Meditations with Native American Elders – February 27
“The Old Ones have always said that no matter who despises or ignores
you, no matter who keeps you from entering their circles, it is right
to pray for them because they are like us, too.”
-Larry P. Aitken, CHIPPEWA
You don’t know how an apple tastes until you taste it. You don’t know
what a fish tastes like until you eat it. You don’t know how it is to
be a woman unless you are one. You don’t know what it means to have a
baby until you have one. So it is with the natural laws. An example:
the natural law of forgiveness says, if you hate someone, pray for the
person to be blessed with happiness, joy and all the blessings of the
Great Spirit. You will not know about this law unless you do it. The
natural law says love others as you love yourself. If you hate yourself
or feel guilt in some area of yourself, you will tend to judge and
condemn your neighbor. You cannot give away what you don’t have. You
teach your children by your example, not by your words. The natural
laws are written in our hearts.
Great Spirit,
teach me how
to look into my
heart.
By: Don Coyhis
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We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful
words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of
the good people.
– Martin Luther King Jr.
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Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
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I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us
with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
– Galileo Galilei
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All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second,
it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
– Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
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Often war is waged only in order to show valor; thus an inner dignity
is ascribed to war itself, and even some philosophers have praised it
as an ennoblement of humanity, forgetting the pronouncement of the
Greek who said, “War is an evil in as much as it produces more wicked
men than it takes away.”
– Immanuel Kant
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If a war be undertaken for the most righteous end, before the resources
of peace have been tried and proved vain to secure it, that war has no
defense, it is a national crime.
– Charles Eliot Norton
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It is part of the moral tragedy with which we are dealing that words
like “democracy,” “freedom,” “rights,” “justice,” which have so often
inspired heroism and have led men to give their lives for things which
make life worthwhile, can also become a trap, the means of destroying
the very things men desire to uphold.
– Sir Norman Angell (1874-1967), 1956.
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No one is more dangerous than one who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
– James Baldwin (1924-1987) Notes of a native son, 1955
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When faced with a choice between confronting an unpleasant reality and
defending a set of comforting and socially accepted beliefs, most
people choose the later course.
– W. Lance Bennett
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It is foolish in the extreme not only to resort to force before
necessity compels, but especially to madly create the conditions that
will lead to this necessity.
– Benjamin Tucker, Liberty, May 22, 1886
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The feeling of patriotism – It is an immoral feeling because, instead
of confessing himself a son of God . . . or even a free man guided by
his own reason, each man under the influence of patriotism confesses
himself the son of his fatherland and the slave of his government, and
commits actions contrary to his reason and conscience.
– Leo Tolstoy, Patriotism and Government
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A modern gentleman is necessarily the enemy of his country. Even in war
he does not fight to defend it, but to prevent his power of preying on
it from passing to a foreigner.
– George Bernard Shaw
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It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country
is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificually
induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant
propaganda of fear.
– General Douglas MacArthur, Speech, May 15, 1951
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A Buddhist Priest Expresses the Buddhist Perspective on Punishment
http://www.stophitting.org/religion/buddhistPunish.php
COLUMBUS, OHIO, March 1, 2005: Rinzai Zen Buddhist Priest, Kobutsu
Malone, writes very candidly in this article about punishment in any
form, corporal or psychological. Reverend Malone says, “The deliberate
infliction of pain on an individual in response to an action after it
has occurred can in no way change the effect of the original action nor
can it serve to educate or awaken the individual. The physical or
emotional pain or injury of punishment done to a child or an adult
creates only fear and trauma. It not only damages the person being
punished, but it damages and enslaves those who inflict the punishment.
The abuse of physical violence visited on anyone is a deliberate act
which scapegoats the person through lack of control over our burden of
internalized oppression.” Reverend Malone also elaborates on the
prevalence of violence in North American culture, “Arrogance and
aggression permeate our society, our history, our religious traditions,
our so-called ‘judicial system’ to the point that we can not dare to
even question the premise of punishment without drawing shocked
response from our fellow citizens. We live in a nation surrounded by
violence, we worship violence and the infliction of pain in our
entertainment, in our day-to-day interrelationships with each other.”
Over time Rev. Malone points out that punishment leads to oppression
out of fear and, when the oppressor is not around, resentment, rage, or
anger are expressed by the person being punished. Alternatively, the
individual being oppressed may take the imposed violence out on someone
else and the cycle of violence continues. Rev. Malone sums it up, “The
only truly effective and successful methods of dealing with correction
of behavior comes through compassionate communication, comprehension of
social responsibility, education, restraint and discipline. Punishment
simply does not, and has never, worked.”