The Second Mindfulness Training

Reading Thich Nhat Hanh's Five Mindfulness Trainings, and despite him being a Buddhist and all, the Spirit whispered to me that he's probably taken out his endowment at some point (think "time, talents, and everything with which the Lord has blessed you or with which he may bless you" as you read this!):

"Aware of the suffering caused by exploitation, social injustice, stealing, and oppression, I am committed to cultivating loving kindness and learning ways to work for the well-being of people, animals, plants, and minerals. I will practice generosity by sharing my time, energy, and material resources with those who are in real need. I am determined not to steal and not to possess anything that should belong to others. I will respect the property of others, but I will prevent others from profiting from human suffering or the suffering of other species on Earth." The World We Have, pp. 11-12 (alternate version here)

OK, so it's not totally LDS but the Spirit's still telling me a lot of Mormons could really get behind this. It's like, you know, one of those those fragmented bits of truth out there in all religions that fits so neatly into the whole entire Truth found within the doctrine of the Church, right? Make sense to me (kind of). Except for the fact that here it feels like Buddhism has something to add to Mormonism, rather than Mormonism adding to Buddhism.

Where in Mormon doctrine do you find explicit prohibitions of exploitation of people, animals, plants and minerals? When was the last time you heard a prophet or apostle tell you to oppose anything causing "the suffering of other species"? The best we have is an awkward statement in the Doctrine & Covenants about how the U.S. Constitution "should be maintained for the rights and protection of all flesh" and how slavery (in the U.S.) is bad. Even if we want to believe the Second Mindfulness Training and the verses in D&C say the same thing, the truth is Thich Nhat Hanh says it way better.

So I'd like to bear my testimony that Thich Nhat Hanh is a partial prophet who should change his ways and be baptized by true authority and be saved, and that Buddhism can sort of be right sometimes but never as right as the Church I was born into. Nham oh Jheses Christh, ahmen!

Heavenly fatherliness #36 - Compassion

According to popular wisdom, a good father shows compassion.

Though I seriously doubt a perfect being has the ability to feel what we feel, Heavenly Father is all about compassion, the Bible says so in more than one place. Proof in the pudding when it comes to God's compassion is, once again, Jesus' sacrifice for humanity as the greatest sign of compassion the Universe will ever know. (Yeah, I know, we run into the whole issue of Heavenly Father delegating responsibilities.)

I'm reminded of a father who recently did his best to put himself in his son's shoes. That father made a real effort to understand and to feel. To share in his son's suffering, if only from a distance (impossible as that is). Does God do that at all? How would he?

The thing about compassion is that it's about the hear and now (the Afterlife is about justice). So where is God here and now? Why is he leaving suffering people with nothing more than a promise that he'll fix all our problems later?

*These attributes represent the popular thoughts of Ask Men’s Jullian Marcus, examiner.com’s Tanya Tringali, and Open Talk Magazine’s Glenn Silvestre as per their respective articles on what makes a good father.

Heavenly fatherliness #27 - Tough but fair

According to popular wisdom, a good father is tough, yet always fair.

We like to think that God is perfectly just and everyone will receive his or her just reward in the Hereafter. We're obsessed with the idea that everyone will be getting what they deserve one day. I'm not sure why anyone believes this, though. God has given no indication throughout scriptural history of ever being fair. In this life God is totally unpredictable, if that were not the case people would have learned that the benefits of living righteously outweighed the benefits of evil doing. Instead we see that being a backstabbing fuck often pays and that climbing the ladder of success means stomping on the fingers of the people on the rungs below.

And God? He's no better than the rest of us, is he? He'll mess anyone up in order to keep his place at the top.

If God's willing to stoop to racism, genocide, war, murder, theft, petty, controlling rules, etc. here and now, why should we believe he's going to sort everything out at the Final Judgement? Because he said so? Are we really going to trust this lying, sadistic megalomaniac? 

"Don't run! I am your fair and loving Father-God!"

*These attributes represent the popular thoughts of Ask Men’s Jullian Marcus, examiner.com’s Tanya Tringali, and Open Talk Magazine’s Glenn Silvestre as per their respective articles on what makes a good father.