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Kip: Would there ever be a point where you would not just fight and die, but KILL for your religious belifes if your religious leader told you to go do it.

I don't have a religion, but I would fight to kill nazi guards if I heard they were killing jews. 'Cause my belief in overall innocence is important enough to kill or die for.

I can kill but I choose not to.
It is possible to convince me otherwise, but it would require significant effort.

Only particular actualities would require killing as a last possible consequence.

It is impossible to know just what those actualities might be ahead of time though and whether it would be me or the other person I would kill.

Joy: I doubt that in a kill-or-be-killed situation I'd be thinking about mystical beliefs anyway.

Unless you train rigorously there no way to know how you would react. This is why police, martial artists and military personnel go through such rigorous training.

The mind under extreme stress is very different than when it is nominally rational.

Joy: There was an interesting angle in a book on Tibetian Buddhism that put forth the idea that if you stopped a person from committing murder by killing him it was for his own good. By killing him you were preventing him from accumulating more negative karma and so you were doing him a favor in the long run.

C: In the following decade of this new millennium the human race is destined to finally discover the facts about its true origins and destiny.

C: As part of this discovery it is essential that we correctly address the overwhelmingly important question of how the phenomena of evil came into the world. This is a question which should be on the mind of every living man and woman.

C: I believe that the answer lies in the ancient records of our forefathers and their myths of KMT.

Big B: Everything is Empty. There is nothing to hold on to, falling down the rabbit hole. Consciousness is an illusion.

The thing about an illusion is that there actually is something there, its just misinterprited by the viewer.

Heat waves may look like water, but they still are heat waves even if they aren't water.

D: Why doesn't emotional pain fade like physical pain? When the physical pain stops you don't go around whining - "I burnt my hand yesterday - it was awful! Woe is me!" We only do that with emotional pain. Why? I wish I knew.

Because physical pain has a physical source, but emotional pain is wholely constructed by the mind. Stop thinking about it and it goes away. So to hold on to the pain, you hold on to the thought - over and over and over.

This is why one must agonize over being slighted and obsess over a wrong to build a good hatred.

Swarm,
When someone is subjected to a Hurricane, Tornado, Earthquake, murder of a loved one, war experience, etc. Emotional damage is tremendous. No amount of will or denial side steps that.

Rape, getting punched out, or ripped off is likely more emotionally damaging than the physical damage. Don't over simpilify people's loss or 'misfortune'.

Well so far I've experienced severe floods, hurricane, tornado, lightning, earthquake, snowed in on top of a mountain by a blizzard and I was at Mt. St. Helens when it blew the first time.

I've had close friends and loved ones die, been ripped off, punched, been in car accidents, lost all I had, went backrupt and been close to death a couple times for various reasons.

When I say physical pain has a physical source, but emotional pain is wholely constructed by the mind, I am not theorizing. I am speaking from my own personal experience.

I'm not seeking to simplify or aggrandize.
I'm trying to point to the end of suffering.

Shit happens, a lot of it has happened to me.
When I am in pain, it hurts.
But when I am just causing me pain, I seek to stop.

Since its always good to be able to baffle them with BS here is a quickish survey of some key points...

First, when talking about the buddha its important to try and keep to the pali cannon since the mahayana texts were basically add ons. (That doesn't mean they have no intrinsic value, just that they really don't represent as closely what the buddha himself actually was on about.)

The buddha described it like a flame on a twig. When the trig is consumed, the fire is extinguished. Where does it go? It doesn't go any where. If you light a new twig, fire starts again, but it isn't the old fire reborn.

1. Is the world eternal or not eternal?
2. Is the world infinite of finite?
3. Is the soul the same as the body or are they different?
4. Does the Buddha exist after death or does he not exist?

These four questions are great scoundrel fodder because they cannot be answered, envoke strong emotions, can be endlessly debated either way and are completely useless in all regards, like all bread-and-butter philosophical questions.

Of course there are many other such topics besides the eternal philosophical questions. Anything having to do with "purity" or taboos for example. Take vegitarianism.

"The first lay precept in Buddhism prohibits killing. Some imply that Buddhists should not eat the meat of animals. This is not necessarily the case. The Buddha distinguished between killing an animal and eating meat. It is immoral conduct that makes one impure, not the food one eats.

In the Pali sutras the Buddha says that vegetarianism is preferable, but begging monks had little or no control over their diet. The Buddha also did not lay an extra burden on his lay followers by demanding they be vegetarians. During the Buddha's time, there was no general rule requiring monks to refrain from eating meat. In fact, the Buddha specifically refused to institute vegetarianism when it was requested and the Pali Canon records the Buddha himself eating meat on several occasions.

There were, however, rules prohibiting certain types of meat, such as human, leopard and elephant meat. Monks are also prohibited from consuming an animal if they have witnessed its death or know it was killed specifically for them.

This rule was not applied to the commercial purchase of meat in the case of a general who sent a servant to purchase meat specifically to feed the Buddha. Therefore, eating commercially purchased meat is not prohibited."

You can now argue endlessly with buddhist vegitarians. :)

www.worldalmanacforkids.com/expl....html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism

09-29-05 9:29 • Reincarnation

Michael: So yeah, what's the deal with Buddhist reincarnation.....So far I've kinda glossed over it as just something thrown in the lot to hook people into Buddha's Sure Thing or to as some obvious nonsense....

What's the scoundrelish take on it ?

What do you call it if you are reborn as a hillbilly?

Reintarnation.

A scoundrel view of reincarnation?

Well, like any delusion, it allows for easy manipulation of the suc..er...subject.

In particular it is easier to shift guilt and blame to the person for things which really have nothing to do with them. “Oh you must have been nasty to yaks in a previous life for all those Chinese to be mean to you now.” (real HHDL paraphrase). This keeps the vic...um...person docile and beat down and opens them up for the pitch -- “In exchange for obedience, subservience, your money and the pleasure of watching you beat your head against the wall, I will get you a better life...next time.”

It really just a weaker variation on the xtian "original sin/heaven & hell" one-two punch. Any 'successful' religion is going to have an Inexplicable Guilt/Unachievable Reward™ engine to keep the yokels, oops, true believers worked up and in line.

There you go.

Dr. Yo: Swarm, you are a very perceptive individual.

09-26-05 6:26 • Science and Spirit

Jack: After reading my original posts, I was disheartened to read what sounded like an opinion that spirituality and science are opposed. In my perspective I see no division between the two, and that those who claim science and spirituality have nothing in common are fanatics of one or the other.

I agree that science and spirituality can have things in common, with the caveat that science and faith are the antithesis of each other.

Faith, by definition is the belief in something in the absense of or contrary to the evidence.

Science allows belief in something based only on its evidence.

This is why I like the "find out for yourself" attitude of solid buddhism.

While I think he has pretty much flaked out of late, it is worth the effort to track down Ken Wilber's book Eye-to-Eye and consider what he has to say about catagorical error (or errors of kind) concerning science, reason and spirituality and the application of scientific techniques to spiritual processes.

An example of this would be the recent study which demonstrated that the average buddhist is actually happier than the average non-buddhist. This takes matters out of the realm of speculation as to whether there is any real effect to the buddhist process to reduce suffering.

Jack: My unclear point was that sometimes those who fanatically cling to science as their secular religion, deny anything and everything beyond the observational methods of science.

Ah, Sciencism or the religion of science is definately not good science. :)

It is also very true that science only is able to examine clearly a specific slice of reality, namely that which is observable, measurable and regular.

As one moves away from those three qualities, the applicability of science degrades. Thus, science can tell one about how color works, but it has far less to say about how art works.

Any one who thinks science is the answer to everything has a serious underestimation of the scope of everything.