Once again, it has been way too long. I've been on Slashdot coming up on 20 years. I honestly can't believe it's still around. Which is why I export all of these journals to Google Docs and Calendar. Of course, who knows how long that'll last. When that time comes though, I'll just do a data export. Anyway.
Will the detractors and whiners listen? Of course not. I see interesting insults about "people who need to control others" (?!) which is "not even wrong"... But I feel better about humanity that enough of you have defended something that is good.
If only more people these days could pass the cookie test. https://www.livescience.com/15...
Also, it doesn't cause more deaths, it just moves a few of them from the fall to the spring. https://www.scientificamerican...
The other reply I saw somewhere here that was great mentioned "if we only" did certain things to minimize the difficulty in making the switch so people don't need to moan about it... and it turns out we do do those things!
You have understood little, and are perhaps approaching it from a prejudiced Western viewpoint. All it is teaching is that one need not hesitate to fight injustice.
Perhaps a deeper reading will help. Its not for nothing that Western greats like Ralph Waldo Emerson amd Henry Thoreau were enamored by the Bhagavad Gita.
Good list https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
J. Robert Oppenheimer
The Trinity test of the Manhattan Project was the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, which lead Oppenheimer to recall verses from the Bhagavad Gita, notably: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds".
J. Robert Oppenheimer, American physicist and director of the Manhattan Project, learned Sanskrit in 1933 and read the Bhagavad Gita in the original form, citing it later as one of the most influential books to shape his philosophy of life.[9] Oppenheimer later recalled that, while witnessing the explosion of the Trinity nuclear test, he thought of verses from the Bhagavad Gita (XI,12):
-[10] If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one...[11][12]
Years later he would explain that another verse had also entered his head at that time:
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.[13][a]
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau wrote "In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial."[18]
Hermann Graf Keyserling
Hermann Graf Keyserling, German Philosopher regarded Bhagavad-Gita as "Perhaps the most beautiful work of the literature of the world."[19]
Hermann Hesse
Hermann Hesse felt that "the marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life's wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion."[7]
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson said this about the Bhagavad Gita: "I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad-Gita. It was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent,the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us."[20]
Wilhelm von Humboldt
Wilhelm von Humboldt
Wilhelm von Humboldt pronounced the Gita as: "The most beautiful, perhaps the only true philosophical song existing in any known tongue
Bulent Ecevit
Turkish Ex prime minister Bulent Ecevit, when asked what had given him the courage to send Turkish troops to Cyprus . His answer was "He was fortified by the Bhagavad Gita which taught that if one were morally right, one need not hesitate to fight injustice".[22]
Lord Warren Hastings
Lord Warren Hastings, the first governor general of British India wrote: "I hesitate not to pronounce the Gita a performance of great originality, of sublimity of conception, reasoning and diction almost unequalled; and a single exception, amongst all the known religions of mankind."[23]
Sunita Williams
Sunita Williams, an American astronaut who holds the record for longest single space flight by a woman carried a copy of Bhagavad Gita and Upanishads with her to space, said "Those are spiritual things to reflect upon yourself,life, world around you and see things other way, I thought it was quite appropriate" while talking about her time in space.[24]
Annie Besant
"That the spiritual man need not be a recluse, that union with the divine Life may be achieved and maintained in the midst of worldly affairs, that the obstacles to that union lie not outside us but within us—such is the central lesson of the Bhagavad-Gt." - Annie Besant[25]
Rudolf Steiner
"If we want to approach such a creation as sublime as the Bhagavad-gita with full understanding it is necessary for us to attune our souls to it. "- Rudolf Steiner[26]
I decided to Google my name. I mean, I've done it many times before, and I know what's out there. But after leaving most social media a few years ago, and really enjoying the new found privacy, I decided to do a complete privacy audit and see what someone, anyone out in the world could find about me if they so desired.
NOTE: Turning off comments on this because you people are fucking weird. Who honestly has time to read some random dude's journals? You should take a good long look in the mirror, much as I'll be doing in this post. If you've got time for this, you're not living up to your full potential. As I have said before, these are for me. Sure, I could do it privately, but as this is my oldest surviving journal, I like to keep it going. Read on if you want, but you really should be doing something else
super, adv.
: yet another super-overused superlative qualifier.
+1 including this comment
At this point, India has vaccinated more people than the US. Still low in terms of population % but significantly more than "almost nobody"
https://www.downtoearth.org.in...
https://www.reuters.com/world/...
That's a noble goal if and only if you don't believe the Hindu gods to be real. If they're real, they need no human defenders to "protect" them from the "menace" of a child-like deity such as Lord Jahveh. Can one even think such a thing? Lord Brahma, Lord Shiva, Lord Indra, Lord Ganesha, Lady Lakshmi, Lady Kali, or any of the others, "worried" about Lord Jahveh's worshipers incursions in their land "threatening" it, and thus "depending" on the BJP to "save" the Vedas from the "risk"? Nah, this is silly to the extreme! If the possibility of Sanathana Dharma going down ever posited itself, the very next moment, with but a gesture, They'd see it restored to its full glory. There's absolutely no need for BJP and RSS "saviors" to do help Them in this, at all.
The problem is not protecting the deities (they need no protection, plus Hinduism is pluralistic in that, it says, different religions and names of God are, but different paths to the same goal: from the Rgveda).
It is more about defending this tolerant culture from intolerance and world dominating political ideologies associated mainly with Islam (non-believers are chastised as infidels) but also with Christianity. And also the fact that conversion by force is not uncommon.
Example from further up in the thread
Radical Muslim outfits performed an ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Hindu Pandits in the 1990s, chasing them out with terrorism, including threats blaring from mosque loudspeakers warning Hindus and Sikhs to to Convert to Islam, flee or die.
The Hindu population in India (80÷) has worshipped the Divine Consciousness as a feminine principle for over 5000 years.
The Divine Mother, who has been obscured in the shadow of Western religions, is one of the distinctive features of Hinduism: including goddesses and religious traditions oriented to female deities practiced for thousands of years in continuity — unlike short lived goddess cults in many parts of the world
https://www.infinityfoundation... (Worship of the Goddess in Hinduism)
https://www.americamagazine.or... (In the Harvard Classroom: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary)
The vestiges of patriarchy in society are largely a bad hangover from the numerous (unsuccessful) Islamic occupation attempts of the past.
Are you having fun yet?
