During the 2004 election season, [Palin's pastor, Ed Lanins] praised President Bush’s performance during a debate with Sen. John Kerry, then offered a not-so-subtle message about his personal candidate preferences. “I’m not going tell you who to vote for, but if you vote for this particular person, I question your salvation. I’m sorry.” Kalnins added: “If every Christian will vote righteously, it would be a landslide every time.”

So there we have it — Kerry supporters are going to hell.

And that church’s nonprofit status should surely be in question — telling people they’re likely damned for voting for a particular party is outside the pale for a tax-exempt organization that’s forbidden to engage in political campaigning.

Kalnins bristled at the treatment President Bush was receiving over the federal government’s handling of Hurricane Katrina. “I hate criticisms towards the President,” he said, “because it’s like criticisms towards the pastor — it’s almost like, it’s not going to get you anywhere, you know, except for hell. That’s what it’ll get you.”

Criticize the president for gross mismanagement that costs Americans their lives and you’ll go to hell too.

We need to think like Jesus thinks. We are in a time and a season of war, and we need to think like that. We need to develop that instinct. We need to develop as believers the instinct that we are at war, and that war is contending for your faith. … Jesus called us to die. You’re worried about getting hurt? He’s called us to die. Listen, you know we can’t even follow him unless you are willing to give up your life. … I believe that Jesus himself operated from that position of war mode. Everyone say “war mode.”

But on the other hand if you support invading Iraq you’ll go to heaven.

I wonder if the recordings of these sermons are going to be played by the major news outlets on a tape loop, as were the reverend Jeremiah Wright’s comments such as his quoting a white diplomat’s statement that 9/11 was “the chickens coming home to roost”?

A brilliantly logical piece in The Atlantic by Andrew Sullivan.

According to the logic that follows from the Bush administration’s claim that the “enhanced interrogation” techniques they use do not constitute torture:

No war crimes were committed against McCain. And the techniques used are, according to the president, tools to extract accurate information. And so the false confessions that McCain was forced to make were, according to the logic of the Bush administration, as accurate as the “intelligence” we have procured from “interrogating” terror suspects.

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

There is much to enjoy in this account from Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald.

A resident of Wedderburn, Beatrice Alderden, has lodged with Campbelltown City Council her opposition to the Da Bao Monastery’s plans to expand its four-bedroom meditation retreat in O’Hares Road.

“It will really disturb our neighbours,” Mrs Alderden said yesterday. “It’s going to take away our peace, harmony, tranquillity and privacy.”

Buddhists battle residents over temple development - National - smh.com.au

The whole question of whether waterboarding is torture is a bogus one. Nazis were prosecuted at Nuremberg and found guilty of using this precise technique. And the fact that it’s even in question that it may not be torture to drown someone shows how low the current US administration has sunk on the scale of morality.

Nevertheless, because there is a pseudo debate, Christopher Hitchens bravely had himself subjected to waterboarding and describes his experiences in some detail in a Vanity Fair article.

Since the article is entitled “Believe Me, It’s Torture” I don’t need to beware of spoilers.

Some salient points to extract are:

1. The official lie is that this torture technique involves simulated drowning. That’s like saying that giving someone electric shocks is “simulated electrocution” or hanging someone by the neck is simulated hanging.” It’s real drowning, and is torture.

2. Any information extracted is likely to be worthless because people will say anything to make the torture stop.

3. The US can no longer complain if its military personnel are subjected to this torture technique. It has given up the right to do so.

For the record, I think that Hitchens is in many ways a pompous and self-deluding ass — but he’s also a brave man.

A four-legged fish with the head of an alligator. Cool!

And creationists complain about a lack of transitional forms!

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Fossil fills out water-land leap

I was a witness in the court case referred to in a recent Boston Globe story. I’d been asked by the Corrections Department to be an “expert witness” in a case where a Buddhist inmate had not been allowed to have a vegan diet and had not been allowed to have a meditation mat and cushion.

I was pleased that the judge upheld the inmate’s right (which he’s been pushing for over a ten year period) to have a vegan diet. Whether, as a Buddhist, one is a vegetarian, vegan, or meat-eater is a question for the individual’s own conscience, but there’s a perfectly valid case for sticking to a vegan diet as an expression of “ahimsa” or non-harm.

I was more surprised with the decision over the cushion.

Prison officials … testified that the cushion and pillow could be used to hide contraband. They also said that they give Buddhist inmates access to such items in group meditation sessions in a classroom once a week. If Yeboah-Sefah wants to meditate more often, they said, he can use his prison-issued pillow and mattress.

I’d testified that an ordinary pillow would be unsuitable for meditation, and although I understand the security concerns I thought that some compromise would have been reached, along the lines of foam blocks or a meditation bench being made available.

I wasn’t surprised to hear the following comment, which is fairly typical of the attitude of many people in the corrections department:

Steve Kenneway, president of the 4,500-member state correction officers’ union, condemned the lawsuit as an example of when inmates “manipulate the system.”

In fact a corrections department staff member started to say exactly the same thing to me while we were waiting to give evidence. I simply pointed out to her that we were forbidden to discuss the case and she thankfully dropped the issue.

Last night I was interviewed for a film on religion and science. I was a little wary about who the people were behind the film (especially given the deception practiced by the producers of the Intelligent Design film “Expelled,” who lied to participants — or at least the scientist participants — in order to get their involvement).

But they turned out to be a good crowd and to be genuinely seeking a variety of viewpoints. They’d recently interviewed Daniel Dennett, so I was flattered to be included, although I’ve no doubt that Dennett would look askance at my Buddhist practice.

After I’d explained that Darwinism really, really isn’t a problem for Buddhists the interviewer asked if I had a final message for the audience, which would be high-school students and teachers. What I said was along the lines that I’d encourage people to practice radical honesty and to apply the same standards to judge their own beliefs as they apply to the beliefs of others. “intellectual integrity” was one phrase I used.

The illustration above (found on Digg) is a perfect “illustration” of the kind of thing that happens when you switch off your critical faculties in order to support the insupportable (in this case that the bible is literally true and that the world is only a few thousand years old). You end up with lies. You end up lying, and teaching lies to children.

It pains me to have to point out something so obvious, but wouldn’t you think that if dinosaurs were alive 2,000 years ago (or even 10,000 years ago) there would be one single example, somewhere in the world, of dinosaur remains being found alongside modern animals? Or even in recent strata? Really, it would make more sense for these poor benighted, ethically-challenged people to have stuck with the claim that fossil remains were planted by the devil. Or that they were planted by God as a test — apparently even some Christians think that God lies.

I mentioned ages ago that there had been great unease expressed about an Op-Ed piece in the Times arguing that Obama was likely to be a liability in middle-east negotiations because he was (the author claimed) guilty of having abandoned the Muslim faith, that this was a capital offense, and that it was the duty of every Muslim to try to assassinate him. The unease mainly centered around whether these claims were in any way accurate. Bizarrely, the author, Edward Luttwak, hadn’t bothered to consult any authorities on Islam before making his provocative claims.

The Times’ public editor has strongly criticized the decision-making that went into the publication of that piece.

I interviewed five Islamic scholars, at five American universities, recommended by a variety of sources as experts in the field. All of them said that Luttwak’s interpretation of Islamic law was wrong.

…

Luttwak made several sweeping statements that the scholars I interviewed said were incorrect or highly debatable, including assertions that in Islam a father’s religion always determines a child’s, regardless of the facts of his upbringing; that Obama’s “conversion” to Christianity was apostasy; that apostasy is, with few exceptions, a capital crime; and that a Muslim could not be punished for killing an apostate.

…

All the scholars argued that Luttwak had a rigid, simplistic view of Islam that failed to take into account its many strains and the subtleties of its religious law, which is separate from the secular laws in almost all Islamic nations. The Islamic press and television have reported extensively on the United States presidential election, they said, and Obama’s Muslim roots and his Christian religion are well known, yet there have been no suggestions in the Islamic world that he is an apostate.

And most weirdly:

David Shipley, the editor of the Op-Ed page, said Luttwak’s article was vetted by editors who consulted the Koran, associated text, newspaper articles and authoritative histories of Islam. No scholars of Islam were consulted because “we do not customarily call experts to invite them to weigh in on the work of our contributors,” he said.

What?

For years, psychotherapists have worked to relieve suffering by reframing the content of patients’ thoughts, directly altering behavior or helping people gain insight into the subconscious sources of their despair and anxiety. The promise of mindfulness meditation is that it can help patients endure flash floods of emotion during the therapeutic process — and ultimately alter reactions to daily experience at a level that words cannot reach. “The interest in this has just taken off,” said Zindel Segal, a psychologist at the Center of Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, where the above group therapy session was taped. “And I think a big part of it is that more and more therapists are practicing some form of contemplation themselves and want to bring that into therapy.”

(Mindfulness Meditation, Based on Buddha’s Teachings, Gains Ground With Therapists - NYTimes.com)

This is a good overview of the history and current state of mindfulness in therapeutic practice. It gives a fair showing both to the proponents of mindfulness as part of therapy and to those who are skeptical.

This is one of the most shocking things I have ever seen — the “stowage” arrangements for the “cargo” on a British slaving ship.

Ghastly.

A Cambodian Buddhist blogger writes about how Christians in his country are trying to bribe locals to adopt their religion, and how they even successfully had the subtitles to The Davinci Code censored, despite being a tiny minority in Cambodia.

Dan Sarkipato has a looooooooooong post on Ekhart Tolle and Oprah Winfrey, and why their message is unChristian. Fair enough! (I got bored and started skimming about 1/4 of the way down the post.) I’ve found some useful stuff in Tolle’s “The Power of Now” but some of it strikes me as being simply flaky.

The Dalai Lama has been in Nottingham and Nemma was impressed.

Lt. Jeanette Shin, a Buddhist military chaplain, offers a beautiful Memorial Day reflection on impermanence. Gassho!

Barbara O’Brien has a shorter piece on Buddhists in the military, which also mentions Lt. Shin. I’ve been trying to get an interview out of Lt. Shin for months now, but haven’t had any luck so far.

Fascinating post by Emily Gould, formerly a blogger at Gawker.com, a gossipy, catty, media- and celebrity-obsessed site that I have the good fortune of only having read about.

She shows how the tendency to be inappropriately open on the internet can leave you exposed and vulnerable, and in her case having panic attacks on bathroom floors. She also shows how viciously attacking people because they are “in the public gaze” can come back and bite you when, by doing so, you put yourself in that same public gaze.

Reading about Gawker reminds me on the Buddhist teaching of the Six Realms, which you can take as either a literal depiction of where we can be reborn or (and this is my preference) a symbolic representation of the kinds of worlds we can create for ourselves. The world of Gawker (the Ashura realm?) seems strange and pitiful — like watching adult children bickering over nothing.

Update: Here’s the article where I first learned about the Gawker network of sites. There’s something distasteful to me about the whole enterprise, which has been described as a series of “digital-era sweatshops”.

(I’m in bed sick with a sore throat: hence the increased blogging level this morning).

The Times has a scary picture illustrating how much food the average US family throws out each month. It’s quite staggering. It’s certainly more than my family eats in a week, and perhaps closer to what we consume in two weeks.

Click on the image to see the full-size version.

Meanwhile, famine looms in Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya. And “growth of the global food supply has slowed even as the population has continued to increase” while the US “is in the midst of slashing, by as much as 75 percent, its $59.5 million annual support for a global research network that focuses on improving crops vital to agriculture in poor countries.”

Back to that average 122 pounds of food thrown out per family per month: I always boggle at these stats because since my family throws out very little food (we eat left-overs for lunch, most days) that must mean that other families throw out more. For a supposedly religious nation the population of the US seems to think little about others.

The brain’s a fascinating thing — apparently the most complex known object in the universe. And you can mess with it using magnets:

Many scientists now use [transcranial magnetic stumulation] for basic research. Some have used it to induce electrical changes in the brain’s temporal lobes, which have been linked with religious belief, because some sufferers of temporal lobe epilepsy seem to experience hallucinations that bear a striking resemblance to mystical experiences of holy figures.

How a magnet turned off my speech - Telegraph

I’m told that “the chickens are coming home to roost” (Rev. Jeremiah Wright) was virtually broadcast on a loop, causing problems for presidential candidate Barack Obama. I don’t have a TV but I read about it plenty in the newspapers.

I’ve seen much less about the Reverend John Hagee, whose support was actively solicited by presidential candidate John McCain.

Here’s a rather disturbing video in which Hagee claims that Hitler was sent by God to punish the Jews for their wickedness in remaining in Europe, rather than heading off to the “promised land” to start the state of Israel.

PS. The Reverend Jeremiah Wright, in saying that the “chickens are coming home to roost” was at pains to point out that he was quoting a white US diplomat, Ambassador Edward Peck. I don’t believe the TV channels broadcast that part of his sermon. Nor did they note that “the chickens are coming home to roost” is just another way of saying “He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword.” Now who said that again?

I wasn’t planning to write more on Geshe Michael Roach — his situation has, in a way, nothing to do with me, and I mainly wrote because,

a) I found the NYT story on him to be so bizarre, and
b) I was surprised by the lack of response on Buddhist blogs (which makes me think I may be violating some rule and being terribly rude by even mentioning the article).

But in checking in to see whether the Buddho-blogo-sphere had responded further I found that there’s an entire site devoted to criticism of the Geshe.

The parallels with Sangharakshita seem even stronger, since he too has entire websites devoted (anonymously) to engineering his downfall and that of his movement (which is my movement). Those sites are anonymous (the work of cowards, in my opinion), riddled with falsehoods and seem to take the viewpoint that “in war, all things are fair.” Interestingly, the anti-Roach site is not anonymous. It’s run by a Tibetan Buddhist called Gary Friedman.

Hokai, a Croatian Buddhist, also has a blog article about the NYT piece. That’s where I found the link to the anti-Roach site:

Now, the story might have been charming if it wasn’t a bit of a problem for the Tibetan sangha West and East, involving even the office of the Dalai Lama. The woman mentioned in the article is not the only woman involved (link on four dakinis), while Roach insists on still being a Gelugpa monk, and Robert Thurman won’t talk to him.

Einstein was noted for using the terms God and religion in his discussions, for example in his famously expressed doubts about the randomness of quantum physics: “God does not play dice.”

But he seems to have, more privately, taken a highly skeptical stance towards religion, as show in a Guardian report on a recently-published letter.

The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.

He also was scornful about the Jews claimed position as God’s chose people:

For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.

The Tricycle Blog points out that two quotes on BUddhism widely attributed to Einstein on the internet (and we all know how reliable that is) appears to be spurious (this is just one of them):

The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism.

I’d like to think the old fella would have had a kindly eye for Buddhism (if only he and the Dalai Lama could have met) but you never know, he might have been highly skeptical of that as well. On the other hand, some of his (genuine) quotations are very Buddhist in nature.

The first time I heard of Geshe Michael Roach was when a Buddhist acquaintance told me about a book called “The Diamond Cutter.” The book was on the theme of Right Livelihood and since I had just completed a masters degree in Buddhism and business and since books on that topic are thin on the ground I rushed out and bought a hardback copy. Only to be greatly disappointed.

I couldn’t help thinking that he was indulging in what Sangharakshita calls “spiritual triumphalism,” which is his term for the touting of material success as an indicator of spiritual attainment. Geshe Michael was keen to impress that it was his spiritual approach to business that had helped him create a multi-million dollar business, and that his material success was the proof of his spiritual acumen. Maybe so, but I was put off by the style.

But worse than that was the sheer confusion of his thinking. The point at which I was most exasperated was when he claimed that if you see the world as full of pollution and dirt this was — wait for it — because you have a dirty mind. If your mind wasn’t preoccupied with sexual thoughts then your world would change and there simply wouldn’t be any pollution. He meant this quite literally — not metaphorically.

“The wisdom of thousands of years of extraordinary thinkers on the other side of the world says that the very particular cause of filthy or foul-smelling environments is sexual monkey-business.” (p. 110)

It was this strange literalness that made me wonder if the Geshe had a screw loose, and I thought that this was one of the worst books on Buddhism I’d ever read. No. It was the worst.

An article today in the New York Times pushes my doubts to a new level. In “Buddhist Teachers Make Their Own Limits in a Spiritual Partnership” it’s revealed that Geshe Michael and Christie McNally, another teacher, have taken a vow never to be more than 15 feet apart from one another. This means that although they claim to be celibate they are in close proximity at all times. Maybe it can be done, but she’s pretty hot.

It’s hard not to have doubts about just how celibate they are. According to the article:

The couple also admit to a hands-on physical relationship that they describe as intense but chaste. Mr. Roach compares it to the relationship his mother had with her doctor when she was dying of breast cancer. “The surgeon lay his hand on her breast, but there wasn’t any carnal thought in his mind,” he said. “He was doing some life-or-death thing. For us it is the same.”

Call me cynical, but my response is “Who are you kidding?” Hand on breast? Life-or-death? No carnal thought?

The Tibetan Buddhist hierarchy is not impressed, and the Dalai Lama’s office has prevented Geshe Roach from teaching in Dharamsala, his holiness’ home in exile.

I must say that it would be an intense spiritual practice to live constantly within 15 feet of any other human being. Man, but I need my space! I’d go crazy. It would also be intense to be subjected (as I presume the Geshe and his partner are) to constant sexual tension. But I don’t think either of these practices would be very useful — not for me, anyway. Maybe the Geshe is made of different stuff?

I’d expected to see more Buddhist blog activity about this. Maybe it’s a defect on Google, but it’s only throwing up a couple of articles at present: Fiercecupcake gives a micro-mention to the story, and there are quite a few comments following that post, some of which take the viewpoint that this is revealing misogyny in the Buddhist world (oh, and it does exist!). Bookofjoe does little more than repost the entire Times article.

I’d expect more … interest?

Technorati brings up a post on the topic by Peter Stinson, who says he is “speechless.” Maybe other Buddhist bloggers are speechless as well.

The conservative commentator David Brooks, for whom I have a lot of respect, has an intriguing article in the New York Times called The Neural Buddhists, which is a kind of commentary on and updating of Tom Wolfe’s 1996 essay, “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died.”

Both pieces deal with the impact that neuroscience, and particularly neuroimaging, where we can directly observe what goes on in the human brain, has on religion.

There are a few misunderstandings in Brooks’ piece. For example he wrongly (in my view) claims that Wolfe was predicting that in the 21st century studies of genetics and neuroscience would lead to a renewed debate over the existence of God, while I haven’t seen Wolfe making that argument; he relegates the acceptance of God’s demise to the 19th century and Nietzsche’s dictum, “God is dead.”

And he seems to believe that Dawkin’s “Selfish Gene” necessarily leads to selfish humans, while it’s clear that Dawkins does not believe that, did not make that argument, and in fact argued to the contrary. (Genes are selfish in that they propagate through a population if they enhance the survival of the individuals carrying them — those genes could well be promoting survival traits such as generosity, compassion, and cooperation).

Of course there is a renewed debate about the existence of God (witness the salvos of books on atheism in recent years) but that’s beside the point.

Brooks goes on to say “The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going end up challenging faith in the Bible.” I think that’s true as well, even if it’s based on a misreading of Wolfe, but then the two do tend to go hand in hand.

Where Brooks is more interesting is where he builds an argument that we can have transcendent spiritual experiences without the need for a belief in God –

The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits

– and that therefore the challenge to biblical authority will come from “scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.”

He points to four scientific/Buddhist beliefs or observations that lead to this outcome:

• First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships.
• Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions.
• Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love.
• Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

The first is definitely a Buddhist belief (or observation), and also fits with modern science’s view of the self. There is in neither system of inquiry any “core” to the mind. There is no central observer or decision-maker. The “self” is simply an illusion that arises in the midst of many simultaneous processes unfolding in the brain.

The second certainly squares with my understanding of Buddhism and with modern trends in the scientific understanding of morality (listen to the episode of RadioLab on Morality, for example). The Buddha described his system as a “natural” morality as opposed to the “conventional” moralities that emerge as a result of cultural conditions.

The third is also both Buddhist and scientific. Buddhist psychology shows the emergence of so-called higher states of consciousness (dhyana or jhana) that manifest when the mind (any mind, belonging to anyone of whatever religion) is trained to be calm and focused. Science has shown that similar states can be temporarily induced through, for example, magnetic fields.

But the fourth I find puzzlingly misplaced. This seems more like a metaphysical proposition than anything Buddhist (nothing in Buddhism that I can think of resembles this) or science (ditto).

If he’s saying that God is merely a construct imposed on experiences that we’re hard-wired to have, given the right conditions, then I agree with him entirely. I’m just not sure that’s what he’s saying. Or indeed of what he’s saying.

Where I think he’s most perceptive is in spotting the trend that’s emerging for Buddhism and science to merge in the study of the mind, emotions, and “self.” This trend is made easy by the fact that Buddhism is nondogmatic and therefore open to abandoning its own teachings if they are proven to be false. And by the fact that Buddhists have a considerable history of mental observation, with which science only now has the tools to be able to find physical correlates. And by the fact that some scientists have been practicing Buddhist meditation and have found that it works.

Interestingly Wolfe posits the following (rather than a challenge to God’s existence) as the logical conclusion of modern research:

…in the year 2006 or 2026, some new Nietzsche will step forward to announce: “The self is dead” — except that being prone to the poetic, like Nietzsche I, he will probably say: “The soul is dead.” He will say that he is merely bringing the news, the news of the greatest event of the millennium: “The soul, that last refuge of values, is dead, because educated people no longer believe it exists.”

Of course the Buddha said the same thing 2,500 years ago, which suggests that the modern world still has some way to go in understanding that one needs neither the belief in a soul nor a belief in God in order to have a moral and spiritual system, a set of values, or a meaningful way of life:

“There is the case, monk, where a well-instructed disciple of the noble ones — who has regard for nobles ones, is well-versed & disciplined in their Dhamma; who has regard for men of integrity, is well-versed & disciplined in their Dhamma — does not assume form to be the self, or the self as possessing form, or form as in the self, or the self as in form. He does not assume feeling to be the self… does not assume perception to be the self… does not assume fabrications to be the self… He does not assume consciousness to be the self, or the self as possessing consciousness, or consciousness as in the self, or the self as in consciousness.

“This, monk, is how self-identity view no longer comes about.”

I don’t know who the pastor being interviewed is, but he runs rings around the Fox News reporter, who does a great job of showing how “impartial” that channel is. We need more people like this pastor, who can articulately and passionately promote justice.