Q: Do you believe in God?
A: No.
Q: So, you are an atheist!
A: No.
Q: Then what do you believe in?
A: As little as possible.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~O~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We tend to frame things we encounter into patterns familiar to us. Nowhere is it so obvious as when we regard other religions.
Once, at Sinte Gleska College in Mission, South Dakota, I perused the library for Lakota creation myths. As befits a large and socially complex people, there were several widely disparate stories.
A bit later, at Pine Ridge Reservation, I conversed with a fellow named Red Cloud. He pointed to the car in which his old girl friend sat, telling me she was visiting the rez from Sacramento, where she had moved to work. He told me the three teenagers in the backseat were her children. The youngest and the oldest, he said with chest-swelling pride, were his. Certainly a fellow with a broad view of things, though perhaps it was more a cultural thing than personal. I told him about the eleven different creation myths I had uncovered at Mission. Uh-huh, he said. Which did he believe? Unhesitatingly, he replied, All of them!
The general frame of the monotheisms of the Western culture sees religion primarily as what a person believes to be ultimately true of reality. What you believe determines your tribe, and vice versa. But you can sort religions in one particular way into those based on doctrine, and those based on pragmatic experience. Those that determine your membership in a flock determined by your submission and acceptance of a set of dogmas and the authority that promotes them, and those that are a path you follow by taking up a prescribed practice.
We are used to inquire about religious teaching with, Is it true? Of course, the answer is mostly No! with regard to someone else's religion. But with a religion like Buddhism, the emphasis is more on, Is it useful? Will it help me get down the road to liberation?
The romantic philosophic notion that what is most true is obviously the most helpful, might itself be true — if only proving something true or false were not so often so devilishly difficult, and fraught with distortions caused by emotional bias. Much easier just to try something and see if it works. Best of all is to see what works by transparent methodology and consistent analysis.
At least, that's what I believe.
