Religion

PATH TO OBLIVION:

Worrying Picture for Buddhism Worldwide (Tsering Namgyal Khortsa, 3/21/26, Asia Sentinel)

According to the latest analysis by the Pew Research Center, covering 201 countries and territories, Buddhists are the world’s only major religious group whose population declined between 2010 and 2020 despite the powerful charisma of the Dalai Lama, the highest spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism and global recognition as a figure of peace, and Buddhism’s rational self-help approach emphasizing inner peace, compassion, and mental discipline over dogmatic belief or divine authority. […]

Demographic trends are not favorable to Buddhism. Nearly all Buddhists—98 percent—live in the Asia-Pacific region, with around 40 percent concentrated in five East Asian societies: China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. These regions tend to have older populations and lower birth rates. The median age of Buddhists globally is about 40, significantly higher than the global median of 31. Fertility rates among Buddhists are also low, averaging 1.6 children per woman—well below the replacement level of 2.1 needed to maintain population size.

As a result, between 2010 and 2020, the number of Buddhists in these five East Asian societies fell by approximately 32 million, or 22 percent.

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

King Kong Died for Our Sins: Why Unexpected Christ Figures Matter (Mike Schramm, 3/11/26, Christ & Culture)

No, Kong was not the heroic Christ figure one expected, but that is what made him a thought-provoking one.

Fiction—whether in novel, TV, or movie form—is filled with similarly unexpected, almost scandalous, Christ figures. Fans of Breaking Bad may have noticed Walter White’s cruciform pose that followed the death that saved his downtrodden former partner. While the bear-man Beorn from The Hobbit fights for good in the end, his chaotic unpredictability coupled with his hypostatic union of bear and human natures point to Christ’s unpredictable actions throughout the Gospels.

One final example from fiction I remember: Having to write a paper on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in high school, I was struck by one prompt proposing Randall McMurphy as a Christ figure. He is an outsider to the mental health facility who operates beyond the level of the inhabitants. He continually upends the status quo and frustrates the established authorities. He seeks to emotionally free the imprisoned and it is his death that contextualizes Chief Bromden’s escape (being the narrator, he is also a stand-in for us, so it is our freedom that is instantiated too).

One would like to think we were the prompt.

EMPATHY IS A HOAX:

The Cartesian Ghost and Gilbert Ryle’s Critique (Robert Kmita, 3/07/26, Voegelin View)

In the same ironic style, Ryle continues by maintaining that, according to the dualist perspective, each of us lives “the ghostly life of a Robinson Crusoe,” exiled on the island of his own soul, lost somewhere within the body. As a logical consequence, no person has access to the “intimacy,” to the events of another person’s inner life. Therefore, we could do no more than speculate by using “problematic inferences” based on certain behaviors that uncertainly signal what the agent is thinking.

Heck, you don’t even comprehend your own inner being.

CHILDREN OF FAITH:

My Conversion to Skeptical Belief (Christopher Beha, 2/10/26, NY Times)

To many, this will sound like a bit of a paradox, since skepticism and belief are understood to be in serious tension, if not outright opposition. We are all skeptical at certain times about certain things, but when we refer to someone more generally as a “skeptic,” we tend to mean that this person bases beliefs about the world entirely on the rational examination of objective evidence. More pointedly, we almost always mean that this person does not believe in God. But this is not at all the term’s historical meaning.

The Greek philosopher Pyrrho of Elis is often counted as the first philosophical skeptic. His complete doubt about the possibility of any human knowledge extended so far that, according to an ancient, possibly apocryphal account, he refused even to accept the evidence of his senses while walking down the street, “taking no precaution, but facing all risks as they came, whether carts, precipices, dogs or what not.” (His less skeptical friends followed behind to keep him out of trouble.)

Pyrrho’s first great modern disciple, the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, would not even say that he knew nothing, which seemed to express too much certainty. He preferred to put the matter as a question: “What do I know?” Yet Montaigne’s essays contain countless expressions of Christian piety. Precisely because we can’t have knowledge about even the most basic points, he argued, we must inevitably take certain things on faith — at least, if we don’t have friends kind enough to spend their lives guiding us around dogs and carts.

It’s possible to understand the entire modern philosophical tradition as an effort to grapple with the extreme skepticism that Montaigne reintroduced to Western culture without falling, as Montaigne did, back on faith. Four hundred and fifty years later, that project has brought us to a strange point.

The strangeness resides in the fact that reason disproves the foundations of Reason and demonstrates that all is faith.

WOULDN’T SAY, “NO”:

A century in the Siberian wilderness: the Old Believers who time forgot: In 1978, Soviet scientists stumbled upon a family living in a remote part of Russia. They hadn’t interacted with outsiders for decades. Almost half a century later, one of them is still there (Sophie Pinkham, 1/22/26, The Guardian)

None of the Lykov children had ever seen bread. But when the geologists offered them a loaf and some jam, they refused. “We are not allowed that,” they said, in a refrain that would become familiar to all their visitors. Natalia and Agafia were hard to understand, not only because of their archaic vocabulary but also because of an odd, chanting cadence that one geologist described as “a slow, blurred cooing”.

The Lykovs were Old Believers, members of the Orthodox Christian schismatic sect whose history is deeply bound up with that of the forest and the countryside. The Old Believers emerged in the mid-17th century after Patriarch Nikon, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, amended the liturgy to bring it into harmony with the Greek Orthodox version. The reforms altered the spelling of “Jesus” – at a time when letters were understood as something close to the literal flesh of God – and changed the number of fingers to be raised when making the sign of the cross from two to three.

Those who rejected these innovations became known as Old Believers. To the rebels, who soon broke into many different branches, Nikon’s reforms were a betrayal of the true Christianity. Their anger fed on broader social injustices of the era and was further stoked by the notorious lack of respect for Russian Orthodoxy shown by Peter the Great. A self-consciously westernising tsar, Peter preferred the gods Bacchus and Mars.

In the early days of the schism, Old Believers were burned alive, tortured and imprisoned for their faith. Many were cast into pits in the ground. They believed that they bore a tremendous burden – the preservation of the true words of God – and their extreme ways of living reflected this sense of responsibility. As the whole world fell into sin, they maintained their purity. While they awaited the end of the world, they maintained strict rules about diet (for the Lykovs, no bread or jam), clothing, everyday practices and the adoption of new technology. Some Old Believers and other religious dissidents resorted to self-immolation. Whole communities locked themselves in their village churches and set them aflame.

Others took refuge in the forest, the safest place to hide from the authorities and preserve their way of life without risk of contamination by the outside world. Many branches of Old Believers were “priestless”, meaning that a family could worship without the help of a professional man of God. For the most radical Old Believers, holiness was directly correlated to isolation. The highest holiness was the life of the hermit. In the Bible hermits retreated to the desert; in Russia they retreated to the forest. But they called the forest a desert, deriving the names for hermits and for monasteries from the same word. The forest was the wasteland of holiness, the emptiness of God.