I highly recommend that people read or listen to Bill Moyers’ interview with “freelance monotheist” Karen Armstrong which appeared on his Journal program a week ago (http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/03132009/transcript3.html). In it she pointed out in a very clear way that the Golden Rule (a.k.a. compassion, literally “feeling with” the other) is the one core doctrine that all the great religions share:
“I find that the heart of it is the idea of feeling with the other,
experiencing with the other, compassion. And every single one of the
major world religions has developed its own version of the Golden Rule.
Don’t do to others what you would not like them to do to you. … Compassion doesn’t mean feeling sorry for people. It doesn’t mean pity.
It means putting yourself in the position of the other, learning about
the other. Learning what’s motivating the other, learning about their
grievances. …
Archive for March, 2009
Respecting Religion (and Anti-Religion)
Sunday, March 22nd, 2009Music in Mud Time
Sunday, March 8th, 2009Yesterday there were signs that Spring had finally arrived in New Hampshire. The temperature rose to an astonishing 50 degrees, the roads were crowded with pickup trucks carrying vats of maple sap to the sugar houses, the snow piles were shorter by as much as ten inches, but still had a lot of melting to do (ice-fishers were still out on the thick ice of the millpond in Greenville, and tomorrow’s forecast calls for snow). Most importantly, mud season had begun. The road to our house was getting quite rutted, and brown was edging out white as the dominant color of the landscape.
Denise had, as a birthday present, gotten
America’s Best Loved Jaguar Dies
Friday, March 6th, 2009I want to celebrate the life of a jaguar named “Macho”, a cat
Be Like a Bird
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009[Edited 3/2/2009 to include link to recording - in player at www.myspace.com/jimgiddings]
There’s a song I’ve loved for
The end of the Clean Coal Myth (and) Dydd Gwyl Dewi Hapus
Monday, March 2nd, 2009Today, March 2, 2009, is the day of the first civil disobedience action to combat global warming. Bill McKibben of 350 .org and dozens or hundreds of other activists plan to risk arrest to protest the presence of a coal-burning power plant in the US Capital and by extension to expose the lie that there is such a thing as “clean coal.”. Coal is the most CO2-intensive fuel we use, and extracting it and burning it kills many peoipleeach year and destroys the environment in countless other ways. We need to have a massive campaign to move to genuinely renewable energy sources and conservation.
Today is also Saint David’s day, and I think Saint David (Dewi Sant ca. 520- 601 ad) might well be thought of as the patron saint of