SirPalomides

And it remains unproven that the wet markets had anything to do with it. That's not the task of regulators but scientists, and they're working on it. Conspiracy theories are popular in every country. Your "instead" however suggests that's the only thing going on, which is dishonest.

Li Hongzhi's UFO cult said it, so it must be true!

Ah, I see, so the usual racist garbage it is!

Yes, yes, of course! Don't forget to vaccinate yourself with bleach now.

Any link between dog and cat consumption and COVID-19, or is this just the usual racist garbage?

Journalist Yasha Levine is great as usual.

That's a silly thing to say. While research is still being done to determine how and from what species the virus might have transferred to humans from, the government has been taking measures to curb or completely shut down wildlife trade. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/18/covid-19-a-blessing-for-pangolins

It’s true, NBC news is a famous communist mouthpiece. I get paid 50 cents every time I share one of their articles.

Hey man, he's trying to do better.

Also, posting propaganda from the Epoch Times/ NTD is forbidden per the anti-right wing garbage guidelines promulgated by @sean and enforced by @Trunk. For those needing further information on Epoch Times, see this report here: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/trump-qanon-impending-judgment-day-behind-facebook-fueled-rise-epoch-n1044121

I posted this in the other COVID-19 thread but it's worth putting here too: https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/20/trump-media-chinese-lab-coronavirus-conspiracy/

That's what it reads like to me, I'm afraid. I am not a psychologist or anything like that, though, so I would really urge Tryingtodobetter to talk to some mental health professionals.

It's true that a lot of ideas we have today about authorship, plagiarism, etc. were not shared for most of history since literacy came about. To write a sutra and ascribe it to the Buddha may have seemed perfectly honest and straightforward if the doctrines taught were logical extensions of what the Buddha taught elsewhere. In that sense it wasn't something new but an unfolding of what had already been delivered.

Here's a really cool website devoted to the study of a Confucian autumn sacrificial ceremony. It includes complete video of a ritual done in Taiwan in 1998, with subtitles and explanatory text. https://academics.hamilton.edu/asian_studies/home/autumnalsacrifice/index.html

I believe an argument for the apparently late appearance of the Mahayana sutras is that they were hidden in the realm of the Nagas until it was time for them to be revealed in our world. Terma have similar explanations in Vajrayana. Religions change, expand, elaborate, like everything else in human society; trying to reconstruct an original, pristine version of anything is just another form of innovation.

That's pretty much Augustine talking. As someone paraphrased it, "For God was so pissed off at the world that he had his only son tortured to death and now he feels much better." Augustine was a brilliant man but had some twisted views that can partly be blamed on bad Latin translations. I wonder, if Augustine had known how definitive his views would be for Latin Christendom, whether he would have been more cautious. There were some moderating voices in the Latin church- e.g. John Cassian, but Augustine was the giant in the kiddie pool of Latin theology. Despite their claim to be returning to the pure font of scripture without reliance on human traditions, the Protestant reformers leaned hard on Augustine, more than any other church father, and Calvin and friends in particular took his worst ideas to their logical conclusion, declaring that God predetermines which souls will be damned or saved before they even exist, and the tiny minority of people who are thus arbitrarily saved should be effusively grateful that they won the lottery. The Eastern churches never fell under Augustine's sway so these developments did not occur with them. Not that they are problem-free but their view of salvation is far less punitive and their vision of God does not come off like an abusive psychopath.

That's the Augustinian way of looking at it, which came to utterly dominate Western Christian theology. Greek and Syriac theologians had a far less punitive way of thinking about it- Christ became human to mend the wounded human nature and save us all from death. They inherited an idea of Hades from Hellenistic thinking, which was a place where all the dead went to, and it was not necessarily one of active torment or punishment. In the church of the first millennium Augustine's theology was little known outside of Latin-speaking territories and the centers of Christian theology- Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem- all communicated in Greek.

Ah for some reason I missed that key bit. I guess Mount Meru is real!

To a large extent it is normal in Christian theology to "prove" the heavenly realities with hints and analogies from the observable world, so I would not say blind faith is something the theologians would accept as a characterization. With even the strangest mysteries (e.g. the Trinity, the incarnation, the eucharist) there are attempts to prop up the doctrines with analogy and evidence from experience. While they might still defy reason, they are not supposed to insult it. Where the system can break down is when the believer is asked to accept something that goes utterly against reason or moral sense- the usual response is, "Who are you to judge God?" or something like that- the problem here, of course, is that we have been asked thus far to accept a, b, c based on appeals to our reason and senses, and now we are asked to reject our reason and senses. This is most commonly encountered with regards to the teaching of eternal damnation. The theologian David Bentley Hart in his book That All Shall Be Saved does a brilliant job destroying this logic and argues (very successfully my opinion) for universal salvation on the basis of longstanding Christian tradition.

It's an interesting question, because, based on the descriptions of the mountain, if we take it as a typical geographic feature it would be readily falsifiable even by people living ~ 500 BCE simply by looking at the sky around them. The same is probably true of a lot of sacred cosmology. To work within these systems requires not just being a philosopher but a poet, for whom distinctions between "literal" and "metaphorical," "real" and "imaginary," are utterly rearranged if not obliterated altogether... and poetry is in short supply these days.

*pushes up glasses* Well actually as I recall stake-burning heretics was not widespread until maybe the mid to late medieval period. Heretics were more often just ostracized, exiled, or, if they were really outspoken, maybe mutilated and exiled. And it depends on the region too- sometimes the heretics were too numerous and people just had to learn to get along or look the other way. Evangelicals though are really annoying and might have their tongues cut out to stop them singing their horrible praise songs.

What Theravada vs Mahayana Buddhist practices did you have in mind? Because there is a lot of overlap. I think we should also think carefully about the way Protestant/ Reformation thinking about Christianity colors our way of thinking about other religions. Even Westerners who were not raised in Protestantism are ingrained with very dubious assumptions about how religions start out with some "pure" teaching that is later adulterated with lots of extraneous doctrine and cultural baggage. But the Four Noble Truths and the eightfold path, in their classic expositions, are inseparable from the teaching about karma and rebirth. This is not a tenable solution, and here's why: in the Buddhist view, everything is "psychologized", insofar as all phenomena are held to be expressions of mental states. That is equally true of the realm we live in as of hell realms, deva realms, etc. So if we "psychologize" these other states, the implicit assumption is that our present state- the body we inhabit, the ground we walk on, the chair we sit in, etc.- is more real than these other states. This is a major surrender to the prevailing materialist positivism of the present age and a rejection of much of the dharma. The result is not Buddhism but some kind of materialist psychotherapy with a lot of Asian LARPing mixed in. And that, I dare say, is a fair description of so much what passes for Zen in Western societies. With Vajrayana I think it's much harder to get away with this sort of stuff, because so much of the practice- the guru-devotion, the intense asceticism, the offerings and prayers, etc., simply doesn't make sense as just metaphorical ritual.

Incidentally this concept was brought up in Netflix's Tiger King documentary, where one of the private zoo owners has a number of concubines recruited from his underpaid staff- his followers claimed that he was imparting "shaktipat" when he was banging them.

While it's easy and fun to make fun of the stupid MAGA protestors claiming that quarantine violates their rights, it's worth remembering that Western media were saying similar things in January about China's quarantine measures. For example: https://slate.com/technology/2020/01/coronavirus-2019-ncov-china-quarantine.html Fortunately for the US pundits, Americans have exceedingly short attention spans and shorter memories.

From the blog of the great journalist Elijah Magnier: "100 days after the assassination of Soleimani: Did the US achieve its objectives?" Part 1 Part 2