Was it moral for scientists and engineers to design the atom bomb? The Pornoscanners?

Proulx michel imples the answer is "no" on a comment here.

The part about the pornoscanners is based on my reading of Jane Hamsher's post here, which includes the link to the threatened possible sexual molestation of a passenger here.

The answer to the first question, I'd say is "Wrong question, but if forced for an answer I'd say 'yes'." The reason I say yes is because I think it's easy to see how game theory applies in this question .

The second question is more difficult, but I would say, no, it was not moral to do so especially when you consider the principals involved - namely Michael Chertoff. People do have a responsibility to at least try to work with people who are dedicated to others. It's clear that the possible sexual abuse of untold numbers of people didn't matter to Chertoff - what mattered was lining his pockets.

American Buddhists are silent about the mosque? Is that the biggest issue we face?

Danny Fisher asks why "Buddhists are sitting out the Islamaphobia debate."  This, to me, is a rather naive viewpoint, and completely and utterly misses the larger point: the brouhaha over building mosques in America is but a tiny piece of a much larger strategem by the right wing in this country in which it seeks to take power, to the detriment of all Americans.

It's but a tiny piece of a larger puzzle.  For example, it would do all well to speak out and oppose some of the nonsense that is going on in this year's ballot measures. Among them are measures which are clearly arising out of racist intent, a contempt for human existence, and a desire to cede ground on the environment. 

But, to be fair, it is somewhat unreasonable for all Buddhists to act like nice progressives on these issues; some of us aren't progressive.  I just bring up the points because the mosque issues are just one facet of a concerted effort by the right wing to divide us so they may continue to enrich themselves at our expense.  And that's a much bigger issue than the mosque- because it's the root issue of the mosque.  But, as many have routinely pointed out, "engaged" Buddhism can often wind up being one big ego trip.  As for myself, I am quite politically involved thank you very much on the left side of things.  And if you aren't trying to get the "big picture" then there's likely a whole host of issues you're missing.

Too, Fisher's characterization of "Buddhists" as passive observers in all this is quite incorrect.  Many of us have been doing that.    Furthermore, his characterization of the atheist bashing Dalai Lama  (I could  also mention "Dorje Shugden follower suppressing" ) as someone who is someone who "offer[s] ways of engaging that are rooted in practice" is itself ignorant of other forms of religious bigotry in the Buddhist camp that get a free pass from him - and other American Buddhists.

I share the concerns of Fisher regarding the rights of Muslims to build mosques anywhere they please.  But, Danny, please spare us the moralistic lectures, and the Dalai Lama isn't an example of Buddhism to American Buddhists in general.

P.Z. Myers has a point...

Although it's grossly insensitive to many people's beliefs, if the first amendment is real, and if you have no problem with flag burning as far as the first amendment is concerned, or Nazis marching in Skokie Illinois (ACLU first amendment cases that were decided in favor of free speech) then I think our system could stomach a lunatic who wants to burn "Korans". (I saw some footage, and it looked like they were burning translations of the Koran, and as anyone who knows anything about Islam knows, a translation of the Koran just ain't the Koran.)

The lesson of that incident [where Myers "desecrated" a communion wafer]  wasn't that you can find some jerk somewhere who will disrespect what some group finds holy — that was trivial and uninteresting, and I actually had to ignore many of the elaborate suggestions for cracker disposal sent my way to emphasize the absolute triviality of tossing a cracker/piece of Jesus in the trash. No, the real lesson was that mobs of people will react with irrational freakish hysteria to the idea that other people don't believe as they do.
The problem isn't the desecrators. The problem is the people who have an unwarranted sense of privilege, that their beliefs will not be questioned or criticized, ever, by anyone. What I was saying was that it was crazy to believe a cracker turns into Jesus, and what all the outraged Catholics were doing is confirming to an awesome degree just how mad their beliefs were, with their prolonged and excessive outrage.
So I'm looking at this recent episode with Terry Jones — a fellow I don't like at all, and I think he's a fanatical goofball — and I see that the serious problem here isn't Jones at all…it's all the lunatics who are insisting that burning the Koran is a major international catastrophe.
It's just a frackin' book, people.

 And yeah, there's folks that this is the "very word of  a deity" spoken to a guy in Arabia long ago, but if freedom speech and religion means anything, it means the freedom to ridicule, insult, and yes, "desecrate" whatever others think is "holy."

Now whether this guy Terry Jones should burn Korans is another issue; the guy's clearly Koo-Koo for CoCo Puffs^®.

And our way of life can even handle clowns like this guy who's going to be at a "Value" "Voters" "Summit."  (How come that "value" has come to mean "low quality?" Maybe it's the same way that the meaning of the word "cynic"  has evolved.)  And I think the word "clown" here is not meant to be derrogatory, it's meant to describe psychologically what this man represents functionally in our public square.

Bryan Fischer, the "Director of Issues Analysis" for the American Family Association, wrote a blog post yesterday that argues that "Germany is giving us a template on how we handle Muslims: just like we handle neo-Nazis," which amounts to German police carrying "out 30 predawn raids against the nation's largest neo-Nazi group two days ago."
Fischer is known for his Islamophobia, previously arguing that the U.S. should have "no more mosques, period," because "every single mosque is a potential terror training center or recruitment center for jihad" and thus "you cannot claim first amendment protections if your religious organization is engaged in subversive activities."...

Fischer, who is scheduled to speak at the conservative Value Voters summit this month alongside Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, Mike Huckabee and others, also wrote: "I see no reason why our policies toward Islam in the West in general and America in particular should not be a mirror image of our policies toward the neo-Nazi movement."
Fischer adds that "our aim should be to make it as unthinkable for a resident of America to embrace Islam as we have made it to embrace Aryan Nations ideology. And for the same reasons."

 Finally, one more bit courtesy of P.Z. Myers...

Although it's not about people dying it IS about academic freedom...

P.Z. Myers has a must read post today, on what might happen when researchers talk about published peer-reviewed research on bat fellatio, and its possible relation to human behavior.

There's a petition to sign.  It's about academic freedom.

The Religious Right Gets Repugnant in Amaraillo Texas

Think Progress has news of what can only be called a Christian hate group.

An evangelical Christian hate group called “Repent Amarillo” is reportedly terrorizing the town of Amarillo, Texas. Repent fashions itself as a sort of militia and targets a wide range of community members they deem offensive to their theology: gays, liberal Christians, Muslims, environmentalists, breast cancer events that do not highlight abortion, Halloween, “spring break events,” and pornography shops. On its website, Repent has posted a “Warfare Map” of its enemies in town.

And they don't like Buddhists one bit. If you look at the map in the link, for example, at the green push-pin in the upper right hand corner they've "targeted" Wat Lao Buddharam as a place where they have identified as having "idol worship" and a "false god."

And if you read their "Mission" page clearly they think it's within their "mission" to harass non-Christians, and that includes Buddhists.

I hope people of all religions and non-religions can join together to help expose this group for what it is.

Brit Hume, Gateway Pundit, and Others Should Try Buddhism

I had only noted in passing the other day about the Brit Hume bit. Given the extent that it made a splash in my corner of the blogosphere, and given the vitriolic reactions from some righties in response to the insouciance received from Hume's advice to Tiger Woods is to abandon Buddhism I thought a bit more discussion was in order.

Barbara O'Brien wrote a touching bit on explaining Buddhism to those who ought to know better.

Several conservatives however, have actually defended Hume's remark. The Gateway Pundit's site over at "First Things," seems to have cornered the market on vitriol and bigotry. This is the link to the first post the blogger wrote on that, and this is good enough to get the feel for the, uh, Christian love. Now to the Gateway Pundit's credit he links to a piece by David Gibson at Politics Daily (though implying that it's unfairly criticizing Mr. Hume). From Gibson's piece it is brought out that Hume became more religious after his son's suicide in 1998.

I can not conceive of the personal deformation that one must endure in the death of one's child. Such a thing is horrendous to contemplate. But of course, for such suffering Buddhism does offer a path out of that hell. To one's own suffering, perhaps, one's own path. Or not. Does Brit Hume appear as though he is not resentful? Do I in this blog? In "worse times" there was quite a bit of vitriol on this blog about the horrible directions the former regime led the country. Even now, I am extremely dissatisfied with the current administration, although it is orders of magnitude better than their predecessors. But I digress, perhaps.

Buddhists have techniques for overcoming greed, hatred, and ignorance and their derivatives, even if we aren't always skillful at using them. (The Japanese have a saying, "Even monkeys fall from trees." Perhaps monkeys have sayings too.) If you look at the comments in the post I referenced from the Gateway Pundit, you'll find many commenters seething with resentment, with very few self-avowed Christians willing to actually go near the fact that Hume's remark was profoundly ignorant of Buddhism.

That brings me to my last point. It would be very good, I think, for these commenters and pundits to actually investigate Buddhism, so that they would not make such ill-informed statements at the very least. In the 1893 Parliament of World Religions in Chicago, Buddhists from Japan attended, even though the prevailing attitude there was Christian triumphalism. Teachers such as Soen Shaku and D. T. Suzuki ably presented the Buddhist case and more. And yet, the anti-Buddhist bigotry on the part of Christians persisted, and in 1896 Soen Shaku responded to a particular bit of bigotry reminiscent of Hume's uninformed remarks. Soen Shaku's remarks are telling, in that he makes a cogent case that Jesus Christ wasn't exactly a moral paragon for Buddhists:

We may grant that Jesus Christ is the greatest master and teacher that appeared in the West after Buddha, but the picture of Jesus Christ as we find it in the Gospel is marred by the accounts of such miracles as the great draft of fishes, which involves a great and useless destruction of life (for we read that the fishermen followed Jesus, leaving the fish behind), and by the transformation of water into wine at the marriage-feast at Cana. Nor has Jesus Christ attained to the calmness and dignity of Buddha, for the passion of anger.

Now truth be told, I haven't attained the calmness and dignity of the Buddha, but that's my goal at least. It does seem to me that too many of the self-avowed followers of Christ tend to emulate his lack of anger management. So in the spirit of Mr. Hume recommending what he claimed helped him, I would humbly suggest to these gentlemen and others what worked for me is the practice of Buddhism, the recognition that life is suffering, that there is a cause and a way out of suffering, and that by following the Eightfold Path one can transcend suffering.

True, I don't have Hume's megaphone, and ultimately I'm just a guy still trying to transcend much suffering and ignorance myself, but at least I recognize the need to quench resentments, and sometimes have some success.

Hollow Sync

Via a comment from the inimitable Nella Lou at the inimitable gniz place I learned that not only does "Bill" Harris not like people saying he's a liar and a scammer, but he evidently doesn't want "disparaging" things said about him, his products or the Centerpointe Research Institute [sic].

Either that or his attorney went rogue on him; but in any case, it's clearly over the top - I'd call it "vicious" behavior. Maybe somebody's brain was malfunctioning? I dunno but it sure seems like someone was being really coercive here.

I will say this: from the post in question, I would have to conclude that Mr. Harris is not practicing what I would consider right action or right livelihood. And by trying to glom onto that awful "The Secret/'Law' of Attraction" trend (as his blog notes as of today), he's not propagating anything that I know of as Dharma. That's his right, of course, but the idea that somehow his schtick is in any way related to anything "Zen monks" do is simply absurd.

Nobody's mug is sacred...

Despite what some folks would have you believe.

For all the charges and counter-charges that have been raised during the crisis — including vote rigging, the rape of jailed protesters and the plotting of a velvet revolution — each side seemed to agree that burning an image of Ayatollah Khomeini, the father of the state who is revered as divine, was going too far.

The opposition has rebutted charges that its supporters were responsible for the trampling, ripping or burning of images of Ayatollah Khomeini that were broadcast on state-controlled television after student protests spread across the nation on Dec. 7. Thousands of students clashed with Basij militia members at universities across Iran, in the largest protest rallies in months.

Since then, state television has broadcast images of the damaged pictures. None of the videos showed clearly who was responsible.

And speaking of religious liberties...

More commentary on this to come...