On Fox News Sunday, January 3, 2010, Brit Hume made the following remarks about the Buddhism of Tiger Woods, remarks which have been the subject of much controversy for days:
Tiger Woods will recover as a golfer. Whether he can recover as a person, I think is a very open question, and it’s a tragic situation with him. He’s lost his family, it’s not clear to me whether he’ll be able to have a relationship with his children, but the Tiger Woods that emerges once the news value dies out of this scandal, the extent to which he can recover, it seems to me, depends on his faith. He’s said to be a Buddhist, I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith, so my message to Tiger would be 'Tiger, turn to the Christian faith, and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.'
Since Hume is a self-professed Christian, is it reasonable to expect that Tiger's present record of misbehavior wouldn't call into question for such a person the character of Tiger's own religion? Indeed, Tiger's egregious misbehavior suggests that some awfully bad karma from a past life has been manifesting itself in this one just as much as his pre-eminence as an athlete suggests the opposite. What extremes these are. What was he in a past life that he should be what he is in this one?
Christianity explains reality very differently, in terms of tragedy, where human excellence derived from a divine spark becomes co-mingled with total depravity because of a choice taken to disobey, made freely. To the Buddhist, all of this is an illusion, both the good and the evil, along with the idea of personality, whether human or divine. Escaping from the great chain of being represents a rather different religious goal than forgiveness, redemption and eternal life. But Tiger's penchant for the procreative act seems like a strange, deep and willful entanglement in it.
The thing which jumps out at me about this spectacle is how incidental religion has seemed to the careers of the principals involved, and how avocational. Hume should feel as free to speak his mind as I feel to say that his chosen venue was unwise, if he sincerely had Tiger's eternal welfare foremost in his mind.
