Chismar:  Do you think Hollywood is glamorizing Eastern faiths? Why are so many jumping on board?

Olasky:  You have to go individual by individual but a lot of it comes out of animosity to Christianity.  Buddhism is seen basically as the anti-Christianity.  Now Christianity has a set of commandments, Buddhism supposedly doesn’t have that, although Buddhism actual does, they’re different.  A lot of reporters who may have been brought up in strict Christian households as kids are rebelling against that.  They have grown to see Christianity very sadly, they have grown to see Christianity not as a religion of grace but as a set of rules.  And so sometimes they rebel against that and say well here Buddhism we can just live and enjoy different parts of this theology or that theology.  We don’t actually have a confessioned faith to which we are to subscribe and so forth.  So it’s seen as a much more relaxed, flexible religion and the way it works out, I mean if you talk to Buddhist priests and so forth, that’s often not the case at all, but that’s the way it’s portrayed and the way a lot of people see it. 

And I know people associate Buddhism with probably the most popular form in the United States right now, Zen Buddhism as something deeply spiritual but not requiring you to do your theological homework.  And Zen Buddhism again there are good things and bad things associated with it.  There have been some books that have come out recently, scholarly books explaining how Buddhism, in particularly Zen Buddhism was very important in the Japanese military during the 1920s and 1930s.  The idea that in fact the idea that the samurai ideal was very much coming out of Zen Buddhism in the sense that you go into the zone.  You concentrate on what you’re doing at the moment, you don’t worry about this other stuff and the way that was applied militarily in Japan was you can go and kill people without having any qualms about it because they’re not really there, the material does not really exist.  And you go about and do your duties and don’t worry about these other things so you can be in a killing zone and in fact I can’t remember offhand the name of the author but he’s written a couple of very well documented books about the Japanese military Zen and connects in some ways the famous or infamous rape of Nanjing in 1937 with Zen Buddhism.  The soldiers have done very terrible things but in the sense of feeling well I’m not really doing those terrible things because I and the people I am hurting in this moment really don’t exist as material objects.  I mean we’re not real so I can do this stuff without worrying about it a whole lot.