Jeffrey Kripal is the latest professor of religious studies to come out, in good modern style, writing off Christianity (and presumably Judaism) as a pooped-out and poopy old farce for stunted schmucks who worship, in Aldous Huxley’s (Joycean, not Blakean) phrase, "Old Noboddady." His alternative? Why, ‘neurobuddhism,’ of course — that apparently even more venerable yet more-relevant-than-ever east-west fusion cuisine for the soul. I’ve said a bit about neurobuddhism in the past — it is a lame term, and something of an insult to Buddhism, too, if I can venture that judgment (which more or less follows Nietzsche’s practical and knowingly inadequate use of ‘European Buddhism’ to evoke the Whimper of History).
Now, there are a lot of things I could say about Kripal’s piece — few of them terribly kind — but one place where it does seem at least somewhat useful to focus is on his central assumption that Christianity is somehow not imaginative (or inspired) enough to grasp the great genius of sci-pantheism. Ahem:
The phrase "neural Buddhists" calls up the ways in which the conclusions of modern neuroscience and a collection of ancient meditation practices developed in Asia have come to similar experiential and empirical conclusions about a number of things, including the ultimate nonexistence of the individual self or surface social ego.
For a professor (and "chair") of religious studies not to at least hint that Christians have thought of the self and the soul as different things since Aquinas is, it seems to me, a gross act of negligence — minimum, especially in this context. Because it points revealingly to the point of that Thomist distinction: the self is different than the soul, and lower than it, but it still really exists; my paradoxical attempt to find repose in the prospect that "I" don’t really exist is a knowing delusion — an always-failing, already-failed therapy of denial against the sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes unpleasant reality of my self.
But on the other hand, little of what Kripal talks up as so great — with the exception, sorry folks, of his Plato-meets-Esalen-style sexual socialism — is really at odds with Christianity. (I defy someone to construct the slam-dunk Christian case against the discipline of coitus reservatus , for instance.) The whole thing Kripal wants to lay on us seems to be a superfluous bridge too far, as if under the desk of his Rice University office sits a goblin that insists nothing like progress or utopia — or enjoyable sex — can ever be glimpsed or pursued so long as hoary old Christianity is still around. Rubbish, I say. He’ll have to do better than that.
