Ever since the 1960s, interest in Buddhism has been growing, especially among our social elites.  Hollywood and the music industry seem particularly amenable to the Eastern religion. The list of Buddhist converts in those fields is considerable, including, to name a few, Orlando Bloom, Angelina Jolie, Richard Gere, and the late Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys.

A good deal of the appeal of Buddhism in America has to do with its embrace of a laissez-faire subjectivism that is quite amenable to American individualism. In a conversation with Stephen Colbert, Gere described leaving the Christian faith of his family—despite his father’s highly compassionate Christian example—because the Buddhist “science of the mind” was superior. What the “superior” science of the mind reveals, in Gere’s account, is that there is no objective reality. We are living in The Matrix, where nothing is real beyond the mental activity of any individual’s mind.

If one cares to consult more learned authorities, there are whole libraries on the relative merits of Christianity and Buddhism. On the very most basic level, however, one is forced to conclude that Christianity is superior to Buddhism.

This is objectively the case. It is not just a matter of Christians preferring the religion they have chosen to one they have not. For, of the two, only Christianity is consistent with the valorization and preeminence of life.

Even given the existence of death, life—the vital force, l’élan vital—is defined by one basic imperative: It wants to continue to live, to remain existing, and to remain so forever. Death can be integrated into this view, and it must be. But death is never accepted as the necessary end to life. Even if individual living things cannot escape death, life finds a way to perpetuate itself beyond death. Life struggles always to overcome the deaths of living beings and to find a way forward toward … more life.

Christianity accepts the death of these mortal bodies, but it cannot accept that this death be permanent. Perfection of the spirit permits the overcoming of death. In fact, it demands it.

Christianity is at its core the defeat of death. It cannot accept death. It loves life too much.

Even when Christianity seems to be concentrating on the fact of death, it is affirming life. Critics never tire of insinuating, for example, that the cross as a symbol necessarily signifies a celebration of the destruction of life. The comedian Bill Hicks ridiculed Christian beliefs with a bit in which Jesus is depicted as deferring his return because Christians had “missed the point” in their use of the symbol of the cross. But Hicks and others who take this perspective do little more than prove that they have misunderstood the most basic elements of the faith. It is the overcoming of the cross that Christians celebrate by invoking it. The symbol of the cross recalls Christ’s death, certainly. But it also, and much more importantly, points to the resurrection that came after it.

Buddhism is quite a different matter. It has no concept of eternal life even remotely like that in Christianity. In fact, it celebrates the rejection of life because, according to Buddhist belief, life is little more than lamentable and unacceptable suffering. The Buddhist accepts and even longs for annihilation and nonexistence as the “answer” to that suffering.

This cannot be sufficiently emphasized. That’s what the goal of Buddhism is. One can scarcely believe otherwise after accurately understanding the ideas and doctrines of the Buddhists themselves, a task too many American “Buddhists” have not troubled themselves to take up in any serious way. Nirvana is the escape from the cycle of rebirth, which Buddhists see as an intolerable prison. Nirvana is nothing more than a changing of the mind about the nature of reality. It is not presented as the afterlife is depicted in Christianity, that is, as a realm of existence different and separated from the world in which we now live, in which individual souls live eternally in their uniqueness and in communal communion with other souls and with God Himself.

Nirvana is described in Buddhism as a change of consciousness such that one no longer sees phenomena in the world—including the discreteness of individual human personalities—as separate but instead as parts of the same whole. When one becomes “enlightened” in Buddhist practice, one stops believing in the falsehood (as Buddhism teaches it is) of one’s separate identity and existence. Instead, one comes to see all the joys and all the sufferings of the individual identity as irrelevant delusions.

There is nothing in Buddhism that suggests enlightened Buddhists do not die. Buddhism expressly argues that the extinction of the individual personality is a positive event, since it causes one to stop taking suffering seriously. Nirvana is the realization of the futility of life and the rejection of the world’s cycle of rebirth, in which life continually reaffirms itself despite suffering by triumphing over death to continue living. It is understood in Buddhism as an escape from suffering.

So where does one escape to in leaving suffering behind and achieving nirvana? To the void. To nothingness and nonexistence. Life is suffering for Buddhism, and so getting away from it is the best possible thing. A literal translation of the Sanskrit Nirvana gives “‘blowing out’ or ‘becoming extinguished,’ as when a flame is blown out or a fire burns out.” This could scarcely be more clear. And it is not hidden in Buddhist belief. It’s right there at the entry to the belief system, a first principle.

Buddhism rejects life and embraces the void.

Consider the case of Jessy Kirkpatrick as an illustration. Kirkpatrick is a “nonbinary” biological female who has had extreme body modifications that have transformed her face into something alien-looking. It is evident, both visually and in reading her story that she is psychologically and spiritually troubled. Mentally healthy people do not mutilate their bodies in that catastrophic way. She has, quite literally, taken on the form of a demon through silicone implants and skin-stretching operations. She somehow believes this is a spiritually affirmative act. It is impossible to imagine her claiming that she mounted the assault she’s carried out on her own body in the name of the Christian faith, and indeed she does not claim to have done so. Instead, she asserts she has done this in consonance with her “Buddhist religion.”

One would be hard-pressed to argue that she is acting in a way fundamentally inconsistent with the basic goal of self-extinguishment in Buddhism. In her efforts to annihilate the individual human form that is Jessy Kirkpatrick, she can perhaps reasonably claim to be on the path to Nirvana, which, again, is the end of suffering through the negation of life.

Let us be clear. Not all Buddhists (indeed, far from all) are this nihilistically dedicated to the destruction of their own identities and lives. And one must admitted that the Buddhist practice of meditation can be a helpful way of mitigating the stress of some of life’s struggles. But of the two religions considered here, the deepest principle of only one is consistent with such behavior as we see in this poor, self-destructive young woman discussed above.

The religious tradition Kirkpatrick claims does not provide an evident philosophical argument for eternal life as a positive achievement. For beings that desire immortality, the choice between Christianity and Buddhism is self-evident.