Americans do not exclude the possibility of forgiving Osama bin Laden

Letter to US Senator Barbara Boxer
December 24, 2009
Dear Senator Boxer,
Please be apprised that, I, as a US citizen, do not exclude the possibility of forgiving Osama bin Laden for the terrorist attacks of 9/11, or of some form of general diplomatic discussions. I believe many Americans feel likewise. Neither will I hesitate to [...]

Critique of President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech

The world must remain a place where citizens read the comments of political leaders and subject them to common sense analysis. Let us avoid the alternative: a world where we become dulled by the drone of meaningless speeches and the profusion of political nonsense — until we are no longer able to think [...]

Latest Pope Bashing by the Media

Latest Pope Bashing by the Media
Eager to seize even the slightest pretense for bashing the Pope, news media, European governments, and even medical journals have taken his recent comments about African AIDS completely out of context.
The Lancet even went so far as to accuse His Holiness of “manipulating science” and having “publicly distorted scientific [...]

Christian Satyagraha

What is Satyagraha?:  Satyagraha and Christianity
Mohandas Gandhi called his philosophy of social change by peaceful means satyagraha. The word is derived from the Indian words satya (truth) and graha (from the same Indo-European root word from which comes our ‘grasp’, ‘grab’, and ‘grip’).
Satyagraha is more than a philosophical system; it is a metaphysical [...]

Notes: On the unity of world religious culture

I recently ran across the following quote from 20th-century Christian author, C. S. Lewis in his book, The Abolition of Man. These remarks preface an assemblage of quotes that relate to what Lewis termed Natural Law, which he more or less equated with ancient Chinese term, the Tao:
The idea of collecting independent testimonies presupposes [...]

Countering Political Evil

At the Watchblog Third Party Website, Joel S. Hirschhorn wrote an good article titled The Evolution of Evil. He identifies as an essential problem the current two-party system. To quote Joel:
Most corrupt and legally sanctioned forms of tyranny hide in plain sight as democracies with free elections….  Nothing conceals tyranny better than elections. [...]

America’s Malaise: What is the Real Problem?

In her Huffington Post blog, Middle-East expert and columnist Judith Kipper recently added an article titled “America’s Malaise“. She made some good points. At least it’s good to see someone explicitly addressing the problem. America does suffer from something – you can call it malaise, severe uncertainty, a crisis of confidence, [...]

Urbanization Crisis and Sustainable Transportation

Ran across this article at the World Resource Institute website:
SUSTAINABLE CITIES, SUSTAINABLE TRANSPORTATION
From the article:
Urbanization – A Glimpse of the Future
“Cities continue to be seen as offering economic opportunity superior to what can be realized in the countryside. Urban migration takes place on such a scale that we now have a new category [...]

Redeeming Corporations and Renewing America

Recently AOL, whom I pay to host one of my websites, has begun treating its customers so badly it’s almost unbelievable. I won’t go into details, but the bottom line is that I need to find a new hosting service. The search led me to the company BlueHost.com, where, among other things, I [...]

Politics: Inner and Outer

A fairly little-known fact is that Plato’s Republic, a work often taught in government and political science classes, is really about psychology. If you read the Republic closely, you see that Plato (through the character of Socrates) introduces the ideal State as a metaphor for the human soul. The idea is to, using [...]