Green Oasis

The third act of this week’s episode of This American Life features two Mormon missionaries street contacting in Manhattan.

[I just read this in Tao: The Watercourse Way by Alan Watts, pp. 83–4.]

The superior man [or woman] goes through his life without any one preconceived course of action or any taboo. He merely decides for the moment what is the right thing to do.… The goody-goodies are the thieves of virtue. [Li Chi 32, The Wisdom of China and India by Lin Yutang, p. 835]

In other words, a true human is not a model of righteousness, a prig or a prude, but recognizes that some failings are as necessary to genuine human nature as salt to stew. Merely righteous people are impossible to live with because the have no humor, do not allow the true human nature to be, and are dangerously unconscious of their own shadows.… It is an essential, then of political wu-wei that one does not try to enforce laws against human nature and send people to jail for “sins,” or crimes without unwilling victims. Trust in human nature is acceptance of the good-and-bad of it, and it is hard to trust those who do not admit their own weaknesses.

Remember the Muhammad comics from Denmark that got some Muslims in an uproar? Here they are just in case you haven’t seen them yet because newspapers in the U.S. don’t want to take the heat (I don’t really blame them).

Jyllands-Posten (the newpaper that originally published the comics) reports that “all of [Denmark's] major dailies decided to re-print it on Wednesday after it was discovered that Muslim extremists had plotted to assassinate the man who drew it, Kurt Westergaard.”

We have a conflict of ideas: the idea that a person’s religious sensibilities must be respected under penalty of violence versus the idea that we must all be free to say what we want within very liberal bounds. Tolerance of opposing viewpoints in a liberal democracy must find its limit when people plot murder, yet the freedom of conscience of innocent Muslims must be respected. Religious extremism like this might be the poison pill that kills democracy if we can’t strike a proper balance in response.

Having said that, the whole point of this post was just for me to stick up for freedom of speech in my little way.

(via Jesus and Mo)

The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool.—Jane Wagner

Since discussion veered to neoconservatism and religion, has anyone else seen the BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares? It’s a thought provoking, eye opening look at religion, politics, and the entanglement of neoconservatism and islamism.

Both [the Islamists and Neoconservatives] were idealists who were born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build a better world. And both had a very similar explanation for what caused that failure. These two groups have changed the world, but not in the way that either intended. Together, they created today’’s nightmare vision of a secret, organized evil that threatens the world. A fantasy that politicians then found restored their power and authority in a disillusioned age. And those with the darkest fears became the most powerful.

Perhaps a bit partisan (anything interesting is), but it connected a lot of dots for me.