I come to this often topic,
Of why I’m not a Buddhist.
At the beginning of my life
I said of myself I was a “Christian Buddhist.”
It was then said, “Those terms are antithetical.”
Certainly, they are.
Buddhism is a religion that praises suffering
As if it were the only meaning in life.
Suffering, to suffer…
Suffer in pleasure, suffer in pain
Suffer in war, suffering, suffering, suffering.
And after all of the suffering,
The meaninglessness,
The sitting among the tombs,
One’s greatest aspiration is to die.
That is the highest ideal of Buddhism.
Not to go to heaven…
No… simply to stop the reincarnation cycle.
It is what is called, “Nirvana.”
Nirvana is not heaven.
It simply is not.
Greeks and Egyptians have heaven
Yet their gods are vain, and will war among one another.
Viking’s heaven is to fight over a goblet and pork chop.
Islam’s heaven is nice, but how do you get there?
Do you just do a lot of good?
And what about people who did a lot of bad?
Do they just have to work off their good?
Like the Hindus and Buddhists have Karma
Evil must be worked off?
Because I see how evil I am today…
Being much more loving and kind than most people
And I see the extent of my evil
And I know Karma is a bitch;—
It makes a murderer never suffer once
And puts a good man who has a conscience out on the street.
It kind of invalidates itself, doesn’t it?
The happiest people seem to be the most vile in my experience.
So… we know it doesn’t exist.
Christians know this happens. They know…
They expect it… They often guarantee it.
Hindus the same, but there never is a real reward.
Hindus believe the ultimate goal is to be annihilated.
Westerners believe in heaven,
They believe in Hindu’s heaven,
They believe it is Islam’s heaven…
A nice little garden you go to
Where you get to make love and eat and drink.
Rightly, Westerners think all religions have heaven.
Very few religions do, outside of Western traditions.
Because, we believe in Heaven, we know there’s a heaven
And all religions aside, we know it’s there.
I talked to a so called “Religions Scholar.”
He said, “All religions have heaven.”
No… there are about seven religions practiced today.
Four of them do not believe in heaven,
Two of them do, and another just has no faith.
All the others I tend to reject…
Not because they didn’t survive…
My religion won’t in a little while.
How do I know this?
Because men don’t want to believe in the truth, anymore.
A persecuted Minority can be right
If that minority has the truth on their side.
Christianity does.
Why I’m not an atheist,
The simple reason is because it’s insane.
John Lennon says, “All you need is love,”
But he beat his wife.
If his character is anything to display
If Atheists, then I want nothing to do with their religion
Or lack there of.
I’m not Agnostic, because it’s stupid.
If I half believed in God
Then I’d better pick some religion
And make sure it’s right.
Only one seems to advocate truth…
“Turn the other cheek”
“Give to those who ask”
“Murderers will be torn to pieces”
“Frivolous sex is not right.”
One of those I’m sure
Most of you don’t believe in…
The last one.
And granted, your civilization sucks.
I have to live in it.
I don’t want to.
And, I see ya’ll suffer like the Buddhists do
Not believing in Fairy Tales
When the Fairy Tale simply says you’re in control of your own fortune.
Bad fortune? Probably bad people.
Not all the time…
Because they are happy.
I imagine people who live today
Are as happy as a Psychopath
Butchering a sheep or something.
Some pleasure is there…
I know.
But, there are better pleasures.
Buddhism believes it’s not so.
Christianity affirms that there is good.
I think most religions forget that
Or try to say they don’t,
But then when you look at it…
It’s a perfect engine for state craft.
Christianity doesn’t seem to be.
It seems to scorn capitalism
Communism
Socialism.
Everyone wants Jesus to be on their side…
Jesus’ side was weighing a shekel
For a pound of wheat.
And how much better would society be
If that’s what we did?
“No, because Modern society is so advanced.”
You have TVs. Want a cookie?
Because that’s about as advanced as we got in the past 100 years.
I call that a dark age.
And that’s, also, why I’m not an atheist.
And the reason I’m not a Muslim
It must be added here…
If you took every bad thing, thought
Idea—I said the “B” word in this poem—
And tallied it up in a day…
And say gave me time in hell for it…
I’m a student of La Rochefoucauld’s maxims.
I understand that would be my entire life
Spent in hell… and whatever sins I committed in hell
I’d spend that time still in hell.
A cycle, a cycle, a cycle.
Christians like to believe I’m evil…
Atheists like to believe I’m stupid…
The other religions like to believe my religion is true
Because clearly I make a case for it
And they realize, “Huh… this makes sense.”
And Muslims who look at this would say,
“But Hell is so bad, that it burns away your evil.”
Every Muslim, listen to this.
I do nothing on the account of a day, beside say the “B” word
That, in your eyes, would constitute as sin.
In my eyes, in my heart, I know how desperate I am.
I understand that I write this poem half to convert you
The other half is to eat.
I understand that I want love
Half because it will make me better,
The other half is because I want to eat.
I understand that I don’t like clothes
Yet I buy them… and have a lot more than Jesus recommended.
I understand I argue…
I understand I am hard to deal with…
I understand I insult people…
And though I do it all with the best intentions…
Converting a soul…
Removing a mote…
Discouraging bad behavior…
It is all sin.
At my best, it’s filthy rags.
You, yourself, are the same.
You worship Allah, what you call god
And “he is pleased with you…”
Your desire to be rich
To eat…
To have wives…
To have children…
To protect your own…
And then my religion,
God dies for you.
Did your god die for you?
He doesn’t even want you to be filled with him.
He wants you to bow to a stone
And he wants you to sit and say a repetitious prayer
Five times a day.
He wants you to fast once a year.
He wants you to go to Mecca to worship that rock.
Why? My God, you worship Him by feeding the homeless.
You do it by being kind to a person in a wheelchair.
Yours, you do it by bowing to a book, a rock,
And that’s all Allah is, I’m afraid.
He’s a book. He’s a rock.
And you look at Christians.
They worship a book.
They worship a rock.
So does the rest of the earth.
Me, I say the “B” word,
And I know how bad I am.
I know it… I see it… I hate it…
And your god says it goes away by touching your head
To a rock every day.
My God says, “I’ll take it out of you.”
And He does.
Day by day, it disappears little by little
And that’s the proof I have that He is LORD.
I don’t doubt Muslims are good people…
Or Hindus, or Buddhists, or Atheists, or Jews,
I just doubt their religion is what made them good.
Often, what’s good in them is the very God I worship
And when that starts fading,
It’s normally about the time that they get ensconced in their faiths.
Me… I get ensconced in my faith, too.
It’s simply to do what’s right,
To know I’ll never be fully good,
And to just say, “I’ll do my best,
“And Jesus will do the rest.”
Because my God said, “He who feeds the least of these
“Feeds me.”
All worship in my religion
Is centered around how you treat others.
It’s not prayers, Hail Mary’s
Or anything of the sort.
It rather is a religion about love.
Love sometimes rebukes.
My friends sits across from me
Gets angry that I said something that was right…
He leaves…
My religion is that it won’t be the last time we ever talk.
My family hurts me…
My friends abandon me…
My religion is that I’ll put in the effort needed to mend those wounds.
Because surely every other religion is about
How everyone around you isn’t perfect.
Christianity is about how you aren’t perfect.
And yet you should strive to be.
B. K. Neifert 