Worldviews: compare and contrast
I sit after an active day at work and scan my newsletters for inspiration:
Kansas plays politics with education, preferring to teach their kids something that is not withing the mainstream of scientific thought and masquerading it as science. How can these children, victimized by the Vulture Culture of Creationism into ignorance, compete in the global marketplace that is their future? Is it more important to these parents and parental surrogates to hobble a generation of young minds in order to win a small political victory? That last question was rhetorical - of course its more important!
Newsweek blunders, people die, a big fuss is made. This feeds the newsbeast for a week. Our nation blunders into war and many more people die, Americans and Muslims, men, women and children. Where’s the fuss? Where’s the outrage?
Iraq is literally blowing apart. The vacuum created by the US is too strong for the fledgling government. Any suicide bombers and those killed by them should be counted as war casualties. Were it not for the war, they would not be strapping explosives to themselves so readily.
Does anyone know whether we have yet outdone the so-called evil of Saddam yet? Have we yet killed enough civilians to outnumber the atrocities perpetrated by the old regime? How about if we add up all the soldiers, the collateral damage (by this I mean the innocents), the foreign reporters, and the suicide bombing victims and the bombers themselves? It’s a fair bet that whatever the magic number is, we’ll get there before there is a viable, American sanctioned Democracy in Iraq.
To contrast the current insanity of global media and politics, I offer some wisdom from a little-known (in America, at least) book of wisdom: the Dhammapada. Will all the rabid fundamentalist Christians please leave the room?
Thank you.
“Whoever moved from carelessness to vigilance,
Lights up the world
Like the moon that emerges from a cloud.
Whoever overcomes his unwholesome deeds
With wholesome actions
Illuminates the world
Like the moon emerging from a cloud.
There is blindness all around.
Only very few can see.
Many are like birds trapped in a net.
Only a few escape and achieve liberation.
A man who violates even one spiritual law,
Who is dishonest and telling lies,
Unconcerned with the life hereafter,
There is no evil such a one dares not do.”
Edited from the Dhammapada, Chapter 13, The World.