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Happy
Thanksgiving to you and to so many of God's creatures (humans not
excluded) that you share your love with. [Take my reference to God with
a grain of salt. I am an agnostic by choice – I don't say "agnostic by
faith or conviction" becos that would
be a contradiction.]
BTW,
I am one of those agnostics, those Lefties if you like, who as a
non-believer, recognizes that billions of humans around the world get
their moral sustenance from their distinct faiths and that when the
Marxists dismiss all religions as specimens
of false consciousness and refuse to engage with faith communities,
they make a big mistake. The Lefties also allow the fanatics within
each faith tradition to go unchallenged. All of us then face the
consequences.
Am reading an interesting book on Buddhism – Pankaj Mishra's An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World.
He argues that Buddhism nudges us in the direction of meditation and
mindfulness in order to resolve our individual personal struggles with
human suffering (indeed the focus of Buddha's thought and meditations)
and has little to say on issues of social justice in larger circles of
society and politics. I have been thinking at the same time of Sikhism,
the faith in which I nominally grew up –
my Dad was also a skeptic of sorts although not an agnostic. Sikhism,
in contrast, is a project in social engineering – an unending struggle
for social justice and for First Amendment rights in their largest
connotations. Meditation at the personal, individual
level is not forgotten in Sikhism – but living fully and actively with
an awareness of issues that affect family and community is at the heart
of the Sikh way of life. And in some of those ways, I am a Sikh all
right.
That
is the burden of my song on Thanksgiving Day (also Hanukah today! - a
rare coincidence). Sorry to insist on making you my captive audience
for a few minutes!!
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