It is Sunday, so let us talk about "faith" and "facts".
Religious authority is weak, as an organization, in the Northern Hemisphere. The reason there are so many churches in the southern US is half the people don't agree with the other half. Some of the organized Methodists want to boot one of their own, outgoing President George W. Bush. 54% of Catholic voters, and a high majority of Hispanics, disregarded the advise from the pulpit. Those numbers CAN and will grow.
And those huge new churches and temples? Some have just as dire a situation as Bear Stearns....remember the PTL bankruptcy? The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
Progressives should be able to define ideals, generally, and so lets look as an Islamic concept, because ONE religion dominates the equatorial world. The term "white flag" is not the same as surrender, it is a signal of a truce. Under a white flag, parties in dispute have conversations, toward a settlement.
Hudna (هدنة) is an Arabic term meaning "truce" or "armistice" as well as "calm" or "quiet", coming from a verbal root meaning "calm". It is sometimes translated as "cease-fire".
If we can't even define a "perfect solution", then we have no reason to expect one.
And we should always be ready to steal good ideas, get those ideas working, then worry about who to compensate. Hell, some Texas preacher is on GMA, mandating 7 days of married sex, from a king sized Serta pulpit...doesn't Yoko Ono have some copyright interests??
Re-Intro of Hudna:
Hudna (هدنة) is an Arabic term meaning "truce" or "armistice" as well as "calm" or "quiet", coming from a verbal root meaning "calm". It is sometimes translated as "cease-fire".
When bargaining in faith, which one has to do to invoke a Hudna, this boils down to ten years of "commerce", "trade", "fair jurisdictioning", because you cannot think about those types of movements in a state of turmoil.
Because Hudna is rare, the only position stated in wiki states "if Muslims are weak", and we have to get over that superiority/power mindset, agree it is the whole Mother Earth that is weakening, at this moment.
This is TAILOR-made for optimists, no place to go but UP.
According to Umdat as-Salik, a medieval summary of Shafi'i jurisprudence, hudnas with a non-Muslim enemy should be limited to 10 years: "if Muslims are weak, a truce may be made for ten years if necessary, for the Prophet made a truce with the Quraysh for that long, as is related by Abu Dawud"
There, that is IT, an ideal to shoot for, a goal to achieve.
We can't "win" anything, because that means somebody lost.
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Discuss amongst ourselves, because what follows is rambling tripe.
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In a perfect world, mother earth needs a 10 year MINIMUM "rest", regardless of religiousity or ethnicity. The books are already written on how to capitalize on the current state of affairs, it needs at least that long to replace opium poppies in Afghanistan with an even MORE profitable pomegranite trees. (I know, I've tried to grow them...)
Can we agree, that instead of remembering Jonestown, the IDEAL example in recent history, of living ones faith, was the Amish in the wake of the Pennsylvania school house shooting? "Turn the other cheek" was the lesson of that day.
Can we agree that Jimmy Carter's Habitat for Humanity concept is the ideal work of an ex-President? "I am my brother's keeper" can be generalized as the theme, the same as health care, public works and government subsidizations.
Agrarian middle class is the path to Jeffersonian democracy. Minus the slavery part. Period.
All the world depends on development of the barren sands on the equator. You need sun to grow plants, you need plants to cleanse the air, you need to use sea water to grow the plants, because we got plenty. Convert the plenty to precious, that is economically sane.
I'm especially not speaking of Dole Pineapple or United Banana's interests nor monopolizations.
Mother Earth needs salt water purifiers and fancy irrigation systems on the equator, built by a skilled workforce, designed by engineering genius' and marketed by frat boy nepotitic idjuts.
Entrepreneurs need to develop wheat for food and straw for housing. Hemp oils and sugar canes for renewable fuels. It needs to export sun based electricity somehow...there are sand dunes full of wind, you betcha.
And it REQUIRES adjoining schools and clinics, so the following generations of renewable resource providers enjoy middle class sanity, rather than hand to mouth existence. NO more of this short term gain thinking, think where YOU want to be in fifty years.
When you look at the map, and look at the equatorial situations for the United States, it sucks.
Back to my original point, about religious leadership.
It is time to make THEM earn their suppers. In the separation of church and state debate, there is a concept I call "tend to your OWN turnips".
However, we need somehow to gather all the grand poohbahs and pashas, rajahs and shieks, sultans or the mineret cryers unions, of the Islamic world, and talk about a Hudna.
Pardon any implied disrespect, all the variations make it look more chopped up than 500 sects of Christianity, and it all sounds like Chutes and Ladders sometimes.
If the Pope or Russian Metropolitian or Dalai Lama want to help, WITHOUT ego or pre-conceived notions of historical power, they are welcome.
But if they don't want to help, by educating their adherents more than anything else, place them on the pile of irrelevance.
Because we question authority, I think the sexually ignorant Pope, Bishop and a lot of parish priests are going to lose in a fight over bedroom issues. All's they can do is talk, they cannot walk the walk, based on precedent.
(For instance, my devout younger brother no longer attends, and he won't, until the 5 year stint by his crappy priest is finished. He likes them old tough Irish types, not like the current one, who has maybe 50 Mexican stamps on his passport). We recognize and abhor hypocrisies, organized religion is facing declining membership.
However, the Progressive should learn and respect the religious implications in the Muslim world.
With 5 times per day reverence, taboos on alcohol and other vices, in the scorecard of sin, they ARE the (maybe) the latterdaysaints. Or maybe I mean, they have more devotion than Westerners, as a unit.
(Boy, is THAT a contra-conversational statement to defend).
What I always heard in the old days, from travelers and professors, was that "hospitality" from Timbuktu to Tehran, seemed to be a religiously mandated decree. What I know from biblical stories is the best years of the Hebrew history was under the Persian umbrella.
Hospitality implies commerce, because tourism generates trades and markets.
The HUDNA is an Islamic concept we need to attempt, NOW, ideally a ten year truce to begin with. From:
"hadana: he grew quiet. hadina: he quieted (transitive or intransitive). haadana: he made peace with. The noun from each of these is hudna."