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For buddhists, not killing is mostly axiomatic, based on the Five Precepts. The mental gymnastics that guy was undertaking trying to reconcile that axiom with other dogma that would otherwise allow killing was quite impressive.

That's the problem with axioms.

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How? I don't see that in what he says (I see other problems which I mentioned previously). It's not "do not kill under any kind of circumstance, willingly or not, consciously or not". There's a lot of nuance behind the simple, short Buddhist precept "I will refrain (or abstain) from killing". Precepts are shortly formulated to help you keep in mind a huge deal of theory and, more importantly, practice behind them. And they are explicitly not abstract axioms to be dogmatically held without any kind of practical context of reality.

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