If it can't save everyone, it can't save me.

One of the things I like about Buddhism is that it offers a clear and simple method for spiritual growth. No matter what ups and downs you're going through, the only thing you have to do is meditate, thereby calming your mind, purifying it, and gaining understanding of the true nature of reality, and, if you work hard enough and happen to believe in it, attaining nirvana. A simple and elegant answer for everything, but not for everyone. What about those who can't meditate? Children, people suffering from serious mental disorders or neurological conditions, people in great physical or emotional pain. Buddhism has nothing to offer them (apart from the idea that their circumstances are a product of accumulated karma, but that's too insulting to even consider). What does Buddhism have to say to a committed meditator in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, which will eventually make him unable to even understand what Buddhism means? "Don't worry, everything passes, you'll be dead in a few years time"?

I cannot possibly settle down for a set of beliefs that bestows meaning upon my life and those of the mentally fit while leaving the rest of humanity to drown in the absurdity of existence. I'm not into monstrous gods that save some people and damn others. I need spirituality to make me believe (okay, let's be optimistic: make me realise) that the life of every single human being is worth living and has a meaning. It often seems to me that the only way to ensure that is to believe in an afterlife in which you would be taken by the hand and ushered into a place of unfailing love, where all your wounds would heal and you just wouldn't know what to do with that much happiness. That's the only compensation that's close to good enough to make up for the tragedy of a man tortured to death, or a young girl raped by an entire platoon, or a woman disfigured for life by the acid poured on her by her husband, or a man who sees his children starve to death, or a nun who is repeatedly penetrated with an electric cattle prod, or a boy whose hand is hacked off by another boy's machete, or a woman buried up to her waist and stoned to death for adultery. If there isn't an answer for these people, something that makes their lives and deaths truly meaningful, all the spiritual practices in the world are only a collection of hollow techniques to generate some warm, fuzzy feelings that we naively take to confirm the idiotic belief that everything's hunky dory with the universe.

I annoys me when some people say that it's only through our ignorance that we bring suffering upon ourselves, or when they (e.g. Alan Watts) tell us that the real nature of the universe is playful and we're just taking it too seriously. I don't know, I have some trouble with the idea that Auswitch is the universe being playful. We could also enlighten this man by telling him that he should take a more light-hearted approach to life. Preposterous ideas aside, tragedy is only too real. A spirituality that can't acknowledge that and weep for humanity doesn't deserve my respect. This is an issue to which Christianity provides an unlikely but comforting answer: although the purpose of suffering remains a mystery, God himself chose to experience it himself in an rather extreme form, as if to reassure us that it does have a meaning, even if we don't understand it yet. I know, I know ... That's just my own interpretation. What Christianity actually says is that God, incarnate in Jesus, let himself be crucified to pay for our sins, which amounts to saying that God killed himself to appease himself. God couldn't be that dumb, could he?

So it seems that I have two options. One is to believe in an afterlife in which a loving God (or some other benevolent being or beings) that would make everything okay, wipe every tear, soothe every pain, and ultimately make us understand the transcendent purpose of this seeming nightmare. And the other one is ... I can't remember.