[Buddha-l] NYTimes.com: Let Us Pray for Wealth

[Dan Lusthaus]

Richard,

> What I
> see when I look at the two maps is that there tends to be quite a bit of
> overlap between politically troubled regions of the earth and places that
> have been designated as areas that should be dominated by the United
States

Of course that's all you can see. We've listened to your samaropa on that
pratibimba for years now. Abhuta-parikalpa, my friend.

I realize you don't want to be disturbed by the facts, because you find the
facts disturbing, but here is a little pratipaksa for your samaropa-moha.
Carry these maps back in time -- lo and behold, you will discover these same
trouble spots (or near proximity) going back centuries, all the way back
before there was a US and a George Bush and all the other demons you torture
yourself with. The Western Chinese border has been a hot spot for 500 years,
before white people first starved in Jamestown. The Parsees and Bahais etc.
didn't flee centuries ago due to Bush. Buddhism didn't disappear from
Central Asia and India due to Bush. And no one even knew what petroleum was
back then....

> How many 9/11s in the last ten years have there been. One. From a single
> instance, one cannot draw any general conclusions.

For goodness sake. You can eelwriggle better than that!

> There was quite a good program on the CBC radio program Ideas in which a
> scholar who has spent the past decade or so studying websites promoting
> violence. He has also studied a large number of other al-Qa'eda
literature.
> The main pattern he has detected is that people drawn to fantasies and
plans
> of violent attacks in Western countries are young adults with professional
> educations who have very little interest in religious practice and who are
> second or third generation descendants of immigrants from the Middle East.

How convenient! Maybe that explains some of the people who cruise websites,
it hardly does justice to the bigger picture. Hamas and Hizbollah are not
interested in religion? The Jihadis from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere who've
been coming to Iraq to martyr themselves have no interest in religion? I
guess you have to be an incompetent or ridiculous to get air time on CBS.

> These people, he reports, tend to be driven not by either religious or
> political fanaticism but by a perception that they are living in societies
in
> which they are not fully accepted.

Sure, it's Bush's fault.


> > But let's put aside the (very real) threat that Islam today poses to the
> > nonMuslim world.
>
> No, let's not put that aside. Your principal delusion is that it is Islam
that
> poses the threat. The biggest threat facing the world today is
environmental
> degradation being caused by human beings consuming far more than the
planet
> can provide.

When did we start playing either/or? One shouldn't worry about heart attacks
because cancer is more likely (or is that vice versa)? Geeze, Richard, you
need to hone up your evasions.


>... is the United States of America. That the United States of
> America has chosen...

Speaking of obsessive rants....

(Incidentally China is rapidly surpassing the US in consumption, pollution,
etc. That will maybe be the one thing you and Bush will then have in
common -- you'll both despise China. Or is umbrage only reserved for the...
what was the name of that evil country again?)

Cheer up, you old fart.

Dan