By Lauren McCauley, staff writer Common Dreams January 26, 2015
Braving snow and blizzard warnings, health, labor and environmental activists rallied outside a New York City hotel on Monday where industry leaders met with international trade representatives to commence the "final negotiations" over the secret text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Leading the protest and carrying signs that read "Hands Off Our Medicine," protesters with health groups Doctors Without Borders and Health Global Access Project (GAP) warned that the TPP will undermine efforts to ensure access to affordable, life-saving medicines in both the United States and abroad.
Roughly one hundred people, including the Teamsters and the Raging Grannies, joined the health activists in chanting "Derail Fast Track," in reference to the Administration's push to pass the agreement quickly without Congressional interference.
"The TPP would create a vicious cycle. The provisions currently proposed will allow for fracking and other practices that fuel environmental degradation and make people sick. Strengthened intellectual property rules will then prevent people from accessing life- saving medicines," said Michael Tikili, national field organizer for Health GAP, in a press statement. "Thirteen million people living with HIV depend on generic AIDS medicines and another 20-plus million are waiting line for treatment. By protecting Pharma’s bloated profits, the Obama administration is undermining its own global AIDS initiative—this isn’t a trade agreement—it’s a death pact."
As Tikili further explained to Common Dreams, national efforts to end epidemics such as HIV and Hepititis C are being thwarted by the prospective trade laws which would threaten generic manufacturers in countries with patent suits. For instance, Tikili says, the U.S. government says it is "going to war on HIV" while at the same time pushing laws that limit drug production and access in certain countries.
"It is a public health issue, a global health issue," Tikili said. "Countries are trying to fight epidemics and this really limits that. It puts the process over people." Most of the agreement details have been so kept in the shadows that many members of Congress have not seen the text. What little is known has been revealed through leaks.
According to Health GAP, leaked drafts of the TPP revealed that the U.S. is seeking stronger, longer, and more accessible patent monopolies on medicines and new monopolies on drug regulatory data that would prevent marketing of more affordable generic equivalents. The TPP will reportedly also place some of the "most severe intellectual property rules ever demanded in international trade," including strict price control measures and enhanced investor rights that would permit Big Pharma to sue governments when they expect profits will be undermined by government policy.
After the rally, protesters reportedly marched to the office of Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to call on the lawmaker to oppose Fast Track authorization and demand to see the contents of the agreement.
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/01/26/calling-tpp-death-pact-health-advocates-rally-outside-secretive-trade-talks
Tuesday, 27 January 2015
Thursday, 22 January 2015
Paris is a Warning
By Seamus Milne Extract from Guardian article 15 Jan. 2015
Just as there is a blindness in sections of progressive France about how the secular ideology used to break the grip of the powerful is now used to discipline the powerless, the right to single out one religion for abuse has been raised to the status of a core liberal value.
The absurdity was there for all to see at the “Je suis Charlie” demonstration in Paris on Sunday. A march supposedly to defend freedom of expression was led by serried ranks of warmongers and autocrats: from Nato war leaders and Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu to Jordan’s King Abdullah and Egypt’s foreign minister, who between them have jailed, killed and flogged any number of journalists while staging massacres and interventions that have left hundreds of thousands dead, bombing TV stations from Serbia to Afghanistan as they go.
The scene was beyond satire. But it also highlighted the central role of the war on terror in the Paris atrocities, and how the serried ranks are likely to use them for their own ends. Of course, the cocktail of causes and motivations for the attacks are complex: from an inheritance of savage colonial brutality in Algeria via poverty, racism, criminality and takfiri jihadist ideology.
But without the war waged by western powers, including France, to bring to heel and reoccupy the Arab and Muslim world, last week’s attacks clearly wouldn’t have taken place. That war on terror has lasted 13 years – even if attempts to control the region long predate it – unleashing brutality and destruction on a vast scale.
It’s what the killers say themselves. The Kouachi brothers were radicalised by the Iraq war and trained in Yemen by al-Qaida. Cherif Kouachi insisted the attacks had been carried out in revenge for the “children of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria”. Ahmed Coulibaly said they were a response to France’s attacks on Isis, while claiming the supermarket slaughter was revenge for the deaths of Muslims in Palestine.
Such wanton killings are, of course, entirely counterproductive to the causes they are supposed to promote – and the targets, shaped by a reactionary religious framework, feed the idea that these are some mutant product of European cultural wars. But there were no such attacks in Europe before 2001. The apparent exception was the Paris bombings of 1995, a direct spillover from Algeria’s civil war and France’s role in it. Instead, a form of violent fundamentalism fostered in the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan 30 years ago has blown back into western heartlands.
France famously refused to take part in the US-British aggression against Iraq. But it has been making up for lost time ever since, sending troops to Afghanistan, intervening in one African state after another, from Libya and Mali to Ivory Coast and the Central African Republic, bombing Iraq and backing Syrian rebels. Like Britain, France has been arming and garrisoning the Gulf autocrats, while the French president has declared himself a “partner” to the Egyptian dictator Sisi and “ready” to bomb Libya again.
The former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin, who led opposition to the Iraq war, this week described Isis as the “deformed child” of western policy. The west’s wars in the Muslim world “always nourish new wars” and “terrorism among us”, he wrote, while “we simplify” these conflicts “by seeing only the Islamist symptom”.
He’s right – but he’s not one of the serried ranks who will use the latest attacks to justify more military intervention. Given what has taken place over the past decade, Europeans are fortunate that terrorist outrages have been relatively rare. But a price has been paid in loss of freedoms, growing antisemitism and rampant Islamophobia. So long as we allow this war to continue indefinitely, the threats will grow. In a globalised world, there’s no insulation. What happens there ends up happening here too.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/15/paris-warning-no-insulation-wars-arab-muslim-world
Just as there is a blindness in sections of progressive France about how the secular ideology used to break the grip of the powerful is now used to discipline the powerless, the right to single out one religion for abuse has been raised to the status of a core liberal value.
The absurdity was there for all to see at the “Je suis Charlie” demonstration in Paris on Sunday. A march supposedly to defend freedom of expression was led by serried ranks of warmongers and autocrats: from Nato war leaders and Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu to Jordan’s King Abdullah and Egypt’s foreign minister, who between them have jailed, killed and flogged any number of journalists while staging massacres and interventions that have left hundreds of thousands dead, bombing TV stations from Serbia to Afghanistan as they go.
The scene was beyond satire. But it also highlighted the central role of the war on terror in the Paris atrocities, and how the serried ranks are likely to use them for their own ends. Of course, the cocktail of causes and motivations for the attacks are complex: from an inheritance of savage colonial brutality in Algeria via poverty, racism, criminality and takfiri jihadist ideology.
But without the war waged by western powers, including France, to bring to heel and reoccupy the Arab and Muslim world, last week’s attacks clearly wouldn’t have taken place. That war on terror has lasted 13 years – even if attempts to control the region long predate it – unleashing brutality and destruction on a vast scale.
It’s what the killers say themselves. The Kouachi brothers were radicalised by the Iraq war and trained in Yemen by al-Qaida. Cherif Kouachi insisted the attacks had been carried out in revenge for the “children of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria”. Ahmed Coulibaly said they were a response to France’s attacks on Isis, while claiming the supermarket slaughter was revenge for the deaths of Muslims in Palestine.
Such wanton killings are, of course, entirely counterproductive to the causes they are supposed to promote – and the targets, shaped by a reactionary religious framework, feed the idea that these are some mutant product of European cultural wars. But there were no such attacks in Europe before 2001. The apparent exception was the Paris bombings of 1995, a direct spillover from Algeria’s civil war and France’s role in it. Instead, a form of violent fundamentalism fostered in the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan 30 years ago has blown back into western heartlands.
France famously refused to take part in the US-British aggression against Iraq. But it has been making up for lost time ever since, sending troops to Afghanistan, intervening in one African state after another, from Libya and Mali to Ivory Coast and the Central African Republic, bombing Iraq and backing Syrian rebels. Like Britain, France has been arming and garrisoning the Gulf autocrats, while the French president has declared himself a “partner” to the Egyptian dictator Sisi and “ready” to bomb Libya again.
The former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin, who led opposition to the Iraq war, this week described Isis as the “deformed child” of western policy. The west’s wars in the Muslim world “always nourish new wars” and “terrorism among us”, he wrote, while “we simplify” these conflicts “by seeing only the Islamist symptom”.
He’s right – but he’s not one of the serried ranks who will use the latest attacks to justify more military intervention. Given what has taken place over the past decade, Europeans are fortunate that terrorist outrages have been relatively rare. But a price has been paid in loss of freedoms, growing antisemitism and rampant Islamophobia. So long as we allow this war to continue indefinitely, the threats will grow. In a globalised world, there’s no insulation. What happens there ends up happening here too.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/15/paris-warning-no-insulation-wars-arab-muslim-world
Is Islam to Blame for the Shooting at Charlie Hebdo in Paris?
Nicholas Kristof Op-Ed Columnist NYTIMES Jan. 7, 2015
The French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo skewers people of all faiths and backgrounds. One cartoon showed rolls of toilet paper marked “Bible,” “Torah” and “Quran,” and the explanation: “In the toilet, all religions.” Yet when masked gunmen stormed Charlie Hebdo’s offices in Paris on Wednesday with AK-47s, murdering 12 people in the worst terror attack on French soil in decades, many of us assumed immediately that the perpetrators weren’t Christian or Jewish fanatics but more likely Islamic extremists.
Outraged Christians, Jews or atheists might vent frustrations on Facebook or Twitter. Yet it looks as if Islamic extremists once again have expressed their displeasure with bullets. Many ask, Is there something about Islam that leads inexorably to violence, terrorism and subjugation of women?
The question arises because fanatical Muslims so often seem to murder in the name of God, from the 2004 Madrid train bombing that killed 191 people to the murder of hostages at a cafe in Sydney, Australia, last month. I wrote last year of a growing strain of intolerance in the Islamic world after a brave Pakistani lawyer friend of mine, Rashid Rehman, was murdered for defending a university professor falsely accused of insulting the Prophet Muhammad.
Some of the most systematic terrorism in the Islamic world has been the daily persecution of Christians and other religious minorities, from the Bahai to the Yazidi to the Ahmadis. Then there’s the oppression of women. Of the bottom 10 countries in the World Economic Forum’s gender gap report, I count nine as majority Muslim.
So, sure, there’s a strain of Islamic intolerance and extremism that is the backdrop to the attack on Charlie Hebdo. The magazine was firebombed in 2011 after a cover depicted Muhammad saying, “100 lashes if you’re not dying of laughter.” Earlier, Charlie Hebdo had published a cartoon showing Muhammad crying and saying, “It’s hard to be loved by idiots.”
Terror incidents lead many Westerners to perceive Islam as inherently extremist. I think that is too glib. Small numbers of terrorists make headlines, but they aren’t representative of a complex and diverse religion of 1.6 billion adherents. My Twitter feed Wednesday brimmed with Muslims denouncing the attack — and noting that fanatical Muslims damage the image of Muhammad far more than the most vituperative cartoonist.
One of the things I’ve learned in journalism is to beware of perceiving the world through simple narratives, because then new information is mindlessly plugged into those story lines. In my travels from Mauritania to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan to Indonesia, extremist Muslims have shared with me their own deeply held false narratives of America as an oppressive state controlled by Zionists and determined to crush Islam. That’s an absurd caricature, and we should be wary ourselves of caricaturing a religion as diverse as Islam.
Let’s also acknowledge that the most courageous, peace-loving people in the Middle East who are standing up to Muslim fanatics are themselves often devout Muslims. Some read the Quran and blow up girls’ schools, but more read the Quran and build girls’ schools. The Taliban represents one brand of Islam; the Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai the polar opposite.
The great divide is not between faiths. Rather it is between terrorists and moderates, between those who are tolerant and those who “otherize.” In Australia after the hostage crisis, some Muslims feared revenge attacks. Then a wave of non-Muslim Australians rose to the occasion, offering to escort Muslims and ensure their safety, using the hashtag #IllRideWithYou on Twitter. More than 250,000 such comments were posted on Twitter — a model of big-hearted compassion after terror attacks. Bravo! That’s the spirit.
Let’s stand with Charlie Hebdo, for the global outpouring of support has been inspiring. Let’s denounce terrorism, oppression and misogyny in the Islamic world — and everywhere else. But let’s be careful not to respond to terrorists’ intolerance with our own. [Abbrev.]
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/08/opinion/nicholas-kristof-lessons-from-the-charlie-hebdo-shooting-in-paris.html?_r=0
The French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo skewers people of all faiths and backgrounds. One cartoon showed rolls of toilet paper marked “Bible,” “Torah” and “Quran,” and the explanation: “In the toilet, all religions.” Yet when masked gunmen stormed Charlie Hebdo’s offices in Paris on Wednesday with AK-47s, murdering 12 people in the worst terror attack on French soil in decades, many of us assumed immediately that the perpetrators weren’t Christian or Jewish fanatics but more likely Islamic extremists.
Outraged Christians, Jews or atheists might vent frustrations on Facebook or Twitter. Yet it looks as if Islamic extremists once again have expressed their displeasure with bullets. Many ask, Is there something about Islam that leads inexorably to violence, terrorism and subjugation of women?
The question arises because fanatical Muslims so often seem to murder in the name of God, from the 2004 Madrid train bombing that killed 191 people to the murder of hostages at a cafe in Sydney, Australia, last month. I wrote last year of a growing strain of intolerance in the Islamic world after a brave Pakistani lawyer friend of mine, Rashid Rehman, was murdered for defending a university professor falsely accused of insulting the Prophet Muhammad.
Some of the most systematic terrorism in the Islamic world has been the daily persecution of Christians and other religious minorities, from the Bahai to the Yazidi to the Ahmadis. Then there’s the oppression of women. Of the bottom 10 countries in the World Economic Forum’s gender gap report, I count nine as majority Muslim.
So, sure, there’s a strain of Islamic intolerance and extremism that is the backdrop to the attack on Charlie Hebdo. The magazine was firebombed in 2011 after a cover depicted Muhammad saying, “100 lashes if you’re not dying of laughter.” Earlier, Charlie Hebdo had published a cartoon showing Muhammad crying and saying, “It’s hard to be loved by idiots.”
Terror incidents lead many Westerners to perceive Islam as inherently extremist. I think that is too glib. Small numbers of terrorists make headlines, but they aren’t representative of a complex and diverse religion of 1.6 billion adherents. My Twitter feed Wednesday brimmed with Muslims denouncing the attack — and noting that fanatical Muslims damage the image of Muhammad far more than the most vituperative cartoonist.
One of the things I’ve learned in journalism is to beware of perceiving the world through simple narratives, because then new information is mindlessly plugged into those story lines. In my travels from Mauritania to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan to Indonesia, extremist Muslims have shared with me their own deeply held false narratives of America as an oppressive state controlled by Zionists and determined to crush Islam. That’s an absurd caricature, and we should be wary ourselves of caricaturing a religion as diverse as Islam.
Let’s also acknowledge that the most courageous, peace-loving people in the Middle East who are standing up to Muslim fanatics are themselves often devout Muslims. Some read the Quran and blow up girls’ schools, but more read the Quran and build girls’ schools. The Taliban represents one brand of Islam; the Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai the polar opposite.
The great divide is not between faiths. Rather it is between terrorists and moderates, between those who are tolerant and those who “otherize.” In Australia after the hostage crisis, some Muslims feared revenge attacks. Then a wave of non-Muslim Australians rose to the occasion, offering to escort Muslims and ensure their safety, using the hashtag #IllRideWithYou on Twitter. More than 250,000 such comments were posted on Twitter — a model of big-hearted compassion after terror attacks. Bravo! That’s the spirit.
Let’s stand with Charlie Hebdo, for the global outpouring of support has been inspiring. Let’s denounce terrorism, oppression and misogyny in the Islamic world — and everywhere else. But let’s be careful not to respond to terrorists’ intolerance with our own. [Abbrev.]
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/08/opinion/nicholas-kristof-lessons-from-the-charlie-hebdo-shooting-in-paris.html?_r=0
Monday, 29 December 2014
Quotes
Security – a new vision: “It is easy to spend hundreds of billions in response to terrorist threats, but the reality is that the resources needed to disrupt a modern economy are small… The challenge is not to provide a high-tech response to terrorism but to build a global society that is environmentally sustainable and equitable – one that restores hope for everyone. Such an effort would do more to combat terrorism than any increase in military expenditures or any new weapons systems, however advanced.” Plan B 4.0 P. 265. Martin Luther King’s Nobel Lecture 1964
Karen Armstrong “Religion is at its best when it helps us to ask questions and holds us in a state of wonder – and arguably at its worst when it tries to answer them authoritatively and dogmatically.” P.108 “Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life”.
From Prof. Richard Falk’s Peace Lecture, 7 Nov. 2014:
“On the legacies of World War I it is certainly appropriate to note that for the first time in history the impetus to form a global institutional mechanism with the overriding mission of preventing future wars entered the mainstream, at least rhetorically.”
“The terrifying turmoil now going on in the Middle East can be traced back to some fundamentally wrong decisions made in the peace diplomacy that followed the war, and cannot be properly understood or addressed without appreciating its World War I roots. ‘ “There is no doubt that the unresolved Palestinian quest for self-determination has caused frequent wars, as well as inflicted on the Palestinian people both the catastrophic dispossession of 1948, the nakba, and a brutal occupation that has continued since 1967, increasingly assuming an apartheid structure of military administration. The United States has assumed the role earlier played by Britain in protecting Israel’s interests in what has been a hostile environment regardless of Israel’s frequent violation of international law and elemental morality, above all, its unwillingness to cooperate in reaching agreement with Palestinians based on equality of rights as the foundation for a sustainable and just peace.”
“The kind of war making that occurred in World War I and took new technological forms in World War II is a virus that continues to lie dormant in the body politic. It is exhibited by the refusal to seek the abolition of nuclear weaponry or the globalizing of the rule of law, and by the insistence that our side in every war is essentially innocent and good and our adversary is evil, even barbaric.”
From Richard Rohr’s book “Eager To Love”:
“It is important to know that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but in fact, certitude and the demand for certitude.” P. 172
“The common variety of church life in most denominations could be called ‘fast-food’ religion instead of deeply nutritious meals that feed and change people at deep unconscious levels… Christianity has largely reflected current cultural values, and even bourgeois values, during most of its history. Alfred North Whitehead, however, put it somewhat unkindly: ‘Modern religion has tended to degenerate into a decent formula whereby people can embellish an otherwise comfortable life.’ I wish that were not true.” P. 195
“We all know love’s absence as hell, and its presence goes by the name of heaven.” P. 263
“Only love can move across boundaries and across cultures. Love is a very real energy, a spiritual life force that is much more powerful than ideas or mere thoughts. Love is endlessly alive.” P. 267
Ends and Means: “As soon as means which would ensure an end are shown to be evil, the end will show itself as unrealizable.” Milovan Djilas
Karen Armstrong “Religion is at its best when it helps us to ask questions and holds us in a state of wonder – and arguably at its worst when it tries to answer them authoritatively and dogmatically.” P.108 “Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life”.
From Prof. Richard Falk’s Peace Lecture, 7 Nov. 2014:
“On the legacies of World War I it is certainly appropriate to note that for the first time in history the impetus to form a global institutional mechanism with the overriding mission of preventing future wars entered the mainstream, at least rhetorically.”
“The terrifying turmoil now going on in the Middle East can be traced back to some fundamentally wrong decisions made in the peace diplomacy that followed the war, and cannot be properly understood or addressed without appreciating its World War I roots. ‘ “There is no doubt that the unresolved Palestinian quest for self-determination has caused frequent wars, as well as inflicted on the Palestinian people both the catastrophic dispossession of 1948, the nakba, and a brutal occupation that has continued since 1967, increasingly assuming an apartheid structure of military administration. The United States has assumed the role earlier played by Britain in protecting Israel’s interests in what has been a hostile environment regardless of Israel’s frequent violation of international law and elemental morality, above all, its unwillingness to cooperate in reaching agreement with Palestinians based on equality of rights as the foundation for a sustainable and just peace.”
“The kind of war making that occurred in World War I and took new technological forms in World War II is a virus that continues to lie dormant in the body politic. It is exhibited by the refusal to seek the abolition of nuclear weaponry or the globalizing of the rule of law, and by the insistence that our side in every war is essentially innocent and good and our adversary is evil, even barbaric.”
From Richard Rohr’s book “Eager To Love”:
“It is important to know that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but in fact, certitude and the demand for certitude.” P. 172
“The common variety of church life in most denominations could be called ‘fast-food’ religion instead of deeply nutritious meals that feed and change people at deep unconscious levels… Christianity has largely reflected current cultural values, and even bourgeois values, during most of its history. Alfred North Whitehead, however, put it somewhat unkindly: ‘Modern religion has tended to degenerate into a decent formula whereby people can embellish an otherwise comfortable life.’ I wish that were not true.” P. 195
“We all know love’s absence as hell, and its presence goes by the name of heaven.” P. 263
“Only love can move across boundaries and across cultures. Love is a very real energy, a spiritual life force that is much more powerful than ideas or mere thoughts. Love is endlessly alive.” P. 267
Ends and Means: “As soon as means which would ensure an end are shown to be evil, the end will show itself as unrealizable.” Milovan Djilas
Wednesday, 17 December 2014
Thinking About God
Ian Harris
Otago Daily Times Dec. 12, 2014
So, too, can Christians and Muslims, though those faiths seek to transcend the racial identity which is a hallmark of Judaism.
DO people begin with a worldview and find a place for God within
it (or not, as the case may be?) Or do they begin with a view of God and mould
their worldview around that (or not, as the case may be)?
A lot will depend on what they mean by “God”, and that is
infinitely variable, both between religions and within them. Priests, rabbis
and mullahs naturally seek to pass on the received orthodox view: their concept
of God then becomes the starting-point for the worldview they teach.
There is a danger inherent in that, however. A God that can
be made “official” in this way may become an instrument of power and repression
in the hands of those who define him. The history of all religions sadly shows
that.
In the freer modern air of the West, it may help to begin
with the worldview rather than with any preordained understanding of God.
The worldview is the lens through which people make sense of
their experience, the way they come to terms with everything around them. It
develops out of all their learnings and experiences, first as children and then
as adults, usually without their even being aware of it.
People whose minds are open and curious are constantly
absorbing new information and experiences, and modify their worldview
accordingly. Those with closed minds do not. Either way, a person’s worldview
is central in helping him or her to see things in relation to each other. It
provides a framework in the search for meaning and wholeness.
Language and culture have a huge bearing on the worldview
that people form. That is apparent, for example, in divergent Maori and Pakeha
attitudes to land, Waitangi Treaty issues and the foreshore, or in Israeli and
Arab perceptions of Palestine. On top of that, everyone brings to it something
uniquely personal, and each person’s worldview is his or her own.
Since earliest times, religions have provided a unifying,
stabilising focus for society, helping to shape the worldview of people loyal
to them. One obvious example is the Jews’ conviction that they are God’s chosen
people, blessed with a divine destiny despite all the setbacks and suffering
they have endured over the centuries. All Jews can say: “I was born into a
story.”
So, too, can Christians and Muslims, though those faiths seek to transcend the racial identity which is a hallmark of Judaism.
American theologian Gordon Kaufman was in no doubt about the
primacy of a person’s worldview in making sense of life, and of the importance
of the God-symbol in this regard.
For 3000 years the monotheistic faiths have understood God
as a supernatural being existing apart from the world and human beings, though
impacting directly upon them. That understanding is still widely affirmed in
western societies, but as they become more secular it is losing its pulling
power. That need not be the end of God, however, for as a human creation the
God-symbol can and does evolve.
So Kaufman suggests that in the modern world “God” is to be
understood not as a distinct object or being, but as “an important constituent
of an over-arching worldview”. The function of the God-symbol is then to bring meaning
and fulfilment to human life, because “it sums up, unifies and represents in a
personification what are taken to be the highest and most indispensable human
ideals and values”.
For Kaufman, the God-symbol in the Christian tradition
conjures up essentially humane images, as seen supremely in Jesus.
He speaks of a “cosmic movement” toward the fuller
realisation of human possibilities, regardless of race, sex, nationality,
culture or anything else. The purpose of religious institutions is to tune in
to this humanising drive, and when true to their founding vision, they do so by
creating communities of openness, love and freedom.
Obviously, cultivating a worldview with such a God-symbol at
the centre will influence profoundly the way a person perceives the world and
behaves in it. That is because it removes the central focus of life from
oneself and one’s own race, culture and destiny: when the God-symbol is the
focal point of a person’s worldview, everything else becomes relative to it.
A cameo in Lloyd Jones’ The
Book of Fame illustrates the same dynamic in more traditional form. The 1905 All Blacks are standing in the glow of a fire in their Welsh hotel
for a Christmas service, and Bob Deans prays: “God be in our thoughts, and in
our words . . .”
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