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Ahmadinejad"The Iranian President claimed today that he never called for an extermination of Jews, but only asked proponents of Zionism to stop supporting the regime that occupies Palestine, and accused the Western media misreporting his speeches to help “bullying tyrants” make a case for attacking the Islamic nation."
TaggedI was 'tagged' by Wehlia.
Well, here are the rules...
1. Find the nearest book. 2. Name the book and the author. 3. Turn to page 123. 4. Go to the fifth sentence on the page. 5. Copy out the next three sentences and post to your blog. 6. Tag three more folks. The book that was closest to me (after the phone book) is in at work right now. It is a series of essays by Anthony Burgess, and the particular sentence was something about how Picasso's cubism pointed out the absurdity of war. The closest book right now, simply because of its placement on my bookselves is one I read about thirteen years ago, called 'At Sundry Times' by R. C. Zaehner. It is a book with sweeping ecumenical themes, written before he (the Spalding professor of eastern religions) became a more disgruntled and bitter Catholic. This bitterness made his later books much more interesting. "The theme of Brahman is again taken up in chapter V, which is almost identical, as far as doctrine is concerned, with chapter ii, though its exaltation of Brahman as both the goal of Yoga and as an external agency is far more extreme. It is again concerned with the self-disipline of Yoga, and its hero is the yoga-yukta or brahma-yoga-yukt atma, 'the man whose self or soul is joined together by the joining of Brahman', in other words what we would call an 'integrated' personality, 'integrated' in the Jungian sense of 'harmonized around the immortal centre or 'self' of the total psyche'. Integration (joga) is attained by the remorseless concentration of attention on one point; 'Shutting off external contacts, fixing the eye between the eyebrows and making the in-and-out breathings which pass through the nostrils, equal, the sage who has control of his senses, sensus communis (manas), and intellect (buddhi), and has done with desire, fear and anger, intent on release, is ever released.'" I'm not going to tag anyone, but feel free to tell me about the book you're presently reading, and perhaps include a good snippet in the comments. A Quiz: Probably Meant for AmericansYour 'Do You Want the Terrorists to Win' Score: 98%
You are a terrorist-loving, Bush-bashing, "blame America first"-crowd traitor. You are in league with evil-doers who hate our freedoms. By all counts you are a liberal, and as such cleary desire the terrorists to succeed and impose their harsh theocratic restrictions on us all. You are fit to be hung for treason! Luckily George Bush is tapping your internet connection and is now aware of your thought-crime. Have a nice day.... in Guantanamo! 12月8日 PluralismI'm always fascinated and a little frightened when approaching Richard Dawkins. I'm fascinated when he talks about science, and a little frightened when he talks about religion. Its easy to tell where his expertise lies. I deplore the anti-science spirit found in fundamentalism, but fundamentalism is always a violent (intellectually or otherwise) reaction within religion to some percieved threat. Intensify the threat, and you feed the reaction. Of course, this is what he's doing. Creationists see evolution and atheism as one in the same. So it seems does Dawkins. What the rest of us moderates think, religious or otherwise, is of about equal concern and equal contempt to both Dawkins and the creationists; they are in agreement about a surprising number of things. The difference is, according to Dawkins, that he is right.
"I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere."
He then goes on to clarify this with a statement that is more akin to the relativism generally associated with a scientific theory.
"We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it."
But his use of the word 'true' here followed by the statement of scientific relativism must certainly be confusing to the average person.
Dawkins hostility towards religion has always struck me as a naïve knee-jerk reaction. First of all, what is religion? I looked it up in a dictionary just to see.
I find this kind of vague. One might suggest that Dawkins himself is in a sense religious using the fourth definition. I'm sure we all pursue some cause with conscientious devotion. Regardless, religion isn't something that can be plucked from humanity any more than thoughts or opinions; it is quintessentially human. I like the term 'world view' better than 'religion' myself because its meaning is clearer;
"'Every person carries in his head a mental model of the world - a subjective representation of external reality,' writes Alvin Toffler in Future Shock. This mental model is, he says, like a giant filing cabinet. It contains a slot for every item of information coming to us. It organizes our knowledge and gives us a place from which to argue. As E. F. Schumacher says, 'When we think, we do not just think: we think with ideas. Our mind is not a blank, a tabula rasa. When we begin to think we can do so only because our mind is already filled with all sorts of ideas with which to think.' These 'more or less fixed ideas' we think with constitute our mental model of the world - in other words, our world view.
What are the major slots in our filing cabinet? Essentially they include these basic concepts:
(1) our concept of the most real thing in existence (our notion of God or of ultimate reality);
(2) our view of the essential nature of the external world (ordered or chaotic, material or spiritual);
(3) our idea of who we and others really are (our concept of human nature); this includes our idea of how we know (epistemology) and our notion of what happens to us after we die;
(4) our understanding of the good (ethics); and
(5) our understanding of the meaning of humanity's sojourn on earth (the meaning of history).
A world view, in other words, is a map of reality; like any map it may fit what is really there or it may be grossly misleading. The map is not the world itself, of course, only an image of it, more or less accurate in some places, distorted in others. Still all of us carry around such a map in our mental make-up, and we act on it. All of our thinking presupposes it. Most of our experience fits into it. That which does not challenges us to modify our world view, or our world view prevents us from accepting the experience as veridical - really reflecting the way things are."
-James W. Sire, 'How to Read Slowly'
What is thought of as 'religion' is, to a greater or lesser extent, an intricate part of this map; it might just make more sense to say it is the map, but that won't be met by thunderous applause from those who consider themselves nonreligious. However we care to define it, religion is the product of humanity; we make God in our own image. Religion is a mechanism to understand, or at least deal with reality; however out-of-touch it may seem. (To be honest, it almost seems that the more out-of-touch the ideology is, the more comforting it somehow is, and so, the more successful it is.) Religion isn't going anywhere, and blaming ideologies or sacred books for evil acts ignores their source; it was humans that created them, and it was humans who acted on them. You aren't going to snuff out ideologies or evil acts unless you snuff out their source. We're the problem, not some archaic religious text. They could all be burnt in a fire tomorrow; one group of humans would still find some reason to kill another group. That reason would probably be the typical combination of greed and nationalism we're all familiar with. And then some sort of religious devotion would develop around someone who died to fill the void, and who knows where that might lead. I say better the devil you know.
A criticism
A good critique of 'The God Delusion'
12月3日 'Post-Rapture Post' |
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