I’m no expert on Buddhism or Hinduism, and I am surely putting words into the mouths here, but I just find this model extremely appealing, where you are a one life, one shot or MMP person. I’ll try to through a post together on it eventually.

It is pretty self evident Matt. We are usually selfish to avoid our own short term suffering. We fail to share our good stuff because we want more of it ourselves.

These seems demonstrably wrong to me (at least in the near term)

As I recall, a major hanging point for you here was how I define pre-mortal suffering, or rather, my lack of defining pre-mortal suffering. Sorry, to come back to it so late, but I’d like to define pre-mortal suffering here as I did in my post about Hinduism. This understanding of eternal suffering is also extant in Buddhism. To paraphrase, Suffering comes from selfishness, and individuals are selfish as a state of being. But the Third noble truth of Buddhism is that this suffering can be alleviated by alleviating selfishness. I believe that where Mormonism and Buddhism differ is that the 4th Noble Truth of Buddhism outlines a path of self-effort which leads to the cessation of suffering, whereas our Faith points to Christ and a community of interdependent beings relying on Christ and each other to come to the same cessation.

If it makes you feel better — I only act condescendingly to you because I suspect I’m smarter, better looking, and better smelling than you. Oh and I think I have better manners at other people’s blogs than you do as well. But other than that I have no good reasons to condescend.

My daughter does the same thing.

Well it might be because she is smarter, better looking, and better smelling than you too, no? I’ll bet she has better manners than you when she comments at blogs at least.

It makes you grouchy to loose, so you respond by calling me a dick in code?

A) The word you are looking for is “lose”, not “loose”. And since I didn’t lose anything (I was being sarcastic when I made comment #84 — you obviously lost the actual argument about God suffering) this part doesn’t apply to me.

B) I didn’t call you a dick, I called you a tool. Since you love dictionaries, here is the definition of a tool from the urban dictionary:

One who lacks the mental capacity to know he is being used. A fool. A cretin. Characterized by low intelligence and/or self-steem.

C) Now that you mention it — yeah you do seem like kind of a dick too. Thanks for pointing that out.

And all this brings me to my final point. You have repeatedly proven to have atrocious blog manners. That makes you a minor troll in my eyes. Yes, sometimes you have not acted trollishly, but you have acted like a troll too many times for my tastes. This is my blog and I require my guests here to not act like trolls. Therefore, I’m dropping all of your comments into moderation for a while. Perhaps you can improve your manners and eventually find yourself out of Thang probation.