Inspired by some current threads in IMHO. FWIW, I was raised Catholic, am now a self-described New Ager.
A common error of cognition is to see the good within the bad as an actual positive good. For example, seeing Albert Speer as not just one of the better Nazis but actually a good guy because he wasn’t as bad as Himmler and he said he was sorry during his trial.
Thus, the current pope and Dalai Lama seem to earn a lot of praise because they are not Jerry Falwell or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Now they both seem like nice guys. Perhaps they are. The pope seems to have some good political opinions, though he has nothing of spiritual value to convey. The Dalai Lama does him one better by perhaps having some valuable spiritual things to say.
Yet both, on the whole, are crap, and while it’s fine to laud their individual opinions with which one agrees (and I do), to see them as forces for the spiritual betterment of mankind is incorrect in my view. Let’s look at them both.
Pope Francis
The Catholic Church fucking sucks! There’s no way around that. It’s ass-backwards in every aspect of sexuality, and it’s a controlling asshole of an organization. It’s corrupt. It’s full of hypocrite priests who tell people to follow the Church’s sexual teachings and then do whatever they want themselves.
If you’re the pope, you’re obviously supporting this shithouse Chuch to which Jesus would no doubt say, “Get behind me, Satan!” if he were here. There’s no fucking excuse for supporting it. You can’t reform it; you can only try to take it apart gently and lay its remains in a cardboard box.
The pope says some very basic things about social and economic justice, which is all to the good. But he’s said nothing against his Church’s anachronistic teachings on sexuality or anything else. If he starts renouncing the Church’s bullshit, I shall applaud him indeed.
Dalai Lama
I have to criticize my fellow New Agers, since we tend to give this guy a free pass. Yes, he’s a friendly old man. Yes, he’s probably more spiritually advanced than the average person.
So what’s the problem? Well, for one thing, he isn’t the reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama. I believe in reincarnation (though I don’t think it works as people tend to think it does), but humans don’t control it and a religion certainly doesn’t. It’s not true that he is this person. Moreover, he must know through introspection that he isn’t, so he is in effect a goddamn liar.
Further, he stands in support for a dogmatic religion that isn’t true. I think Buddhism has a lot of wisdom and truth in it, but Tibetan Buddhism and the Truth are certainly not the same circle on the Venn diagram. Just as any religion isn’t. I think the Dalai Lama is smart enough to know that, so he should own that.
Further, Tibetan Buddhism is massively tainted by the horrific and un-Buddhist behavior of the lamas for centuries up to and including the Dalai Lama’s own tenure (though he was quite young). Cite:
http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html
The lamas ran Tibet like their own slave labor camp with horrible taxes, cruel punishments, and general oppressiveness. China really did liberate Tibet when it moved in (though that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been shitty itself in the meantime. But the idea of giving Tibet back to the lamas to run is stupid.).
Yet, I was in a store in Indy recently specializing in Tibetan goods and picked up a book of sayings by the Dalai Lama, and he was saying Tibet used to be run as a land of peace, blah blah. He’s either very ignorant or a liar.
Like the pope, the Dalai Lama teaches anachronistic shit about sexuality and is against gay rights. Sometimes he even says inexplicably dumb shit, like this:
So yeah, these ain’t the most evil dudes in the world, but they are, at the end of the day, both dudes pretending to be something they’re not in religions that are dogmatic and not true while saying dumb shit. Thus, despite seeming like nice old guys, they both actually suck.