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The Difference Between Saving Sentient Beings and Getting Involved in Politics

Nov. 27, 2008 |   By a practitioner in Taiwan

(Clearwisdom.net) A while ago, I went out with a colleague who was a director of the Science Academy before his retirement. During our conversation, we began to chat about Falun Gong. I told him about the worldwide spreading of Falun Gong since 1992 and the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) persecution that began in 1999. When he learned of the harvesting of organs from living practitioners, he couldn't believe it. In the end he said, "The CCP is a totalitarian regime. You have so many people practicing. If I were the CCP, I would suppress you as well."

After I thought more about what he said, I realized that I've met many people who have similar mentalities to his. At that point I was shocked because I realized that this mentality is really frightening. To use an analogy: a robber killed a person. When the witness told the bystanders to stop the robber from harming more people, the bystanders said, "If I were this robber, I would kill this person as well." Isn't this validating the murder? Weren't the bystanders also bad people?

Master said in "Fa Teaching at the 2007 New York Fa Conference,"

"At the end, during the time when gods are supposed to be saving people, although a person's degree of morality isn't directly taken into account, the deterioration of your own morality has led to the baseline's collapse, and this is what caused you to fail to identify with the Fa and recognize it. Isn't that the reason why you cannot be saved and rescued?"

Not long ago, some CCP officials came to visit Taiwan. Our practitioners soon held a press conference calling for these officials to help stop the persecution and disintegrate the CCP. But I noticed some practitioners were opposed to the press conference, feeling that we were getting involved in politics. In my opinion, these practitioners were not much different from the bystanders in the above-mentioned example. Master said in Zhuan Falun,

"And there's a problem with your character if you don't do anything when you see something awful like murder or arson. How could you then demonstrate that you're a good person? If you don't even do anything about things like murder and arson, then what would you do something about?"

If we confuse saving sentient beings with getting involved in politics, we are lowering ourselves to the level of non-practitioners. How can we save sentient beings with such a mentality?

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