This may suprise you, but Fox News Sunday was the site of some evangelical Christian proselytizing last week. Anchor-turned-commentator Brit Hume went on the offensive with the Tiger Woods fiasco when he said that Tiger just needed Jesus. He was working from public statements on Mr. Woods' part in which he stated that he is a Buddhist. Buddhism, Mr. Hume posited, doesn't "offer the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith".
I think that the almost complete silence on the part of Buddhists would counter that opinion, Mr. Hume. If anyone has a beef with you right now it is Buddhism. Yet even one of the more public voices of Buddhism, the Columbia professor Robert Thurman, refused to "strike back" on this morning's edition of the Takeaway on Public Radio. He was quite willing to counteract the vastly oversimplified and usually incorrect assumptions from Hume's statements, but he was very unwilling to say much more than Mr. Hume needs a comparative religions course.
The funny thing is that it takes Professor Thurman, a practicing Buddhist, to show that Hume's statement is in fact counter to the teachings of Jesus. To imply that simply being Christian means that you can make a "complete recovery", as if he no longer will have any sin to contend with or the very real issues with a wife and family is not something that Thurman (or I) agree with. Buddhism and Christianity alike prohibit Tiger's recent behavior (if the reports are accurate) as some of the worst actions a person can do.
The worst that Thurman could manage was that Hume was rude. He was rude to Buddhists and Christians alike. I'll say amen to that.
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