Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama actually deserve no slack

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.

Well, that’s your opinion. Not everyone on earth shares your opinion.

I agree with the OP on the Church.

Don’t know enough about the Dalai Lama to agree or disagree.

So, the perfect is the enemy of the good. Thanks for sharing.

Honestly, I think this is a less troubling error than an inability to see the good within the bad.

Not because I think the good within the bad needs to be acknowledged for the sake of the bad. It needs to be acknowledged so that we can see that people aren’t all bad or all good. If we think, “Well, I can’t be a _____ because _______s are bad people and I’m not a bad person,” then we never confront reality.

We shouldn’t acknowledge the good to be fair. We should acknowledge it to prevent ourselves from thinking we have good qualities, therefore we are above doing evil.

Yeah, I’m somewhat disturbed by how many people of my generation (X) and general worldview (secular, liberal) love the Dalai Lama. I can only assume it’s because he’s cute and the Beastie Boys love him, and they’ve therefore not bothered to look at him too closely.

It’s my humble opinion, in fact!

Nope, talking about the cognitive error I delineated in the OP.

I agree with your point. I’m not advocating B&W thinking. The opposite, in fact. With Pope Francis, because he’s not Darth Sidious Benedict XVI, people are saying stuff like Pope Francis totally fucking rocks! No, relative goodness doesn’t not make one “rock.”

Seeing the perfect as the enemy of the good is also a “cognitive error”. The Pope is an influential figure to a sixth of the world’s population. If he can use that office to promote caring for the poor and protecting the environment, then so much the better.

snerk He’s bashing the pope! snerk

I have to disagree here, particularly with the Pope. Yes, there’s a LOT of issues with the Catholic Church, but it also has two millenia of momentum behind it. As great as it would be for him to come out and make some sweeping changes, assume for the sake of argument that he wants to, I don’t think he can. He can’t just reverse that momentum, but he can nudge it in a better direction, and even what little bit he has changed has made a LOT of Catholics upset. If he were to come out and change more, that very well could create a crisis in the Church not seen since Martin Luther.

Instead, I think he realizes that that can’t happen over night, but what he can do is start a process in place where more like-minded bishops are made or promoted within the Church so that progress can continue to be made over the next several decades. As such, I think any real judgment of how much good he may or may not do during his Papacy should be reserved for the time being. Regardless, holding a Pope responsible for not dismantling the Church seems a little… excessive. I think he really does want to reform it, and since it isn’t going anywhere, I say let him try.
And as for the Dalai Lama, yeah, it’s certainly popular to love the guy here in the west. By a similar token, I don’t think it’s fair to judge him for the acts of previous Lamas, particularly since he’s mostly inept as a political leader for most of his life. I think he gets far more credit for his wisdom and philosophy than he deserves, but a lot of that does come from the fact that the West has gotten jaded with our own religions and he’s done a lot to draw attention to his version of Buddhism, especially as he’s been the face of it for so long during the time when mass media didn’t even exist until what it is now. And, of course, let us not forget that we in the West hate Communists, so we’re going to be sympathetic to Tibet in that cause as well.

That all said, I think it’s unfair to hold him responsible for believing the tenants of his faith. It’d be one thing if he was a Joseph Smith or L Ron Hubbard type who created their religions as adults, but he’s been “known” to be the reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama since he was a little child. Even if we assume it’s all bullshit and he’s just some dude who got picked, then he’s still been indoctrinated with that belief his entire life. I can’t reasonably deny his sincerity in his beliefs.

Ultimately, pretty much any major figure seen as a paragon of virtue has major character flaws, inconsistencies and hypocrisies… just like all of us. If you look back at any great man in history about whom enough is known, you’ll find some dark stuff; ditto for finding some good stuff about generally evil people. The difference now is that these people are alive, so they’re not whitewashed by history. Further, in the age of mass media we know, or at least can find out, pretty much anything we want about any public figure.

Normally I’d agree, but doesn’t the Dalai Lama believe that he is, in fact, all of those previous lamas? By his own belief system, it seems he’s open to criticism on that front.

Also, did you mean to use “inept” there?

Pretty sure he means impotent in the political sense as China invaded and occupied his country.

You are right, that is also a cognitive error, but I’m not making it. Francis is a much better pope than Benedict. I’d much rather have Francis as pope. I’m glad that he’s speaking out for social and economic justice.

I’m only saying that, while recognizing these good things, one should not then embrace him as “fucking rocks!” Ultimately, he’s the leader of a corrupt organization that preaches untruths.

I thought Buddhism was the least dogmatic of the major religions, unless the OP is specifically denigrating the specific sect that the DL is the head of.

All you say is true. He’s about as good as we can expect right now. I do appreciate his bravery in changing what he has.

It’s a different issue, though. If the pope is a non-believer and is sneakily trying to reform the Church as best he can, then that would be different. But he’s a believer and he supports a corrupt organization. I will give him his relative props–but that’s all he deserves. People are effusive over this guy! The cognitive error is to take the relatively good as “fucking rocks.”

It’s certainly fair to judge him for not renouncing their previous acts. Rather, he supports them.

He’s been the face of a myth that he’s had the power to dispel (i.e., that the lamas were good, spiritual guys and Tibetan Buddhism is true). Another example: I lived in Japan 8 years, and Buddhism is, for all intents and purposes, dead there. So I cringe when people talk about something being “Zen” (when they’re serious). We have that metaphor here based on a fantasy of the East, whereas Japanese people don’t recognize that thought at all.

Right, the whole “free Tibet” thing then redounds to a brighter halo on the guy.

It’s his gig, so yeah. Either he doesn’t believe, in which case he’s a liar, or he does, and his intelligence is compromised. I don’t fault him for believing in Buddhism but in believing in his own status, etc.

What you say is true.

That is a very complicated issue and varies across sects. I think the DL is a special case because the belief is about him personally, and the lamas were also temporal leaders using religion to keep people in bondage.

Actually, since Tibet was basically closed to the world until pretty recently, there are no objective accounts for what life was like back in the old days. And the Chinese propaganda machine has a vested interest in painting a certain picture.

Certainly, in the 6 months or so that I spent in Tibet on 6 trips I took there, it was about 99% hit rate that the local Tibetans thought that life was worse after the Chinese invasion than before it. Now Tibetans are a minority in their own land, witness their culture, language and religion all under attack.

The DL is a good guy in my book. And he became both the spiritual and temporal leader of Tibet at age 16 in one of the most tumultuous times in Tibetan history. He was trying hard to modernize a medieval era theocracy while dealing with being invaded, occupied and then needing to flee to India. It is hard to find a balanced view of the current DL that criticizes how he managed the affairs of State during his formal vestment. You may want to criticize previous incarnations, and the criticism may be justified, but it’s hard to make a credible bitch slapping of the current DL.

and the post Dalai Lama Tibet has not be especially kind to the native Tibetans.

The cite I gave above seems pretty good. Since this was 1959, there are still plenty of old people to tell the tale of what it was like.

Move in the Han! Yeah, that stuff isn’t cool at all. It’s not a reason, however, to idealize the old Tibet.

What did he do to do that? More curious than doubting (doubt would come from the fact he was just 23 or 24 and probably lacking the objectivity needed to be a reformer).

Well, he was raised in a brainwashed state from childhood, so I would cut him some slack on that, even if he were not so great. But he’s an adult now, and I think the criticisms of him I made above apply. I never accused him of being a cruel or bad leader himself.