Posted in religion at 3:42 pm by nemo
James reappears
Thanks for your comment, I was worried, and also wary that someone might actually try my ‘meditation retreat’ suggestion, which was a bad one, since 1. I don’t do retreats (I am not a guru), and 2. I didn’t describe the situation referred to, which was far too severe to induce meditative states.
As to fakirs, much of the spirituality of Sufism was done among beggars, wanderers, and in situations modern surburbanites would find not to their liking (including jihadic battlefield situations of a harrowing nature). But then again difficult situations are often counterproductive to development, so who can say. I am not a sufi, nor do I have a ’spiritual path’, so my remarks, actually, were misleading. But fakirs are fakirs, wanderers, homeless persons, and ‘idiots’ at the next to last stop.
If you can eat garbage and ride freightrains you can survive handily in a dynamic economy like the American. It can be tremendously relaxing to suddenly stand outside the economic system, outside of its pressure, it is a miniature enlightenment in itself to suddenly see your ‘robot motivator’ unhooked from the social machine.
But such liberations are brief, and there is no real ‘outside the system’, so courting the outsider’s existence is not, as such, the answer to anything. The hobo’s path tends to be downhill.
The classic buddhists, one should note, did court outsider status, and did so systematically, ritually, and quite practically, as a group exercise. Beggars bowls and world renunciation. In that form the outside path chugged uphill.
But it is better to never imitate anyone, so I will file away these autobiographical details.
Here’s a link to some photographs to the Dalai Lama’s residence: Dalai Lama’s excessively ritzy crash pad with a superficial spiritual decor.
I feel compassion for the Dalai Lama: he is the victim of events, and as a reborn boddhissattwa he starts life from scratch, like every other honest joe. Recovering the starting point you once achieved can be difficult, let alone advancing from that, and for a high lama, maybe impossible: caught up in politics. That’s the catch in Tibetan lama system, perhaps. How would I know? Just some thoughts, or worries at the Tibet disaster.
I say this because Tibetans are having a problem and they don’t seem to be able to proceed in a practical fashion towards resolving the Tibetan problem.
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Posted in you've got mail at 1:51 pm by nemo
_______________________________
UPDATE FROM THE
ELECTRONIC INTIFADA
http://electronicIntifada.net
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Posted in Evolution at 5:51 pm by nemo
Your View: Evolutionists don’t allow students to think freely
The natural design argument should rightly allows us to question Dennett style thinking about a complex mechanism coming into existence by chance. But the ‘natural design’ argument is not the ‘intelligent design’ argument. The ID people have exploited this ambiguity, and in the process made Darwinists even more rigid.
I am writing in reaction of The Free Press article concerning Daniel Dennett’s visit to MSU this coming April. The article stated Dennett likes to compare the human body to a computer, yet Dennett believes humans were created by chance. It’s amazing how blind Dennett’s reasoning is.
If I gave Dennett a Dell computer, and asked him if it came about by chance, he would emphatically say no. However, if I changed the subject to the human body, Dennett would say the human body was not designed and came about by random chance.
The human body is millions of times more complicated than any computer, how then does it seem more reasonable that a human being can come about by chance but a computer cannot?
What baffles me is people who believe in this contradiction of logic are called thinkers — to be cognitive, articulate and worthy of academic praise.
Sadly, many public school students only get a slanted view of certain topics. Educators often bring in speakers who agree with the view they teach but rarely bring in a speaker who gives another side to the argument. These teachers should be ashamed to call themselves educators.
Education, especially at a public school, should present both sides to an issue. Otherwise the school is indoctrinating students instead of allowing them to think freely. I find it sad that most evolutionists call themselves “free thinkers” yet force students to only consider their beloved theory.
Evolution has a stranglehold on today’s educational system and it is time to start allowing students to truly be free thinkers.
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Posted in Evolution at 2:55 pm by nemo
PT cites: Eden and Evolution
Eden and Evolution
Religious critics of evolution are wrong about its flaws. But are they right that it threatens belief in a loving God?
By Shankar Vedantam
Sunday, February 5, 2006; W08
The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid . . .
– Isaiah 11:6
What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horridly cruel works of nature.
– Charles Darwin
Darwin completely misunderstood evolution.
Check out the eonic effect: Evolution has a much larger dimension than anything Darwin’s understood in his slander against evolution, and pompus ‘realism’ about nature.
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Posted in Evolution at 2:42 pm by nemo
From Ha’aretz
Only force, not spirit, will prevail
By Yossi Sarid
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