Thomas_More
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ALB, you are right about what most people identifying as Buddhists believe and that includes the westerners who have adopted “Buddhism”. And, as I said, it’s all a sop given not only to the peasantry and the poor, but also to the rulers, so that “Buddhism” would be protected and furthered.
For example, the Dalai Lama is supposed to be the incarnation of Chenresig. And it’s mumbo jumbo.But I will fish out something from a monk, who was recorded by Alexandra David-Neel, who trashes reincarnation as having nothing to do with Buddhism.
The Dalai Lama knows this too. Gautama believed in tailoring one’s language to suit the listener’s capacity for understanding. Crudely put, this could be considered hypocrisy, but in fact it accords with Buddhist doctrine.
Would a philosophy that denies immortality of the self, that denies the existence of soul and the perpetuity of the “person”, and even denies personhood in the first place, ever gain ground? It would have frizzled away and appealed to no one, neither prince nor slave. As it was, elements of the philosophy were preserved for the educated, distinct from the religion which satisfied most people. The concept of two Buddhisms was already established in Gautama’s lifetime.Even the popular religion has never claimed a person can remember their “past lives”. In fact it says such would be overwhelming and is impossible.
And karma too can be taken in the crude, popular, religious sense, or in a different sense, the sense of genetic “memory”, evolutionary “memory.”
Understood thus, it is crude indeed to equate it with “judgment”, “punishment”, “reward”, and such anthropocentric, unscientific notions – again related to human delusions of “the self.”
Which is why reincarnation, on the part of the Buddhist missionaries, was a sop to the peoples they came across, who, like people in the West too, were and are desperate for the perpetuity of the self – which has no place in Buddhist philosophy. As Lafcadio Hearn elaborates: We consist of trillions of beings and will be part of trillions of beings, ad infinitum. There is no transmigration of any individual or “soul”/”self”, because such titles are human convention alone, and not separate material existences apart from their aggregates.
The flag of revolution was green. Belfort Bax says the revolutionary French tricolour, very early on, was blue, green and red.
The green came from the English Levellers, who also hoisted a green flag at La Rochelle.
Monmouth’s troops carried a green standard in 1685.
The present colours of the German flag, black, red and gold, were the colours of the Weimar Republic and, in 1525, the colours of Muenzer’s army of revolutionary peasants.
A little bit of class war:
A Question of Suspense (1961).
A capitalist murders one of his employees who has discovered a crime. The employee’s wife seeks revenge.
“MOSCOW, December 10. /TASS/. Russia demands that Finland bring to justice people who burned the Russian flag in Helsinki on December 6 and take measures to prevent such extremist actions from happening again, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Saturday.”
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Flags are the religious idols of modern capitalism. Treating them as the colored pieces of rag that they are is tantamount to spitting on the holy statues of Baal.
A soldier is praised the more he kills, but if he puts the national flag in jeopardy he is up on a serious charge.Millions supported Hitler. Does that make him right?
His autographed photos were in higher demand than the Beatles’ ever were.
Edward Carson: “Was it a rough neighbourhood?”
Oscar Wilde: “I believe, yes, that it wasn’t all that far from the Houses of Parliament.”
(Paraphrased).
I am totally with Movimiento on this, even though I am English. Good manners have been depleted here since the 1980s, and what used to be loutish and vulgar is now mainstream.
Capitalism erodes and soils relationships between people, and the internet is seen as a safe outlet for frustration, rage, and vulgarity that would be swiftly met with face to face.
Tolerance and patience have considerably diminished, and universal contempt and animosity has intensified.
Learn some manners, Lizzie, and the same goes for True Imperialism.
Don’t insult goldfish. They are not imperialists. TI is being a racist by using the word Neanderthal pejoratively.
