[Buddha-l] Ethical Dilemmas

[Joy Vriens]

Second attempt, my first message left when I was joyfully tapping away and
some accidental key combination of gmail, that I ignore, send it off.

Good morning (relatively speaking) Dan,

I assure you it is morning here.


> Being human comes with instructions and obligations. If you choose to
> ignore
> or argue against them, that too is a choice. But bad ethics.
>

Wrong puja, bad ethics, relativism is bad... What is your absolute or
ultimate reference point? From where are you looking and calling your
judgements?

Being human comes with instructions and obligations. True. Aztecs had their
instructions and obligations, we in the West, in Europe, in France etc have
ours


> If I were a minority I would be VERY afraid to live in today's Europe
> (obviously half a century ago was even worse -- perhaps we are getting a
> glimpse into why that is the case). One of my professors, Bibhuti Yadav,
> used to say Buddhism has no ethics. Despite all the bluster about "Buddhist
> Ethics" these days, the last few days have started to convince me that
> Yadav
> was right. Domage.
>

Yes, looking at last days election results at different places in Europe, it
doesn't look good at all. Ethics always seem to be the ethics of a group.
And it seems to be particularly difficult nowadays to be/remain a group in a
globalising world, globalising is it really? Truth about the situation as it
is (the end of "Communication"), justice and vision are the keywords of
Jacques Attali's project to prepare France to pull it out of the crisis. We
can only have a universal ethic if we are or act as a group and share the
same values and take into account the interests of all. That not being the
case, globally speaking, and probably not even possible, we can't have
universal ethics.
Universal ethics can also be so abstract that they don't apply in a concrete
situation. Hence "Buddhism has no ethics" because it doesn't live up to the
Ethics you measure it with.

Joy