[Buddha-l] Silence ?

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Tue, 2005-04-05 at 20:58 -0400, Stanley J. Ziobro II wrote:

> Actually, this Pope was his own person and not nearly as rigid as rigid
> liberals seem to characterize him.

Forget the terms "liberal" and "conservative", for they have pretty much
lost all meaning in today's world. The Pope's anti-Communist views seem
to have prevented him from seeing any validity in the work of Romero and
other liberation theologians, which seems to me to represent an
inflexibility, almost a blindness.

> For example, anyone who disagrees that abortion, the destruction of
> the traditional family, euthenasia, and the like are fundamentally
> good for any society is termed "rigid," whereas anyone who agrees with
> this nexus of agendas is, what, "progressive," "forward
> looking," "intelligent," "visionary"?

That is your perception, and a bad one, I would add. It certainly does
not fit the case of how I have used words. I would call a person rigid
if and only if he or she were, well, rigid. Rigidity to me implies an
unyielding and uncompromising stance, especially an unhelpful one. The
contrastive term to "rigid" to my ear is "flexible" rather than
"progressive" or "intelligent". I think there is no doubt at all that
the Pope was intelligent and even visionary. In many respects he was
also quite progressive, for example in his long-overdue apology to the
Jews and his rapprochement with the Muslims. In other areas, however,
especially those involving resistant to right-wing totalitarians in
Central America, his stance was, I think, tragically rigid and short-
sighted.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico