[Newspoetry] Brooks on Neural Buddhists

[DL Emerick]

Dear Mr. Brooks...
(re http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/opinion/13brooks.html)

You focus too much through the narrow lens of individualism.

JUSTICE is the primary issue relating to SOUL, not CONSCIOUSNESS.  Buddhism
promotes a just life.  Indeed, in a sense, all morality and every religion
should.

Consciousness is an optional theoretical artifact of soul survival.  When it
might consist of being eternally aware of having lived unjustly, it would be
a torment caused only by awareness of one's injustice and the impossibility
of rectifying that injustice.

Conversely, disputes over the possible blessing of continued existence for
the soul are systematically irrelevant to the question of JUSTICE.  For, if
one lives unjustly, one could only hope that no soul survives.  Yet, if one
lives justly, whether the soul survives or not simply does not matter.
Acting justly is ever its own reward, eternal or otherwise; the capacity for
justice alone makes man rather unique among all animals.

The position some of us Jews take is thus quite simple: questions of
afterlife and soul are irrelevant as issues.  Such issues are distractions
from justice.  They are examples of idle theology taken too abstractly,
taken away from life.

The grand question of soul treats JUSTICE as the crux of "how one ought to
live", just for the sake of being alive, in the here and now.

(As for love, it would equally be both selfish and collective. That is, one
ought to be worthy of being loved by one's own self, as well as by others,
that they might love you at least as well as you deserve.  That is what the
Rabbis said, that life is balanced justly between the extreme claims of the
one and the many.  Though Life is bound by justice, love yet exceeds the
bounds of justice, as the emotion that most supports justice.)

L'chaim...

Sincerely, DLE