guilty writer

I shouldn't be writing right now; I should be resolving ambiguous genotypes into haplotypes and then writing my essay about free will (which I'm actually excited for). But alas if I don't write things down I forget them. My LTP seems more short-lived than most people's.

Anyway, thing number one:
I was working at one of our Amnesty International events tonight (I'm on the executive board). It was a human rights photo exhibition, but someone had also submitted a report about Uganda. Why, I am not sure, since she obviously wasn't going to win the photo award, and I'm fairly certain I was the only person that actually read her report. But it was fairly informative. After reading about the disasters in Rwanda and Sudan, I believed that Uganda was more of a model of the way an African country should be with decent health care and education and a government that isn't murdering all of the civilians. But apparently I am in the crowd of people that isn't fully informed about Uganda. The report was about the Lord's something-or-other rebellion group in Northern Uganda. I guess it was started by some spiritualist leader and then taken over by another. It's responsible for abducting children when they are very young and forcing them to serve in the army, making them kill their family and friends or given them to men as sex slaves. I always kind of shudder when I read about child soldiers, because I can't imagine ever having do to the things they make them do, or being that desensitized to violence at such a young age, and because I work on PTSD; I know what it can do to just a tiny rat. What can the most horrific acts imaginable do to a ten-year-old soldier? Anyway, what I found interesting was again the corruption of religion. I guess the group initially started as a way to fight for a government based on the Ten Commandments. When I read that in the paper, it made me wonder how people can possibly be so self-deceiving. The Ten Commandments include a lot of things that explicityl condemn raping small girls and making little boys chop off their friend's hands. Love one another? Thou shalt not kill? But most importantly, I suppose, is the "love one another." I mean, I know they've managed to convince themselves that kidnapping these children and putting them through hell is best for their spiritual enlightenment or some other perverse thing. But really, if spiritual growth involves violating the most basic rule of the rule of the most basic tenants of the religion and of the political activism, how can that be right? And how can the adults that are members of this group put up with the horrors they are committing in the name of God? It makes me sick. But I know it's not only happening in Uganda, or now. It has happened in so many places through all of history, this religious corruption. It's so alarming, taking something so beautiful like religion and twisting it into something so terrible.

Thing two: I saw the Dalai Lama today. I bought tickets to see him Saturday a few months ago because I wasn't sure I'd win the lottery for student tickets for the show today at my school. But lucky me I got a ticket.

He didn't talk that long because he was kind of late; I think he went over talking to the Center for Ethics people here becuase they were all late too. One thing he said that I liked was something like "inner disarmament is necessary for external disarmament, and until we have the first we cannot have the other."

The main body of his talk was about developing compassion that can provide secular ethics. He said that secularism wasn't the rejection of religion; it was the equal respect for all religions. In some ways, though, I think that definition then applies to the Dalai Lama himself, and he is obviously not necessarily secular, so I would revise the definition slightly if I were him. Anyway, I got the point. He talked about two kinds of compassion: biased, attached biological compassion for those that show compassion to us and a more complex, undirected compassion that develops from education and prayer and meditation.

By far the most interesting thing he said though was probably something not many people noticed, but I happen to be obsessed with the topic. He said (again, not exact quote): "I am Buddhist, so to me Buddhism is the best religion for me. But you may have a different religion that is the best religion for you." I think he was probably still talking about religious tolerance at that point, but I missed a lot of what he said immediately after this statement because it got me thinking.

It wasn't new, of course. I've read enough Buddhism (and also Hinduism; respect for other people's truths seems to be a pretty clearly Eastern thing) that it wasn't a shocker, the idea that it's possible for someone to be happier with a religion that isn't ones one, and that that religion oculd be *right* for that person, but not for oneself. I'm not sure why, then, I started thinking about it again when he said that. I guess becuase until now I've been making conjectures about Buddhism based on what I have read by the Dalai Lama and others, but now I had confirmation that what I had intuited about Buddhism or Eastern religion was correct.

It is an interesting statement. Because if you believe in some kinds of absolute truths (more true in Hinduism, but also true in Buddhism) that contradict another religion, yet you believe that for someone else that is a member of that other religion, that other religion is the best for him, and brings him the most happiness, then in a way you believe that that person's happiness is best served by- if not lies- untruths. Now Eastern religion has a way of becoming an amoeba and sucking up other religions so that if Christianity or Islam and Buddhuism were juxtaposed, there would be a lot more incongruities between Buddhism and Christianity from the Christian perspective than from the Buddhist perspective. This asymmetry, I think, is partially due to the lack of institutionalization in Buddhism. Sometimes I think people use institution as a way to externalize religion and make it into a negative dialectic rather than a positive dialectic like the eight-fold path or whatever it's called in Buddhism. But even given Buddhism's ability to adapt to differenes in religion, there are differences that can't be resolved from either end. For instance, belief in a contained God. That is something that Buddhism just can't claim. Or belief in Hell.

So in a way, if you are all hippie and Easterny and you believe that everyone is entitled to their own subjective notion of truth, but you still believe in objective truth, you are kind of condemning everyone to home the best truth is a religion other than your own to a less complete existence. Which is interesting to say the least.

That said, though, I really like that aspect of Eastern religion. If only Islam was more like that, then I think that a lot of the conflict in the Middle East would be nullified. Acceptance of others is a really important key to compassion, which may be why it seems a lot of people don't develop religious compassion for those of opposing faiths.

I think Christianity (and Islam, but I don't have my Qu'ran handy to quote anything) has a lot more asymmetries between doctrine and action than Eastern religion (sorry, I'm leaving out Taoism, but it's very similar in its behavior to Hinduism and Buddhism). For instance, consider two things that I read tonight:

1. "Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.
"He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.
..."There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear; because fear hath torment. He that fearteth is not made perfect in love.'
(From 1 John, which is one of my favorite books in the Bible and which, I think, should be a sumamry statistic of Christianity)

2. (Link here) "The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.
More than half of people who attend services at least once a week -- 54 percent -- said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified -- more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did."

Now 4 in 10 versus 6 and 10 isn't a staggering difference, but I'm assuming it must have passed the t-test or whatever to make it to CNN.

It reminds me of something I've heard about in school several times, this experiment they did on these religious leaders (Catholic maybe?) at some university. They had the professors write a talk to give on the Good Samaritan and then staged some old man or something on the steps to the religious building to look as if he was fallen and injured or homeless or something (sorry, I'm a littly rusty on the details). Anyway, they found that I think if not every one almost every one of the religious leaders stepped right over the pleading man on the way to give their talks about the Good Samaritan. They varied a lot of things but the only thing that had an effect on whether people stopped was whether or not they were late to give their speeches (they were less likely to stop if they were late).

So that story, along with the torture story compared to the articles about love, is quite exemplary of the issues I think are inherent in Christianity these days. Maybe it's precisely because of the more regimented and institutionalized nature of Christianity when compared to Eastern religions, but people that are Hindu or whatever seem a lot more unified within themselves between their actions and their beliefs. Any rules are more cultural and less externally restrictive like the rules in my religion for instance (not saying the rules in my religion are wrong; I mean, obviously I believe in them, and there are a lot, but I will admit that they make it more difficult to follow my religion with unity of mind/heart).

Anyway, I really need to get back to my haplotypes... I'm still working out ways to generate money to volunteer in South America this summer and India next summer. I wish volunteering was less expensive. But maybe it's good to have that kind of sacrifice, like a screening for dedication. I really do want to help, though. Reading about Africa makes me realize how different the states of the world are. I'm going to have to agree with the analysis in Ken Wilberg's "A Theory of Everything" or something in which he hijacks the theory of Don Beck ("Spiral Dynamics") and applies it to government to explain the varying states of governmental/civilian evolution around the world. Too bad we aren't as synergistic as the socialist states in Europe. I mean, who wouldn't want to be like Sweden? :-) But Sudan for instance is lightyears away from Sudan. It's crazy. In a globalized world, civilizations are still falling way behind in technology just because they haven't figured out basic human rights. Too bad the UNDHR is basically useless and unenforcable.

The Ottoman empire fell in part because of it's inability to technologically compete with a developing Europe due to its isolationist tactics.

Also, in Africa's defense, Europe really screwed it up. The problems in Rwanda for instance are very reminiscent of European influence. The Hutus and Tutsis used to live in relative harmony until Europe came in and really messed up all of the stabilization in it's attempt at colonizing the country. Same with Uganda. Europe just screwed everything up. Colonialism is a very bad thing sometimes. How are we to know in our fancy countries the delicate balances of sophistication and power in little countries in Africa? And knowing how complex the world really is, what in the world made the Europeans (or the Americans earlier last century) thing that meddling was a safe bet? Now look what we've created. And we've left them to the mess, refusing to donate enough money to really stop genocide or conscription of child soldiers into rebel groups. This is what happens when you try to introduce government without allowing a natural local evolution. Which is maybe also why Iraq didn't really work, and why as a general rule democratization doesn't work in countries that just aren't evolved enough to cope with it. And like in Rwanda, biases are inevitably introduced that really throw of equilibrium.

Okay, now I really, really have to go. I could probably drone on forever about these sorts of things, but unfortunately in my life the haplotypes currently are prioritized above mass killing in Uganda or asymmetries in Christianity as opposed to Eastern faith.

Me, I stick with my Bah'ai-tinted Mormonism.