^ The (un)originality of the sermon on the mount.
The following is McCabe I think.
1. On christianism's encouragement of Poverty of *Spirit*. Cf. Pagan views on frugal *life*.
2. Meekness and Turning The Other Cheek stuff. Gandhianism. Romantic notions are all fine sentiments in theory. In reality it's another matter. Remember (and compare with) Bodhi's sane expose on Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (sp?).
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Modern divines recognize these weaknesses, and say that it is not a single discourse, but a collection of sayings of Jesus put in a dramatic form by the writer of the Gospels. This, they say, does not in the least detract from its value. The sentiments embodied in it are superb, unique, etc. Let us see.
<b>It opens with the famous Eight Beatitudes, "Blessed are the poor in spirit," and so on.</b> I have noticed that much time is wasted by clericals and anti-clericals in conflicts over this supposed glorification of poverty. Divines with a pretension to a knowledge of Greek assure us that what Jesus really says is: "Blessed be the poor." That is nonsense, for the Greek text, which lies before me, contains no verb at all. In plain English, this first and much- quoted sentence of the great sermon is a piece of confusion. Consistently with other texts of the Gospels, and the tenets of the Essenians, it ought to be a frank glorification of poverty. But the writer expressly says "the poor in spirit," or poor-spirited; and the only plausible meaning we can give to it is "the humble in spirit." Our age does not want that counsel. It has done incalculable harm in the past. But, in any case, to say that there is anything original in a religious moralist commending humility is quite absurd. The later books of the Old Testament and the Talmud are full of such passages, and one could cull even from the pagan moralists a whole anthology of such sentiments. <b>Even material poverty, if any insist that Jesus meant this, is glorified by them, Seneca wrote a treatise on it. Plutarch asks: "What disease shall we say that the rich man suffereth from but spiritual poverty?" ("On Covetousness," iv). Epictetus says: "Any person may live happy in poverty, but few in wealth and power" ("Fragments," cxxviii).</b><!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The next sentence is "Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted": which is almost a quotation from Isaiah (Ixi, 1-2, etc.), or from innumerable verses of the prophets and the psalms. Every moralist who believes in God makes a commonplace of the sentiment. So it is with the blessing of "the meek" -- another disastrous counsel which Christianity impressed upon the world. The psalms and prophets are full of it, and every Stoic repeats it. Seneca says: "I will be meek and yielding to my enemies" ("On the Happy Life," xx, 5). Plutarch writes: "A calm and meek and humane temper is not more pleasant to those with whom we live than to him who possesseth it" ("On Restraining Anger," xvi).
Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius constantly say it. And I admire it no more in them than in Matthew; but anything less original than these "Eight Platitudes," as they ought to be called, it would be difficult to conceive. I have in my other work given many perfect parallels to each, and could have given scores. Each sentiment is a moral and religious commonplace,
(Don't know what Seneca was thinking; but Greco-Romans were only human after all. Certainly possible for humans to be too in love with some notions, especially if pondering such things from the comfort of their homes and hearths.)
After the Beatitudes the writer makes Jesus address his audience as "the salt of the earth," and "the light of the world," and so on. It is obviously meant to be an address to a few chosen disciples; yet at the close, we are told, "the people were astonished at his doctrine." The whole passage is a clumsy late fabrication, for at that time, the very beginning of the career of Jesus, there was no question of any "persecution." And what would the four burly fishermen, who had just been recruited in Galilee, think of hearing that they were "the light of the world"? It was precisely the title which Jewish pupils gave to their most learned Rabbis.
Jesus is then said to have assured his hearers that he advocated no change whatever in "the Law": the most essential injunctions of which (sacrifice, etc.) he spent his career in denouncing. "Till heaven and earth shall pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled" (v, 18). Here Matthew puts into the mouth of Jesus the sentiment of the Judaizing Christians, and confirms it in the next verse with a stern threat; and in the very next verse he switches off to the sentiments of the anti-Judaizing Christians and begins to belabor the Pharisees -- the model observers of the Law!
The writer does not even understand them. The old law was, he makes Jesus say, that you must not kill: the new law is that you shall not even be angry with your brother "without a cause." A few verses earlier the lesson was that you must not even be angry with your brother if you have a cause. Moreover, there is nothing in the least new about this "new and higher morality." The Pharisees of the second century must have smiled at it, because precisely the old law ran (Lev. xix, 18): "Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart . ... thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." And, as I have already said, the Rabbis quoted in the Talmud and the pagan moralists abound in the same sense.
Matthew makes Jesus follow up his counsel by saying that if you take a gift to the altar and recollect that you have a grudge against a man, you must "leave the gift before the altar" and go first and be reconciled. A pretty anachronism! There were no Christian altars to receive gifts until decades after the death of Jesus; and men did not take "gifts," but animals to be sacrificed (which Jesus denounced), to the Jewish altars.
He goes on to say that the old law was that you should not commit adultery: the new law makes it a sin even to desire a woman. But the oldest law precisely was: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife," and the later books of the Old Testament say exactly what Jesus is supposed to say: "Lust not after her beauty in thine heart" (Prov. vi, 25), and "Gaze not on a maid ... gaze not on another's beauty," (Ecclus. ix, 5 and 8). The Rabbis went even beyond Jesus. "Whosoever," says the Talmud, "regardeth even the little finger of a woman hath already sinned in his heart" (Beracbot, 24, 1). Seneca, Epictetus and all the Stoics are just as stern with us. "It is the intention, not the outward act, which makes the wickedness," says Seneca ("On the Happy Life," xvi). Our age is not likely to be moved by these exaggerated pruderies.
Then there is the "sublime principle," in a matter of vital human importance, about divorce. Mark and Luke make Jesus forbid divorce under any conditions. Matthew allows divorce for "fornication." The result is that the Churches are entirely at variance on one of the most important of social and moral problems. The Catholic thinks all divorce invalid; the British Protestant is sure that a woman commits no sin if she remarries after divorcing her husband for adultery; the German or American Protestant genially commits all three Evangelists (if not Jesus) to the flames and gets a divorce for half a dozen reasons. Verily, our age would be sadly perplexed if it had not these simple and sublime teachings of Jesus!
I may add that the Jews at the time of Jesus were just as divided as the primitive Christians evidently were, and Christians are today. Some Rabbis -- unknown to Matthew -- forbade divorce altogether; some allowed it for adultery; others admitted many grounds for divorce. And we are told that it is only from religion that we can get any clear and firm guidance on sex-questions.
Several verses on oaths follow: and the writer of the Gospel again makes a mistake in thinking that the Old Testament and the Pharisees did not forbid swearing. "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain" is one of the Ten Commandments; and more than one passage of the Old Testament says, like Ecclus. xxiii, 9-11, "Accustom not thy mouth to an oath." There were no civic or official oaths in Judea; but there is no Christian country that has not myriads of them. Until recently Christian civilizations prosecuted any man who acted on Christ's injunction and refused to take an oath. Less than a century ago men who sought justice in British courts of law were contemptuously dismissed because they had scruples about taking an oath. Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus condemned oaths just as Jesus did. Popes and bishops insist on them.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
More on The Turning Of The Cheek:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Next comes the famous council that, whereas the old law permitted one to demand "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," in the new and higher dispensation you must even turn the other cheek to the smiter and give the cloak also to the man who takes your coat.
Since Christendom is unanimously agreed, and always has been agreed, that no man of sense would act upon this "sublime teaching" of Jesus, we need hardly linger over it. But it is necessary to point out once more that it is certainly not Jesus -- not a Jew of the year 30 A.D. who said this. For, although the "eye for an eye" principle is found in Exodus, where it seems to be a fragment of earlier tribal customs, the later books of the Old Testament say, over and over again, precisely what Matthew gives as a new law. "I gave my back to the smiters and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair," says Isaiah (1, 6). "Let him give his cheek to him that smiteth him," says Jeremiah in Lamentations (iii, 30). "If any demand thy ass, give him also the saddle," says the Talmud (Baba kamma, 92, 2); and this saying is described as a popular proverb. "Let him strike thee," says Plato (Gorgias, 527), giving counsel how to deal with an angry man.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->There in the heart of Agnostic China, three hundred years before the Sermon on the Mount was delivered, you have the complete doctrine of loving your enemies as a commonplace of humanitarian morality.
Buddha in India taught the same doctrine. Love was to be universal, he insisted; and in the Dhammapada we read: "Hatred ceases by love: this is an old rule." It seems, in fact, to have been as common in India centuries before Christ as it was in China. In the "laws of Manu," compiled early in the Christian Era, but consisting of ancient Hindu writings, it is said: "Against an angry man let him not in return show anger: let him bless when he is cursed."
(McCabe knows a lot about Romans, Greeks, christian and possibly even Judaic history. But I've seen some mistakes of his on Hindu and other Asian traditions. Though it sounds plausibly Hindu enough, yet until that last statement regarding Manu is confirmed by knowledgeable Hindus, am not swinging either way on it. )
Non-Christian European moralists -- Socrates and Plato, Seneca, Pliny, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius -- all had the same sentiment. "We ought not to retaliate, or render evil for evil to anyone," said Socrate, quoted approvingly by Plato. Seneca wrote a whole treatise on "Anger"' condemning it in every form. It is therefore not in the least surprising that, when Greek influence began to be felt in Judea, as we see in Ecclesiasticus and Proverbs, the same sentiment is reproduced. "Thou shalt not hate thy brother," was already written in Leviticus; but, as I said before, the Jew's "brother" always meant a Jew. The sentiment, however, was now so common in every school of moralists that the finer Hebrews naturally adopted it, and, through the school of the Rabbi Hillel, it passed on to the Christians.
Here, then, is a sentiment, which thousands of Christian writers have claimed to be entirely original in Christ, actually found to be a commonplace of moralists for hundreds of years before Christ and in the "pagan" world. I trust the Christian reader will see in this a striking illustration of the way in which he is misled; but I will carry the argument just one step farther.
It occurred to no Christian, not even to Christ, that, if this moral sentiment is lofty, it ought pre-eminently to apply to man's conception of God. On what principle must Christ as man love his enemies, and Christ as God devise for them an eternity of fiendish torment? Let your Dr. Rileys answer that. And, since God, the ideal, was held to punish transgressors of his law, human and ecclesiastical society everywhere continued without scruple to do so.
<b>We realize today that this is immoral. We inflict penalties to deter would-be transgressors, not as punishment. Who introduced this idea into the world? Plato and Aristotle. They taught the Greeks that the "punishment" of a criminal was "a moral medicine" and a deterrent.</b> Then came Christianity, and the sentiment was lost. Punishment, as such, was more abominable than ever. At last a group of humanitarians, won the reform. Who were they? Grotius (a liberal Christian or semi-Rationalist, and the least effective), and then Hobbes, Montesquieu, Beecaria, Filangiere, Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, and (above all) Bentham -- all Rationalists, most of the Agnostics.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Well, it wasn't just Plato and Aristotle who were of this opinion. Bodhi has shown how Kautilya and other Hindus had also sanely stressed the importance of punishing criminal behaviour to safeguard society instead of cosying up to terrorist fiends (Bodhi's articles on Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam again).
Christo Sonia/MMS-led government is rather too christian and lets terrorists off the hook from mass-murder.
McCabe again:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The Churches dare not in our age consistently advocate their Christian ethic. It is a condemnation, root and branch, of all pleasure. An ethic which puts married folk on a lower level, as weaklings who cannot scale the heights of superiority, has no place in the twentieth century. An ethic that preaches that a man must embrace poverty if he would be really virtuous dare not be urged from any pulpit in America. <b>An ethic that bids the really just man turn the other cheek to the smiter is not lofty or sublime, but a sheer blunder.</b> And these things are essential parts of Christ's morality, however little they may be obtruded in Christian morality.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Am in agreement with McCabe's statement in bold.
But faithful catholic Sonia Goonda is not allowed to read Joseph McCabe because the Vatican has put his works in the church's list of forbidden books. And so Hindus suffer the terrorisms patronised by "saint me now, I don't want it awarded posthumously" Sonia.
Hey, that's what she'll be: Santa Antonia Maino, Patron Saint of Terrorists/Terrorism.
The following is McCabe I think.
1. On christianism's encouragement of Poverty of *Spirit*. Cf. Pagan views on frugal *life*.
2. Meekness and Turning The Other Cheek stuff. Gandhianism. Romantic notions are all fine sentiments in theory. In reality it's another matter. Remember (and compare with) Bodhi's sane expose on Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (sp?).
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Modern divines recognize these weaknesses, and say that it is not a single discourse, but a collection of sayings of Jesus put in a dramatic form by the writer of the Gospels. This, they say, does not in the least detract from its value. The sentiments embodied in it are superb, unique, etc. Let us see.
<b>It opens with the famous Eight Beatitudes, "Blessed are the poor in spirit," and so on.</b> I have noticed that much time is wasted by clericals and anti-clericals in conflicts over this supposed glorification of poverty. Divines with a pretension to a knowledge of Greek assure us that what Jesus really says is: "Blessed be the poor." That is nonsense, for the Greek text, which lies before me, contains no verb at all. In plain English, this first and much- quoted sentence of the great sermon is a piece of confusion. Consistently with other texts of the Gospels, and the tenets of the Essenians, it ought to be a frank glorification of poverty. But the writer expressly says "the poor in spirit," or poor-spirited; and the only plausible meaning we can give to it is "the humble in spirit." Our age does not want that counsel. It has done incalculable harm in the past. But, in any case, to say that there is anything original in a religious moralist commending humility is quite absurd. The later books of the Old Testament and the Talmud are full of such passages, and one could cull even from the pagan moralists a whole anthology of such sentiments. <b>Even material poverty, if any insist that Jesus meant this, is glorified by them, Seneca wrote a treatise on it. Plutarch asks: "What disease shall we say that the rich man suffereth from but spiritual poverty?" ("On Covetousness," iv). Epictetus says: "Any person may live happy in poverty, but few in wealth and power" ("Fragments," cxxviii).</b><!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The next sentence is "Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted": which is almost a quotation from Isaiah (Ixi, 1-2, etc.), or from innumerable verses of the prophets and the psalms. Every moralist who believes in God makes a commonplace of the sentiment. So it is with the blessing of "the meek" -- another disastrous counsel which Christianity impressed upon the world. The psalms and prophets are full of it, and every Stoic repeats it. Seneca says: "I will be meek and yielding to my enemies" ("On the Happy Life," xx, 5). Plutarch writes: "A calm and meek and humane temper is not more pleasant to those with whom we live than to him who possesseth it" ("On Restraining Anger," xvi).
Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius constantly say it. And I admire it no more in them than in Matthew; but anything less original than these "Eight Platitudes," as they ought to be called, it would be difficult to conceive. I have in my other work given many perfect parallels to each, and could have given scores. Each sentiment is a moral and religious commonplace,
(Don't know what Seneca was thinking; but Greco-Romans were only human after all. Certainly possible for humans to be too in love with some notions, especially if pondering such things from the comfort of their homes and hearths.)
After the Beatitudes the writer makes Jesus address his audience as "the salt of the earth," and "the light of the world," and so on. It is obviously meant to be an address to a few chosen disciples; yet at the close, we are told, "the people were astonished at his doctrine." The whole passage is a clumsy late fabrication, for at that time, the very beginning of the career of Jesus, there was no question of any "persecution." And what would the four burly fishermen, who had just been recruited in Galilee, think of hearing that they were "the light of the world"? It was precisely the title which Jewish pupils gave to their most learned Rabbis.
Jesus is then said to have assured his hearers that he advocated no change whatever in "the Law": the most essential injunctions of which (sacrifice, etc.) he spent his career in denouncing. "Till heaven and earth shall pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled" (v, 18). Here Matthew puts into the mouth of Jesus the sentiment of the Judaizing Christians, and confirms it in the next verse with a stern threat; and in the very next verse he switches off to the sentiments of the anti-Judaizing Christians and begins to belabor the Pharisees -- the model observers of the Law!
The writer does not even understand them. The old law was, he makes Jesus say, that you must not kill: the new law is that you shall not even be angry with your brother "without a cause." A few verses earlier the lesson was that you must not even be angry with your brother if you have a cause. Moreover, there is nothing in the least new about this "new and higher morality." The Pharisees of the second century must have smiled at it, because precisely the old law ran (Lev. xix, 18): "Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart . ... thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." And, as I have already said, the Rabbis quoted in the Talmud and the pagan moralists abound in the same sense.
Matthew makes Jesus follow up his counsel by saying that if you take a gift to the altar and recollect that you have a grudge against a man, you must "leave the gift before the altar" and go first and be reconciled. A pretty anachronism! There were no Christian altars to receive gifts until decades after the death of Jesus; and men did not take "gifts," but animals to be sacrificed (which Jesus denounced), to the Jewish altars.
He goes on to say that the old law was that you should not commit adultery: the new law makes it a sin even to desire a woman. But the oldest law precisely was: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife," and the later books of the Old Testament say exactly what Jesus is supposed to say: "Lust not after her beauty in thine heart" (Prov. vi, 25), and "Gaze not on a maid ... gaze not on another's beauty," (Ecclus. ix, 5 and 8). The Rabbis went even beyond Jesus. "Whosoever," says the Talmud, "regardeth even the little finger of a woman hath already sinned in his heart" (Beracbot, 24, 1). Seneca, Epictetus and all the Stoics are just as stern with us. "It is the intention, not the outward act, which makes the wickedness," says Seneca ("On the Happy Life," xvi). Our age is not likely to be moved by these exaggerated pruderies.
Then there is the "sublime principle," in a matter of vital human importance, about divorce. Mark and Luke make Jesus forbid divorce under any conditions. Matthew allows divorce for "fornication." The result is that the Churches are entirely at variance on one of the most important of social and moral problems. The Catholic thinks all divorce invalid; the British Protestant is sure that a woman commits no sin if she remarries after divorcing her husband for adultery; the German or American Protestant genially commits all three Evangelists (if not Jesus) to the flames and gets a divorce for half a dozen reasons. Verily, our age would be sadly perplexed if it had not these simple and sublime teachings of Jesus!
I may add that the Jews at the time of Jesus were just as divided as the primitive Christians evidently were, and Christians are today. Some Rabbis -- unknown to Matthew -- forbade divorce altogether; some allowed it for adultery; others admitted many grounds for divorce. And we are told that it is only from religion that we can get any clear and firm guidance on sex-questions.
Several verses on oaths follow: and the writer of the Gospel again makes a mistake in thinking that the Old Testament and the Pharisees did not forbid swearing. "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain" is one of the Ten Commandments; and more than one passage of the Old Testament says, like Ecclus. xxiii, 9-11, "Accustom not thy mouth to an oath." There were no civic or official oaths in Judea; but there is no Christian country that has not myriads of them. Until recently Christian civilizations prosecuted any man who acted on Christ's injunction and refused to take an oath. Less than a century ago men who sought justice in British courts of law were contemptuously dismissed because they had scruples about taking an oath. Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus condemned oaths just as Jesus did. Popes and bishops insist on them.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
More on The Turning Of The Cheek:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Next comes the famous council that, whereas the old law permitted one to demand "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," in the new and higher dispensation you must even turn the other cheek to the smiter and give the cloak also to the man who takes your coat.
Since Christendom is unanimously agreed, and always has been agreed, that no man of sense would act upon this "sublime teaching" of Jesus, we need hardly linger over it. But it is necessary to point out once more that it is certainly not Jesus -- not a Jew of the year 30 A.D. who said this. For, although the "eye for an eye" principle is found in Exodus, where it seems to be a fragment of earlier tribal customs, the later books of the Old Testament say, over and over again, precisely what Matthew gives as a new law. "I gave my back to the smiters and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair," says Isaiah (1, 6). "Let him give his cheek to him that smiteth him," says Jeremiah in Lamentations (iii, 30). "If any demand thy ass, give him also the saddle," says the Talmud (Baba kamma, 92, 2); and this saying is described as a popular proverb. "Let him strike thee," says Plato (Gorgias, 527), giving counsel how to deal with an angry man.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->There in the heart of Agnostic China, three hundred years before the Sermon on the Mount was delivered, you have the complete doctrine of loving your enemies as a commonplace of humanitarian morality.
Buddha in India taught the same doctrine. Love was to be universal, he insisted; and in the Dhammapada we read: "Hatred ceases by love: this is an old rule." It seems, in fact, to have been as common in India centuries before Christ as it was in China. In the "laws of Manu," compiled early in the Christian Era, but consisting of ancient Hindu writings, it is said: "Against an angry man let him not in return show anger: let him bless when he is cursed."
(McCabe knows a lot about Romans, Greeks, christian and possibly even Judaic history. But I've seen some mistakes of his on Hindu and other Asian traditions. Though it sounds plausibly Hindu enough, yet until that last statement regarding Manu is confirmed by knowledgeable Hindus, am not swinging either way on it. )
Non-Christian European moralists -- Socrates and Plato, Seneca, Pliny, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius -- all had the same sentiment. "We ought not to retaliate, or render evil for evil to anyone," said Socrate, quoted approvingly by Plato. Seneca wrote a whole treatise on "Anger"' condemning it in every form. It is therefore not in the least surprising that, when Greek influence began to be felt in Judea, as we see in Ecclesiasticus and Proverbs, the same sentiment is reproduced. "Thou shalt not hate thy brother," was already written in Leviticus; but, as I said before, the Jew's "brother" always meant a Jew. The sentiment, however, was now so common in every school of moralists that the finer Hebrews naturally adopted it, and, through the school of the Rabbi Hillel, it passed on to the Christians.
Here, then, is a sentiment, which thousands of Christian writers have claimed to be entirely original in Christ, actually found to be a commonplace of moralists for hundreds of years before Christ and in the "pagan" world. I trust the Christian reader will see in this a striking illustration of the way in which he is misled; but I will carry the argument just one step farther.
It occurred to no Christian, not even to Christ, that, if this moral sentiment is lofty, it ought pre-eminently to apply to man's conception of God. On what principle must Christ as man love his enemies, and Christ as God devise for them an eternity of fiendish torment? Let your Dr. Rileys answer that. And, since God, the ideal, was held to punish transgressors of his law, human and ecclesiastical society everywhere continued without scruple to do so.
<b>We realize today that this is immoral. We inflict penalties to deter would-be transgressors, not as punishment. Who introduced this idea into the world? Plato and Aristotle. They taught the Greeks that the "punishment" of a criminal was "a moral medicine" and a deterrent.</b> Then came Christianity, and the sentiment was lost. Punishment, as such, was more abominable than ever. At last a group of humanitarians, won the reform. Who were they? Grotius (a liberal Christian or semi-Rationalist, and the least effective), and then Hobbes, Montesquieu, Beecaria, Filangiere, Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, and (above all) Bentham -- all Rationalists, most of the Agnostics.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Well, it wasn't just Plato and Aristotle who were of this opinion. Bodhi has shown how Kautilya and other Hindus had also sanely stressed the importance of punishing criminal behaviour to safeguard society instead of cosying up to terrorist fiends (Bodhi's articles on Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam again).
Christo Sonia/MMS-led government is rather too christian and lets terrorists off the hook from mass-murder.
McCabe again:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The Churches dare not in our age consistently advocate their Christian ethic. It is a condemnation, root and branch, of all pleasure. An ethic which puts married folk on a lower level, as weaklings who cannot scale the heights of superiority, has no place in the twentieth century. An ethic that preaches that a man must embrace poverty if he would be really virtuous dare not be urged from any pulpit in America. <b>An ethic that bids the really just man turn the other cheek to the smiter is not lofty or sublime, but a sheer blunder.</b> And these things are essential parts of Christ's morality, however little they may be obtruded in Christian morality.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Am in agreement with McCabe's statement in bold.
But faithful catholic Sonia Goonda is not allowed to read Joseph McCabe because the Vatican has put his works in the church's list of forbidden books. And so Hindus suffer the terrorisms patronised by "saint me now, I don't want it awarded posthumously" Sonia.
Hey, that's what she'll be: Santa Antonia Maino, Patron Saint of Terrorists/Terrorism.