Let's start a new trend!

Another brick in the wall wrote

My biggest problem with Buddhism is that it teaches that suffering is the result of desire. So those people in Indonesia got hit with a tsunami because they wanted to catch more fish to build a better life? Many desires are perfectly legitimate: the desire for happiness, for food, for knowledge etc.

It's hard to deny the logic, though; Suffering is what happens when reality fails to match your desires. If you have no desires, you have no suffering.

I don't think they mean that desire causes supernatural forces to punish you.

So if you're starving to death you should stop wanting food? I guess just have a Protestant mindset- work hard and good things will come. I think it would have been better to say that desire for excess causes suffering. If i'm not mistaken, this is what Buddha was getting at. He tried the one extreme of poverty living in the woods with almost nothing, and then he tried the extreme of living in decadence. In his final stage, he became the content fat man beloved the world over. I read somewhere that a student asked Buddha if there was a god and he answered "who cares?"

This is a bit of tangent, but the whole bit with reincarnation seems a little fishy. If there are a fixed number of souls (which I believe is what Hinduism and Buddhism teach) and the human population is increasing, where are the new souls coming from?

In defense of Buddhism, I will say it has a good record of not causing wars.

Look at me- I've been reduced to replying to my own posts! Help!