What is the value of a day? One single day? Can a day be given any kind of meaningful value?

I've had many days I love to remember. Days that have been very valuable to me. Days spent with family and friends doing things we love to do. Or just talking. Or simply being together in peace and comfort. Or even time spent by myself doing something I like. Joyous days. How can you assign any value to such days? But then there are the days I'd like to forget. Days of failure. Days when I've lied to people I care about. Days when I've let good friends down. Days when my whole world seems to come crashing down around me. Such days don't seem very valuable at all. But they're part of my life. Living in this world, I have to accept the whole package. The good and the bad. It means I have to accept every day that comes, no matter what I may be facing.

There are certain people in India called “Rat Eaters”. They are the lowest caste in Hindu society, and they function as slaves for the land-owners. After hours of toil in the fields, the only compensation they get is the chance to glean whatever the fields have to offer. If they're lucky, they may find some rats. Otherwise, they steal what the rats have accumulated. In the case of one woman, she would search for rats' nests and steal the food they had stowed there. Usually a few grains of rice or such. Then she would bring her bounty back to where her family was and they would make soup with it.

What amazes me is that this woman had grown up in this environment, so incredibly painful and repressive, and yet she was still willing to bear children who would experience the same fate that she had. This completely astounds me. I would think that if I were in her position, the last thing I would want to do would be to bring more children into this kind of life where they would be lucky to reach the age of five, and if they did, their life would be a living hell. It brings cognitive dissonance to a new level!

On the one hand, you have a situation in which nobody wins. If you're born into the Rat Eater caste then that's where you stay. Your life will be filled with pain and suffering until you die. There's no way out, excluding some kind of miracle. On the other hand, I see a woman who chooses to be a mother. Granted, I don't know her society or its values, but there's one thing that is undeniable. She is a mother. And her greatest concern is for her children. Why else would she labor so long in the fields for so little pay? If she didn't love her children she could abandon them, or keep all the rats' findings for herself. But she doesn't. No, I believe this woman actually loves her children, which brings me back around to the original problem. Why would she do this to her children?

It doesn't make sense at all.

Unless-

Maybe she knows something that I don't. What if the value of a single day was actually incredibly more than what I could imagine? To be honest, this question doesn't work well from the Materialist point of view. If I believe that the material universe is all that there is and all that matters then what this woman has done is completely wrong. But if I am a true Materialist, then nothing matters anyway because once I die it's all over. QED. However, I am not a Materialist. My mind is open to things beyond this material world. I can accept the possibility that there may be other layers of reality beyond this one. It is possible that this life offers opportunities that are unique and powerful, even in the smallest of circumstances. And it is possible that the value of a day in this world is inconceivable in the context of the greater scheme of things. Just one single day. Just ask the Rat Eaters why they keep on living. They might not be able to tell you, but they keep on living anyway.

There must be a reason.

Category: General

this is a picture from a recent new york times article on the zoe's ark situation:

The Orphans Who Didn’t Need Saving

these are some of the children (at least this is what the government of chad wants us to believe) who are waiting to be sent back to where they were living, which might not be possible to determine in some cases for many of the *actual* children involved. the times article is pretty informative and very unbiased. my comments won't be quite as neutral...

in the first report i read about this alleged kidnapping, one of the charity workers was quoted as saying that the arrests happened because the officials in chad were asking for a bribe that was too big to pay. but since that first report, none of the subsequent reports have mentioned that. instead, they've focused on whether this was a case of true charity or some greedy scheme to make money by trafficking in young children. honestly, this shouldn't even be a question. there are a lot of easier ways to make money than traveling thousands of miles to a war zone and exposing yourself to countless dangers, including the possibility of being arrested by corrupt officials on whatever charges they can fabricate. the government of chad has had a deep-rooted hatred of europeans, and the french in particular, as this article points out. the volunteers of zoe's ark were the perfect target for a bitter government to seek revenge for all the wrongs the europeans have or haven't committed against them.

here's another thing to consider: wherever these children came from in this war-torn region, isn't it interesting that their “caretakers”, be they family or friends, were willing to let *103* of their children be given over to *complete strangers*??!! i don't care what excuse they claim the volunteers invented, anyone who would subject their children to such unknown circumstances clearly doesn't care much about them to begin with. there are 1.9 million children in chad. of these, *380,000* are not expected to make it to the age of five!! and *720,000* will grow up stunted because of malnutrition!! don't tell me the chadians care much about children. if one out of five won't live to be five years old, and almost half will be severely disabled, and they keep adding more to the population, what does that say about their concern for their own offspring? the situation in chad has been horrible for many years, and the chadians know things won't change soon. but still they continue to bring huge amounts of children into the world, knowing that they're only adding to the numbers of those who will suffer and die. i'm sorry, the chadians don't give a sh*t about what happens to their children. that is, they didn't until now- until this whole thing became a major news story. now i bet every chadian in the country is going to claim that one or more of the children belong to them. people can be such devious f*ckers!!

here's my spin on what happened. the zoe's ark volunteers went to save 103 children from a life of unimaginable danger and suffering. these children were allowed to leave with the complete approval of those who were “caring” for them. when the volunteers sought to leave the country, the chadian officials demanded a king's ransom for allowing them to depart. the volunteers couldn't pay it (which the chadian officials knew already) and so they used that as a pretext to arrest them on charges of kidnapping. the chadians knew they could get plenty of dishonest witnesses to make the charges stick. and so now you have 10 innocent people who are facing the very real possibility of being sentenced to 20 years of *hard labor* for caring about children that the chadians themselves obviously could have cared less about (not)!! i'll tell you, if sarkozy had any b*lls, he'd tell chad to release those people immediately or face immediate military action! but like many frenchmen, he completely lacks spine. i know, he's worried about france's relations with chad as he plans on deploying troops to the east of that country, as related in this article:

Sarkozy intervention results in seven freed

so how about this, chad? you escort the ten french hostages to a comfortable jet with first class tickets bound for france, you apologize to them for what they've gone through and drop all charges against them. *or* instead of landing to the east of you, those french troops will come right into the capital, set up their headquaters there, and then grab the hostages from you! come on, sarkozy, don't be a wimp. in july your ex-wife Cécilia was able to liberate a group of medical workers “detained” in Libya. do you want the world to know that your ex has more backbone than you? and while we're at it, *you* need to apologize to the zoe's ark volunteers for condemning their actions when you have no idea what the f*ck actually happened. you need to declare their innocence and welcome them home as the true heroes that they are!

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one of the sad truths is that as long as chad is ruled by such a corrupt government, most of the charitable efforts they receive will only be offset by the government's ever-increasing greed. however, there is a simple solution to the poverty problem in chad (and in other poor countries) if a somewhat ethical government can be created. may i submit to you, the *childbirth lottery*!!

before you jump to conclusions about my motivations, hear me out. the poverty in chad and many other poor countries is due to a population that is much larger than its resources. often the stress of such overwhelming impoverishment leads to armed conflicts. therefor, if poverty is reduced, war will be reduced or in some cases eliminated altogether. with the right kind of government in power, a childbirth lottery would have a huge impact on poverty. this government would need to be controlled, either by itself or by an outside force, so that its own demands on the country's resources would be limited. once this has been accomplished, the lottery can begin. each year, a certain number of women will be allowed to have children. the rest will be sterilized. “*omg*!! how f*ckin crazy can you get??!!” you think that's crazy, huh? well let's think this through. the chadians in general have little or no self control, common sense, or compassion for the suffering of other human beings. one way to limit population growth would be to establish limits on how many children each family can have. however, this would never work in chad. anyone who would bring a child into the world with a one-in-five chance of dying by the age of four would not observe any kind of government-imposed limits. so the only other way to limit population growth is through random sterilization. i agree that this solution could itself be corrupted too, but it would have one guaranteed effect, no matter what: less children would be born in a country that can't even care for the children it already has. i know this brings up all sorts of issues about individual freedoms, and i'm all for personal liberty, as long as it is accompanied by appropriate responsibility. the reality is that the chadians have displayed little to no responsibility in general. and as a result, their liberty has condemned hundreds of thousands of innocent children to lives of terrible suffering and early death. so really, is random sterilization such a monstrous thing? if the sterilization of one chadian woman results in saving one or more children from suffering and/or death, don't you think it's worth it? don't get me wrong- i'm not talking about genocide. i'm not advocating the elimination of various races through limits on reproduction. think about it: if 380,000 chadians won't live to the age of five, then those poor souls aren't gonna do sh*t to sustain their race. the only purpose these children could serve is to suffer and die at a very young age. how can *anyone* justify this?!

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of course, some people might suggest random abortions as an alternative, but it has never been proven that abortions don't cause suffering for the unborn child, so i can't condone this as a viable solution. when in doubt, err on the side of mercy, i say. and mercy would desire that the birth rate in countries like chad be reduced. just as a loving parent at times will need to intervene in a child's life to force it to behave in productive ways, so chad needs an external “parent” to take control and make it adhere to necessary limits that it doesn't want to abide by. you see, in this increasingly connected world, the state of each country progressively affects the state of all the others. the extreme poverty in chad and countries like it often leads to wars and instability that reverberate throughout the entire planet. as far as i can tell, the greatest contributor to poverty, and the one that is easiest to control if we are willing to commit to it, is unlimited birth rates. but let me add one more stipulation. there may be certain areas that for whatever reason become so incapable of sustaining human life that a level of zero reproduction is indicated. if this is the case, and if the people affected are a considerably unique race (which would be the case most of the time, with few exceptions), and whose numbers are so small that there is a real threat of extinction, then we must do everything we can to preserve that race by relocating them to another area that has better resources, no matter what the cost.

the bottom line is this: chad is having problems that it cannot or will not deal with. as a result, volunteers from various regions are trying to help ease the suffering of innocent children in that country. if the “government” in chad wants to f*ck these compassionate volunteers over for no reason at all besides their overwhelming need to “make an example” of innocent humanitarians like the members of zoe's ark, who, according to chad's president Idriss Deby “might have been involved in a paedophile ring or wanted to sell the children’s organs [???]”, then something must be done to stop mr. deby and his cohorts. if sarkozy won't do anything to halt these lying bastards, then maybe his wife will. but if no help is going to come out of france then *someone* needs to step up to the plate. i will be very disappointed if the whole world stands by, idly twiddling their thumbs (i had another metaphor, but it's not quite sfw) while ten innocent humanitarians are consigned to a fate worse than death by some half-baked (avoiding another nsfw metaphor here) group of thugs who arrogantly think they can defy people who should know right from wrong and who have the power and resources and should be willing to take take action quickly and with as much force as is necessary- i will be extremely disappointed if nobody does anything to save these innocent humble servants from these chadian _____s. (fill in the blank- anything i can think of is too obscene, even with the asterisks.)

that's my rant for this month. please feel free to comment. happy trails, compañeros!

(btw, the picture at the top came from chad and was likely filtered by the chadian government. some or all of those [relatively] well-fed [though not by western standards], clean-looking children may not even be from the group that zoe's ark was trying to help. face it- it's hard to get a good photo op of chadian children in their natural environment- you have to search all over the place to find any likely candidates, and then you have to find bunches of clean looking clothes and sweets to make them smile. it took a lot of work to make this piece of propaganda.)

Category: General

here's cinci (above)...

and here's my latest post...


i just found out that pink is the traditional color used in world maps to show areas controlled by the british empire. "why pink?" i wondered. and then it hit me: isn't pink the color of that nice little antacid drink? And those tablets? coincidence?

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original saying: "guns don't kill people, *people* kill people."

variation #1: "guns don't kill people, *people* kill people. but people can also be killed by roaming herds of killer hyenas. and other things."

variation #2: "guns don't kill people, *people* kill people. and sometimes people kill other things besides people. people have actually killed a lot of things that aren't people. like harp seals and spotted owls, flies and snails that happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. they tried to kill cinci freedom, but instead of becoming so much hamburger meat, she jumped a six foot high fence and eluded her captors (both the police and the spca) for eleven days. then peter max donated $180,000 worth of his paintings so that she could live free of fear the rest of her life, grazing among the green hills of new york. if anyone understands the absurdity of gun control laws, i think cinci does!

variation #3: "guns don't kill people, termination of vital life functions kill people!"

variation #4: "guns don't kill people. they just act as a go-between, kind of like alberto gonzalez and a bunch of others we could name."

variation #5: "guns don't kill people. guns kill *guns*. i'm trying to tell you, this gun-on-gun violence has got to stop!!"

variation #6: "guns don't kill people. people kill guns. or we should, at least. aren't we higher on the evolutionary scale than they are?

variation #7: “guns don't kill people. not as much as the black bears in the west. sure, black bears used to be friendly and people would feed them out of their hands. you idiots! you've just made a wild animal unafraid to approach humans! just be glad that black bears don't have guns...

(i'm not sure about the grizzlies, though. I heard a shipment of ak's was sent to a ranger station somewhere in montana.)

variation #8: “guns don't kill people. microsoft kills people. wait- hold on here. maybe microsoft doesn't kill people, but what about bill gates? okay, maybe bill gates himself hasn't killed anyone, but what about one of his lieutenants? What if he took out a contract on some engineer from apple and he sent one of his geekiest engineers telling him “i don't care how you do it, just make it look like an accident. like he was trying to debug an incredibly complex program and he suddenly had a heart attack. while he was standing in a puddle of water. and someone handed him a wire connected to 10,000 watts of electricity.” stranger things have happened...

variation #9: “guns don't kill people. guns kill *vegetables*. now i *know* i have the support of the succotash lobby on this one. The increase in succotash shootings has been unbelievable. at the same time, however, we must realize that there is a substantial debate over whether or not vegetables are actually “alive”, and hence can be “killed”. what is death? is it defined as the point at which the soul (for those who believe this kind of thing) returns to its origins? if so, does succotash even have a soul? and what about rachel ray? (just kidding!) life is pretty hard to nail down. so in the absence of a really good definition of life, we have to accept the fact that life might be undefinable. and in that case, death and killing are also undefinable. and so with this in mind, do guns (or people) kill people? answer: death is undefinable. rephrase the question...

variation #10: “what about columbine?” what about it? were guns the main problem at columbine? would more gun laws have kept those students from mowing down their peers in heartless blood lust? well, they broke 11 gun laws when they entered the campus. Would a couple of more laws have stopped them? blaming guns for columbine is like blaming spoons for rosie o'donnel's *fat ass*. sorry, the spoons are just tools. so are the guns. what they do is up to the person who uses them...

epilogue:

under the constitution of the united states, we are granted the right to bear arms. there are several reasons that we have this right. the first is so that individuals can protect themselves from lawless intruders. an armed homeowner is an incredibly strong deterrent to would-be criminals. the second reason is so that we can rise up against the federal government if it ever gained too much power. but the executive branch wants to deceive us about this particular freedom, because they don't want to lose their power. The federal government wants the average citizen to feel intimidated by their domestic police- known collectively as the state police, highway patrol, sheriff, national guard, the atf, the office of homeland security, the cia, fbi, nsa, irs...

the federal government doesn't want its power threatened, and so peace-loving people like ourselves will be challenged with a dictatorial regime that will not tolerate resistance...

we can resist passively, but it ain't gonna do much. so what can we do? i dunno. i actually don't advocate guns or violence, but i also don't advocate a government, like the one we have now, that wants to strip us all of our constitutional rights. the constitution is actually a farce, because it is being ignored so blatantly. our courts feel free to interpret the constitution however they feel best benefits themselves or their paying interests. the executive branch feels they are completely above the law. the legislative branch seems to have little power anymore. and so the people who really own this country are playing fast and free with many things that our very lives depend upon. we don't own this land. *they* own it and they don't care what happens to us, as long as we provide them cheap labor. “they” are part of a very exclusive club that none of us belong to. “they” have no idea what it's like to live in our shoes. “they” have the money and the power, and so we have to play by their rules. For now...

how long will this last...?

btw, this "attention gay drivers" bullshit on this website in the google ads just doesn't cut it. if you're gonna do that kind of crap, then the christian view that homosexuality is immoral deserves equal time...

just sayin'...

Category: General

here's the article about this unimaginably sad tragedy.

Times Article

here's a man trying to protect his property and a bunch of under-age thugs beat him to death. i have only two questions. trying teens as adults, yes or no? death penalty, yes or no? if people refuse to teach their children how to behave, how else are the rest of us supposed to protect ourselves? sure, this is from a uk newspaper, but the us isn't a whole lot different!

Category: General

This guy has been driving for 4 years??!! Pretty scary...

Here's a link to the NY Times article:

Six Inches Too Tall

Category: General

Yep, things just seem to be getting better and better. Thank you, our governing "servants", for lying to us and saying there were all these WMD's, and saying the US wasn't going to try any "nation building". Here we go again- Vietnam, etc., revisited with a vengance!

Category: General

Hi pee-pulllllllzzzz...

Time to spice up this blog network with a bunch o' fun stuffs. We got lots o' pictures and stories and all the Texas B-B-Q you can handle.

First off, here's a public service announcement for y'all. Look at this here hand-out that a buddy of mine got from the friendly state of Virginia:

After reading this incredibly insightful piece of information (to state it nicely) that the commonwealth of cured ham chooses to thrust upon unsuspecting commercial drivers, understand that the driver in question had a regulation height trailer that was less than 13 feet 3 inches in height. And yet both times he went through this stretch of highway he was told he was over-height. Do you smell something rotten in Denmark? Could Virginia beach be playing games at the expense of lowly truck drivers??!!! How could they, since such a major tourist trap (I mean attraction) relies on trucks for so much of its commerce? Needless to say, fighting an "over height" ticket would be a pretty easy thing to do. But what would really throw them for a loop is if all us truck drivers filed a class action lawsuit. Oh, if we only were more organized! Help us, Trucker Doc...

Next, we have a story about the Wifi that broke all speed records. You don't believe me? Lookie here:




This is the fastest download speed I have ever had with any WiFi. It was so fast, in fact, that my computer didn't even have time to save it to the proper file name. The data was there on my hard drive alright, but the file name had a bunch of numbers and letters that meant nothing to me. This all happened at the Flying J in Tye, Texas on May 19. Just to let you all know, the speed of the downloads decreased quite a bit after that. At one point I was getting slow speeds of 7 or 8 KB/sec. So you never know what you'll get.

Finally, here's a picture I'm quite proud of:



I found a link to this little game in one of the blogs I subscribe to. This score is *way* beyond what I ever thought I could get. When I started playing this game I thought I'd be lucky to make it past the fourth level. But I kept playing and started figuring out a bunch of new strategies as things kept going along. It's a simple game, but there are some pretty complex little details that make it surprisingly deep. The post that had this link said "Try to beat -55." Good luck with that one, folks. To do that well, you would have to have no life at all. I have a life, and so I'm very happy with the score I got. One note of caution here. When you go to the website, you will be asked to install a Japanese language package. Above all, don't do it!! The game works fine without the install. Of course, you're on your own trying to figure out how it all works, since it's all in Japanese anyway, but for me that was half of the fun. And you don't want to open your computer up to potential problems. I allowed a "language package" install the other day and suddenly a couple Microsoft programs that I already had kept wanting to re-install themselves every time I started them. If my computer hadn't made an automatic restore point the day before, I would have been really hating life. So without further delay, here's the link for

Cat with Bow Golf.

Enjoy!

Category: General

Well, nobody commented on the cute little youtube video i linked to in the last post. for those who you who haven't seen it, you're missing out on something special!

From time to time i check out this blog and i'm frequently surprised in a delighted kind of way when i spot new comments. heerz one from a beloved friend:



great insight, amigo. you see, if our desires are bad, then something's seriously wrong. (i firmly believe that everything is perfectly right in the long run, btw.) but buddhism points to an important fact still: this fact is that we have desires but we can't completely fulfill them in this world. but that doesn't make desires wrong. it just means that our desires have to be postponed a little while. it's called delayed gratification, and it's the foundation of maturity. being mature means waiting for the things you want because you know you will be better off having them later. and this involves a certain amount of belief in the idea that there is some kind of existence that transcends our perceptible time/space universe. for many scientists, this is unthinkable. for some reason there is a powerful group of secular humanists who do not want to even consider the idea that anything exists outside of our perceptible realm, and so anything relating to God or spirituality is automatically shunned as irrelivant and worthless. Sadly, this leads to the kind of short-term thinking that says, "Well, I'm getting ripped off here, so everything must be against me and I'll just go buy a gun and start blowing away people because I feel so mistreated." Thank you, secular humanists. Thank you, atheists. Thank you, darwinists. Because again and again, your poisonous philosophies lead to tragedies that are unimaginable. The Jewish Haulocost came from Naziism, which was a direct result of Darwinism. The Virginia Tech tragedy resulted from a student who obviously had no moral compass whatsoever. Hellooo-oooo!! I'm sure mister Cho could easily have been an atheist and/or secular humanist. Because if he wasn't, then the things he did would have seriously conflicted with his own personal beliefs. To be honest, it's really very hard to shoot innocent people several times in a cold, calculated way if you have any kind of sense that what you are doing could be wrong. but according to the moral relativity that is propogated today, what mister Cho did was probaby completely acceptable by the rules he chose to embrace. However, there are greater rules involved here. these rules do not come from this realm. they transecnd this realm. and these rules will have their effect no matter what happens in this tiny corner of the universe. the purpose of our lives here is very difficult to determine, but the irony is that the purpose of our lives here is incredibly more important than we can understand. that's part of the reason why i seem to be so antagonistic toward middle-eastern citizens- because there is often such an overwhelming devaluation of human life. but i'm not here to promote any particular ideology (except mine, of course [ha ha]). choose your religion, and i assure you you're gonna be apologizing for something down the line. that's the nature of our limited understanding. we all have such limited understanding that we would truly be devistated by the full knowledge of our limitations. and im not just talking about a certain group here. if you're breathing, this is the truth. but my purpose here is to inspire others to look beyond the limitations imposed by those who imagine they are the rulers over the rest of us. for example:

did you know that the mighty movers in the "scientific" community have come to the conclusion that the observable universe only accounts for five percent of the effects of gravity and energy around us? how ironic. these scientists will shun any non-physical sources without the least consideration, but they're willing to put their trust in two very unknown and mysterious forces called "dark matter" and "dark energy" which have no relation to our observable universe at all. what they're really saying is that there's something out there that affects the gravity and energy in this universe, but they don't know what it is. however, they choose to believe that this is some invisible kind of matter that doesn't exist outside the physical realm, because if it did, then their own observations would become very subjective and they wouldn't get the kind of government grants that they love so dearly. scientist just hate to lose their money and power. that's how piltdown man came to be. but propaganda wins over true science, as evidenced by the fact that al gore got a prize for his incredibly unscientific lies. it's all politics in the end. it's not about what is true, but what you can make people think is true. ironically, in a few years time we're gonna all look back and see how much money we've put into "carbon control" and see how the global temperature is doing whatever it wants in spite of the paranoia that has taken hold today. did you know that our oceans are the greatest producers of carbon dioxide? so let's f*cking start regulating the oceans, dammit!!! but back to our original buddhist thoughts. buddhism isn't bad if it helps us delay our personal gratification so we can experience greater gratification in the long run. this requires waiting...

Category: General

In order to break things up a bit since the subjects discussed here have been of a pretty serious nature, I offer you the following humorous video. (My apologies to anyone who has had their kidney stolen!):

(Click on the picture to watch the video.)

Category: General

Okee dokee. thanks for both of your comments. roadhzrd, it's nice to know that someone else senses the same feelings of dislike that i sense. i tell you, if an arabic driver held the door open for me or put out his hand to shake mine i think i'd crap my pants! truly, they have an entirely different set of rules. they seem to place a very low value on human life and especially the lives of women and children. They often seem very arrogant and disrespectful. You say "the different sects have been killing each other since the start of different religions." That's so true! Do you know what the difference is between the Sunnis and the Shia? The only difference is that each group had a different opinion about who should be the successor to Mohammed. That's it! That's what all this damned fighting that has gone on for centuries is about! American soldiers are getting killed in Iraq because of a disagreement that Muslims had hundreds of years ago. Kinda sad, ain't it? Really, we don't even live in the same world as these people, and so i agree with you that we have no business being in that country (as atriz256 probably agrees:)

Now atrix256, you have some great bytes of wisdom. i gather from what you say that you believe people often use religious differences as an excuse to hate others. this is true. when it comes down to it, i think we'd both agree that it's not so much what people *say* they believe as how they treat their neighbors. (and in this respect i think many of us fall way short. i myself very much, at least...) you cite buddhism as a religion that doesn't judge others and so it would be a good way to bring about peace among the nations of the world. the one great truth about buddhism is that it recognizes that desires are the root of suffering in this world. but the one great downfall of buddhism is that it seeks to eliminate desires. you speak about not judging, but the ironic fact is that buddhism is based on judgement at its very foundation. what is the noble eightfold path of buddhism?

Right Speech
Right Action
Right Livelihood
Right Effort/Exercise
Right Mindfulness/Awareness
Right Concentration
Right Thoughts
Right Understanding

these are noble goals indeed, but they all require *judgement*. what is *right* in any of these cases? right speech, right action- aren't these things incredibly subjective from our pov? who can say what is right? when we do this, aren't we making a judgement?

Furthermore:



I've never met a buddhist monk. but I have to question this, young paduwan. Jesus taught that if you look upon someone with anger in your heart you are guilty of hurting them. Do you believe this is true? I believe it because it comes from the Tao. And so the thought that *any* buddhist monk *never* had a bad feeling toward *anyone* is quite inconceivable. oh yes, i'm sure there are many monks who have abstained from doing violence to others. but then again, there are many monks who have taken up arms against their enemies.

frankly, i don't have the good of humanity in mind. i'm too busy trying to work out how to live each day in peace with my neighbors. it's a very difficult job. it's not so hard with buddhists, though. atheists aren't really that hard because you just have to avoid talking about god. mormons and jehovah's witnesses are pretty easy too. christian scientists are another matter. and fundamentalists can be a complete pain in the ass at times! muslims and hindus live in a different universe altogether. scientology isn't even a subject. blah blah, blah blah. and so we leave you all with one last question. Do you believe there are no absolutes? Are you *absolutely* sure??!!

Category: General