Dang Zang

Tony Blair gives us a vivid example of the wheel of fortune. He had such huge support when he gave us in the UK a believable Labour (if only weakly) government. I was a big fan, and I was hardly alone.

Now he has turned into one of the most reviled figures of recent British political history: arrogant, lying and almost certainly a war criminal.

He is also proving to us how out-of-balance the British system is – the political executive is slipping out of control.

We should perhaps all take a moment to consider the value of the Arrest Blair Campaign as described in the Guardian.

So was it hubris? Did he start to believe his own publicity? Did he start to believe that God was on his side? He has fallen – but he should fall further yet.

This news is well-known now, but I wanted to add my enthusiasm:

http://www.karmapa-in-europe.net/

It’s hardly surprising: Apple is purging anything to do with the Dalai Lama from its apps in China.

They should do an app (someone probably already has) to sell to the PRC government that purges the Dalai Lama’s name (or anything else subversive like “Tibetan independence” or “Tiananmen Square”) from any text flowing through the iPhone!

Last night a rather worthy – and not entirely unpleasant – TV program dealt with the run-up to Christmas from the point of view of three different “faith traditions”. My question, therefore, is: “what’s one of them?” The fact that the three concerned were Christianity, Judaism, and a very open-minded, friendly version of Islam did not bring me much clarity. I had an uneasy feeling that the term is being used to sweep diverging beliefs into a dark corner where we need not talk about them, as if they were a  mad cousin who has been shipped off to the mental home.

I do, certainly, realise that “faith” should be about something much more than mere “belief”; reducing somebody’s faith to a mere belief, or set of beliefs, might be useful in primary school, but it does not encourage insight into any mature kind of spirituality.

I find, however, it hard to accept that these “faiths” do not also imply certain specific, possibly conflicting, beliefs. What seems to happen in my own mind, and I suspect that this is what the use of the phrase “faith tradition” tends to do, is to reduce “faith” again, but in a different way. Rather than reducing it to a mere set of beliefs, “faith tradition” tends to reduce it to a set of traditional observances. My picture of the follower of a “faith tradition” (and I know I use brackets too often, but I can’t help also but wonder how many people think of themselves in those terms) is of someone who perhaps has some beliefs at the back of their mind, but these beliefs are held for reasons that have as much, or more, to do with tradition as with intellectual rigour. Once the reduction has been done – I would like to say “emasculation”, but I’m not sure if that word still has the right connotations – we can go on to say:

“Look, this lot light candles around Christmas time, that lot light candles to celebrate Hanukkah, and the other lot light candles at the time of Ramadan: ergo it’s all jolly nice and jolly similar and we can all be jolly friendly.”

Well, of course, being jolly friendly to one another would be a wonderful thing, and there ought to be more of it, and I applaud the points the programme was overtly making. Thoroughly. But I can’t help but feel that talk of “faith traditions” is selling real spirituality down the river.

OBC (Obligatory Buddhist Content): many Buddhists light candles at the time of the full moon in May.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama is in Sydney. It is important that I begin by saying that I have huge respect for HHDL (as we know him on the net). I have seen him a few times, such as in Coventry Cathedral or in Hamburg, where he gave a number of teachings and empowerments that I attended. Now it is not, I think, that I have seen him so much that I have become jaded, but the enormous circus that surrounds him, at least in Australia, leaves me simply cold and uninterested.

A few months ago, for instance, I received e-mails containing a special offer: for a price of less than $150 I could attend a “Peace Through Justice Nobel Peace Prize Breakfast” with HHDL, billed as “this visit’s most intimate public audience”, with no more than 1440 guests.

Oh yes, now I remember why I’m not excited.

Whatever your prayer, now is a good time to say it.

Nepal – I would almost say my favourite country – has not stopped this primitive, superstious slaughter. The estimate is that 500,000 animals are being sacrificed. The description is that the process, even as animal slaughter goes, is slow and cruel.

Oh, what bad karma this will bring on that poor place! Pray for the animals, pray for the country that allows it, pray for the fools who participate!

You can learn more at Tibetan Volunteers for Animals, or you can search for Gadhimai.

I run three blogs. None of them is wildly active. Some of the posts have received a few comments – thanks for the interest!

Until now I simply had a system in which unknown posters have to have their first post approved by me. Once I have approved a post from you, you are then able to post without further checks. This works automatically, it’s simple and easy.  So far I’ve only had one human idiot whose posts I rejected.

It’s the non-human idiots that are the problem; every day I have to mark a large number of spam posts as such, and then delete them. It is to be believed that the vast majority of these – perhaps all – are machine-generated: spambots! I’ve therefore just added a “captcha” system. Most readers will be familiar with this kind of thing – you have to recognize an oddly written sequence of letters or numbers, perhaps a word. This is very hard to program a machine to do, so mostly only humans will get past.

I think I have set it so that it is only if you are an unknown user that this will appear. Like the freedom to add messages without me having to check them that known users, with a history of at least one approved comment, already have, it’s only the first time that you should have to face this small hurdle. If you have any problems with it – please let me know!