Spirituality – Dead-Logic

Four Columns

or,

The Sermon That Made Me An Agnostic

“We sit outside and argue all night long
About a God we’ve never seen but never fails to side with me.”
Primitive Radio Gods,
Standing Outside A Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand

I spent my 20s as a Christian minister and online Christian apologist and blogger. In fact, the Dead-Logic blog started as a Christian apologetics blog over on Blogger. I’ve been blogging on and off for many years. The bulk of this article is from a blog entry I wrote in 2011. I’ve updated it to share here.

Killing the Buddha

“If you meet the Buddha, kill him.”

I first heard this saying years ago when, as I wandered around on this fairly new invention called “The Internet,” I stumbled upon a website called “Killing the Buddha.”

As the story goes, a monk deep in meditation experiences what he thinks is enlightenment – the awakening, the Buddha-mind – and reports this to his master.

The master explains to the monk that this is nothing special at all, and can even hinder his real progress. The master then instructs: “If you see the Buddha, kill him.”

While various interpretations of this Zen kōan have been offered over the years, I’ve found value in understanding “the Buddha” we encounter to represent our desire for enlightenment rather than enlightenment itself. Humans long to be right, and we generally hate being wrong. That longing can lead us to convince ourselves we know more than we actually do. It’s a typical human habit to assume or just make something up to fill in the gaps in our knowledge.

Continue reading “Killing the Buddha”

Like a Child

I spent a lot of time in my years of studying theology and philosophy pondering the meaning of this seemingly simple directive found in Matthew 18:3-5…

“Change and become like little children.”

Even now, many years since I last considered myself “religious,” I still think about that verse and what it means.