Link: Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus

Link: Many Faiths, One Truth

When I was a boy in Tibet, I felt that my own Buddhist religion must be the best — and that other faiths were somehow inferior. Now I see how naïve I was, and how dangerous the extremes of religious intolerance can be today.

Read the full post by Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, here... http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/opinion/25gyatso.html

Contagious Love Experiment

Let me start at the begining…

I was in middle school when I saw 9/11 on the news. I saw the hole in the Pentagon firsthand. For months afterwards, I’d wake up early before school to watch the news and better understand the situation. I understood that there were people out there who wanted to destroy my country and hated my religion. My religion (church, religious school) promoted war and I made a deal with God that if the war was still going on when I graduated high school, I would be honored to enlist in the army as an infantryman.

Well, the war was still going on and I was somewhat glad that I hadn’t missed out on the action. I left for basic training in July of 06 and was deployed to Baghdad by Feb of 07.

I had grown up hearing ideas like “love your enemies”, “return evil with good”, and “judge not lest you be judged”. But I treated these sayings that the central figure of my religion taught as if they were just nice sounding lines, but not practical. But slowly, my excuses started to fade away. I learned that the military trains people to hate and dehumanize entire people groups, not showing sadness for the difficult task of “removing evil”. I learned that the Iraqis weren’t waiting for us with open arms, men, women, and children from the town we were in protested our presence. I learned innocent people die. I learned that it doesn’t matter what uniform you have on, it’s about what’s inside. And sadly, the military tries to rob you of what’s inside and the result is people treating killing like a joke and showing little care for human life.

Read the full blog here... http://contagiousloveexperiment.wordpress.com/about

Faith First

William James was an American Apologist. An Apologist is a defender of faith. The term is most often used associated with Christian thinkers who defend the existence of God. William James was taking on a scientific world and risking his own reputation by defending the right to believe in things for which you do not and perhaps can never have direct evidence of. James wrote an essay called “The Will to Believe” that is central to his thinking and is so profound that it demands careful consideration even today.

Read the full post at http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/2009/09/05/faith-first

Charter for Compassion

Control over consciousness

“The knowledge of how to control consciousness must be reformulated every time the cultural context changes. The wisdom of the mystics, of the Sufi, of the great yogis, or of the Zen masters might have been excellent in their own time—and might still be the best, if we lived in those times and in those cultures. But when transplanted to contemporary California those systems lose quite a bit of their original power. They contain elements that are specific to their original contexts, and when these accidental components are not distinguished from what is essential, the path to freedom gets overgrown by brambles of meaningless mumbo jumbo. Ritual form wins over substance, and the seeker is back where he started.
Control over consciousness cannot be institutionalized. As soon as it becomes part of a set of social rules and norms, it ceases to be effective in the way it was originally intended to be.” ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi from Flow

Read Brian Johnson's illuminating comments here...
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=207821200345

President Obama calls for a "new beginning" between the US and Muslims

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8082948.stm