Killing the Buddha by Peter Manseau & Jeff Sharlet

I often find it is interesting and instructive to study an issue by looking at the grey areas; the borderline between out right rejection and actual belief. I especially find this to be the case when discussing belief in God. Doubt is often the stimulus for faith. I enjoy reading books, fiction and non, that deal with faith, divinity, or the supernatural in interesting ways. So it was not unusual for me to stumble on to the web site Killing the Buddha, The site's manifesto offers this explanation:

Killing the Buddha is a religion magazine for people made anxious by churches, people embarrassed to be caught in the "spirituality" section of a bookstore, people both hostile and drawn to talk of God. It is for people who somehow want to be religious, who want to know what it means to know the divine, but for good reasons are not and do not. If the religious have come to own religious discourse it is because they alone have had places where religious language could be spoken and understood. Now there is a forum for the supposedly non-religious to think and talk about what religion is, is not and might be. Killing the Buddha is it.

This struck me as a worthwhile, and potentially interesting, project and I have often clicked over to see what they were up to. More recently, I was reminded of the site and decided to pick up the book of the same name.

Killing the Buddha : A Heretic's Bible is hard to describe. In its most basic form it is a series of essays alternated with stories from life on the road in search of the weird underside of spirituality in America. The road stories are told by the web site's founding editors Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet. The essays are told by a variety of writers but are a loose attempt to recreate scripture for the modern world. These essays take on various books of the Bible but from sort of angry, modern, heretical perspective. It is as if the authors approach the Bible not as divine revelation but cultural and historical literature to be deconstructed and reinvented. Instead of the traditional Christian "what is God trying to tell me", they ask "what does this say about humanity?" The result is a sort of religious and literary anthropology. The perspective isn't exactly hostile but neither is it particularly sympathetic either. It has a certain cynical fascination; interested in exploring the ideas but ultimately rejecting the traditional answers.

Article Author: Kevin Holtsberry

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