Islam is NOT a religion of peace but a terrorist cult.

As anyone can see, the violence is not over class differences (rich vs poor), not because the U.S. is still in Iraq, but because of religious differences. Anyone who says that Islam is a religion of peace KNOWS that she/he's lying.

Members of Al-Qaida cannot be dismissed as wayward radicals.  Fighters for al-Qaida are carefully following the writings of the Qur'an.  Their interpretation of the Qur'an is the correct one.  Of course, other denominations of Islam say the same thing--and to settle the differences, they kill.  They blow themselves up inside mosques, at food markets--anywhere there's a crowd.  They not only blow themselves up, but they arm bicycles and donkeys with explosive devices and detonate them by remote control.  And large segments of the moslem population support all this. New al-Qaida in Iraq Chief Vows Blood-Soaked Days

AIDS/HIV in Africa, can masturbation be the only way for safety?

I have had many, many tests for AIDS and all have proven to be negative. Thank goodness,I rely on masturbation, as I still do, for sexual relief. But for so many others others, things are different. At Front Lines, AIDS War Is Falling Apart

Martin Luther King, Jr.

On Monday here in the United States we will celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.

When I was growing up, I lived in South Carolina. It was the mid-sixites and the legal institutions of American apartheid were being dismantled. As a white kid, of some priviledge, my peers weren't all for these changes, just as surely as many adults around me were not. I had an advantage over some of my school mates in being less well-off than they. Indeed, in addition to caring for the five children in my family, my mother was a school teacher. She taught in schools that were being racially desegregated. There were many battles that led to these changes, but perhaps the most significant were court rulings which found that segregated schools were inherently unequal. So my mother in her everyday work life was on the forefront of these changes.

It's rather off point, but when Dr. King was assasinated a schoolmate at school was telling the same general outlines of a conspiracy which emerged again in 1999 and here I don't know what the truth is. This is what the Department of Justice reports. The sad truth is that many Americans hated Dr. King and believed strongly in white supremancy. Too many Americans still hold fast to their hatred.

I like Howard Sochurek's Life magazine portrait because it shows Martin Luther King, Jr. as a handsome man, a real man and not the mythic hero. We have learned he had feet of clay like all of us. That doesn't detract from his legacy, because it reminds us that ordinary people can make a difference. Of course it wasn't Martin King alone, but the thousands who walked beside him. But Martin Luther King, Jr. was extraodinary; his words remain as some of the most eloquent in the English language. I love these words from Strength to Love (1963):

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction....The chain reaction of evil--hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars--must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

In the spring of 1967 King spoke at the Riverside Church in New York City, Beyond Vietnam--A Time to Break Silence:

True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

Many see this speach a marker of his doom to come; calling for a "restructuring" too dangerous to contemplate. Via the wonderful blog 3quarksdaily comes this review by Stewart Home of Mark Kurlansky's , 1968: The Year that Rocked The World. The times they were a changing.

Louis Menand in his book The Metaphysical Club writes about the development of Pragamatism as an American intellectual idea:

Pragamatism was designed to make it harder for people to be driven to violence by their beliefs.

But he notes: "The Cold War was a war over principles." So thinking in America strayed into distinctly non-pragmatic territory, of black and white; good and evil. He also points out that the inspirations for Dr. King had come from Reinhold Niebur and Mahatma Gandhi rather than the pragmatism of Oliver Wendell Holmes and John Dewey. Values of tolerence and liberty took root in soil of a worldview that split the world into two.

There is a strain of that Manichaenism in today's "War on Terror." I wonder what if Martin Luther King hadn't been murdered? Where would his strong mind and compassionate heart have taken him? His opposition to the Vietnam War was a watershed. He had moved irrevocably from a worldview supported by fixed principles to a worldview shaped by patterns of relationships.

We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing"-oriented society to a "person"-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable to being conquered.

Nowadays, the tributes to Martin Luther King, Jr. are often rote and spoken in well-worn cliches. Still his words can move and are worth reading and listening to. There are numerous sites with quotations from Dr. King: here, here, and here, for starters.

Protoslacker

I'm delighted that Proud Ugandan posted and looking forward very much to his "Interview with Jesus."

I'm afraid that my "Sunday Sermonettes" cast a somewhat religious tone to this endeavor. It's a bit ironic that, because the idea of the Sunday Semonettes is to shed some light on freethinkers, i.e. not-religious people.

People don't all think the same way--thank goodness. Broad differences are surprisingly hard to generalize about. One problem is simply taking for granted thinking that's common and familiar to one's place and time. Perhaps the best way to gain some perspective about those is by reading the thoughts of some residing in a different place or time.

Through our Internet chats I've already discovered that Proud Ugandan and I share many ideas; or that we have similar reactions to threads of ideas common to us both. I'm sure I'll sometimes be surprised by what Proud Ugandan has to say, but am so eager to listen.

"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread." I felt rather foolish last night while chatting with Proud Uganda and he told me he'd written a draft post. I quickly located it and asked him if I should publish it. He responded, "Yes, but..." Apparently I didn't listen to the "but..." and clicked publish. There are some issues to work out. The format of the blog doesn't view well in whatever environment (browser?) Proud Ugandan sees this page in. We'll work on that together. It's a lot easier for me because I don't have to pay for the connection by the minute.

It will be good for Proud Ugandan to sort out some of these issues himself. A really important purpose of this blog is simply learning the way around Blogger. The goal is for Proud Ugandan and other Ugandans to use the medium of blogs to share ideas.

I didn't post a Sunday Sermonette last Sunday and at the risk of being a space hog, I'll wait until next.

Welcome Proud Ugandan. Happy blogging!

Proud Ugandan

IN INTERVIEW WITH JESUS

Just for a bit of fun take a short break and look at some of my
contemporary political or philosophical thoughts on subjects
that appear to be getting the public's attention...

Am not a great writer but most friends say,i have gone on higher heights in discovering the knowledge and wisdom of understanding. In my mailings on this blog,you will come across many issues that raise and smells a rat more especially in the region where am writing from. Below is my first issue,where in feel like having an interview with Jesus. The man whom i never met but personally served him as a church leader.

AN INTERVIEW WITH JESUS

Ye shall know the truth and only that truth shall set you free. For too many countless eons all of mankind has been relentlessly, intentionally, unnecessarily and ruthlessly enslaved in nearly every fashion imaginable; physically, intellectually, emotionally, psychologically, and most sadly of all, spiritually. The more than ill-conceived mythologies of our own Judeo-Christian world as well as the rest of the world, have most definitely burdened/enslaved us for no other legitimate reason than to only serve those who have thrived on the exercise of power over our bodies, minds and spirits. One of the world's greatest teachers some two thousand years ago set forth the simple formula for our salvation as well as our inalienable right to be happy in this one life that we all have to live in this now diminishing Garden of Eden, "Love one another as you love yourself so that there might be joy in your life. Upon this one and only commandment rests the entirety of the law and the prophets." This great man was named Jesus and I can't imagine anyone having more to offer this troubled world then and most certainly now, which is why I wanted to make available his candid and totally unrehearsed remarks and reactions to this world that he had left forever some two thousand years ago and with no intentions of ever returning back as many tells us.

PLEASE take the time to evaluate the QUESTIONS as they are recorded in future and from there you will be able to read just what this great man had to share in response. This was a continuing work in progress and thought, and required only the briefest amount of time to actually complete the thirty-three questions that had been submitted in order of discovering/learning more of the actual truth about Jesus' life and contributions to all of mankind.

On this blog,you will somehow find one question each week until all our thirty three questions are answered. Entitled Question One through Question Thirty-three I will be recording for your benefit bits and pieces of information that are offered by Jesus only to enlighten your own path to the truth. There has always been that knowledge of what is now being shared with you, but for any number of reasons, previously known only to those who intentionally failed to disclose the full truth. The reality has often alluded us even in the face of hard evidence. The intention is not to dissuade you from any beliefs that you may have acquired to this point in your spiritual growth, but to offer you a less antiquated understanding of those basic spiritual principles that Jesus had originally designed to awaken your own unique, divine and powerful inner being. God is LOVE and that one and only God resides in all of us if only given the encouragement to express itself in our daily lives. And when I express "all of us," I'm sure that Jesus joins me in that it means every single man, woman and child, no matter as to their religion, physical heritage or geography.

Sunday Sermonette

Loren Eiseley 


We're off to a slow start. Proud Ugandan has been ill, and I've been preoccupied. Proud Ugandan tried to post, but it did work for some reason. All this is par for the course. What I don't want to do is to monopolize the converation. But I've been told (not by Proud Ugandan) that "white people take up a lot of space" and frequently more directly that I talk too much. None of that will take Proud Ugandan by surprise, so I thought I might as well post.

A recent post at Dave Pollard's wonderful blog How to Save the World praises of the American scientist, poet, writer Loren Eiseley. Eiseley died in 1977 but his books remain in print and there are many Web sites to discover his eloquent writing online. Pollard is often moved as much by Eiseley's prose and his poetry, and presents a few selections of his prose as poetry. This one seemed appropriate for a Sunday Sermonette:

"the notion of some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing"

Let men beat men, if they will,
but why do they have to beat and starve small things?
Why? -- Why? I will never forget that dog's eyes,
nor the eyes of every starved mongrel I have fed from Curacao to Cuernavaca.
Nor the drowning one I once fished out of an irrigation ditch in California,
only to see him limp away with his ribs showing
as mine once showed in that cabin long ago in Manitou.

This is why I am a wanderer forever in the streets of men,
a wanderer in mind,
and, in these matters, a creature of desperate impulse.

It is not because I am filled with obscure guilt
that I step gently over, and not upon, an autumn cricket.
It is not because of guilt
that I refuse to shoot the last osprey from her nest in the tide marsh.
I posses empathy;
I have grown with man in his mind's growing.
I share that sympathy and compassion
which extends beyond the barriers of class and race and form
until it partakes of the universal whole.

I am not ashamed to profess this emotion, nor will I call it a pathology.
Only through this experience many times repeated and enhanced
does man become truly human.

Only then will his gun arm be forever lowered.

Both Proud Ugandan and I have at times in our lives been deeply motivated by Christian faith, and both of us have changed course. Many religious people argue that morality requires religious faith. That doesn't seem the case, and mostly it seems futile to argue with religious zealots. However thoughtful believers have taken the time to consider Eiseley, for example this page.

In this passage Eiseley makes compassion central to his and our own humanity. These are not words of an immoral man left compassless by being unthethered to religion. They are words of a person taking his humanity seriously in composing a life; knowing his life is but a small part of all creation.

Sunday Sermonette

Tai Solarin 


There is a tradition among some bloggers to make Sunday posts to praise to a freethinker. I'm so pleased that Proud Ugandan has joined this blog now and we can begin a dialog. Proud Uganda is a hero in my eyes because he's a freethinker where it's very unpopular to be one.

I also have some concerns and worries. Sometimes people are made to pay for their free thinking in most harsh ways. Sadly poor people are the ones who most often pay and can least afford it. Reporters Without Borders has created a Hanbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents and Ethan Zuckerman whose wonderful blog is called My heart's in Accra is ontop of this critical issue for example in this recent post.

I don't imagine that this blog will capture much attention. Certainly the intent is not to stir up trouble. Rather both Proud Ugandan and I envision ways that blogs can be valuable for Ugandans and others in Africa to empower themselves through Internet communications.

The custom on the Net is to provide links, but I don't remember where I saw that Ugandans are among the most entrepreneurial in the world. Still, that impression rings true from my limited exposure to my Ugandan friends. There's a real "can-do" attitude, and certainly Proud Ugandan provides a good example.

We want to be careful here. This blog is a way to learn about blogs so that some of the uses we imagine for them can be realised. For example, Proud Ugandan is very concerned about the ethical uses of technology, especially as that subject relates to Africans. Proud Ugandan hopes to provide forums where Ugandans can learn and offer their views on this important subject, and blogs may prove to be a good forum.

But freethinkers are often unpopular. I've already let the cat out of the bag as far as Proud Ugandan's gender, he's a man. Whoops! It's not going to be easy to keep his cover from a determined investigator. Since he already has some exposure on the Internet, he's not as worried as I am about this as I am. I'll follow his lead on this matter. I think mostly we'll steer clear of extreme controversy here. Still we both know that freethinking can be hazardous to ones health and safety.

The picture is of Tai Solarin. I admire Solarin because he lived honestly holding unpopular views; views which nonetheless were brimming with his belief in human potential and goodness. Richard C. Carrier has a good paper about the life of Tai Solarian. He tells a wonderful story about Solarian:

Dr. Solarin says that "blacks hold onto their God just as the drunken man holds on to the street lamp post--for physical support only." He paints an interesting analogy from a childhood memory. He made a long journey with his mother once, who gave him a "bicycle" to help him finish the journey--which was really just a wheel he had to hit with a stick to keep it going. He says that without the "bicycle" he would never have made the forty mile walk, but upon reflection he realized that he had really carried himself and the bicycle all along. Religion is like that bicycle, Tai says. We only need it when we lack the confidence and determination to face the world alone. "To get the young Africans weaned from their almost congenital reliance on fate," Tai says, "they must be educated to stand on their feet." And the best way to accomplish that is for the government to copy the Mayflower School throughout Nigeria.

Proud Ugandan has confidence and determination. I hope others will get a glimpse of that here in this blog. And that others more resourceful than I will contribute to his development as a strong African determined to improve his life and the lives of his fellow countrymen.