bodhi tree swaying

Ron Paul has taken a brave stance that will make him unpopular with many conservatives.

It is repeatedly said that 64% of the people, after listening to the political demagogues, don’t want the mosque to be built. What would we do if 75% of the people insist that no more Catholic churches be built in New York City? The point being is that majorities can become oppressors of minority rights as well as individual dictators. Statistics of support is irrelevant when it comes to the purpose of government in a free society—protecting liberty.

Via Think Progress

Ron Paul is a man I disagree with on many things, but he’s spot on here. This is where libertarianism and liberalism overlap.

Here’s a great quote from an article about The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s book on the social damage inflicted by inequality:

Once countries reach a certain level of wealth, what affects the citizenry is not the growth in GDP but the level of inequality. Man is a social primate and people who worry about their status and feel too keenly the humiliations their superiors inflict on them become anxious, mistrustful, isolated and stressed. This pattern holds whether you look at inequalities within different countries or between more equal or unequal states in the US or counties in Chile.

It looks like a book worth reading.

From David Brooks:

In 1950, thousands of teenagers were asked if they considered themselves an “important person.” Twelve percent said yes. In the late 1980s, another few thousand were asked. This time, 80 percent of girls and 77 percent of boys said yes.

Read the full article…

Interesting and provocative stuff from writer (and meditator) Robert Wright:

This autumn will see the publication of a book that promises to help us out here: “What Technology Wants,” by Kevin Kelly, a long-time tech-watcher who helped launch Wired magazine and was its executive editor back in its young, edgy days.

Don’t let the title of Kelly’s book terrify you. He assures us that he doesn’t think technology is conscious — at least, not “at this point.” For now, he says, technology’s “mechanical wants are not carefully considered deliberations but rather leanings.”

So relax; apparently we have a few years before Keanu Reeves gets stuffed into a gooey pod by robotic overlords who use people as batteries. Still, it’s notable that, before Reeves played that role in “The Matrix,” the movie’s directors gave him a copy of Kelly’s earlier book, “Out

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Below is an extract from Emily Colette Wilkinson’s review of Marcus Aurelius: A Life, by Frank McLynn. The parallels with the Buddhist approach are striking, and I can’t help feeling again that it’s a tragedy that Stoic philosophy — the original Western Buddhism? — was stamped out by that Middle-Eastern upstart religion, the early Christian church.

Marcus’ creed held that virtue was its own reward and the only life goal worth pursuing. On the Stoic view, we have no power to determine whether we’ll be rich or poor, famous or infamous, sick or healthy, but we can control whether or not we are good. Thus, life’s pleasures and pains–poverty, disease, fame, death-become “indifferents” to the Stoics–i.e. matters that have no direct bearing on our moral wellbeing and so are irrelevant. As a Stoic, I might be poor and sick and

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Sanghapala, a fellow member of the Triratna Buddhist Order (formerly the FWBO) brought this video to my attention. It’s a really fascinating insight by Dan Pink into what really motivates people to excel.

We learn:

For mechanical skills, the higher the reward, the better the performance. But, for even moderately demanding cognitive skills, a larger reward leads to poorer performance.

The way money works as a motivator is that if you don’t pay people enough, they won’t be motivated. Once people are comfortable with the amount they’re being paid, money isn’t an issue and they can concentrate on their work. Once the money issue is dealt with, there are three factors that lead to better performance:

1. Autonomy: if you want engaged workers, they have to be self-directed.
2. Mastery: people like to develop excellence. It’s satisfying to do something …

A long term study of students at the university of Michigan suggests that empathy has been declining since the 1980s and 1990s, with a particularly steep drop after 2000:

“We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000,” said Sara Konrath, a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research. “College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago, as measured by standard tests of this personality trait.”

Konrath conducted the meta-analysis, combining the results of 72 different studies of American college students conducted between 1979 and 2009, with U-M graduate student Edward O’Brien and undergraduate student Courtney Hsing.

Compared to college students of the late 1970s, the study found, college students today are less likely to agree with statements such as “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective” and “I

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From a fascinating article by Paul Bloom:

Not long ago, a team of researchers watched a 1-year-old boy take justice into his own hands. The boy had just seen a puppet show in which one puppet played with a ball while interacting with two other puppets. The center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the right, who would pass it back. And the center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the left . . . who would run away with it. Then the two puppets on the ends were brought down from the stage and set before the toddler. Each was placed next to a pile of treats. At this point, the toddler was asked to take a treat away from one puppet. Like most children in this situation, the boy took it from

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Delivered 28 August 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C.

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely …

I recently received this email from the Rev. Danny Fisher, Coordinator of the Buddhist Chaplaincy Program at University of the West in Rosemead, CA.

I just recorded a video post for my blog in which I read the Metta Sutta as a show of solidarity with the monks and nuns of Burma, who were recently forbidden from reciting the text at one large monastery and allegedly elsewhere throughout the country. (This is presumably because the text was chanted by monks and nuns participating in 2007′s “Saffron Revolution.”)

http://chaplaindanny.blogspot.com/2009/08/reading-and-call-to-action.html

As I say in the video and the post, it occurred to me that this might be a great, easy way for lots of people (especially Buddhist/religious/spiritual bloggers) to show support for the monastics and people of Burma. So, I guess what I’m saying is that I’m hoping to start a little video campaign of people reciting the Metta Sutta as a

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There’s an interesting article today in the Boston Globe about the Malleus Maleficarum – "The Hammer of Witches."

"The lengthy tome was medieval Europe’s definitive guide to recognizing and prosecuting witchcraft, the justification for a wave of burnings-at-the-stake — largely of peasant women — that took place from the late 1400s to about 1520. And it helped spread the paranoid notion of a vast satanic conspiracy: a world where demons roamed freely, enticing women to cast spells, kill babies, interfere with procreation, and try to delay the fast-approaching End Times. (At the time, many thought the Earth’s sell-by date was 1535.)

"Written largely by a Dominican friar from Germany named Henricus Institoris, republished broadly in its day, the Malleus was last translated from Latin to English in the 1920s. This month Cambridge University Press published a modern translation in a one-volume

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I got this message from Kathy Rowe on Facebook recently and thought I’d share it more widely. Jarvis is a Buddhist inmate on death row, and a talented writer.

I spoke to Jarvis again recently and we talked about this facebook group. He was excited to know of all the people here showing support and taking an interest in him. I also read out the personal messages people have sent and he was moved by them and told me he felt blessed.

He wanted to offer something to you all and asked me to send you this piece of writing he did, called ‘No Bars to Love‘ 

We were also talking about his new book being published by Harper Collins in September and he told me that it’s possible to order it on Amazon.com now and it’s about $9 cheaper to

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Charles M. Blow has this interesting graphic on his NYT blog today, showing the change in the religious composition of the US Supreme Court.

Thirty years ago all but one justice were protestant. Now protestants are in a minority. I’d imagine it’ll be a while before we have a Buddhist, Hindu, or Muslim justice on the Supreme Court.

• I have to confess I sometimes feel a bit despondent about where we’re going as a society, but then I see a video like this and I feel very hopeful. These kids just seem to love the physical act of singing, and of hearing themselves singing.

• A Fake Buddha Quote courtesy of Jnanagarbha, who received it in his twitter feed:

• "An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea. Buddha."

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I put this image together to show the relative volumes of the Earth, the Earth’s total water reserves (salt, fresh, vapor), and the accessible fresh water reserves. If you look at about five o’clock on the water sphere, you’ll see a smaller. That’s all the fresh water available for human use on our planet. It doesn’t look like much!

This is an adaptation of the image shown here, showing the relative volumes of the Earth’s total water reserves and atmosphere. The image of the Earth is from NASA.

I calculated the sphere representing the fresh water reserves based on the claim at globalchange.umich.edu that

“…of the world’s fresh water … ~0.007% … is accessible for direct human uses. This is the water found in lakes, rivers, reservoirs and those underground sources that are shallow enough to be tapped at an affordable cost.

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Sounds like a joke: A Priest, a rabbi, and imam, and a Buddhist monk were on a game show…

A new game show on Turkish television will pit a Greek Orthodox priest, a rabbi, an imam and a Buddhist monk against one another in attempt to convert atheists to their respective religions.

In each episode of Penitents Compete, to be broadcast by Turkey’s Kanal T television station in September, the four faith guides will try to persuade 10 atheists of the merits and truth of their creeds.

The show’s producers say there is a good chance none of the atheists will be converted, Turkey’s Hurriyet Daily News and Economic Review reports.

But those who are will be sent on a pilgrimage. New Muslims will head to Mecca, Buddhists to Tibet and Jews and Christians to Jerusalem – with television cameras following them.

“They can’t see this trip as a getaway but as a religious experience,”

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We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

(Abridged)

Frederick Douglass July 5, 1852

1 Mr. President, Friends and Fellow Citizens: The task before me is one which requires much previous thought and study for its proper performance. The papers and placards say, that I am to deliver a 4th [of] July oration. This certainly sounds large, and out of the common way, for it is true that I have often had the privilege to speak in this beautiful Hall, and to address many who now honor me with their presence, the fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable-and the difficulties to be overcome in getting from the latter to the former, are by no means slight. That I am here to-day is, to me, a matter of astonishment as well as of gratitude.

2 This, for the purpose …

If I hadn’t seen this Microsoft ad on PC Magazine’s website I would have assumed it was a spoof. How could any respectable company produce such an obnoxious advertisement?