http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/...4254205666.html

I would like to take about the difference between the major religions. Hinduism/Buddhism are Teacher/Parent religions, whereas Abrahamic religions are King religions.

Primitive man heard thunder and lightning and thought God, up there, must be angry about something. Sure enough, fire and floods followed, destroying everything. Hence a fear of God! You see this fear reflected in Abrahamic religions. Amazingly the oldest religion, Hinduism, does not teach us to fear God! Truly divine, truly mind-boggling!

Anyway back to the 2 types of religions, Abrahamic religions made God in the image of their king. Most kings in those days were men, so God had to be a man. A King issues orders, commands and passes out judgements. Sound familiar? When one is brought before the King, one fell to their knees and shook with fear, for this man could order their death! Here again, fear of God returns in another form. In these religions a devotee is reduced to a Servant, slave, or subject. These people have their back bent and are usually down on their knees.

The danger with these religions as we are seeing with the terrorism, is that it takes away personal responsibility. They call themselves soldiers of God, the problem with being a soldier is that you must obey commands. When a superior says kill, you must kill, whether it is a women or even a child. This is why terrorists and cults mostly come from within these religions. Young men are told that they are servants of God, God is telling them to go kill, and so they must!

The problem here is with the mindset - a mindset of being reduced to being a slave, subject or servant, blindly obeying orders.


To continue, Hinduism/Buddhism are teacher religions. We are students of God, that is clearly evident with Krishna imparting us the Gita and the Buddha.

We must act like students not blind animals obeying God. A teacher wants her students to discuss various issues from various viewpoints. Disagree if you feel that you are right, even with the teacher. Your realize that this is democracy in action.

Ever wonder why muslim pakistan has so much trouble with democracy while Hindu India does not? Many westerners thought India would go the same way as other newly formed countries, dive into a strongmen ruled country, but India continues to surprise them. To me it is no surprise, as long as India is Hindu, it will remain a democracy!

Act like students of God, sit or stand before the teacher. Love and respect the teacher, never fear the teacher. Once we start kneeling before God like the muslims do and lowering ourselves to a subject or slave level, we cease to be Hindus.

Watch the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsX6LYdNBNw

Chopper carrying Andhra Pradesh CM missing
Wed Sep 2, 2009 7:19pm IST


HYDERABAD (Reuters) - A helicopter carrying Y.S.R. Reddy, chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, went missing near a dense jungle while on a routine district tour early on Wednesday, officials said.

"The chief minister's chopper still remains untraced," K. Rosiah, the state finance minister said in Hyderabad.

"I am appealing to people to please help us in search operations," he said, hours after the air traffic control room lost contact with the helicopter in bad weather.

Air Force officials said five helicopters were scanning the state's Kurnool and Chittor districts for the missing chopper.

"So far, we have not found it," Wing Commander T.K. Singha, told Reuters in New Delhi.

http://news.google.com/news/more?pz=1&ncl=...okBJ0rM&topic=h

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/...article1268690/

This has to be the most insane (and low quality) piece of propaganda around. Note how even this excellent piece of news which would not have occurred without the greatness of Hindu culture (which was solely responsible for arresting AIDS) is attempted to be put down. This Canadian apparently didn't get a chance to "Thaw" out completely before writing this crap.

Maybe the rest of the world doesn't want to follow the degenerate culture of this author. Western Civilization is not declining, it's in a virtual free fall!, as White women are more interested in having "fun" than families. These are not my words, but of the few remaining White conservatives.

Watch on the West
A Newsletter of FPRI’s Center for the Study of America and the West
The Idea of the West

Volume 1, Number 5
August 1998

By David Gress

This essay draws on David Gress’s new book From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents (The Free Press). Dr. Gress is co-director of FPRI’s Center for America and the West and co-director of our History Institute. From Plato to NATO, the second volume to emerge from the History Academy, follows the publication of Walter McDougall’s Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776 (Houghton Mifflin, 1997). Gress and McDougall are jointly writing the third volume— The Use and Abuse of History.

If your organization would like to host a lecture by Dr. Gress, please contact Alan Luxenberg at 215-732-3774, ext. 105.

Since the end of the Cold War, culture, religion, and the complex sources of political passions have moved to center stage in the study of social change. Books such as Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations demonstrate a new interest on the part of social scientists in the big questions and the long sweep of history. The great economic, social, and strategic transformations of recent years are being explained not in terms of their immediate context but through an understanding of their deep anthropological and geopolitical roots.

This is a highly welcome development, although those of us who are historians may wonder why it took so long to realize the obvious— that you can’t explain major change by last year’s or even last century’s wars and elections. One important effect of the new interest in culture among American political scientists is that the distinction between domestic and international issues has become irrelevant. Analogous factors operate across borders, and putting American developments in one box and global changes in another only makes understanding and therefore rational policymaking more difficult. Social inequality, fundamentalism, the crisis of the family, drug problems, religious revivals, the rise of secular elites — such developments of vital significance for the future cannot be understood by reference to one country or region alone. They are global, and America is no longer a country apart, whose condition can be studied in isolation. The critical demarcations of today are not national borders, but the lines of confrontation that separate traditionalists from liberals, fundamentalists from secularists, individualists from collectivists, libertarians from statists, and they run through and across all countries.

The new scholarship on global change understands this. What it sometimes lacks is a historical understanding of the identity of one of the major players in the emerging world— the West. It was to fill this need and thus to complement the cultural focus of scholars such as Fukuyama and Huntington that I wrote From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents. This book answers the question “What is this West that everyone is talking about, either to praise or condemn?” It criticizes widespread notions of the West common on both left and right and restores to view a richer understanding of Western identity as it evolved over two thousand years than the superficial idea that the West is simply democracy and free markets. That idea is not so much wrong as insufficient. It is not enough to know that the West is democratic and capitalist; it is necessary to know how those features emerged and why, and that they are themselves but manifestations of an underlying, paradoxical, and unique civilizational identity.

It is necessary to know these things not just for the sake of scholarly accuracy, but because misidentifying the West gives a dangerously misleading picture of its role and potential in the twenty-first century global landscape. The American political and cultural landscape at the year 2000 is torn between two incompatible ideas: one, that the West is globally triumphant and that the future of the world will be one of Westernization, in which all societies and cultures converge on a democratic and capitalist norm, with McDonalds in every town and Disney videos in every home. The other is that the West is an evil culture of exploitation, patriarchy, and environmental degradation, a legacy of Eurocentrism that has been abolished in America by feminism and multiculturalism, and that certainly neither has nor deserves to have any future. One response to these opposed beliefs is to conclude that the West doesn’t really exist: each side invents the West it wants to have. Another, however, is to delve into history to find the true identity of a culture that, today, can generate such negative as well as positive feelings. After all, during the Cold War, politicians spoke easily of “the West”: were they also just making it up, or were they talking about something real?

Many Americans have encountered the West in the Western civ courses given in most colleges and universities. The history of those courses is a microcosm of the broader fate of the idea of the West in our time.

They were invented in the aftermath of World War I to give returning soldiers a grounding in what they had been defending in the trenches of France. A generation of American educators thought it possible and desirable to distill all the best ideas of the past 2,500 years of Greek, Roman, and European philosophy, literature, and social thought into a seamless, two-semester garment, a story of the slow but sure growth of liberty and individual rights up to its culmination in liberal American democracy.

The West of these courses was, for fifty years, highly successful in assimilating generations of students into a certain cultural tradition, one that was Eurocentric and very definitely built out of the ideas of dead white males. Since the 1960s, this West came under attack. The first attackers accused it of elitism: the story of Western civ ignored the poor, the slaves, the downtrodden. Later attackers, the multiculturalists, accused it of making European reason into a universal standard: other cultures had other ways of knowing and doing, and these were at least as good as those of the male chauvinist, technocratic West.

These critics had a point, though it wasn’t the point they thought they had. They were right that the “Western civ West” was superficial and turned all of history into a smooth success story. History is about passion, conflict, blood, and treachery as well as about reason, harmony, peace, and liberty. The identity of the West, which is indeed based on reason, science, democracy, and capitalism, did not grow with relentless logic from ancient Greece to the present. It grew by paradox and contradiction out of the jungle of desires, ambition, and greed that is human nature, always and everywhere. The story of the West is therefore the story of how universal human desires produced this particular culture in Europe and later in America, just as they produced other cultures elsewhere, such as Islam, China, Japan, and India.

My reformulation of Western identity for the twenty-first century turns on three basic claims.

First, the West did not begin with the Greeks. In the standard story, the Western civ story, the Greeks invented liberty and philosophy and thus laid the foundation of all subsequent Western identity. If that is true, why did it take so long to get from Athenian democracy to modern America? Something must have happened to delay the evolution of the West. My answer is that what happened was the West itself, which had to evolve by its own logic before the Greek ideas of democracy and philosophical investigation could reappear to inspire and shape modern politics, education, and science.

Turning the Greeks into the first Westerners is to misunderstand both the Greeks and the West. The Greeks were not modern democrats, not just because they denied the vote to women and kept slaves, but because their idea of democracy was unlike ours in critical ways. Common to both ancient and modern democracy is the idea of the equal right of all citizens to speak out and to participate in government. But the Greeks differed in defining democracy not just as the right, but the obligation to participate. Also, in Greece, democracy meant direct rule by all citizens. The idea of representation through universal suffrage which is the basis of modern democracy did not even begin to be formulated until the seventeenth century.

Second, the formation of the West was a centuries-long process that began when the Roman Empire became Christian in the fourth century and ended when the three legacies of Greece, Christianity, and the Germanic societies of northern Europe formed a symbiosis— which I call the Old West— by around the year 1000. Two features of this symbiosis remain essential to a substantive Western identity but are completely overshadowed by the contemporary emphasis on democracy and free markets and other universalist principles. The first was geopolitical pluralism: the West has always been about dividing power, so that no single person or entity could become supreme. This was not done by planning and foresight, as in the American Constitution. It happened by accident, because the balance of power in Europe never allowed a permanent empire to arise. It then appeared in hindsight — and this is the second feature — that dividing power was a condition of liberty. Democracy began to emerge in Europe in places where rulers could not exercise total control. These early and partial forms of liberty gave people incentives to work, save, and invest without fearing expropriation. Over centuries, these niches of freedom produced a new synthesis, which I call the New West: the synthesis of political liberty, property rights, and economic development.

A critical point in this analysis is that the West did not become free and prosperous because people in Europe were just lucky. Rather, Europe and later America benefited from an initially unintended side effect of political competition, namely that societies where power was less than total were also societies where people had property rights and therefore invested rather than consumed, which was the beginning of sustained growth. Growth, in turn, spurred interest in liberty as one of its preconditions, thus launching a positive spiral from which all could ultimately benefit.

Third, the New West of democracy, capitalism, and the scientific method grew out of the Old Western symbiosis and cannot survive if it does not keep its umbilical connection to the past alive. The Old West included elements that we today are tempted to regard as anachronistic or dangerous to liberty— Christianity and the Germanic ethos, for example. One purpose of my book is to revive the 18th-century idea that the Germanic societies contributed an original model of social liberty to the Greek, Roman, and Christian inheritance, the liberty of free tribes in which decisions were jointly made and that only joint decisions were binding on all. This Germanic liberty joined with Christianity to produce what I call Christian ethnicity, the loyalty of people to religion, king, territory, and personal honor that shaped the Old West in each of its many national and regional variants.

Western pluralism was not just a source of freedom and prosperity. It was also a source of conflict, because each ruler always feared losing ground to others. Many historians have condemned nationalism as the great vice of the West. I am concerned rather to account for the passions of nationalism by rooting them in Christian ethnicity, which is itself a kind of paradox— the paradox of a universalist religion in the guise of national ideology, whether English, French, German, Russian, or American. You cannot separate economic growth and democratization from political competition and war in Western history. They are all aspects of the same thing. The difference in our time is that Western societies have finally rejected aggressive war as a means of policy. One may hope that this leaves the other aspects— prosperity and democracy— to flourish.

This symbiosis in Western history of liberty and conflict brings us back to the blood and passion of history. It was not always pleasant for its victims and would not win many friends in today’s American academy. It led to holy war in the Crusades and to the ethic of sacrifice that launched and prolonged many later wars. But it also produced the energy necessary for the societies of freedom to survive the challenge of despotism in the world wars and Cold War of this century that is now ending. Therefore we need to recover these old connections, not to reintroduce war as a tool of policy, but to understand that change and progress in history are never simple and never costless.

The final message of the book is that universalism— the idea that everyone wants democracy and free markets, and will get them— is wrong because the world is not the West. On the other hand, if Western elites forget their roots and launch themselves into the illusions of a conflict-free multiculturalism, they risk bringing down the West and with it an essential building block of tomorrow’s multipolar world order. The West owes it to the world not to disappear.

http://www.fpri.org/ww/0105.199808.gress...ewest.html

BJP disowns Jaswant’s ‘Jinnah’ book

* Party president says Jinnah played role in division of India

By Iftikhar Gilani

NEW DELHI: Indian opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), officially dissociated itself on Tuesday from senior party leader Jaswant Singh’s book on Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, saying it “does not represent the views of the party”.

A day after the book’s release, BJP President Rajnath Singh released a statement saying the views expressed by the former external affairs minister did not reflect the party position. “The book authored by Shri Jaswant Singh does not represent the views of the Bharatiya Janata Party. In fact the party completely dissociates itself from the contents of the book,” it said.

Too well known: In his book, Jaswant has held Jawaharlal Nehru responsible for the partition of India, adding Jinnah has been unfairly “demonised” in India. Rajnath underlined that Jinnah had played an important role in the “division of India, which led to a lot of dislocation and destabilisation of millions of people”. “It is too well known. We cannot wish away this painful part of our history,” he said. He also took objection to the ridicule of Sardar Vallabhai Patel by Jaswant, saying the country’s first home minister had played an historic role in the unification and consolidation of India amidst serious threats to its unity and integrity. “The entire country remains indebted and proud of all the profound vision, courage and leadership of Patel,” he said.

Earlier, BJP’s deputy leader in the Lok Sabha Sushma Swaraj had indicated that Jaswant Singh’s views on Jinnah would “certainly” be the subject of a detailed discussion at the party’s three-day brainstorming session in Simla due to begin today (Wednesday). “Denigrating Sardar Patel and eulogising Jinnah are views that are totally against the party’s basic ideology and belief,” she was quoted as saying in a report published in The Hindu. There could be, and would be, no compromise on the party beliefs, she added.

<b>We Are All Hindus Now</b>


America is not a Christian nation. We are, it is true, a nation founded by Christians, and according to a 2008 survey, 76 percent of us continue to identify as Christian (still, that's the lowest percentage in American history). Of course, we are not a Hindu—or Muslim, or Jewish, or Wiccan—nation, either. A million-plus Hindus live in the United States, a fraction of the billion who live on Earth. But recent poll data show that conceptually, at least, we are slowly becoming more like Hindus and less like traditional Christians in the ways we think about God, our selves, each other, and eternity.


The Rig Veda, the most ancient Hindu scripture, says this: "Truth is One, but the sages speak of it by many names." A Hindu believes there are many paths to God. Jesus is one way, the Qur'an is another, yoga practice is a third. None is better than any other; all are equal. The most traditional, conservative Christians have not been taught to think like this. They learn in Sunday school that their religion is true, and others are false. Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through me."

Americans are no longer buying it. According to a 2008 Pew Forum survey, 65 percent of us believe that "many religions can lead to eternal life"—including 37 percent of white evangelicals, the group most likely to believe that salvation is theirs alone. Also, the number of people who seek spiritual truth outside church is growing. Thirty percent of Americans call themselves "spiritual, not religious," according to a 2009 NEWSWEEK Poll, up from 24 percent in 2005. Stephen Prothero, religion professor at Boston University, has long framed the American propensity for "the divine-deli-cafeteria religion" as "very much in the spirit of Hinduism. You're not picking and choosing from different religions, because they're all the same," he says. "It isn't about orthodoxy. It's about whatever works. If going to yoga works, great—and if going to Catholic mass works, great. And if going to Catholic mass plus the yoga plus the Buddhist retreat works, that's great, too."


Then there's the question of what happens when you die. Christians traditionally believe that bodies and souls are sacred, that together they comprise the "self," and that at the end of time they will be reunited in the Resurrection. You need both, in other words, and you need them forever. Hindus believe no such thing. At death, the body burns on a pyre, while the spirit—where identity resides—escapes. In reincarnation, central to Hinduism, selves come back to earth again and again in different bodies. So here is another way in which Americans are becoming more Hindu: 24 percent of Americans say they believe in reincarnation, according to a 2008 Harris poll. So agnostic are we about the ultimate fates of our bodies that we're burning them—like Hindus—after death. More than a third of Americans now choose cremation, according to the Cremation Association of North America, up from 6 percent in 1975. "I do think the more spiritual role of religion tends to deemphasize some of the more starkly literal interpretations of the Resurrection," agrees Diana Eck, professor of comparative religion at Harvard. So let us all say "om.


http://www.newsweek.com/id/212155

<b>U.S. Government to Track Citizens Visiting Federal Websites</b>
Date: 8/13/2009 1:13:37 PM

http://action.afa.net/Blogs/BlogPost.aspx?id=2147486275

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->In the reversal of a nine-year policy preventing the use of tracking cookies on those people who visit federal websites, the White House is now considering changing this policy.

Even the ACLU is concerned about this policy reversal, calling it a "serious threat to Americans' personal information." Their website states:

Since 2000, it has been the policy of the federal government not to use such technology. But the OMB is now seeking to change that policy and is considering the use of cookies for tracking web visitors across multiple sessions and storing their unique preferences and surfing habits. Though this is a major shift in policy, the announcement of this program consists of only a single page from the federal register that contains almost no detail.

“This is a sea change in government privacy policy,” said Michael Macleod-Ball, Acting Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “Without explaining this reversal of policy, the OMB is seeking to allow the mass collection of personal information of every user of a federal government website. Until the OMB answers the multitude of questions surrounding this policy shift, we will continue to raise our strenuous objections.”

The use of cookies allows a website to differentiate between users and build a database of each user’s viewing habits and the information they share with the site. Since web surfers frequently share information like their name or email address (if they’ve signed up for a service) or search request terms, the use of cookies frequently allows a user’s identity and web surfing habits to be linked. In addition, websites can allow third parties, such as advertisers, to also place cookies on a user’s computer.

“Americans rely on the information from the federal government to research politics, medical issues and legal requirements. The OMB is now asking to retain the personal and identifiable information we leave behind,” said Christopher Calabrese, Counsel for the ACLU Technology and Liberty Project. “No American should have to sacrifice privacy or risk surveillance in order to access free government information. No policy change should be adopted without wide ranging debate including information on the restrictions and uses of cookies as well as impact on privacy.”

This is just the latest McCarthy type move by the Obama administration this week. Earlier in the week I blogged about the White House asking members of the public to report anyone spreading "disinformation" about ObamaCare. Now they want to keep track of who is visiting federal websites. Bush took a lot of flak for the Patriot Act, but Obama's administration isn't looking any better to me right now.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recent.../us2009kdb2.php
<b>Magnitude 7.6 - ANDAMAN ISLANDS, INDIA REGION</b>

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/dyfi/e...2/us/index.html

<b>TSUNAMI ALERT: India, Myanmar, Indonesia, Thailand and Bangladesh... </b>