Christian Propaganda

Recent visitors to this site will probably have noticed that in the "Video Bar" (in the green column to the right) we have had a series of talks on the Four Noble Truths by the Dalai Lama, if you look now you will see that one of these has mysteriously been replaced by "Buddhism Topical Video (No God Necessary)". If you then click on this thumbnail up pops a video entitled "Christian Answers, Topical Video: Buddhism" by Steve Morrison and Larry Wessels. The video then precedes to "examine Buddhism from a biblical perspective", this seems to be purely a put down, we're all atheistic, idol worshiping cultists who have rejected the "Lord as our saviour".

So how did this happen? The content of the Video Bar feature in the blog is determined by the use of "Keywords", these are the same as "tags" or "labels" (as can be seen at the bottom of this post) these are used as a means of aggregating similar items together. Therefor in our Video Bar the keywords used are "Dalai Lama - The Four Noble Truths". If one looks at the source for the "christian answers" video you will see the following list of keywords -

"Ashoka, Nagarjuna, Pali, Canon, Tripitaka, three, baskets, Vinaya, Pitaka, discipline, Sutra, threads, Adhidharma, scholasticism, dependent, origination, Dharma, Sabbham, dukkham, dalai, lama, Zen, Buddhism, Mahayana, nirvana, shingon, theravada, vajrayana, right, understanding, thoughts, speech, action, livelihood, endeavor, mindfulness, concentration, monks, sunya, temples, Tenzin, Gyatso".

As you can see this video is going to sneak itself into almost any Buddhist keyword search. The reason that it has only recently been able to do this is that YouTube has just been taken over by Google where the christian video is hosted, YouTube now gives access to Google's video database as well as its own.

I'm leaving this interloper up for a while so that you can all make your own minds up on it (they reckon that that's one of the problems with Buddhists). As a buddhist I'm not into censorship. By the way if you go to the Christian Answers.Net website, this isn't even where this video came from, for that go to http://www.biblequery.org both sites are typical American fundamentalist Christian sites............. But make your own mind up!

As this Christian video has effectively "removed" the third Noble Truth I will put all of the Dalai Lama's talks on to the Dharma Studies page.