Found in translation

I listen to Thai language lessons as I walk each morning.  It’s not a good way to learn the language, but I feel I am making a little progress.  My mind wonders and I seem to be eavesdropping rather than learning the language. 

Two simple sentences, however, seemed to speak volumes this morning.

Religion leads people to happiness is the first.  This seems true for Buddhism where the mind is turned inward and the real world is put at a distance. Buddha is almost always depicted as smiling. Buddhists also believe in the circle of life and death so your next life may be even happier even if you are a grasshopper.

It seems less true of stern Christianity with its pie in the sky when you die.  Yet there is so much art and music that ties emotion to a sense of beauty and joy that Christianity certainly has a place for happiness even if it is in the vestry.

Islam does not countenance happiness.  Two colleagues were walking in Riyadh and accosted by a police officer because they were laughing.  They were told no laughing in Riyadh.  There are no joys in Islam save perhaps that for Muslims it is a joy to be a boy – and I think this last is a source of uncountable problems.

The second sentence was:  Education leads people to a better life.  For Buddhists the word better sits in the sentence like a half-deflated balloon.  If a good part of the religion is in distancing yourself from the world, what does better man?  Religion (Buddhism) has a muting or dampening down effect on education in Thailand.

When stern Christian religion was connected to education at least sloth was a sin and studying was prosecuted with vigor and some pain.  Proselytizing at the time of Christian expansion also led to a sense that Christians were God’s people and therefore exceptional.  Now that religion has pretty much been separated from education, American exceptionalism seems like a leftover from another age.  After two world wars and putting a man on the moon, we now seem satisfied when a Presidential wingtip draws a line in the sand and then moves on to get ahead of some other issue of the moment. This may be a safe life, but is it a better one?

In Islam everything you need to know is in the Koran – everything.  My American educated Dean at the college I taught at in Jeddah continually lectured students on sloth generally to no avail. If one male student knew the answer, the class knew the answer.  They too consider themselves exceptional, but this word is a balloon stretched to the breaking point.  When it bursts really bad things happen.  To live by in a garden by a flowing stream is a beautiful metaphor from the Koran for a better life.  To be given 27 virgins upon entering heaven I think much less so . . . no, I don’t need to think, I know this for a fact.   Just what my Saudi friends would consider a better life, I really don’t know.  Probably moving to America would be a start, though.

Ask me to speak these two sentences and I probably could come close – and therein lays the problem.  Language is something you think in only when you don’t have to think about it.

FG           12/6/2015