Mx. Luna Corbden 🐸Anyway, time to stop making fun of Easter and get back to suffering in terrible guilt that Jesus suffered in terrible pain so that anyone who obeys the father won't have to suffer but everyone else is a terrible bad person who gets to suffer for eternity! Yippie! What a joyous, wonderful time of the year!
Duane Johnson 
@corbden Maybe this is just Christianity's roundabout way of arriving at Buddhism. Life is suffering.
@canadaduane It doesn't really take a great approach though. God inflicts the suffering, suffering and obedience in this life are the answer to ending suffering after *death*, and suffering is the central sacrament.
Buddhism says suffering is an unfortunate but unavoidable fact, suffering isn't the same thing as pain, and that suffering comes from attachment. This gives us some answers for reducing suffering for ourselves and others.
Christianity (via Mormonism)
never taught me *how* to be companionate. In fact, its examples of how to be compassionate were actually just lessons on how to be sales force for the church. So it centered the goal of ending of suffering around getting people into the religion that worships suffering.
My first inklings of *how* to feel compassion came from a single Buddhist meditation where he walked me through finding a helpless animal in an alley way and caring for it. It centered care, not suffering. I don't see a lot of Buddhists actually seeking out suffering or telling people they deserve it. They know it's already there, and move on to better pursuits.
I've learned more about how to be a healer from a couple of hours per year of listening to Buddhists than I learned in 20+ years of 20+ hours a week I gave to that church.