[Buddha-l] Delayed Reporting of Political views of Buddhists due to email problems

[Vera, Pedro L.]

Greetings:

I tried thrice to post this message and it seems that it was never delivered to the list. Thanks to Richard and Jim Peavler for pointing out the discrepancy between the email addy for my subscription, and my current one (which was recently reworded slightly by the school).

Happy holidays to all.

Pedro

-----Original Message-----
From: Vera, Pedro L.
Sent: Thu 12/14/2006 3:17 PM
To: Buddhist discussion forum
Subject: RE: [Buddha-l] Political views of Buddhists

My score:

Economic Left/Right: -0.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.41

However, I too found the questions poorly worded and, if parsed enough, non-sensical.

At any rate, I would warn the group that self-report scores are notoriously unreliable. One possibility would be to revive objectifiable Inquisitorial or Puritanical tests, modified to detect Marxists/Communists. Thus, we could drop Marxists down wells (or submerge them in bodies of water at any rate) to see if they drown. If they drown, of course they are not Marxists and we may thus all pray for their entrance into the Pure Land. If they do not drown, they could then be further interrogated to ascertain their truly hidden "post-modernist" views and then an immunization plan (I use the term immunization to continue the metaphor of "post-modernist" views as virions) could be implemented to eradicate the infection and redeem them.

By the way, being ignorant of the arcane and tortuous lingo in most of the humanities, I was puzzled as to what "post-modern" could possible mean. I could identify "modern" as whatever age we are in, "pre-modern" as whatever came before the "modern", but "post-modern"?? Is that like the ghost of Christmas Future?? I finally succumbed to the temptation to follow nonsensical information and did a Wikipedia search on the term and was surprised to find Kierkegaard (which I remembered as an existentialist), Barth (well-regarded theologian) and Thomas Kuhn (which I knew as a historian/philosopher of science) all lumped in the same category.

I did not finish reading the entire Wikipedia article since it got progressively arcane, tortuous and frankly unintelligible. I walked away with my initial feeling verified as correct, that the term "post-modern" is absurd and meaningless (and one that was probably created by the Marxists/Communists to confuse the rest of us!). Of course, I realize that such an assertion might leave me open to the accusation of being an "unconscious" Marxist (or "post-modernist"??). However, now (thanks to Dr. Hayes for providing the link), I have proof (see my score above) that I am not, at least, Marxist. I do seem to have certain Libertarian (or Libertine?) tendencies that should probably be held in check.

Also, as an addendum, I seem to be deviating quite a bit from the scores reported by others in the list.

Happy "post-modern" holidays to all!!

Pedro
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