I don’t know how to make the distinction any clearer. You believe something in your head about Buddhism. Historical facts. Empirical facts. Demographic facts. Personal facts with regard to your own relationship to it. You are or are not a Buddhist. You know or do not know someone who is or is not a Buddhist. Or you are not sure about it. Something, anything that can in fact be shown to all rational men and women as true rather than false.
How else could we interact with the least dysfunction if not in making this distinction? Whether in regard to Buddhism or the coronavirus. What facts can be established?
Ah, but in having established a set of facts, how about our complex and often conflicting moral and political reaction to those facts? How is true and false established here?
On this thread, in regard to enlightened behavior here and now said to reconfigure into karma there and then in the form of reincarnation and Nirvana.
If someone demonstrates reincarnation to a Buddhist, then is that in the category of “things that clearly can be demonstrated”?
Okay, but what does that have to do with my attempt here to have it demonstrated to my own satisfaction? If I hear that anyone has demonstrated the actual existence of reincarnation to anyone else at all, I’m interested. After all, I’m here because what I believe is true “in my head”, is that death = the obliteration of “I” for all the rest of eternity.
That’s why I am curious above as to how particular Buddhists are reacting to the coronavirus pandemic around the globe. There have already been over 7,500 deaths from it. And I am clearly in the most “at risk” group. What then would Buddhists imagine the fate of these “souls” – my “soul” – to be, given their own understanding of Buddhism.
How might reasonable men and women be expected to understand how the fate of one’s self is intertwined with that which Buddhists believe about life after death? How does that actually even “work” sans God?
Again, with so much at stake here for the millions now at risk of exposure, isn’t it a reasonable request to probe deeper into the beliefs of any religious faith?
Or, in being one of KTs “assholes”, am I clearly to be excluded from these discussions?