Religion
In Burma there are tens of thousands of Buddhist paya, temples and pagodas. The latter typically contain multiple Buddha statues so there must be hundreds of thousands of them, perhaps millions.
The economic impact of all this pagoda building and idol fabrication is intriguing. Burma has its own gold and except for imports most consumption on religion is keeping the local economy turning. But there is an opportunity cost in diverting the physical resources and human time and energy.
Boys spend part of their youth as monks or acolytes. Wealthy families can afford to sponsor them longer than the poor. But any boy can and should go. It is voluntary but all religious study and sacrifice counts towards a better life next time ultimately reaching Nirvana, perfect happiness and grace(?).
Lack of good works and/or religious practice and a failure to earn merit will result in being reincarnated lower next time as an animal or a woman. Similar to Muslim and Christian hell except you can buy out, by earning merit, and upgrade again next time. It's an eternity of incarnations not just an eternity of whatever.
Actually the status of women seems to be under revision. In Burmese Days Orwell remarks that in the 1930’s women were lower ranked than animals. But now there are even female monks.
If you have done something particularly bad, coming back as something unpleasant can be avoided by a grand sacrifice like constructing a pagoda.
Small sacrifices include buying gold leaf and applying it to various Buddha images or balls of gold. Women are precluded from these particular practices.
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Gold-leaf merit is not available to women
But a noble soul can also intercede on your behalf as did the Buddha himself on behalf of a women who cut off her breasts for him up Mandalay Mountain way. She came back 2400 years later as Prince Mindon.
The combined economic implications of these practices are vast. So it comes down to values. Many people are desperately poor. But is material wellbeing more important than the spiritual?
People seem to be fed and relatively healthy. There is a certain charm to very well behaved little boys with shaven heads in burgundy togas sitting about studying scripture.
On the whole the Buddhist religion, like most, espouses values that few could take issue with. They are steadfastly good, if a little puritanical. But unlike some other religions they are universally embracing, welcoming people of all beliefs equally to their buildings. They don't exclude unbelievers.
One could argue that by mobilising that part of the economy presently dedicated to avoiding coming back as a frog to more commercial activity they could improve overall material wealth and well-being in this life.
Maybe not everyone truly believes this but it's Pascal's Wager: is it worth the risk of coming back as a frog? If they are right, it’s they who will have the last laugh, as Pascal might have argued. But of course he foolishly cast his lot with Christianity. He is presently calculating the area of a lily-pad and the pressure it exerts.
With lower population growth in Buddhist countries where celibacy is encouraged, poverty is not as evident as elsewhere in the old India. On the other hand male celibacy results in a surfeit of single women and encourages the exploitation of women and prostitution. But unlike some the religion, nor any interpretation of it, does not call for women to be put to death or to be ritually raped for not complying with some bizarre ritual or custom.
In Burma there are few beggars, if you don't count the monks. I suppose that it's difficult to compete with them. Technically the monks are not begging, they are offering you the opportunity to make a personal sacrifice to gain merit towards your next incarnation.
But all is not rosy, average life expectancy is not much more than 60, partly due to failure to control AIDS, mainly for religious reasons.
Religious minorities
The main religious minorities are Christian and Muslim.
The Christians seem to have coalesced. In Yangon, although there is a substantial Roman Catholic church, the Anglican Rangoon Cathedral holds a Roman Mass in addition to Holy Communion. It has some hastily added laminated stations of the cross hung around the walls of the nave. Maybe the Catholic church is undergoing renovations? Pukka sahib turning in his grave!
But there is still a residual or perhaps recently arrived Hindu minority and some villages still retain various animist beliefs so that there are strange things being worshiped all over the place, like twin ceramic cobras with dog faces at the Buddhist temple at the top of Mandalay Hill. Buddha turning in where-ever!
Ceramic cobras with dog faces - you can feed them money - for merit luck - intervention?
A personal view - to be skipped if you have traditional religious views
As I have said elsewhere, continuing to believe something that is demonstrably wrong means that you are making decisions based on faulty data and those decisions are very likely to be wrong. The following propositions are among those believed by the ancients that are demonstrably wrong:
- life is recreated anew with each living thing
- a man carries the seed that gives life to a baby
- the heart is the centre of our emotions and other qualities
- there is a being in each of us separate to our body
- there is a life force
- there are such things as ghosties and ghoulies and long legged beasties and things that go bump in the night (from a Scottish prayer)
Theocratically based cultures could improve their decision making by rejecting any of these false propositions they still adhere to and by accepting two simple propositions:
1 Physical, sensory, evidence is the only evidence any of us have of anything in the Universe. All else is just unfettered human imagination.
2 The overwhelming accumulated physical evidence is that the two cells that combined to form us were both alive before we were conceived. They were part of a continuum of cells that has continued to divide and stay alive, evolving in many directions, for nearly four thousand million years on Earth. We inherited that life from our parents and may hand it on if we have children. In due course, like every living animal, bacterium and plant, including the colony of cells that is us, we will cease to function viably and we will die. Living cells and cellular colonies die by loosing organisation. It is a one way process: life to death - disorder. There can be no return to life from the constituent chemicals or cellular components once their order is disrupted. Further, our consciousness is an artefact of our individual and unique physical brain and the way it is ordered. Sentience is a phenomenon supported by cellular ordering. This becomes obvious when consciousness degrades as we age due to cells not being replaced in our brains or to other neural dysfunction. Consciousness certainly ceases altogether with bodily death.
Thus any belief in a ‘life’ after death, reincarnation or communications with ancestors is based on misinformation - imagination allowed to go wild.
There is nothing wrong with imagination in its place. It makes us human and sustains us all. Creativity, story telling, fantasising, even lying are fundamental to both our inner life and social existence. But as a result, our imaginative flights are very influential and need to be restrained and verified by actual tests, experiments, when applied to physical reality.
To reframe the question I put earlier: Is material wellbeing more important than the intellectual life of the imagination?
For me the answer is both are important. Individually it's about maximising our enjoyment of this 'brief candle' we've unexpectedly had thrust upon us. The balance between the physical and the intellectual varies between individuals but there is always a balance.
So there, I agree with Siddhārtha Gautama, the Buddha, in at least one central respect - the middle way.
At its best Religion is the accumulation of past wisdom, including sensible precepts for social relationships.
Unfortunately religion may also engender a tendency to revere certain leaders and ideologies, leading to periodic periods of despotism, as Burma has repeatedly experienced.
Scepticism about people and their abilities, and particularly about their divine authority to rule, is not a bad thing.
In the land of the gullible and naive the thieves and sophisticates rule.
It is much healthier as people do in Australia, many religious alike, to expect our leaders to behave like the man or woman next door, with no more brains or ability or honesty. Thus many Catholics are just as likely to find fault with the local priest, his cardinal or the Pope as anyone else. They just pray he will improve.
Goodbye once noble Burma! You’re not the nicest place I’ve been to but hopefully you’re struggling to your feet once again.