Believe What You Like But Know What You Must
People are free to be consumed with contemplating their existence, their origins, the origins of the universe, supreme beings, controllers of destiny or anything else. But solving "the Great Mystery" is neither a requirement of being Ohnkwe Ohnwe nor does it provide a path to righteousness. I maintain that spirituality does not require faith or the leaps that faith requires but rather awareness. If it helps to believe that "God has a plan" and we just must have faith that "He" knows what "He" is doing, then walk that path. My interest is in taking the mystery out of life by pointing to the obvious that is ignored everyday in the midst of fanatical ideology and the sometimes not too subtle influences of promoting beliefs over knowledge. I have said it before: “beliefs are what you are told, knowledge is what you experience”. I support a culture that prepares us to receive knowledge and to live a life with purpose. I am certainly not suggesting there is only one way to do that.
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3 comments:
Just caught the tail end of your show on WECK and will definetly try to catch the next airing..
Hi John,
I heard about you, from you, the broadcast and your blog today on Susan Arbetter's "Capitol Pressroom". That was very helpful and truly eye-opening. I have to say that I had no idea and you did a great job explaining the facts of the matter.Thanks for opening a window and letting fresh air in!
Holm
Good morning, John,
I am sitting here listening to your program, which I do every Thursday. You are talking about the bombing of Tokyo and I find it coincidental and I recently wrote a letter to the president about this. I had, in my life, written a letter to the president, but I was compelled to do so when I heard that Obama was visiting Japan but was ot going to apologize for the bombing. Here is the letter I wrote to him.
Dear Mr. President:
It was reported earlier this week that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has apologized for the Komagata Maru incident of 1914 in which “376 Asian passengers spent two months on the ship at the Vancouver harbor and were denied food and water until the Canadian military turned them back.”
The United States can certainly learn a lesson from PM Trudeau not only in humility, but in compassion (something the US sorely lacks). The Komagata Maru incident incident was not nearly as devastating as the unnecessary bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I know, you know, and, now, everybody knows that it was totally unnecessary. Japan was beaten and was already talking surrender terms (although not with the US).
On the night of March 10, 1945 (five months before the first nuclear bomb was dropped), for two hours and 40 minutes, US B-29 bombers flew over Tokyo and dumped massive payloads of cluster bombs equipped with napalm. Over 100,000 charred bodies were left in the wake of this attack.
It was the deadliest conventional air raid ever, worse than Nagasaki and on a par with Hiroshima. But the attack, and similar ones that followed in more than 60 other Japanese cities, have received little attention, eclipsed by the atomic bombings and Japan’s postwar rush to rebuild. (The Japan Times, March 10, 2015)
The Komagata Maru incident of 1914 pales when compared to the destruction of lives and cities that the US inflicted on Japan. Why is it that the US thinks it does not owe Japan an apology?
The US cannot simply say that it was retribution for Pearl Harbor, in which almost all of the casualties (~3,000) were military. If that was the excuse, why not bomb a Japanese naval base? Besides Tokyo, 66 other Japanese cities were also carpet bombed with napalm leaving hundreds of thousand civilians dead. Would the US expect an apology for the wholesale destruction of, say, Cleveland, New York, Chattanooga, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Diego, Baltimore, Miami Salt Lake City, Nashville, Spokane, Duluth, Lexington, Charlotte, Des Moines, Rochester, Sacramento, and 51 other major cities? The only explanation for the reluctance to apologize can be summed up in a single word: hubris.
That, and what was the desire, at that time, to show the Soviet Union that we (the US) not only had this horrible weapon of mass destruction, but that we were also willing to use it—twice. That certainly showed them. From that point on, we (and our children) have been brainwashed into believing that the big, ugly Soviet bear would attack us and wipe us out at any moment. Ironically, it was the the Soviets who were literally scared s@#tless of those crazy Americans who are willing to drop a bomb on the slightest provocation. Really, did the government really believe that a country (the USSR) that had been totally decimated—25,000,000 mostly civilian lives lost—was gung-ho to start another war? Really?! (By the way, according to http://warchronicle.com/numbers/WWII/deaths.htm, total US casualties in WWII were 400,000.) Yes. The United States should own up to the horrors it has inflicted on other countries, and, yes, the Japanese deserve an apology for the wholesale slaughter of civilian populations.
Sincerely,
Irene Díaz-Reyes
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