BEIJING, March 20 (Xinhua) — Foreign nations voiced their support for China’s legitimate actions to handle the violence in Lhasa in recent days, expressing their opposition to the secessionist activities and the politicization of the Beijing Olympics.
Foreign nations voice support for China’s handling of Lhasa riot_English_Xinhua
Russia, Belarus, Vietnam, Singapore, Lesotho, “ambassadors from Arabian nations,” Ivory Coast, Republic of Congo. Whoo-eeee!
Is sin dead? No, not by a long shot. Yet as Easter approaches, some pastors and theologians worry: How can Christians celebrate Jesus’ atonement for their sins and the promise of eternal life in his resurrection if they don’t recognize themselves as sinners?
Has the ‘notion of sin’ been lost? – USATODAY.com
One certainly hopes so. We need a system of ethics that the whole world can agree on, not one that’s based on negative reinforcement — and that obviously doesn’t work.
The concept of sin as punishment is similar to the parent who makes dire threats if misbehavior continues, yet never follows through. It doesn’t take a child (or adult) with any brains at all long enough to figure out that nothing’s likely to happen.
That is not conducive to good behavior. One has to be really frightened to base one’s conduct on the threat of punishment that no one can prove exists.
When people understand that being nice to others is to their own advantage, then we will have the basis of an ethical code for the ages. Forbidding people to “sin” while condoning — for example — war and the destruction of the ecosystem isn’t fooling anyone. “Do as I say, not as I do” has never been very useful advice.
Recently I visited the Jokhang, the circulation of which – always clockwise – is obligatory for many devout Tibetans. As folk from the countryside poured into Lhasa, and to other shrines in the post-harvest pilgrimage season, one sensed that all China’s attempts to crush Tibet’s Tantric-Buddhist traditions, the destruction of its monasteries, the dispersal and imprisonment of its monks, the exile of its Dalai Lama, had failed. Buddhism remains undaunted in Tibet, and with it, as the Chinese always feared, the seeds of a resistance….
Greenway: Seeds of a resistance in Tibet – International Herald Tribune
“There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance–that principle is contempt prior to investigation.”
–Herbert Spencer
I ignored similar concepts for most of my life. I would have told you that I was a liberal, well-educated, philosophically-inclined, hyper-intelligent and well-informed chap, a credit to my mother, my school and my community, and an excellent judge of fine liquor. All but the last were debatable. In reality I was a hard-headed, opinionated, fuzzy-thinking, gun-loving Republican asshole and drunken drug addict. And no, I’m not being hard on myself.
I had some good qualities, for sure. Continue reading
Common Tables puts together group rosters and asks members to meet for dinner at least four times. Participants can talk about theology or the weather. They can share prayers or photos of their children. Nothing’s required. And nothing is off-limits, except proselytizing. The point is simply to reach out, to shake hands with a Buddhist, enjoy a glass of wine with a Wiccan, share laughs with a Sikh or an agnostic or a Jain.
This past week, the controversy surrounding Senator Barack Obama’s pastor, Dr. Jeremiah Wright, reached a head. Investigative reporters at ABC released excerpts from Dr. Wright’s sermons where he appears to be making inflammatory and unpatriotic pronouncements against the United States. Excerpts include Dr. Wright attributing the 9/11 attacks to a matter of “the chickens coming home to roost,” and suggesting African Americans sing “God Damn America” in place of “God Bless America.”
As expected, Senator Obama offered his ceremonial denouncement in response to the perceived outrage of the “American mainstream.” And conservative pundits are sure to have a field day with this story. But before Obamamaniacs jump on the demonizing bandwagon (one that Senator Obama himself seems a little too quick to fuel), let’s view Dr. Wright in proper perspective.
Religion Dispatches – Obama’s pastor and the Politics of Patriotic Treason
Whatever attitude comes through — and it is almost always fraught with ambiguity — religion suffuses Mr. Clarke’s realm. He demands the canvas of Genesis and upon it he enacts experiments in thought. All science fiction does this to a certain extent, trying to imagine alternative universes in which one factor or another is slightly different. What if carbon were not the fundamental element in life forms? What if a society existed that never experienced nighttime?
Mr. Clarke’s enterprise, though, is at the edges of the frame: trying to examine the moments when things come to be and when they come to an end….
When differences in race, age, gender and family makeup were taken into account, students who’d had comprehensive sex education were 60 percent less likely to report a pregnancy than those without any sex education and 50 percent less likely than the abstinence-only group.
Health | UW researchers say comprehensive sex ed cuts teen pregnancies
But Gawd doesn’t want our chil’ren to have sex education. Th’ Revr’n’ says so!
Dwindling foreign oil, rising prices at the gas pump and hype from politically well-connected U.S. agribusiness have combined to create a frenzied rush to convert food grains into ethanol fuel. The move is badly conceived and ill advised. Corporate spin and pork barrel legislation aside, here, by the numbers, are the scientific reasons why corn won’t provide our energy needs: STLtoday – Corn can’t save us
The administration and their friends have been leading us down the biofuel path for reasons that have nothing to do with energy independence. It’s time for Americans (and the rest of the world) to wake up and smell the Kool-Aid.
“Did you read about the death of Alex, the parrot?” he asks. We haven’t, so he continues. “Alex belonged to an animal psychologist named Irene Pepperidge and was capable of amazing things,” he says, among them reasoning and a creative use of words. “Found dead in his cage. I must write to her, express my sadness. I’m not sure how one expresses consolation for the death of a parrot. But such a parrot! Such a parrot!” January/February 2008-Jewish Life
In my eight years working at an independent bookstore, I lost count of how many shoplifters I chased through the streets of Seattle while shouting “Drop the book!” I chased them down crowded pedestrian plazas in the afternoon, I chased them through alleys at night, I even chased one into a train tunnel. I chased a book thief to the waterfront, where he shouted, “Here are your fucking books!” and threw a half-dozen paperbacks, including Bomb the Suburbs and A People’s History of the United States, into Puget Sound, preferring to watch them slowly sink into the muck rather than hand them back to the bookseller they were stolen from. He had that ferocious, orgasmic gleam in his eye of somebody who was living in the climax of his own movie: I suppose he felt like he was liberating them somehow.
Flying Off the Shelves – Books – The Stranger, Seattle’s Only Newspaper
From the time I stumbled into an introduction to Transcendental Meditation in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in 1970, through multiple eras (including my present fifteen-year-old Soto Zen practice), I sat and stared at many walls (and mandalas and candles, and the inside of my eyelids) reveled in sundry bells-and-whistles mental experiences, gotten bored, decided I was going crazy, become enlightened (no, really!), and now I’m ready to share everything I’ve learned. It won’t take long. In fact I can sum it up in one word: nothing.
Michael (Michal) Heller, a Polish Roman Catholic priest and cosmologist whose intellectual and religious life has been grounded in the insights of both science and religion, has won the 2008 Templeton Prize, believed to be the largest yearly monetary award given to a single individual.
Heller, 72, who teaches at the Pontifical Academy of Theology in Cracow, was awarded the prize for his work in connecting the realms of physics, cosmology, theology and philosophy.
The last of three men who shaped my early understanding of the universe died yesterday. Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, science fiction Grand Master and “inventor” of the geostationary communications satellites that rest in “Clarke orbits” and provide much of our communications, was 90 years old.
Along with Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein (the other two Grand Masters), Clarke’s writing was prominent in shaping my world view, combining entertainment with hard science and a hint of mysticism that may well have been responsible for spurring me in the direction of Buddhism, many years after first reading his novels.
Namasté, Sir Art; we’ll miss you.
But HAL lives on…
