Will G.W. Bush go to hell

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Lombardi4
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Will G.W. Bush go to hell

Post by Lombardi4 »

On page 79 of this book: http://www.buddhanet.net/pdf_file/allexistence.pdf , it says that being annoying to others can lead to hell.

Now, since George W. Bush is hated by many many people, would that mean he is more likely to go to hell?

BTW, I don't hate Bush.
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mikenz66
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Re: Will G.W. Bush go to hell

Post by mikenz66 »

Hi Stefan,

I think that it's better to use such teachings to review our own actions, rather than to speculate on the destination of others.

Metta
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Ben
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Re: Will G.W. Bush go to hell

Post by Ben »

Hi Stefan
Mike makes an excellent point. The only thing I would add is to say that the destiny of GWB is irrelevant.
Kind regards

Ben
“No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.”
- Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Learn this from the waters:
in mountain clefts and chasms,
loud gush the streamlets,
but great rivers flow silently.
- Sutta Nipata 3.725

Compassionate Hands Foundation (Buddhist aid in Myanmar) • Buddhist Global ReliefUNHCR

e: [email protected]..
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Jechbi
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Re: Will G.W. Bush go to hell

Post by Jechbi »

May George W. Bush be happy. May George W. Bush be peaceful. May George W. Bush be liberated.

(Even if he was the one of the worst U.S. presidents in history.)
Rain soddens what is kept wrapped up,
But never soddens what is open;
Uncover, then, what is concealed,
Lest it be soddened by the rain.
thornbush
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Re: Will G.W. Bush go to hell

Post by thornbush »

May he avoid more shoes, slippers, sandals, boots.....
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cooran
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Re: Will G.W. Bush go to hell

Post by cooran »

Now .... is it what one intends to have happen, or what the results actually are, which creates our future states?

In which case, most of us have a lot to worry about.
---The trouble is that you think you have time---
---Worry is the Interest, paid in advance, on a debt you may never owe---
---It's not what happens to you in life that is important ~ it's what you do with it ---
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Dhammanando
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Re: Will G.W. Bush go to hell

Post by Dhammanando »

Hi Stefan,
Stefan wrote:On page 79 of this book: http://www.buddhanet.net/pdf_file/allexistence.pdf , it says that being annoying to others can lead to hell.
But the author's mother tongue isn't English and I suspect what he means to say is that if we deliberately act in a pestiferous manner, calculated to cause annoyance and distress to others (for example, by indulging in divisive speech), then the kammas will be of a sort that are conducive to rebirth in hell (assuming that these are the ones that ripen at the time of our death). It doesn't, however, mean that we will be headed for hell merely because others happen to find us annoying.
Now, since George W. Bush is hated by many many people, would that mean he is more likely to go to hell?
I think all those elected to the American presidency (except perhaps Calvin Coolidge) would thereby have greatly boosted their chances of an unfortunate rebirth. But this has nothing to do with how many people loved them or hated them. Rather, it's the result of all the evil compromises that practical politics will impose upon even the wisest and most well-meaning president.

Best wishes,
Dhammanando Bhikkhu
Rūpehi bhikkhave arūpā santatarā.
Arūpehi nirodho santataro ti.


“Bhikkhus, the formless is more peaceful than the form realms.
Cessation is more peaceful than the formless realms.”
(Santatarasutta, Iti 73)
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tiltbillings
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Re: Will G.W. Bush go to hell

Post by tiltbillings »

thornbush wrote:May he avoid more shoes, slippers, sandals, boots.....
or not.

Image
>> Do you see a man wise [enlightened/ariya] in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him.<< -- Proverbs 26:12

This being is bound to samsara, kamma is his means for going beyond. -- SN I, 38.

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” HPatDH p.723
MMK23
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Re: Will G.W. Bush go to hell

Post by MMK23 »

Okay, I'll bite...
Dhammanando wrote:I think all those elected to the American presidency (except perhaps Calvin Coolidge) would thereby have greatly boosted their chances of an unfortunate rebirth. But this has nothing to do with how many people loved them or hated them. Rather, it's the result of all the evil compromises that practical politics will impose upon even the wisest and most well-meaning president.
Why the exception for Coolidge?

MMK23
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jcsuperstar
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Re: Will G.W. Bush go to hell

Post by jcsuperstar »

off hand not counting the anti-asian stuff i dont see too much wrong with him
สัพเพ สัตตา สุขีตา โหนตุ

the mountain may be heavy in and of itself, but if you're not trying to carry it it's not heavy to you- Ajaan Suwat
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tiltbillings
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Re: Will G.W. Bush go to hell

Post by tiltbillings »

jcsuperstar wrote:off hand not counting the anti-asian stuff i dont see too much wrong with him

Not much wrong with him other than starting an unnecessary war costing thousands of lives, and the list can on.
>> Do you see a man wise [enlightened/ariya] in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him.<< -- Proverbs 26:12

This being is bound to samsara, kamma is his means for going beyond. -- SN I, 38.

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” HPatDH p.723
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tiltbillings
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Re: Will G.W. Bush go to hell

Post by tiltbillings »

by jcsuperstar » Sat Jun 13, 2009 5:20 am

i had a talk similar to this once with a friend and i sugested to him that maybe all the people we on the left "hate" really arent evil, maybe they really think theyre doing the right thing... i have a hard time seeing bush as evil, a buffoon yes, but evil probably not. chainey and rush on the other hand...
In the following read "not evil" for "sane."
from Raids on the Unspeakable by Thomas Merton
A devout memory of Adolf Eichmann

One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. I do not doubt it all, and that is precisely why I find it disturbing.

If all the Nazis had been psychotics, as some of their leaders probably were, their appalling cruelty would have been in some sense easier to understand. It is much worse to consider this calm, "well-balanced," unperturbed official conscientiously going about his desk work, his administrative job which happened to be the supervision of mass murder. He was thoughtful, orderly, unimaginative. He had a profound respect for system, for law and order. He was obedient, loyal, a faithful officer of a great state. He served his government very well.

He was not bothered much by guilt. I have not heard that he developed any psychosomatic illnesses. Apparently he slept well. He had a good appetite, or so it seems. True, when he visited Auschwitz, the Camp Commandant, Hoess, in a spirit of sly deviltry, tried to tease the big boss and scare him with some of the sight, Eichmann was disturbed, yes. He was disturbed. Even Himmler had been disturbed, and had gone weak at the knees. Perhaps, in the same way, the general manager of a big steel mill might be disturbed if an accident took place while he happened to be somewhere in the plant. But of course what happened at Auschwitz was not an accident: just the routine unpleasantness of the daily task. One must shoulder the burden of daily monotonous work for the Fatherland. Yes, one must suffer discomfort and even nausea from unpleasant sights and sounds. It all comes under the heading of duty, self-sacrifice, and obedience. Eichmann was devoted to duty. and proud of his job.

The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous.

It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missile, and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared What makes us so sure, after all, that the danger comes from a psychotic getting into a position to fire the first shot in a nuclear war? Psychotics will he suspect. The sane ones will keep them far from the button. No one suspecys the sane, and the sane ones will have perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for firing the shot. They will he obeying sane orders that have come sanely down the chain of command. And because of their sanity they will have no qualms at all. When the missles take off, then, it will be no mistake. We can no longer assume that because a man is "sane" he is therefore in his "right mind." The whole concept of sanity in a society where spiritual values have lost their meaning is itself meaningless. A man can be "sane" in the limited sense that he is not impeded by disordered emotions from acting in a cool, orderly tier, according to the needs and dictates of the social situation in which he finds himself. He can be perfectly "adjusted." God knows, perhaps such people can be perfectly adjusted even in hell itself.

And so I ask myself: what is the meaning of a concept of sanity that excludes love, considers it irrelevant, and destrtoys our capacity to love other human beings, to respond to their needs and their sufferings, to recognize them also as persons, to apprehend their pain as one's own? Evidently this is not necessary for "sanity" at all. It is a religious notion, a spiritual notion, a Christian notion What business have we to equate "sanity" with "Christianity"? None at all, obviously. The worst error is to imagine that a Christian must try to be "sane" like everybody else, that we belong in our kind of society. That we must be "realistic" about it. We must develop a sane Christianity: and there have been plenty of sane Christians in the past. Torture is nothing new, is it? We ought to be able to rationalize a little brainwashing, and genocide, and find a place for nuclear war, or at least for napalm bombs, in our moral theology. Certainly some of us are doing our best along those lines already. There are hopes! Even Christians can shake off their sentimental prejudices about charity, and become sane like Eichmann. They can even cling to a certain set of Christian formulas, and fit them into a Totalist Ideology. Let them talk about justice, charity, love, and the rest. These words have not stopped some sane men from acting very sanely and cleverly in the past.... No, Eichmann was sane. The generals and fighters on both sides, in World War II, the ones who carried out the total destruction of entire cities, these were the sane ones. Those who have invented and developed atomic bombs, thermonuclear bombs, missiles; who have planned the strategy of the next war; who have evaluated the various possibilities of using bacterial and chemical agents: these are not the crazy people, they are the sane people. The ones who coolly estimate how many millions of victims can he considered expendable in a nuclear war, I presume they do all right with the Rorschach ink blots too. On the other hand, you will probably find that the pacifists and the ban-the-bomb people are, quite seriously, just as we read in Time, a little crazy. I am beginning to realize that "sanity" is no longer a value or an end in itself. The "sanity" of modern man is about as useful to him as the huge bulk and muscles of the dinosaur. If he were a little less sane, a little more doubtful, a little more aware of his absurdities and contradictions, perhaps there might be a possibility of his survival. But if he is sane, too sane ... perhaps we must say that in a society like ours the worst insanity is to be totally without anxiety, totally "sane."
>> Do you see a man wise [enlightened/ariya] in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him.<< -- Proverbs 26:12

This being is bound to samsara, kamma is his means for going beyond. -- SN I, 38.

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” HPatDH p.723
Lombardi4
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Re: Will G.W. Bush go to hell

Post by Lombardi4 »

Dhammanando wrote:Hi Stefan,
Stefan wrote:On page 79 of this book: http://www.buddhanet.net/pdf_file/allexistence.pdf , it says that being annoying to others can lead to hell.
But the author's mother tongue isn't English and I suspect what he means to say is that if we deliberately act in a pestiferous manner, calculated to cause annoyance and distress to others (for example, by indulging in divisive speech), then the kammas will be of a sort that are conducive to rebirth in hell (assuming that these are the ones that ripen at the time of our death). It doesn't, however, mean that we will be headed for hell merely because others happen to find us annoying.
Now, since George W. Bush is hated by many many people, would that mean he is more likely to go to hell?
I think all those elected to the American presidency (except perhaps Calvin Coolidge) would thereby have greatly boosted their chances of an unfortunate rebirth. But this has nothing to do with how many people loved them or hated them. Rather, it's the result of all the evil compromises that practical politics will impose upon even the wisest and most well-meaning president.

Best wishes,
Dhammanando Bhikkhu
Thank you Bhante. :anjali:
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Ben
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Re: Will G.W. Bush go to hell

Post by Ben »

Hi Ajahn
Dhammanando wrote:It doesn't, however, mean that we will be headed for hell merely because others happen to find us annoying.
That is indeed a relief.

Metta

Ben
“No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.”
- Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Learn this from the waters:
in mountain clefts and chasms,
loud gush the streamlets,
but great rivers flow silently.
- Sutta Nipata 3.725

Compassionate Hands Foundation (Buddhist aid in Myanmar) • Buddhist Global ReliefUNHCR

e: [email protected]..
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Dhammanando
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Re: Will G.W. Bush go to hell

Post by Dhammanando »

Hi MMK23,
MMK23 wrote:Why the exception for Coolidge?
Because Coolidge displayed a degree of inactivity and a dexterity for snoring that seems to be unmatched by any other US president. At night he slept even longer hours than Reagan, and in the daytime he took lengthy siestas, and preferred lounging in his rocking-chair to any other activity. Obviously the more time a president spends sleeping and lounging in his rocking-chair, the less time he will have to devote to belligerence, criminality and the like.
Snoring_as_a_Fine_Art.pdf
(669.48 KiB) Downloaded 131 times
Best wishes,
Dhammanando
Rūpehi bhikkhave arūpā santatarā.
Arūpehi nirodho santataro ti.


“Bhikkhus, the formless is more peaceful than the form realms.
Cessation is more peaceful than the formless realms.”
(Santatarasutta, Iti 73)
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