Maybe We Should Thank the Buddhists for Mindfulness Meditation
Catholics keep flogging their tired old nag of a gripe about mindfulness meditation, even though heavyweights like Peter Kreeft and Kevin Majeres have given it their thumbs-up. Their big beef? “The Buddhists kicked it off!” Cue the pearl-clutching and incense-waving, as if that’s a knockout punch. It’s the same dim-witted jab they throw at Austrian economics: “The Jews started it!” Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises—agnostic Jews, mind you—so naturally, the whole edifice of market logic must be a synagogue-stained sham.
The reasoning’s as watertight as a rust-eaten trailer roof. Von Mises didn’t buy the God bit, so anyone who thinks economics runs on natural laws is obviously a heretic bound for the stake. Same deal with Galileo—greedy, vain little peacock that he was—so heliocentrism’s just a parade of jackasses chasing their own tails. It all hangs together like a drunk’s alibi.
By that logic, since Buddhists cooked up mindfulness, every poor sap trying to quiet their rattled skull is a card-carrying nihilist. Never mind that the East—teeming with more bodies and older bones than our own crumbling West—might’ve coughed up something useful amid its sprawl of rice paddies and pagodas. Perish the thought! While we’re at it, let’s chuck silk shirts and paper books into the bonfire too—Eastern inventions, after all.
This anti-mindfulness tripe is more worn out and threadbare than the last pair of shorts that look decent on a middle-aged housewife in August.
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Eric Scheske
