A Message from the Editor
T
hirty years ago, my wife and I moved to Ukiah, California, a rural county seat in the redwood country, in order to study Buddhism. An eminent master, the Ven. Hsüan Hua, had just moved to town to turn a de-accessioned hospital into a Buddhist monastery and university. My wife and I soon found that religious experimenters like ourselves were by no means new to our adopted town. Followers of the Hindu avatar Krishna, disciples of the Sikh saint Kirpal Singh, and celebrants of a Wiccan coven—all of them, like us, part of the counterculture wave of urban exiles—had washed into Ukiah Valley ahead of us. Other dissenters from generations previous—Mormons, Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists, various lineages of evangelicals and Pentecostals—had long since planted themselves amid the grove of steeples along Pine and Spring Streets. Eastern Rite monks and Roman Catholic nuns had brought the monastic life to the valley before us. And hardly noticed in the background, in hamlets tucked here and there into the outskirts of the town, bands of Southern Pomo still kept their own counsel. Thirty years ago, American Buddhists like us were exotics, and Buddhist monasteries in the United States numbered less than a dozen. To find one, we had to leave Manhattan and move across the country. Nowadays, meditation classes are offered in every sizeable city, and American Buddhists number in the millions. As for Sikhs, immigration has planted their religion in the urban Midwest, while Hindus write software in every office complex in Silicon Valley. A Mormon is governor in Catholic Massachusetts, and there are mosques near his Statehouse. What was exotic thirty years ago is now commonplace. Once an anomaly, my town in the California Coast Range is today merely a paradigm, a small-scale replica of the religious landscape of much of America and much of the world. Religious diversity brings cultural and intellectual richness, but it also brings conflict and spiritual doubt. Religions are self-verifying systems that do not easily accommodate amendment and contradiction. Yet, of course, on many points they disagree. How, then, are we to know which religion is right? Ready answers to this question quickly give way to less yielding questions. Yes, I have faith in my religion’s scriptures, and I try to abide by them. But my neighbors do much the same in their religions. They are all quite sensible people, but on this point it seems I can only conclude they are misguided, because the integrity of my faith requires me to believe that their religions must be in error wherever they contradict my own. Such is the hallowed logic of religious loyalty. It is a logic that leads religious people to a position of truly embarrassing unreasonableness.
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9/27/05, 5:53 PM