Wapo’s On Faith asked some folks to make some predictions about what the world’s religions have in store for us next year. Here are some excerpts of their commentary.

Susan Jacoby says:

Why should we expect anything different from religion in 2009? Conservative Muslims will continue to make trouble for secular governments in nations with large Muslim populations. Islamist radicals will launch more terrorist attacks somewhere. In Israel, the ultra-Orthodox will continue to occupy territory they believe God gave them. The Roman Catholic Church will continue to pursue its ludicrous strategy of trying to fight poverty without controlling population and trying to address AIDS through abstinence-only education. In the United States, right-wing evangelicals like Rick Warren will continue to try to conceal their true goals from religious liberals like Barack Obama with a message of bogus “tolerance.” Tolerance for their antedeluvian beliefs, that is. At some point, Obama may realize that the “reaching out” has all been on his side and that he will gain nothing by pandering to these people. One lives in hope.

Cal Thomas says:

In the Middle East — the world’s most volatile place — extremist Islam will continue to fuel the fires of hate, anti-Semitism and division. Palestinian children will continue to be taught that their highest goal in life should be martyrdom and the killing of Jews, Christians and other “infidels.”. Saudi Arabia will continue to fund terrorist organizations and build mosques in Western countries, including the United States, for what purpose it does not take an expert to guess. Much has been written on the “Trojan horse” by experienced and credible witnesses to this strategy.

Deepak Chopra says:

The best that religion can hope for is to live comfortably side by side with secular society. Other than that, 2009 will witness the same decline in status and membership as in previous years, with intermittent increases in the sector of fundamentalism. Now that fundamentalism has become a dreaded word in every troubled part of the globe, the taint of extremism may harm that movement as well.

Rabbi Brad Hirschfeld says:

The easy, self-congratulatory, and incorrect answer would be to blame some wicked cabal of secular elites who have it in for the faithful. The real answer probably has more to do with the gap that has opened up between the ethics, values, and wisdom within religion which most Americans still trust, and those religious institutions which people anticipate will have less influence in what may be emerging as a less ideologically driven culture.

Rev. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite says:

The religious vision that “we” (whoever “we” may be) must destroy in order to save cannot be defeated with military might. The only way the love of death in religion can be overcome is through a more powerful religious vision of world-affirming, peace-performing and justice-making love.

I believe that those are our religious the choices, both nationally and internationally, in 2009.

I am actually less awed by the destructive power of religion than by the power of the vision of hope in the midst of hopelessness, empathy in the midst of war, and above all the power of the vision of peace. That is the “awful” truth of religion in which I most profoundly believe. The “awful truth” is that many people, from many different religions, work every day to build justice, peace and hope.

And Willis E. Elliot makes eight points, number seven of which says:

As America’s children have had decreasing contact with “church” (religious institutions), Americans have decreased literacy in religion and increased belief in their inherent human dignity and independence, with all the alleged “rights” imagined as pertaining thereto. Invited to teach at Esalen Institute in 1968, I found that one of those rights was the right of “the second dessert,” the choice of a bed-partner for the night (now called, in our colleges, “hooking up”). Public-school-produced children are more like marbles in a bag than cells in a body: each marble has its holy “dignity” and sacred “rights.” Why wouldn’t they be enraged at society’s denial of any “right,” such as the so-called “constitutional right to gay marriage”?

What do I say?

Who knows? It sure would be nice if instead of trying to be good Christians or good Buddhists that practitioners would become Christs and Buddhas.

May Awakenings abound, and Happy New Year to all.

Here’s a recording of a recent Dharma talk.

ISmile201 – Practicing with Fear and Desire.

Click HERE in order to listen to Michael’s talk.
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In this podcast, Michael discusses how the challenge of practicing with even the darkest of emotions can help open us to Truth.

Deepak Chopra offers some geopolitical advice.

In a broad sense I agree with his points.

Money quote:

…if terrorism is like cancer, let’s treat it that way. Cancer is universal, endemic, and never entirely eradicable. For this generation, terrorism is the same. Our goal should be to keep it in check, with a final vision of healing it. The right wing may resist this interpretation with all its might, but the noxious effects of inflaming Arab sympathizers and thus turning them into terror cells is there for all to see.

I would only add that what looks like a new “surge” of 4 to 5 brigades might miss the mark, or even, by Chopra’s logic, may deepen the cancer’s malignancy. Is anyone talking about a surge in diplomacy?

What do you think?

(Bows, SFGate)

If only my Japanese was a little better… guess I’ll wait for the subtitled version. Still, this ought to be an interesting cinematic ride.

This trailer got to me first from Dosho Port at Wild Fox Zen, then Rev. Danny Fisher talked about it. Finally, Rod Meade Sperry over at Shambhala Sun Space mentioned it, so I figured it was my turn.

Over at integral praxis, they posted a vid that incorporates nice imagery with the thought-provoking words of Dr. Brian Swimme. Two notes:

1. I know of few individuals with a more interesting view of the comprehensive whole than Brian Swimme. He gets the big picture and can articulate it brilliantly in small ways.

2. Because of this, I will always give him my ear whenever he starts speaking.

Jonathan Bartley over at the guardian.co.uk points out how the Virgin Mary might have looked better in red.

There is a tendency to think of Mary as a victim – a slightly passive but worthy virgin, chosen to bear the god-child because she has wouldn’t hurt a first-century fly. But Mary’s response is not one of benign resignation. She celebrates. She bursts into song. And the song she sings is about an end to tyranny and oppression. She anticipates that the powerful will be brought down, the hungry fed, and the rich sent away with nothing. The world will be turned upside down by the baby growing inside her.

And turned upside down it was:

The Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55), as it came to be known, is a profoundly political song of subversion. But it is also entirely in keeping with the tone of the Christmas story. Oppressive Romans are seeking to extend their control and tax the Jewish population through a census. A despotic ruler sees Jesus as a potential threat, and commits a terrible atrocity in his desire to eliminate the risk. Jesus’ family become asylum seekers and flee to Egypt. The baby has clearly come to cause trouble – and he subsequently does so for both the religious and political authorities of his day.

In light of recent papal commentary, the recognition Christianity’s revolutionary nature might do all of us, in every tradition, some good.

Merry Christmas, one and all.

There is a great post by Noah Millman over at The American Scene where he takes on several issues relating to religion, all of which are entertaining. I’m most partial to his description of how religion works:

…most of us who are in any meaningful sense religious are members of corporate bodies extending through time and space. And corporate bodies to exist at all must define their boundaries: this is who we are, this is what we believe, this is how we behave. And this requires an implicitly if not explicitly excluded “not that.”

He goes on to posit what most of us familiar with the work of Ken Wilber and Spiral Dynamics might see as the core of the Mean Green’s dilemma:

This being the case, if freedom of religion means, most fundamentally, the freedom to be a heretic, it equally means the freedom to declare that the other guy is a heretic. In a very real sense, a social environment that is hostile to religious intolerance must necessarily be hostile to religious freedom.

Andrew Sullivan chimes in on this with an astute observation that points directly to the limits of First Tier approaches to Spirit when he suggests that none of us holds a monopoly on truth:

…the impossibility of humankind ever being able to know the Godhead with sufficient certainty to use power to restrain the heretic. Again: the true believer will, in my view, seek freedom for God rather than power against heresy.

First off, “certitude” is the source of the problem. Certitude is exactly what gives rise to the egoic division that says “I’m right, and you’re wrong,” which in turn begets violence. Our futile attempts at knowing God will forever frustrate us since God is precisely beyond the mind. Trying to know God is like trying to shovel away the tide.

Truly being still, on the other hand gets us past the boundaries of both the mind as well as the body. Practicing this expanse mysteriously pushes and pulls at everyone of our relationships, including our old mental and physical constructs. From here, difference and sameness become much less of an issue since they are seen as incomplete aspects of a bigger story.

Here’s a InfiniteSmile.org podcast that might be of interest.

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