Meditations with Native American Elders – February 27<\/p>\n
“The Old Ones have always said that no matter who despises or ignores
\nyou, no matter who keeps you from entering their circles, it is right
\nto pray for them because they are like us, too.”
\n-Larry P. Aitken, CHIPPEWA<\/p>\n
\nYou don’t know how an apple tastes until you taste it. You don’t know
\nwhat a fish tastes like until you eat it. You don’t know how it is to
\nbe a woman unless you are one. You don’t know what it means to have a
\nbaby until you have one. So it is with the natural laws. An example:
\nthe natural law of forgiveness says, if you hate someone, pray for the
\nperson to be blessed with happiness, joy and all the blessings of the
\nGreat Spirit. You will not know about this law unless you do it. The
\nnatural law says love others as you love yourself. If you hate yourself
\nor feel guilt in some area of yourself, you will tend to judge and
\ncondemn your neighbor. You cannot give away what you don’t have. You
\nteach your children by your example, not by your words. The natural
\nlaws are written in our hearts.<\/p>\n
Great Spirit,
\nteach me how
\nto look into my
\nheart.<\/p>\n
By: Don Coyhis <\/p>\n
===<\/p>\n
We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful
\nwords and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of
\nthe good people.
\n– Martin Luther King Jr.<\/p>\n
=<\/p>\n
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
\n– Martin Luther King, Jr.<\/p>\n
=<\/p>\n
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us
\nwith sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
\n– Galileo Galilei <\/p>\n
=<\/p>\n
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second,
\nit is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
\n– Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
\n
\n=<\/p>\n
Often war is waged only in order to show valor; thus an inner dignity
\nis ascribed to war itself, and even some philosophers have praised it
\nas an ennoblement of humanity, forgetting the pronouncement of the
\nGreek who said, “War is an evil in as much as it produces more wicked
\nmen than it takes away.”
\n– Immanuel Kant<\/p>\n
=<\/p>\n
If a war be undertaken for the most righteous end, before the resources
\nof peace have been tried and proved vain to secure it, that war has no
\ndefense, it is a national crime.
\n– Charles Eliot Norton<\/p>\n
=<\/p>\n
It is part of the moral tragedy with which we are dealing that words
\nlike “democracy,” “freedom,” “rights,” “justice,” which have so often
\ninspired heroism and have led men to give their lives for things which
\nmake life worthwhile, can also become a trap, the means of destroying
\nthe very things men desire to uphold.
\n– Sir Norman Angell (1874-1967), 1956.<\/p>\n
=<\/p>\n
No one is more dangerous than one who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
\n– James Baldwin (1924-1987) Notes of a native son, 1955<\/p>\n
=<\/p>\n
When faced with a choice between confronting an unpleasant reality and
\ndefending a set of comforting and socially accepted beliefs, most
\npeople choose the later course.
\n– W. Lance Bennett<\/p>\n
=<\/p>\n
It is foolish in the extreme not only to resort to force before
\nnecessity compels, but especially to madly create the conditions that
\nwill lead to this necessity.
\n– Benjamin Tucker, Liberty, May 22, 1886 <\/p>\n
=<\/p>\n
The feeling of patriotism – It is an immoral feeling because, instead
\nof confessing himself a son of God . . . or even a free man guided by
\nhis own reason, each man under the influence of patriotism confesses
\nhimself the son of his fatherland and the slave of his government, and
\ncommits actions contrary to his reason and conscience.
\n– Leo Tolstoy, Patriotism and Government <\/p>\n
=<\/p>\n
A modern gentleman is necessarily the enemy of his country. Even in war
\nhe does not fight to defend it, but to prevent his power of preying on
\nit from passing to a foreigner.
\n– George Bernard Shaw<\/p>\n
=<\/p>\n
It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country
\nis now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificually
\ninduced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant
\npropaganda of fear.
\n– General Douglas MacArthur, Speech, May 15, 1951 <\/p>\n
===<\/p>\n
A Buddhist Priest Expresses the Buddhist Perspective on Punishment
\nhttp:\/\/www.stophitting.org\/religion\/buddhistPunish.php<\/p>\n
COLUMBUS, OHIO, March 1, 2005: Rinzai Zen Buddhist Priest, Kobutsu
\nMalone, writes very candidly in this article about punishment in any
\nform, corporal or psychological. Reverend Malone says, “The deliberate
\ninfliction of pain on an individual in response to an action after it
\nhas occurred can in no way change the effect of the original action nor
\ncan it serve to educate or awaken the individual. The physical or
\nemotional pain or injury of punishment done to a child or an adult
\ncreates only fear and trauma. It not only damages the person being
\npunished, but it damages and enslaves those who inflict the punishment.
\nThe abuse of physical violence visited on anyone is a deliberate act
\nwhich scapegoats the person through lack of control over our burden of
\ninternalized oppression.” Reverend Malone also elaborates on the
\nprevalence of violence in North American culture, “Arrogance and
\naggression permeate our society, our history, our religious traditions,
\nour so-called ‘judicial system’ to the point that we can not dare to
\neven question the premise of punishment without drawing shocked
\nresponse from our fellow citizens. We live in a nation surrounded by
\nviolence, we worship violence and the infliction of pain in our
\nentertainment, in our day-to-day interrelationships with each other.”
\nOver time Rev. Malone points out that punishment leads to oppression
\nout of fear and, when the oppressor is not around, resentment, rage, or
\nanger are expressed by the person being punished. Alternatively, the
\nindividual being oppressed may take the imposed violence out on someone
\nelse and the cycle of violence continues. Rev. Malone sums it up, “The
\nonly truly effective and successful methods of dealing with correction
\nof behavior comes through compassionate communication, comprehension of
\nsocial responsibility, education, restraint and discipline. Punishment
\nsimply does not, and has never, worked.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacefulhippo.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacefulhippo.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacefulhippo.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacefulhippo.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacefulhippo.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peacefulhippo.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/994\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacefulhippo.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacefulhippo.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacefulhippo.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}