Thanks for your reply. If I’m anything, I’m a Zen Buddhist due to exposure to Japanese engineers long ago. I agree with your post - the difference between the Dalai Lama and the Pope is basically that the Pope gets the job and a lot of people recognise him; even if they don’t like his ideas he’s still “the Pope” and the Vatican has to do what he says, or try not to without getting sacked. But if the present one hadn’t been Dalai Lama, only a few people in Tibet and outside would care who the Dalai Lama was. He is famous because of what he has done, said and stands for, not because of his job description. And, coming back to to where this started, Cruz, say, is more like the Pope whereas Trump and Morgan are (in)famous for those reasons.
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Normally I’d say, ‘that’s a head-scratcher’ but in the case of your in-laws, that head-scratching may well escalate to self-trepanation.
One of my Protestant in-laws, commenting on a couple who were married in the Unitarian Universalist Church, said “well, of course that doesn’t really count.” As far as she was concerned, they were living in sin, a phrase you don’t hear much anymore in public.
Bigotry is everywhere. Some people even show prejudice against any of their fellow countrymen who support a different political candidate or party!
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Then I’m screwed.
The gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that’s where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won’t do if they don’t know about it. This explains why it is so important to shoot missionaries on sight.
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“Small mouth” refers to hungry ghosts. A hungry ghost is a concept in Buddhism and Asian traditional religions representing beings who are driven by intense emotional needs in an animalistic way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungry_ghost
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Yup, this particular lama has been through a particularly significant historical period in his country’s timeline, and handled it amazingly. When you listen to him, it’s really easy to buy into his “I’m just a simple monk” (even though he functionally isn’t) thing. Similarly, the current pope has wider appeal than just to catholics because of his rejection of all the usual pope status and finery.
But again, you don’t have to be tibetan buddhist (which I’m pretty sure happens only among Tibetans/nepalese/locals and fashionable westerners) to recognize that the lama’s a pretty wise soul.
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