210616 The Sentinel, Today's Thinking

Freedom

We all proclaim we live in a free country, but the truth is that freedom is not free. This started in April of 1775 when the revolutionary war actually began. Independence from Brittan was declared on July 4, 1776. Since that time there have been countless wars around the globe to maintain what we call the land of the free.

Rights

We do have rights in this country; each and every one of us has rights.The issue is, as I see it, that one person’s, one group’s rights end when he/she tries to deny the rights of another person. One recent event comes to mind. It was the insurrection that occurred on January 6 of 2021. The group had the right to protest, to march, but the moment that group attacked the capitol of the United States and wreaked havoc and destruction on our property, injured capitol police, killed one of them and were seeking to murder congress people and hang the sitting vice president; that group’s rights ended because it infringed on the rights of every citizen of the United States.

The Lord God and the Buddha

This may seem an odd thing to combine together and there is a dramatic difference between the two. The living God gave us a set of commandments to live by; those commandments, if we examine them in our own lives we find that they are impossible for any living man or woman to live up to. If we are honest to ourselves we will realize we have broken at least a few of them, thereby eliminating or drastically limiting our possibility to join Him in heaven after our own demise. With just a quick review I can see most of us breaking seven of the ten without even trying or realizing we have done it.

The Buddha never proclaimed he was God; he was simply a man pointing the way to living a good life. The Buddha's teachings are that you are welcome to follow the teachings or not. You have to make your own way, make your own decisions. If you take the time to compare the teachings of Jesus Christ and those of the Buddha you will find they are remarkably alike; the Buddha was just 500 years earlier than Jesus. The dichotomy is in the ending. If you fail to follow the commandments you go straight to hell without passing go. If you don’t follow the Buddha’s you do pass go and start over again as many times as it takes to end the life/death cycle and then you go to Nirvana or what Christians call heaven.