Measles Outbreak at Vaccine-Denying Church

[Angrboda]

My mother was a Buddhist. Buddhist worship the path of the 'awakened one.' To walk this path and to acheave this 'wakened' state elevates one to an enlightened sense of being, which trancends all of the 'dukkha/pain and suffering' the ignorant suffer from. To acheave this zen elevates these transcended believers to a state of nirvana. From this state some believe one can reach the ultimate state as a budda has and can be 'reborn' and keep coming back in higher states of existence. The end goal for the Buddhist is 'buddahood.' In essence Buddhism is a form of self worship that elevates it's believer too a FORM of godhood. So the Buddist worships the path to enlightment, which deifies the indivisual to a degree.

To be a Buddhist, and to fight in a war would destroy everything they believed in (That is why so many of them set themselves on fire rather than fight in a war.) For those who fought, and caused suffering and pain knew they could never have the hope to obtain a true state of Zen, thus pushing them to seek other religions, or to simply try and start over.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism
http://nichirenbuddhist.org/LearnBuddhis...k/ch2.html

This has to be one of the most fucked up, wrong-headed descriptions of Buddhism that I've ever heard.

No, just no.

Sorry alpo,
Reference material says yes.

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From this state some believe one can reach the ultimate state as a budda has and can be 'reborn' and keep coming back in higher states of existence ... The end goal for the Buddhist is 'buddahood.' In essence Buddhism is a form of self worship that elevates it's believer too a FORM of godhood.

Siddhartha Gautama .. is recognized by Buddhists as an awakened or enlightened teacher who shared his insights to help sentient beings [attain] the cessation of all suffering, known as the sublime state of nirvāņa.

Nirvāņa ('blown out', 'extinguished', 'quieted') Perhaps better known in Buddhist discourse — where it signifies the psychosocial state that obtains when desire and its corollary, ignorance, have ceased to fuel the psychosocial entity that constitutes the 'person' and drive it on to further rebirth....
(Oxford Dictionary of Hinduism, 2009)

In other words, the goal of Buddhism is not "buddhahood" or "coming back" or indeed any state of existence at all, but the cessation of rebirth and existence. To fully understand the Buddhist concept, one has to understand the Buddhist concept of dependant origination, as Buddhist metaphysics and ontology is radically different from western realism, but the basic result is this: a Buddhist isn't looking to be reborn as a god, she is looking to put an end to being reborn.

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In essence Buddhism is a form of self worship that elevates it's believer too a FORM of godhood....

On one interpretation, although Buddhism rejects the notion of a permanent self, it does not reject the notion of an empirical self (albeit consisting of constantly changing physical and mental phenomena) that can be conveniently referred to with words such as "I", "you", "being", "individual", etc. Early Buddhist scriptures describe an enlightened individual as someone whose changing, empirical self is highly developed. According to Buddhist teachings, this phenomenon [the self] should not, either in whole or in part, be reified, either in affirmation or denial.The Buddha rejected the latter metaphysical assertions as ontological theorizing that binds one to suffering.

On another interpretation, Buddhism rejects any idea of the self. On this view it is incorrect even to speak about an "empirical self"....

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This is because constantly changing physical and mental phenomena all have impermanence, and anything with such impermanence does not amount to the idea of a self. One is permitted to use terms such as "I", "you", and so on, not because they refer to an empirical self, but simply because they are "convenient designations". They are used in much the same way that the word "it" is used in the sentence "It is cold". Here there is nothing that the word "it" refers to. It is merely a grammatical device which allows one to assert "there is cold", while using a substantive term.

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The doctrine of Anatta, that there is no real self, is one of the core doctrines of Buddhism. While some strains of Buddhism acknowledge the existence of gods on other planes of existence, to be reborn a god is the worst fate a Buddhist can imagine, as only humans can achieve nirvana and moksha (release from the endless cycle of death and rebirth). To be reborn as a god is to be fated to multiple more rebirths in order to become human again so that nirvana and moksha are once again attainable. (And the life of gods, though finite, was very, very, long.)

And the Zen Buddhists rationalized fighting in war very easily given the enormous amount of potential for abnegation of personal responsibility with the doctrine of Anatta or no self, that denies the real existence of the 'I', as well as the interwoven concept of dependent origination which, among other things, can be interpreted as saying that personal actions are simply the automatic playing out of karmic law (if my bayonet goes into your eye and kills you, it is not me that is killing you, it is you who have killed yourself by incurring the karma in a past life which required you to be stabbed in the eye in order to release you from the burden; in a sense, by stabbing you in the eye, I am doing you a favor).

(For more on the subject, see "Zen At War" by Brian Daizen Victoria , and "Buddhist Warfare" by Jerryson and Juergensmeyer.)

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That you would prostitute your mother to increase the credibility of your bullshit, as well as misrepresenting the motivations of those monks who set themselves on fire, is reprehensible.

References say that Drich is an embarrassment to his mother. (And everyone else.)