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Guess what tradition the Dalai Lama was raised with, Snoopy.

Very possibly it seemed irrelevant to you at the time. I would take the blogger all the more seriously because they made a distinction between their interpretation and the words they heard. The blogger strikes me as very honest on that basis. I don't see why this is an issue here since the...

Thomas, please tell us: Who is this panentheist? Seeing as you have not cited anyone who is a proponent of panentheism, I'd say that's a vague and meaningless claim. More stabs in the dark. Some would claim that this is the nature of religion. It adds nothing to an understanding of panentheism...

I think world religions share some goals but they are very different in how they actually deal with issues. I think the term "inter-faith" is misleading because it seem to suggest commonalities that don't exist.

Thomas, I've been talking about natural evil. None of my recent posts deal with morality. They deal with natural evil. Yet you respond to my posts as though I've been talking about morality. That's why I introduced Anselm.

The blogger I mentioned offered a slightly different account:His Holiness also went to some length to include non-Buddhists in the practices. He came just short of saying "you don't have to be Buddhist to take bodhisattva vows, but it helps." Under the broadest possible interpretation of his...

I didn't say God is the source and cause of error. However, if you accept the idea of divine immanence, you might accept the idea that He is nevertheless involved in these things No, we were talking about natural disasters, which reflect the imperfection of matter rather than moral intention or...

The Dalai Lama seems to be obsessed with ostracizing Dorje Shugden Buddhists and even got into it at the Long Beach event, much to the surprise of a blogger who attended the event. Specifically, the Dalai Lama apparently made a point of asking Dorje Shugden practitioners to exclude themselves...

Thomas, Now you are merely proving my point that (natural) evil as we experience it does not require moral intention. This impression may be due to our limited vantage point. There may seem to be a contradiction because we don't really understand how G-d works. Wasn't it Anselm who...

Yet you did not actually do the Amitabha Buddha empowerment, or did you ? (if I may ask)

Like I said before (see my Post #2), the Dalai Lama used to speak of these values without invoking religion. He seemed to fully aware of the generic ("nonreligious") approach he was taking. It seems he even made a point of referring to "secular ethics" in order to clarify that these are not...

Good questions. Does borrowing a few things from another faith tradition align you with that tradition enough to where it actually has some effect on how you define your identity and your relationship to the world?

So what is his motive for a mass market promotion of Buddhist ritual?

From our Philosophy of Religion class, we are aware of Natural Evil and Moral Evil. It seems to me that one way to avoid the impression of schizophrenia is to attribute both good and evil to G-d instead of trying to preserve G-d's perfection by excluding Him from Creation. I am the LORD, and...

I did some looking and it appears I'm not the only one to have noticed that there's a problem. This is from the so-called "Mongoose-Canine" letter which is attributed to Tibetans living in exile (in Italy) which addresses concerns about the public conduct of religious ritual. Please note that...

This makes the ritual an imaginative exercise rather than an actual ecclesiastical proceeding with a significance that a given religious group can agree on. But thanks for clarifying. But Enlightenment is specifically a Buddhist concept. What is the value of having people construe it in terms...

I sympathize with you in this matter. Here's our dilemna. The Chinese language developed over several thousand years. It has been traced to Neolithic times and may be 5000 years old. If you accept the idea of Feng Shui being older than the Chinese language, we might reasonably deduce that Feng...

Very good questions that I wanted to revisit. At first glance, obedience might seem like humans' part in a covenantal relationship. But consider this: most of the covenants G-d entered into with the Israelites were unconditional. That is, G-d is portrayed as intending to bless the Israelites...

Elsewhere I noted that communion is what the Catholic mass is all about. Most of the mass is actually preparation for it. The question is how much preparation is enough before the person is ready to go through a ritual. If the timing of an initiation rite is almost entirely determined by the...

You are a clear thinker. We need that on this forum!