Accept my words

… only when you have examined them for yourselves; do not accept them simply because of the reverence you have for me. Those who only have faith in me and affection for me will not find the final freedom. But those who have faith in the truth and are determined on the path, they will find awakening.

Majjhima Nikaya

Allah Nouri

Fr Hilary (Gerard Patrick) Doran 1911 - 2006

Armenian Genocide

New York Times, 15 December 1915	From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia   The Armenian Genocide —  also known as the Armenian Holocaust, Great Calamity or the Armenian Massacre — was the forcible deportation and massacring of hundreds of thousands to over 1.5 million Armenians during the government of the Young Turks from 1915 to 1917 in the Ottoman Empire. It is widely acknowledged to have been one of the first modern, systematic genocides, as many Western sources point to the sheer scale of the death toll as evidence for a systematic, organized plan to eliminate the Armenians. The event is also said to be the second-most studied case of genocide. To date twenty-one countries have officially recognized it as genocide. The government of the Republic of Turkey rejects the characterization of the events as genocide.
Armenian Genocide on the Armeniapedia.org website (Wegner photos) Armenian National Institute (photos) The Armenian Genocide, at www.theforgotten.org, has videos of interviews with survivors Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies, at University of Minnesota Video Dedicated to the Armenian Genocide, on Youtube

Brothers and Sisters

A good motivation is what is needed: compassion without dogmatism, without complicated philosophy; just understanding that others are human brothers and sisters and respecting their human rights and dignities. That we humans can help each other is one of our unique human capacities.

the Dalai Lama

Civil Obedience

Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. . . Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem.

Howard Zinn

found on www.informationclearinghouse.info

Dare To Compare - Israel

By Ghali Hassan

09/26/07 "ICH" — – Few days ago, I had a long e-mail message from someone with the “Jews for Peace” group. The message starts:

“I am very annoyed by your comparison of Israel with Nazi Germany … There is no Auschwitz in Palestine, and the Palestinians have not experienced a holocaust. Palestinians are free to leave any time they wish.”

I do not know anything about the group, but a response is in order:

Thank you for your e-mail. I take it you have never been in Occupied Palestine to see the facts on the ground. Or you are ignorant of Israel’s policies against innocent and virtually defenseless Palestinians with nowhere to go to.

I do not compare Israel with Nazi Germany. Israel is a Zionist settlers’ colony founded on land theft and terror against the Palestinian people; Nazi Germany was not. However, I do – like most people – compare Israeli policies in Palestine with those of the Nazis. If you deny what happened in Palestine in 1948 (Nakba) when thousands of Palestinians were murdered, and an estimated 800,000 Palestinians were terrorised and ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a deliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion by Jewish terrorist organisations, you deny “the holocaust” ever took place.

(continue on ICH)

For All People

The Entire Law

Brahmanism: This is the sum of duty: Do naught unto others which would cause you pain if done to you.: Mahabharata 5:1517

Buddhism: Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.: Udana Varga 5:18

Christianity: All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.: Matthew 7:12

Confucianism: Surely it is the maxim of loving-kindness: Do not unto others that you would not have them do unto you.: Analects 15:23

Islam: No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother what which he desires for himself. Sunnah

Judaism: What is hateful to you, do not to your fellowmen. That is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary.: Talmud, Shabbat 31:a

Taoism: Regard your neighbor’s gain as your own gain, and your neighbor’s loss as your own loss.: T’ai Shag Kan Ying P’ien

Zoroastrianism: That nature alone is good which refrains from doing unto another whatsoever is not good: for itself. : Dadistan-i-dinik 94:5

Newsletter from InformationClearingHouse

For Me To Know And For You To Find Out

What is it?

• It is greater than God 
• the poor have got it
• the happy need it
• and if you eat it, you’ll die!

(There was a survey and 85% of the children in the kindergardens asked knew the answer, but only 17% of the students…)

God

GOD is nameless, for no man can either say or understand aught about Him.

If I say, God is good, it is not true; nay more; I am good, God is not good.

I may even say, I am better than God; for whatever is good, may become better, and whatever may become better, may become best.

Now God is not good, for He cannot become better. And if He cannot become better, He cannot become best, for these three things, good, better, and best, are far from God, since He is above all.

If I also say, God is wise, it is not true; I am wiser than He.

If I also say, God is a Being, it is not true; He is transcendent Being and superessential Nothingness. Concerning this St Augustine says: the best thing that man can say about God is to be able to be silent about Him, from the wisdom of his inner judgement.

Therefore be silent and prate not about God, for whenever thou dost prate about God, thou liest, and committest sin. If thou wilt be without sin, prate not about God. Thou canst understand nought about God, for He is above all understanding.

A master saith: If I had a God whom I could understand, I would never hold Him to be God. God is not only a Father of all good things, as being their First Cause and Creator, but He is also their Mother, since He remains with the creatures which have from Him their being and existence, and maintains them continually in their being. If God did not abide with and in the creatures, they must necessarily have fallen back, so soon as they were created, into the nothingness out of which they were created.

Meister Eckhardt

hegemony over the masses

The history of mankind is a history of the subjugation and exploitation of a great majority of people by an elite few by what has been appropriately termed the ‘ruling class’. The ruling class has many manifestations. It can take the form of a religious orthodoxy, a monarchy, a dictatorship of the proletariat, outright fascism, or, in the case of the United States, corporate statism. In each instance the ruling class relies on academics, scholars and ‘experts’ to legitimize and provide moral authority for its hegemony over the masses.

Ed Crane

Human Rights First!

found on Human Rights First

In an important decision, Judgment Concerning the Interrogation Methods Implied [sic] by the General Security Services, in 1999, the Supreme Court of Israel ruled that even in the face of the "harsh reality" of continual terror unleashed against Israeli civilians, torture or cruel and inhuman treatment have no place in a democratic state, and must be prohibited. In a rigorous examination of the physically coercive interrogation practices employed by the Israeli General Security Services (GSS), the court insisted that two general principles must at all times be respected. These are:

First, a reasonable investigation is necessarily one free of torture, free of cruel, inhuman treatment of the subject and free of any degrading handling whatsoever..These prohibitions are ‘absolute.’ There are no exceptions to them and there is no room for balancing. Indeed, violence directed at a suspect’s body or spirit does not constitute a reasonable investigation practice…

Second, a reasonable investigation is likely to cause discomfort. It may result in insufficient sleep. The conditions under which it is conducted risk being unpleasant. Indeed, it is possible to conduct an effective investigation without resorting to violence. Within the confines of the law, it is permitted to resort to various machinations and specific sophisticated activities which serve investigations today..In the end result, the legality of an investigation is deduced from the propriety of its purpose and from its methods. Thus, for instance, sleep deprivation for a prolonged period, or sleep deprivation at night when this is not necessary to the investigation time wise may be deemed a use of an investigation method which surpasses the least restrictive means.

With these principles as a guide, the Israeli Supreme Court found a number of interrogation techniques to be absolutely forbidden under international and Israeli law, including: cuffing, hooding, loud music, deprivation of sleep, and position abuse.

you might want to go on reading here…

I did do something!

If we were

…to walk in the woods and a spring appeared just when we became thirsty, we would call it a miracle. And if on a second walk, if we became thirsty at just that point again, and again the spring appeared, we would remark on the coincidence. But if that spring were there always, we would take it for granted and cease to notice it. Yet is that not more miraculous still?

Bal Shem Tov

If You Must Hate

If you must hate, if hatred is the leaven of your life, which alone can give flavor, then hate what should be hated: falsehood, violence, selfishness.

Ludwig Börne (Juda Löb Baruch)

Intent is the Force that moves the first Ring of Power

Don Juan explained to me that intent doesn’t refer to have an intention, or to want one thing or the other, but rather has to do with an imponderable force that makes us behave in ways which could be described as intentions, wishing, volition, etc.

Don Juan didn’t bring it forth as a condition of being, stemming from oneself, such as is a habit produced by socialization, or a biological reaction, but rather brought it forth as a private, intimate force that we possess and use individually as a key that makes the first ring of power move in acceptable ways. Intent is what directs our first attention in order for it to focus on the Eagle’s emanations within a certain frame. And intent is also what commands the first ring of power to obstruct or interrupt its flux of energy.

Don Juan suggested me to conceive intent as an invisible force which exists in the universe, without receiving itself, but still affecting everything: the force that creates and sustains skimmings.

Judaism Once Was The Religion Of Active Charity

Rolf Verleger, former chairman of the Jewish Community in Schleswig-Holstein (a German Federal State), criticizes the 'all too simple' comments of German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Israel's recent military action against the Palestinian people. To hold only Hamas responsible does not reflect the very complex historical development of the situation. He asks four questions:

1. None of his Grandparents survived the Nazi Holocaust. Did this fact give Jewish franctireurs and the Jewish Army in 1947/48 the right to expel hundreds of thousands of Arabs from Israel?
2. The German Nazis expropriated the property of his Great-Grandfather in Berlin. Did this fact give the state of Israel the right to confiscate the property of the expelled Arabs?
3. All his uncles and aunts were murdered by the SS. Does this fact give the state of Israel the right to exercise a dictatorial occupation for the last 40 years over the Palestinian people?
4. His Grandma Hannah was shot, because she went to her hair-dresser without wearing the "Judenstern" ( a yellow star to mark Jewish People. It had to be put visibly on the clothes). Does this fact give the State of Israel the right to starve and bombard the people in Gaza?

"In general terms", he asks, "does the fact that the European Jews were the victim of a great wrong, give the state of Israel the right, before God and humanity, to wrong others? This is the real question. And here, Mrs. Merkel is oversimplifying. Israel is not always right."

He also compares the blockade of Gaza with the blockade of Sarajevo in 1990, and adds, "the leaders who did that then were punished as war criminals in The Hague."

"Judaism once was 'the religion of acting charity'. When I say that today, no one is going to believe me."

(Excerpt of an interview given on Deutschlandfunk, 12/29, 2008)

See also:

• The Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis
• Israeli settler abuse compared to pre-holocaust Europe

No Kid Gloves

I am not in favour of offending or hurting anyone just for the sake of it. But I am intrigued and mystified by the disproportionate privileging of religion in our otherwise secular societies. All politicians must get used to disrespectful cartoons of their faces, and nobody riots in their defence.

What is so special about religion that we grant it such uniquely privileged respect? As H. L. Mencken said: ‘We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.’

It is in the light of the unparalleled presumption of respect for religion that I make my own disclaimer for this book. I shall not go out of my way to offend, but nor shall I don kid gloves to handle religion any more gently than I would handle anything else.

Richard Dawkins
The God Delusion

On Life and Death

But in the world, at one time men shun death as the greatest of all evils, and at another time choose it as a respite from the evils in life. The wise man does not deprecate life nor does he fear the cessation of life. The thought of life is no offence to him, nor is the cessation of life regarded as an evil. And even as men choose of food not merely and simply the larger portion, but the more pleasant, so the wise seek to enjoy the time which is most pleasant and not merely that which is longest.

Epicurus

Poverty, Suffering, and Shame

„We kill at every step, not only in wars, riots, and executions. We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, suffering, and shame. In the same way all disrespect for life, all hard-heartedness, all indifference, all contempt is nothing else than killing. With just a little witty skepticism we can kill a good deal of the future in a young person. Life is waiting everywhere, the future is flowering everywhere, but we only see a small part of it and step on much of it with our feet.“

Hermann Hesse, German poet, novelist and Nobel Price winner (1946)

Religious Memes

The following is a partial list of religious memes that might plausibly have survival value in the meme pool, either because of absolute ‘merit’ or because of compatibility with an existing memeplex:

• You will survive your own death.
• If you die a martyr, you will go to an especially wonderful part of paradise where you will enjoy seventy-two virgins (spare a thought for the unfortunate virgins).
• Heretics, blasphemers and apostates should be killed (or otherwise punished, for example by ostracism from their families).
• Belief in God is a supreme virtue. If you find your belief wavering, work hard at restoring it, and beg God to help your unbelief. (In my discussion of Pascal’s Wager I mentioned the odd assumption that the one thing God really wants of us is belief. At the time I treated it as an oddity. Now we have an explanation for it.)
• Faith (belief without evidence) is a virtue. The more your beliefs defy the evidence, the more virtuous you are. Virtuoso believers who can manage to believe something really weird, unsupported and insupportable, in the teeth of evidence and reason, are especially highly rewarded.
• Everybody, even those who do not hold religious beliefs, must respect them with a higher level of automatic and unquestioned respect than that accorded to other kinds of belief (we met this in Chapter 1).
• There are some weird things (such as the Trinity, transubstantiation, incarnation) that we are not meant to understand. Don’t even try to understand one of these, for the attempt might destroy it. Learn how to gain fulfilment in calling it a mystery.
• Beautiful music, art and scriptures are themselves self replicating tokens of religious ideas.

Richard Dawkins
The God Delusion

Religious Tolerance

Remind me of who I am!

Each day an old man while beating a drum would sing out his stories of justice and peace. In spite of his neighbors ridicule he would not stop.

One day a young man yelled out to the old man:
“Why do you do this? No one is listening. No one is changing.”

He gently says to the young man:
“I do not do this to change you but to remind me of who I am.”

Russel’s Teapot

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

Bertrand Russell

Set An Example!

Christ's teaching that man should be kind and charitable, and that of all other teachers who showed humanity the right path, seems to differ from what one sees from the practical point of view which is called common sense; yet according to uncommon sense, in other words super-sense, it is perfectly practical. If you wish to be charitable, think of the comfort of another; if you wish to be happy, think of the happiness of your fellow men; if you wish to be treated well, treat others well; if you wish that people should be just and fair to you, first be so yourself to set an example.

Inayat Khan

The Almighty and Politicians

The argument from scripture

TM:  The argument from scripture…?

RD: There are lots of scriptures all around the world and they contradict each other. There’s really no reason to suppose that just because something’s written down, it’s true. You have to ask who wrote it and when and why.

If you ask somebody, “Why do you believe that your Scripture is the Word of God?” the answer that comes back is, “Oh, because it says so.” And you say, “Well, where does it say so?” And they say, “In my Scripture.” So, the Holy Scripture, whichever it is, The Koran, or The Bible, or The Book of Mormon, says within itself that it is the Word of God. This is a circular argument and not to be taken seriously.

TM=Terrence McNally
RD= Richard Dawkins

found on AlterNet.Org

The Best Foundation For World Peace

I believe that to meet the challenges of our times, human beings will have to develop a greater sense of universal responsibility. Each of us must learn to work not just for one self, one’s own family or one’s nation, but for the benefit of all humankind. Universal responsibility is the is the best foundation for world peace.

The Dalai Lama

read more here…

The Law professor’s speaking

from The Jewish Week

In a recent monograph […], I have shown that torture is permissible and consistent with halacha in all situations where there is a proper, thoughtful military chain of command […] and no other reasonable alternative is available. The basic argument is that the wholesale suspension of the sanctity of life that occurs in wartime also entails the suspension of such secondary human rights issues as the notion of human dignity, the fear of the ethical decline of our soldiers, or even the historical fear of our ongoing victimhood.

Furthermore, the protection of our own soldiers and civilians undoubtedly trumps the claims of human dignity by those who seek to do us evil. […] Neither Hezbollah nor Hamas nor al Qaeda […] treat prisoners they capture in accordance with its requirements […]. Thus we are not required as a matter of international law to treat their prisoners in accordance with the convention on the treatment of prisoners.

In sum, according to Jewish law and ethics, torture in the context of war is no more problematic than death itself, and is permitted by the general license to wage war. There is no logical reason that halacha would categorically prohibit duly authorized wartime torture as a method for acquiring information otherwise not available, in order to save lives in the future.

Michael J. Broyde is a law professor at Emory University and rabbi of the Young Israel synagogue in Atlanta.

The Revealed Religions

The revealed religions are of special importance to us. Those religions, that trace back to one human being, that told other human beings, he or she had been bestowed upon a revelation by God, and who asks others mostly by threatening with eternal perdition to believe this very revelation. The revealed religions are quasi the top of the religions of the I, the ‘ego’. 

Not only the God, who is said to have given a revelation, is an ‘I’, an ‘ego’. Also the revelator speaks as an ‘I’, that asks others to submit their ‘I’ to his. If we consider the matter impartially we notice the revelator to be only talking of himself und that the belief he is asking is the belief in him, the revelator.

Thus he also suggests at the very same time, God will under no circumstances bestow a similar revelation upon anyone else, that everybody else is excluded from a similar revelation and that God him/herself will abide by this revelation for all times to come. The revelator raises thus not only above his followers but also above the God revealed by him. That is why particularly the revealed religions require enlightenment and purgation.

by Bert Hellinger

They Thought They Were Free

Two Kinds Of Speeches

There are two kinds of speeches and two kinds of silences. Speech is either truth or a falsification, and silence is either fruition or heedlessness. If one speaks the truth, his words are better than his silence, but he who invents falsifications, his silence is better than his speech.

Al-Hujwiri

What does “Love” mean?

"If you want to learn to love better, you should start with a friend who you hate!"

Nikka - age 6

A group of professional people posed this question to a group of 4 to 8 year-olds,

"What does love mean?"

The answers they got were broader and deeper than anyone could have imagined.

What is faith?

What is Faith?

When your good deed pleases you
and
your evil deed grieves you,
you are a believer.

What is Sin?

When a thing disturbs (the peace of) your heart,
give it up.

Your Society Is Doomed

When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed.

Ayn Rand found on www.informationclearinghouse.info