Hi Mick:

Mick: I offer something different.

I know you have a difficult time believing it but I would like to hear more of your perspective.

Mick: A message board is not the place for profound realization (I finally conclude).

I have concluded the same. And yet, when you recently mentioned that in Buddhism, human incarnation is difficult to achieve, I thought I better understood your reticence regarding the death penalty.

But too, I got to 'what iffing'. What of the victums. Will they be more likely to return as human because of what transpired? Or, were they somehow reaping their own just karma? Or, could you be more specific, as to why you believe the murderer shouldn't be sent to the back of the incarnation line immediately? Wouldn't that have some benefit in terms of starting over/correcting his karma. Lots of questions come to mind for lack of understanding the frame work of the Buddhist worldview.

I wasn't just being sarcastic before, although some smidgen was implicit. e.g., I don't get evolutionists trying to save everything under the sun from extinction, or diminishing habitat, or what have you. Aren't extinctions the normal course of events in the evolutionary frame work? Would we still want dino's running around, if they could be resurrect through science. Or, assuming humans are the fittest, shouldn't humans survive at the expense of everything that gets in our way? (They're only suppostions, not my positions.)

Ntl, even if minds cannot be changed -and how do we know that fer sure?- perspectives can be expanded.

Mick: Love and compassion in Buddhism are for both the 'good' and 'evil'.

Could you offer an example, flesh it out a bit. Love for evil, compassion for evil. I haven't been able to put a face to it, so to speak.

I remain sincere in my interest of your, and/or your Buddhist perspective Mick.

And yes, my word of God says, if you believe so and so you are saved and if you do not believe, you are not saved. But what you don't understand, at least in relation to me personally, is that I don't view that as making me better than anyone. Better off, yes! in my worldview, but still just as fallable as anyone else. I'm interested in what your worldview tells you. Obviously, not that there is any reward in sending your child off to the bus with a bomb in his back pack, but what.

My primary disappointment with this board -and you specificly- is that I thought it would be more riveting in give and take. Fairly recently, and it's a theme David broached once, someone seemed aghast and dumbfounded that anyone other than lefties(I'm supposing, as republicans were reviled for their interest), in David's perspective. Particularly respecting Triage. I probably missed it, but I didn't see Triage as a pro-lefty statement per se. (But then I consider fascism, communism and socialism all as statist kissing cousins.) Anyhow, from my perspective, based on my perception of Triage, Boomtown and other DB favorites, I was led to believe this would be my kind of place, where folks discuss ideas. And it is, just to a more limited degree than I expected because I saw Davids work as more about observable truths' than ideology.

Ntl, I am pleased I came to play. Yall like family, which ain't necessarily a compliment, lol.

The thing I've come to understand is that even the people I adamantly disagree with(say politics), when up close and personal, are just human, like myself, largely preoccupied with their own interests and concerns. That's why politics, among other human endeavors, should be managed as locally as possible.

respects