Sunday 12 September 2004

Pic of the day: Screenshot from the ever versatile anime Daa Daa Daa.
"There shouldn't be a barrier between Buddhists and Christians" says the monk in the Santa costume. And indeed, the largely Buddhist/Shintoist Japan has adopted Christmas, the festival of giving, although they have a rather relaxed attitude to the rest of the religion. But how are things on our side?

Non-Christian giving?

How come, when I visit The Hungersite, I see stuff like "Chakra stone earrings", "Tibetan Prayer Wheel", and "Contemplative Buddha"? You can feel sure that when you visit, there will be ads for East Asian cultural items. And yet the site is in English and has its origin in the western World. Why aren't the Buddhist ads drowned out in a deluge of Christian ads? After all, mercy and giving are pillars in our religion.

It seems to me an irony that Buddhism puts so much weight on compassion, when the religion basically says that there is no God, but each of us get what we deserve from our earlier lives. It would seem logical from the karma theory that people get what's coming to them, and that this is just what the doctor ordered so they can learn for the next round. In this perspective, it would make sense to keep one's hands off and don't get in the way of the cosmic teacher. And yet compassion is a core virtue of Buddhism.

It seems equally ironic to me that Christianity isn't outclassing them by a few orders of magnitude. After all, our religion teaches us that we don't get what we deserve, but rather are treated with a mercy we cannot live without and cannot fully repay even though we try. "I am in debt to all humans" says the apostle Paul. Without receiving mercy we are lost forever, and the Bible makes it clear that this mercy can and will be withdrawn if we act without mercy toward our fellow men.

To add another wing to the plane, the lord Jesus and his brother James warn people in no uncertain words that riches are dangerous to our eternal life, and that the poor are intrinsically worthy. All other things being equal, and possible even when not, the poor have the moral high ground and the rich are suspect.

It isn't so much that God will punish us for being rich. It is more like, if we hold onto our own riches and don't share, we have never known God and have no idea what the Gospel is all about.

***

Now in all fairness, there is a lot of giving in the Christian milieus. There is hardly a church that does not collect for the poor and other good purposes. There is incessant talk about how God loves a glad giver. So perhaps the Christians don't need fancy new ideas like this Hungersite, where sponsors pay for a small quantity of food each time people load their ads. It is after all not pure giving. But on the other hand ... since it is free, you can give as much as you want at church and still come here and feed the poor for free.

Unless someone has a revelation about why this is bad, I still think it reflects poorly on us Christians that we haven't crowded out the competition. If the site was in Chinese or Japanese, it'd be another matter entirely. But there are supposed to be a billion Christians in the world, and most of them understand some English these days. However, I suspect that fairly few of us understand about hunger. Perhaps that's the key to this one?