality is no longer rebellious in the way that it was in the ’50s and ’60s, when people weren’t owning up that they even had a sex life. People needed that shoved in their face and rock ‘n’ roll was a great medium to do it.
Do you ever find intoxicants, including psychedelics, creatively useful?
I am already on drugs. I am the sort of person who needs to take drugs to make me normal. (laughs) I have experimented. No, I don’t think that it is something that everybody has to do, one, just to be alive, or two, to write great songs.
You’re saying those trappings have nothing to do with the true rebellious soul of rock and roll….
Yeah, the rebellious soul. The mythology of “live fast, die young” perpetrated by rich rock ‘n’ roll stars sickens me. I just want to throw up on these bastards! That’s because in our city, Dublin City, I’ve seen the place truly ravaged by drug addiction. People seriously fucked up, and people inspired by this idea of “living close to the edge.”
.. And I am pissed off that the LP is not so recognized. (laughs) God. Is this mania? It might be.
.. What happened in the ’70s but wasn’t admitted to, was, it became clear how redundant the political ideologies of both the Left and the Right were. They no longer made sense. [It became clear] that Marxist-Leninism, this ideology invented to deal with the Industrial Revolution, which is worlds ago, even though it had been reinterpreted, cannot be applied, and certainly isn’t worth giving or taking a life for.
.. Do you see a different kind of politics and consciousness emerging in the ’90s?
I think we’ve lower to sink before people will say, “We can’t go any further.” I think America is living on borrowed time. I think you’ve borrowed the money to put off this day when you’re going to have to realize: Corporations don’t need people to work for them anymore. Machines don’t ask for wage raises. And they haven’t figured out how they’re going to, on one level, provide consumers, and, on the other, not have work for anybody. This question has been put off, but it will have to be answered. There is something around the corner …