This week at The Immanent Frame, Professor Kathryn Lofton comments on the millennial masculinism of the new atheists:

If you want to be a New Atheist, you are worried a lot. You are worried about the Bible and the Koran, about Talibans and new Inquisitions, about Jerry Falwell and, even more insidiously, Mother Teresa. You’re worried about the candy-covered comforts of hegemony dressed as salvation and you’re worried about mystical communion alone on a countryside ramble. You are worried about belief and practice and leadership and laity. “From the perspective of the new atheists, religion is all one entity,” a New Yorker review of Hitchens explained, and “those who would apologize for any of its forms [...] are helping to sustain the whole.” But the form that worries the New Atheists most isn’t the makings of religion, but what it in turn makes. If you want to be a New Atheist, you have to be worried about the progeny.

Some of the thousands of Tamil civilians interned behind barbed wire at the Menik Farms refugee camp in Sri Lanka. A UN official expressed concern that the camps were militarised and no-one was allowed in or out. Photograph: Gethin Chamberlain. From the Guardian, London, May 29 2009.

I am still not paying attention to the Sri Lankan situation: are you? I posted about it here way back in May when it was much more in the news. Even with Google it’s not as quick as I expected to get updates on what’s been happening to the 270,000 Tamil refugees locked up in a hastily constructed camp in May, when the government won the war against the Tamil Tigers.

At the Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice, which describes itself as nonpartisan (“this Campaign has no ethnic, religious or regional affiliations – its concern is the well-being of all Sri Lankans”) and has Noam Chomsky among others on its Advisory Council, the overview is now a couple of months out of date:

The starting conditions were appalling but they have become even worse. By October, when the monsoons arrive, these camps will become killing fields — this time it will not be bombs but water borne diseases like typhoid and cholera.

Several sources, including the Asia Times dated tomorrow, say that all the refugees are planned to be resettled back to their homes by January. Will it happen? 421 US Congresspeople urged them earlier this month to get on with it. This piece says that 130,000 remain today. The problem is the number of mines still in the ground in the villages the people need to return to.

The current debate over the age at which women should begin taking mammograms is a good example of the kind of pseudoscience that may be introduced once costs becomes a guiding consideration in health care decisions.

As I have argued previously, health care is the one thing we should not economize about. Of course, there may be health care necessities that we cannot afford, in which case we should try to figure out how to afford them, for example, through taxation. But the first thing we should do is to be clear as to what the desirable health care options are.

The Team from SmartMeme.org

When the concept of “framing” an issue comes up, people more often than not think of George Lakoff as the “Go To” guy. If it were me, I’d go to Patrick Reinsborough, one of the founders of SmartMeme.org

I’d met Patrick at a social activists train the trainer workshop led by George Lakey (not Lakoff). The young people I met at that workshop, including Patrick, gave me a huge sense of hope for our world. Today, I got an email from SmartMeme.org with a video about their hopes to have an influence on the climate change gathering in Copenhagen. I know many of the people in this video. They’re brilliant and we need to help get them there!

Books? Videos? Whichever you like (most likely both), there are two new releases that are important for those who are interested in human rights — Abdulaziz Sachedina’s Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights, and a short documentary video on the use of white phosphorus in Gaza by Human Rights Watch.

If the war on drugs needed a spokesperson, it could hardly do better than select Chico Marx in Duck Soup, saying “Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” Sadly for the drug war effort, increasing numbers of both people and governments are starting to believe their own eyes. And what they see is that the war has been futile and counterproductive, causing over half the incarcerations in the US, with no measurable decrease in the amount of drugs consumed. But the war fights back, shooting messengers who speak truth to power. It’s enough to make you reach for a …. whatever.

First, a quick flashback: drug use goes back further than we once thought it did. David Hillman has been the messenger (and his academic career has received a few grievous wounds as a result) about the extent of drug use among Greek philosophers:

An example from Hillman’s own research is a text by Thucydides where brave slaves are sneaking supplies to besieged Spartan soldiers. They carry with them skins of “poppy mixed with honey and pounded linseed.” The original text uses the Greek word for poppy (mekon), which is another word for opium, but in this passage the English version is translated as “poppyseed.” “You don’t send poppy seeds to wounded soldiers,” chides Hillman. “You send them opium.”

The earliest banning of drugs came in the 7th century, when Islamic countries prohibited the consumption of alcohol In the US, the first ban was on smoking opium, prohibited in San Francisco due to fear that “many women and young girls, as well as young men of respectable family, were being induced to visit the Chinese opium-smoking dens, where they were ruined morally and otherwise. ” There was no evidence of that having happened, and the consumption of opium in laudanum, a pain-killer sold to white consumers, remained legal for years afterwards. Selective drug law enforcement based on race and media fear mongering is sadly traditional.

“Life’s beauty is magnificent as it hangs at the edge of death, insisting upon its relevance.” – Ran Ortner

The sea is not art. It is utilitarian and free. It exists with or without us. Although it can be (and is being) altered by human activity, it has no need for us to comprehend it. It will be here after we are gone in whatever manifestation it can muster.

A painting of the sea is different. It is a monument. It is representative. Like any painting, it holds its own meaning beyond the nature of its subject. There are reasons to view a painting of the sea besides just wanting to look at waves.

Open Water No. 24, a painting of the sea by Ran Ortner recently won the $250,000 grand prize at Art Prize, the world’s most lucrative competitive art show.

(To see more of Ran Ortner’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery.)

Last week I introduced Tikkun Daily readers to the new blog at the Project for Integrating Law, Politics and Spirituality, with a post by Nanette Schorr about Sunny Schwartz’s restorative justice work in a San Francisco County jail. The third member of our team at that blog is Doug Ammar, and I love this first post by him. With this story he gives us an idea of what it means for him to practice law with a full intention of connecting at a human level with his clients, including those who spend many years in prison. Here it is in full:

Tuesday Blues

By Doug Ammar

“How can you do that? How can you visit a guy serving a life sentence?”

“What do you mean?” I reply.

“Well, you were his lawyer, right? The client was convicted while he was your client, right?”

“That’s right. Either I or someone else in our office was his lawyer. But, yes we visit our folks in prison,” I answer.

“And you all just keep showing up – years after the case is over? That has to be tough? What do you talk about? Doesn’t he hate you? Doesn’t he want to kill you?”

This week’s spiritual wisdom is a selection from the Shvetashvatara Upanishad as translated by Eknath Easwaran, who is known and respected around the world for being the father of passage meditation.

Shiva painting from Wikimedia Commons.

The learned say life is self-created;
Others say life evolved from time. In truth
The Lord brought the cosmos out of himself.

He is pure consciousness, omnipresent,
Omnipotent, omniscient, creator
Of time and master of the three gunas.
Evolution takes place at his command.

Those who act without thought of personal
Profit and lead a well-disciplined life
Discover in course of time the divine
Principle that all forms of life are one.
They work in the service of the Lord and
Are freed from the law of karma.

Know him to be the primal source of life
Whose glory permeates the universe,
Who is beyond time and space, yet can be
Seen in our hearts in meditation.

When a couple gets married, they traditionally have a wedding. When a child is born, people usually throw some kind of celebration. When a ship sets out on its maiden voyage, it is customary to break a champagne bottle against its bow.

A position as a blogger is, of course, nothing compared to those things. What are the opinions of one pundit, compared to a marriage, a new human life, or the ocean-crossing journeys of a ship? Nevertheless, all traditions teach us that origins are important, and that we should try to begin our first ventures as well as possible–even such humble ventures as this.

So, where to begin? Why not start with the most famous of all accounts of origins, the creation of humankind? But Genesis, by its very nature, covers so many things, so I shall cite just one aspect: its account of the spiritual reasons for human communication.

Genesis portrays the beginnings of communication with the existential need of human beings to be in union with other persons. We can have the whole of inanimate and animal creation brought before us. But we need to engage in the back-and-forth of linguistic communication (whether verbally or in body language) with another person. And the most profound kind of inter-personal communication is that of intimate love between two people.

We know the need for something from its lack. Genesis shows communication as a divine gift to overcome the pain of loneliness. The late Pope John Paul II spoke about this in his lectures on “The Theology of the Body.” Judaism and Islam have their own “theologies of the bodies,” which predate this development in Christianity. As a Muslim who loves poetry, both Eastern and Western, I have decided to give a poetical interpretation of the loneliness of Adam, as described in Genesis, from the standpoint of Sufism (or Islamic metaphysics).

ConnecticutMan1 emailed me an unlikely and highly entertaining article posted by Warranted Wiretaps. They have obtained an exclusive mp3 file of a conference call put together by “the national liberty movement” to improve the quality of right wing blogs.

Unfortunately for them, their call was crashed by a group of twittering humorists.

Dr. John Geyman thinks so. Whether or not you agree, it’s worth considering his argument. He writes:

The negatives far outweigh the positives, and adopting this bill would delay real reform for years to come. Despite a chorus of accolades about the bill by its supporters, even comparing it with the historic importance of Social Security and Medicare, this monster bill instead bears the heavy imprint of corporate stakeholders who themselves are largely responsible for out-of-control health care costs. After months of lobbying and campaign contributions to legislators crafting the legislation, their multiple conflicts of interest and political compromises, this bill ends up being a bailout for the insurance industry and a bonanza for stakeholders in the medical industrial complex.

Read Geyman’s article on HR 3962 for his explanation of the specific problems with the health bill.

I love reading emails from the GoddessScholars list serve. This group of women includes some of the most knowledgeable people in the world when it comes to the divine feminine. The core members — out of several hundred women — are scholars, but the e-list contains artists, musicians, story-tellers, and ritualists as well. Reading their posts, I discover what’s new in the “Goddess Sphere.” I discover where the current controversies lie. And sometimes I discover just how ignorant much of the rest of the world is about this area that’s intensely meaningful to me.

A few months ago the controversies surrounded whether or not new archaeological finds were Goddess figures or not. Then it was on to the Catholic parish worker here in Wisconsin who was fired for her feminist views. After that it was the fact that Marija Gimbutas’s work has been hidden from view, even in events seemingly spawned by her research. And the latest battle seems to concern the very center of our connection with each other — the sacred feminine.

This latest brou-ha-ha began when one member wrote about a friend who was completing her M.A. in Art History. The friend wanted to concentrate on Botticelli’s representation of a variety of Goddesses. But when she approached her advisor, he told her that the sacred feminine was NOT a scholarly topic, but instead a term Dan Brown made up to sell The Da Vinci Code. Whoa! I think every woman on our e-list felt personally assaulted by this unbelievable statement.

We’ve been studying, celebrating, painting, telling stories, ritualizing, and singing songs about the sacred feminine for over 30 years, many on this list — including myself — for that entire time. My response was immediate and critical:

This sounds interesting and hopeful. It’s about how the Seattle protests of ten years ago were more anti than pro, more critical than analytical. The Copenhagen protests promise to be more grown up. Best quote:

“I hope we have grown up to become much more disobedient,” Jordan said, “because life on this world of ours may well be terminated because of too many acts of obedience.”

More quotes:

The big criticism of the movement the media insisted on calling “antiglobalization” was always that it had a laundry list of grievances and few concrete alternatives. The movement converging on Copenhagen, in contrast, is about a single issue–climate change–but it weaves a coherent narrative about its cause, and its cures, that incorporates virtually every issue on the planet. In this narrative, our climate is changing not simply because of particular polluting practices but because of the underlying logic of capitalism, which values short-term profit and perpetual growth above all else. Our governments would have us believe that the same logic can now be harnessed to solve the climate crisis–by creating a tradable commodity called “carbon” and by transforming forests and farmland into “sinks” that will supposedly offset our runaway emissions.

This is beautiful, well said and right on.

A press release from Danny Postel at Interfaith Worker Justice. This is a really important issue and these people have been doing great work on it, including Kim Bobo’s substantial book on the criminality of stealing people’s wages (see below).

November 19th: Campaign against Wage Theft National Day of Action

National Legislation and New Initiatives to be Unveiled Thursday on Capitol Hill

On Thursday, November 19, people in more than 40 cities around the country will take action to stop wage theft, a national crime wave that every year robs millions of workers out of billions of dollars they’ve worked for but never seen.

The national network Interfaith Worker Justice declared November 19 a National Day of Action to Stop Wage Theft to call attention to this “crime wave no one talks about” and to mobilize support for the network’s campaign to end this pernicious practice.

“Thou shalt not steal — it’s a pretty straightforward message,” says Interfaith Worker Justice Executive Director Kim Bobo, whose 2008 book Wage Theft in America: Why Millions of Working Americans Are Not Getting Paid—And What We Can Do About It exposed the national crisis and has become a rallying cry for the campaign to end it.

I attended Catholic Mass while visiting family members this weekend, and I was intrigued by the following statement from the pulpit - “this is the 33rd Sunday in ordinary time”.   The phrase ordinary time as used here refers to a particular segment of the church calendar year (i.e.  It’s not advent, lent, etc.).   But it raised the bigger question about whether we’re living in “ordinary times” in a larger historical sense.  Would we classify the last 6 months as an extraordinary time in history, or as more of an unremarkable ordinary time?   Have we lived through a temporary lull this summer between recent storms of change, and what will come next?  Perhaps.  How would you classify the last half of this decade? 

The people I discussed this with typically thought we were living in extraordinary times in general, and have been doing so for their entire life.   That led to the humorous observation that we often believe an extraordinary period of human history began roughly at the time of our own birth.  Such is human nature.

Such views are a characteristic of exponential rates of change.   The most recent period of history will always seem to be experiencing much more substantial rates of change than previous times, and will therefore seem to be an extraordinary time.   Make no mistake about it; we are living in a time of exponential growth, exponential rates of scientific and technological development, and perhaps exponential rates of social change as well.   We are living in extraordinary times.  

There is an important aspect of exponential curves that we cannot forget though.   If they continue, the rate of change in the coming decades will be even greater than it is today.  There is every reason to believe that this in fact will happen.   So while we are living in extraordinary times compared to previous history, it is likely that the historical impact of the coming decades will be even more significant than what we’re experiencing now.   This means that our “call to action” to engage in helping to direct positive change will continue to grow in importance.

No matter how difficult it may be in a world filled with pain and cruelty, a world facing ecological devastation, wars, global malnutrition and starvation, torture, slavery, and political craziness, there are moments when it is important to stop looking at all the problems and just to focus on all the good. The psalmist said that this is what the focus of the weekly Sabbath or Shabbat celebration should be: “It is good to give thanks..” And that’s part of what Thanksgiving could be about. (Our friends in Canada, or those around the world who celebrate a Thanksgiving at other times or as part of their own spiritual or religious tradition, can still use these ideas).

I don’t mean only a moment of sharing “something we all appreciate” as people are chomping down the traditional meal. I mean, in addition, actually consciously shaping the day in such a way that the focus of attention throughout the day is on giving thanks. I’m posting this ten days in advance because it would take cooperation of many people in your family and guests who are alerted in advance if you want to change the mood of your Thanksgiving gathering to one that actually gives some serious time to the spiritual focus of giving thanks.

Cornel West in the New Yorker

I missed this short piece two weeks ago in the New Yorker but if you did too it’s worth reading. When Cornel West came on board to support Obama in the campaign he said, “Brother, I will be a critical supporter. I’ll be a Socratic supporter.”

So far, West finds himself infinitely more impressed by Obama’s mastery of “spectacle” than by his attention to the poor. “In terms of the impact on young people, I think it’s a beautiful thing,” he said of Obama’s election. “But, in the end, even spectacle has to deal with the darkness. That’s where the bluesman comes in. Guy Lombardo can be nice on a certain night, but you’re going to need Duke Ellington and Count Basie.”

Spectacle: yes. The talk… but we need more of the walk.

Socratic dialogue with Obama is what we are planning for a national conference in June and I hope you will come: more on this soon.The focus will be: “Support Obama to BE the Obama We Voted For — Not the Inside-the-Beltway Pragmatist/Realist whose compromises have led to a decrease in his popularity and opened the door for a revival of the just-recently-discredited Right wing.”

As you may know Cornel West is one of the chairs of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, which is Tikkun‘s support network and potentially a vibrant social movement. The ideas and ingredients are there (e.g. explore the Spiritual Covenant with America or get a taste via my post here in which we contrast the Spiritual Progressive view of health care with the Liberal and Conservative views). It just needs more energetic people to pick them up and run with them. Meanwhile you can join and at very least help the publication of these ideas to continue. Our thanks to all who have done so!

If you haven’t seen it, Cornel West and Michael Lerner’s jointly authored book Jews and Blacks: A Dialogue on Race, Religion, and Culture in America is a remarkably honest and energizing dialogue.

There can be no such thing as a war on terror. It is a slogan, a trope, a category error. It is sloppy logic that leads to bad policy and to an unnecessary hemorrhage of blood and treasure. Terror is a response. Terrorism is a tactic. A terrorist is a criminal. Attorney General Eric Holder is right to try the people accused of plotting and of helping to execute the 9/11 attacks in criminal court. This decision demonstrates faith in the United States Constitution, the judicial system, and the American people.

The United States is fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the name of a larger war on terror that can neither be declared nor won. Terrorist organizations are transnational, nebulous, parasitical. They attach themselves to the hopes, dreams, sufferings and outrages of individuals. These individuals perpetrate terrorist violence for complicated reasons of their own. Whatever the reasons, it is important to understand their actions as criminal and not as acts of war. A nation does not declare war on a gang of thugs.