On Thu, Nov 28, 2002 at 01:25:43PM -0500, chris cunningham wrote: > > powers where Buddhism has usually been practised, but people over here > > probably usually don't think in terms of hells and demons and flying Wu > > Don masters... > > but they do believe in reincarnation? what then does buddhism posit, if Well, I haven't known California Buddhists well enough to know (not saying all American Buddhists are in California, just using that as a label for a trend.) But from what I've seen of Buddhism it makes no sense without reincarnation. You assume suffering is really bad, and that if you die you'll just get a new life, and more suffering, so suicide isn't an option. So you strive for Nirvana instead. Of course, a lot of "California Buddhists" might just call themselves Buddhist, while trying out the meditation and having ideas of achieving oneness with the universe, without worrying about the original stuff. But is this Buddhism, or religious chow mein? > anything, as the origin of this supernatural process of transplantation of > memories and/or personality? or do they bail on first cause arguments, too? Don't know about Buddhism precisely, in any variety, but I think Hinduism, >from which it came after all, believes in a cyclical universe which has always been here. Well, the whole shebang has always been here; a paticular universe gets born and dies, that's the cyclical part. On a time scale of tens or hundreds of thousands of years, I think; puts the 6000 years of Judeo-Christianity to shame. Course, you might think of that as hundreds of thousands of years of the same old same old. *shudder* -xx- Damien X-)