tiltbillings wrote:PeterB wrote:It certainly would be a candidate for an award for " threads most likely to convince the rest of the world that Buddhists are loony "..
.Its like a friggin' parody of Buddhism. The kind of stuff that Born Again Christians say that Buddhists believe. " They think its more important to let your child get a crippling disease than to kill a bug ".
Pushing these things to an extreme for the sake of discussion can help us look at the complexity of the issues, but I have to admit that letting ticks feed on one "out of compassion" (and never mind the consequences) or arguing that we should try to extract a parasitic worm alive and intact from an infected person for the worm's benefit is a level I hope not to ever see again.
Do you have Dhammic reasons to disagree with those views?
Much as I'd like the tick-killers to adhere to "Hoo-ism," they're probably better served by the Buddha than by our views - what ya think? Lest anyone raise the dreaded meta-discussion threat, I'm asking whether personal opinions as expressed are sufficient answer.
FWIW, the extremes are of some use to me and I am benefitting from the discussion. Whether to kill ticks is almost a daily question for me. I see the extremes as extensions of how people understand the precept and it's application. To me, it's useful, and it's hard to predict just when the extremes might even come into play. I have no aspiration to ordination so my perspective and questions are all from the fledgling Buddhist, householder perspective.
As a kid, I grew up with weapons and hunting. I'm familiar with the concept of what level of evolution deserves to be killed and eaten, just killed, or allowed to live. That included ticks and killers, by the way. The discussion here adds light to my former (pre-Buddhist) understandings. I've tried to come to grips with this topic since becoming Buddhist a little over a year and a half ago.
As an adult I went into the military. No tick problems but it traised the bar on understanding what deserves to live or die and whether there are justifying conditions. Weapons for self defense have always been part of the equation. About 15 years ago I began carrying a weapon regularly. A couple of years ago I quit carrying, but there was a long period in which these "what-if killer questions" were quite relevant - they still are sometimes, like a couple of weeks ago (I won't bother to discuss whether and why on firearms - it's a useless discussion because one either studies the Dhamma about it or not, and it's decidedly off topic.)
So my thanks to all for this topic and the decision to leave it open for a variety of perspectives. I can see how it might fizzle out, as most topics do, or morph into a topic more closely related to defense, self defense, "evolutionary rights," etc. Might even be advantageous to move that kind of morph to a new topic.
Hoo
