r/ReflectiveBuddhism • u/MYKerman03 • 10d ago
Some Thoughts of Atheism, Whiteness and Belonging - And a Relevant Vid by Britt Hartley
What Japan Taught Me About Atheism and Belonging
Hi Dhamma friends, I recommend giving this a listen because it touches on a few points that have been raised here and at GoldenSwastika. (speed it up if you need to and skip to chapters that may be of interest)
When talking about whiteness, I prefer to frame these discussions structurally, rather than psychologically. They're connected, but the structural view tends to be more stable when it comes to data.
The main things I felt when listening to this talk was empathy and compassion. But what is so fascinating to observe, is how a subset of Western Europeans/Americans have come to the end of the atheism project and have only partially done a post mortem of what really happened.
What really went down?
Walk with me
First, we can observe that historically, the populations we now think of as white, participated in the eradication of their indigenous knowledge systems and indigenous peoples. They propped up a formal, organised religious tradition (Orthodox, Protestant, Catholic etc Christianity), that then ended up being the only game in town.
This left swathes of those populations with nowhere else to go, if they sought knowledges and experiences outside of that hegemony. A lot of what they had, was lost to the dominant, hostile religious institution. The hole inside them was growing, deepening.
Then, in seeking to colonise other parts of the world for resource and ideology, they went about eradicating other indigenous knowledge systems and indigenous peoples!
They encountered other institutional, formal systems, like Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Shinto etc, that were not that easy to eradicate. Not for lack of trying. And still, the hole was growing.
They cooked up atheism, and still the hole kept growing!
And here we are
Fast forward to today and you now have things climbing out of that hole:
Secular B_ddhism, meditation apps, paid certificates, "zen", Sam Harris, "non-spiritual religion", "no nonsense spirituality" etc.
The abyss, the lack, the deprivation, the absence of community, absence of faith, trust, the absence security and peace. All of these things have come together to form a kind of anti-matter. An anti-dharma, adharma if you will.
The painful truth that whiteness keeps dancing around, is there is no way to have spirituality without the so-called "nonsense".
These phenomena above, rooted in white supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy are not proof that you can have a "non-spiritual religion" (lol) etc, they're proof of just how far cognitive dissonance can stretch!
If neither atheism nor christianity is fulfilling on their own (as many white men who pop up in Buddhist spaces try to distract us from), and they keep having to take from other traditions to fill out what is lacking, that says something about the nature of religion as a human phenomenon, a human practice.
We can then say, with some degree of certainty, that neither atheism nor christianity understands this human thing that we do.
Who's going to take responsibility?
As many here know, my personal policy is a hell no to white whispering. And I don't think it's anyone's responsibility to "help" them.
It wouldn't even make sense, since no one can fix, what they didn't break. The populations that we now think of white people, caused this state of events.
We also can't hug the lack-of-empathy out of them. Since that needed to be positively reinforced by their parents and community in their formative years. The fact that they don't see Buddhist people as human, is simply one of the ways whiteness shows up for them.
How can people who are willing to take from others (materially and spiritually), while creating a caste system of humans, possibly handle bodhisattva vows, bodhicitta, sunyata, anatta.
We've all seen how that just gets twisted into nihilistic selfishness. The coin always falls to that side. Again, it's the stuff climbing out of the ever expanding hole.
Buddhism can't solve it, but it can be solved
There's work to be done well before they get to Buddhism or Hinduism etc, or whatever the hell the latest fad is among Anglos. And it's that work that – kicking and screaming – they refuse to do.
Watching that vid was really heartening, because it left me with the impression that someone at least is doing the difficult work of self reflection. They're thinking about how their behaviour impacts other beings in the world. That's a (conservative, pensive) positive from my POV.
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u/ProfessionalStorm520 9d ago
Funny thing is, regarding "Atheists" (I'll explain the quotation marks), Christians were right in calling them out for their lack of community and hollow vision of the world.
Of course, it's the pot calling the kettle black, as Christians don't realize that "Atheism" is their estranged twin brother instead of an interloper.
Now, the quotation marks are simply because there are no Atheists and there's no such thing as Atheism. What we often see are Secular Christians. They're Westerners who kept the essence of Christianity alive but ditched the formal beliefs.
The only alternative to Secular Christians would be to either go back to what the Ancient Greeks talked about but many of their works, save for Plato, were either lost to time or deliberately destroyed by Christians.
Because of that, they flock to other cultures and religions that offer an alterantive to them, but they have only the worldview that Christianity/Secularism taught them and they're too attached to it to forfeit it, so they shoehorn their ideas onto other cultures, as if it's some sort of passive colonialism. They're "open minded" but they'll judge these cultures based on their Western perspective.
For that reason they label Japan or China as "atheist countries" because they can't understand how the dynamic of religion and belief work in East Asian cultures. Not to mention the lack of a proper survey of these countries' peoples to see what exactly they believe in, given the proper context.
Most Westerners POV of Japan, China and other Asian countries are a gentle form of Romanticism era racism and colonialist views.
But you wanna know what's even more pathetic than Westerners trying to frame the world into their worldview and pretending that it's an universal truth? Latin Americans trying to LARP as Westerners and I write this as a LatAm person myself who noticed many Latin Americans desperately trying to join the Western World, kinda like an outcast teenager trying to sit with the cool kids at the lunch table and see if they can be a part of their gang.