“Do you believe in God?”

Sometimes there is a problem with the way that questions are asked. Those are the questions to which our response is sure to get someone upset. Perhaps they should not be asked? Perhaps they need to be asked differently?

When a response clashes with a person’s beliefs, this is guaranteed to create an uproar, because people are highly invested in their belief systems. We tend even to be highly invested in our opinions.

It is as if our whole identity is threatened when these opinions, and certainly our “deeply held” beliefs are questioned.

Why exactly do we feel threatened when these are challenged? Why does it feel so visceral? As if someone is threatening to chop off a finger or wrench out our heart? Indeed, it is as if these are more than material.

If my hand is amputated I can get a prosthesis. If my heart is diseased, I can maybe receive a transplant. I will still be the same person. Will I be the same person if I adopt a different religion or lose my faith?

I think it depends a lot upon what we base our identity.

So, do I believe in God?

I do not believe in a kindly or a wrathful deity sitting somewhere up in the sky, or one bearing similarly anthropomorphic features. I think that most educated, self-respecting contemporary people would probably give this same response whether or not this is really their image of the deity. They will mention a more sophisticated concept of what “God” represents for them.

It is necessary to dig a little deeper. If there really is an entity called God, Allah, Elohim, Siva, Ahura Mazda, Amida Butsu or whatever, this is going to have to be infinitely powerful and all-knowing. Above and beyond everything else. Anything less would be too limited. If our deity does not exceed all limitations, why do I need him / her / they?

Yet even if we think of God as limitless, omnipresent, omniscient and omnivalent, this remains a conception or a concept in our minds. As humans, We understand reality through such concepts, all of which are highly subjective and culturally conditioned. For example, according to Wikipedia, a banana is a a kind of berry produced by a large herbaceous flowering plant. A cucumber is a fruit that grows on a vine and people in some cultures would see it as blue.

Concepts are used to tame our anarchic reality and make it manageable. We take a feature of this reality and assign to it a definition. To define something means literally to place it within limitations, to limit it.

Do we wish to place limitations around God? If there is a God, could we? This is the entire reason that Jews and Muslims refuse to create images that represent the deity. Jews go further and refuse to “name” God. They replace the word with epithets. When pressed for a name in the Biblical tale, God’s response is only “I will be who I will be” (the meaning of “Yahwee”) – and Jews refuse to speak or write even that name. Muslims disallow even the artful representation of God’s creation. They see this as blasphemy.

When religions, such as Hinduism, do allow for such representations, they have highly sophisticated responses to the issue of the implied limitation – they understand the problem very well. This is even built into folk traditions so that not just the savants will understand it.

Ultimately, the question of God’s existence is less important than what it reveals about ourselves and our way of understanding the world.

Links of the day

Israeli complicity in Sri Lanka war crimes must be investigated | Opinions | Al Jazeera https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/6/27/israeli-complicity-in-sri-lanka-war-crimes-must-be-investigated

“During the civil war, Israel sold weapons and backed the Sri Lankan army while it was committing grave atrocities.”

Israel OK’s plans for thousands of new settlement homes, defying White House calls for restraint | AP News https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-settlements-west-bank-biden-49c4788ffc5f5ee41d5c48365ac5395b

“Peace Now, an anti-settlement watchdog group, said Israel has now approved over 13,000 settlement housing units this year. That is nearly three times the number of homes approved in all of 2022 and marks the most approvals in any year since it began systematically tracking the planning procedures in 2012.”

French Government Bans “Earth Uprising” Direct-Action Climate Group

After the banning of [i]Les Soulèvements de la Terre[/i], it seems that George Monbiot did not choose the best possible moment to extoll the French government’s environmental response.

The meaning of purpose; the purpose of meaning

Purpose or lack of purpose is something that exists in the human plane. To escape suffering that is caused by war, famine, climate change, a person risks his life with the purpose of reaching a better place. Purposes relate to cause and effect; to agency. A subject acts and an object receives the action. By virtue of our lived experience, we interpret the universe in terms of separation; we see causes and effects and we look for purpose. If we find it, we decide that there is meaning to our lives, to the universe. If we do not find it, we may decide to believe in a supernatural or an unknowable purpose: “mysterious are the ways of God…” Or contrarily, we decide that there is no purpose, neither meaning. It’s all a blank.

This is all from our human point of view, the perspective of individual subjects existing in a universe of objects. You can say that indeed this is all that matters: whether our experience of reality is valid or not, we are stuck in it. This is what we know and perhaps all that we will ever know. We suffer, we struggle to find meaning, we search for a purpose to our lives.

And yet it is still important to understand the limitation of our manner of looking at the world, and to admit that there is another way of seeing reality, even if this is not currently accessible to us. In this other reality, there are no subjects or objects, because there is no one to stand “outside” or “apart” from the universe and observe it. There is just an all encompassing unity in which every particle of the cosmos is a full expression of the whole, in which everything is in perfect sync. Because it is all one, there is no agency: there is nothing separate to be acted upon. So, indeed, there is no “purpose” and no “meaning” that exist independently of the whole. There is no consciousness that is separate from existence.

The purpose, if you will, is therefore intrinsic.

I am stuck in an inflatable dinghy on the open sea. The craft is losing air and taking on water. I have no life jacket, and am unable to swim. My dreams of a better life, or any kind of life, have ended in failure and will soon end in death. Shall I be thankful for the short time I was able to spend with my mother and siblings? Shall I die with feelings of immense bitterness at the broken promises, the greedy smuggler who betrayed me, the foolishness of my venture, the loss of everything I hoped for, the cruelty of my fate? Shall I look from the dark ocean to the sea of stars, and think that I am one of them; that they are my brothers. That I am somehow a vessel for this cosmic radiance that comes to me across the aeons, and will continue to shine far into the future; a continuum of life. Shall I come to terms with mortality and immortality, perfection, beauty, frailty and power?

Machine translation of Sanskrit

In 2022, Google finally added Sanskrit to its machine translation program: “Sanskrit is the number one, most requested language at Google Translate, and we are finally adding it”

However, copying and moving devanagari script around is not always simple.

Here I tried to copy the following from a textual PDF (a sloka in the Bhagavad Gita) :

and got this:

नयादत्तक कस्यशचत्पयाप श न चवैव सभकवृतश शवभभव।

अजयानकनयाववृतश जयानश तकन मभह्यननत जनतवव।। 5.15।।

which is rather different – letters have been skipped and replaced willy-nilly.

A translation of the original given in the PDF is : The Omniscient neither accepts anybody’s sin nor even virtue. Knowledge remains covered by ignorance; thereby the creatures become deluded.

Google struggles to make sense of the garbled text thus:

There is nothing wrong with the judge and nothing else. Ajay’s daughter is covered with Jayansha’s technique. 5.15.

(Horrible, but convincing on the face of it).

I was more or less able to overcome the problem by transliterating the actual letters back into Devanagari, as in: नादत्ते कस्यचित्पपम् नचैव सुकूतम् विभु which Google rendered as The Lord does not take away anyone’s sin or goodness This seems to be a viable translation candidate – it would be necessary to compare a few translations to see how it is usually rendered.

Recent links

resident dousing burned out property

Palestinian shot dead as dozens of Jewish settlers torch homes, vehicles in West Bank

Dozens of Jewish settlers, some armed, set fire to houses and vehicles in the Palestinian West Bank town of Turmus Aya on Wednesday, Israeli security sources said.

On Wednesday afternoon, after the rampage, clashes broke out between security forces and local Palestinians. The Palestinian Health Ministry announced that one person, 27-year-old Omar Ketin, had been shot dead. protestors demand freedom for Assange

Daniel Ellsberg is lauded in death by the same media that lets Assange rot in jail

What Ellsberg understood most keenly was the desperate need – if humanity was to survive – both for more whistleblowers to come forward to expose their states’ crimes, and for a tenacious, watchdog media to give their full backing.

Watching the media abandon Assange to his persecutors, Ellsberg could draw only one possible conclusion: that humanity’s odds were shortening by the day.

Tags: sanskrit

“Once I let go of what was expected of me…”

“… I began to paint like this.”*

artist Hiam Mustafa, at the opening of a new exhibition “Us and Them”, in our village the other day. She’s a Druze artist from Daliat al-Carmel.

*her words, approximately.

“Empire” meets “The Dawn of Everything”

Before going to sleep, listened to another podcast of the excellent “Empire” series of William Dalrymple and Anita Anand. This was the first of a new series on the subject of slavery, and the episode featured, as guest speaker, David Wengrow, author of The Dawn of Everything.

I was interested in this one because I recently finished this book and think it is brilliant – one of the freshest and most original approaches to human history that one can read. Among other things, it reveals the endless possibilities for human governance, and the range of possible alternative frameworks, once we free our minds of rigid pre-conceived ideas.

Actually, I think this wasn’t one of the best Empire podcasts. Anand and Dalrymple are more susceptible to our human tendency to look for heroes and create value judgements about different societies – in this case, mainly the Sumerians and the Egyptians. Wengrow resists these tendencies, both because his approach is more frank and scientific, and because he’s keenly aware of the lenses through which we look at past civilizations. So in the podcast he was like a slippery fish they can never quite catch.

Two Kids a Day (film)

This is a documentary about the detention of Palestinian children. The title, Two Kids a Day reflects the arrest of 12 – 14 year olds by Israeli soldiers. The statistic is quoted by one of the protagonists, a settler in the Civil Administration to say, as it were, “hey, that’s not so many.” (the true statistic is about 1,000 kids per year.)

Minors are arrested from the streets or from their homes in night raids, usually on suspicion of throwing stones. Twelve to fourteen year olds, under the rules of the Civil Authority, may be detained for 6 months at a stretch, in clear violation of the Geneva conventions to which Israel is signatory. They are interrogated under threats of violence (or worse) and pressured into betraying their friends. Many of them are imprisoned more than once, and some of the boys interviewed in the film, who have now reached the age of 16-18, have spent a total of 3 years in detention.

Links

Ancient Britons built Stonehenge – then vanished. Is science closing in on their killers?

This is wonderful. The oldest-found human in Britain was dark-skinned, had black hair and blue-green eyes. But Stonehenge was probably built by later immigrants who had olive skin and may be related to the Basques. But plague may have reduced the population, making them vulnerable to an incursion by modern Brits, who were descended from fair haired invaders from the Asian steppes.

All this should be a reality check for notions of where people are “really” from, and how we measure who is entitled to settle where in the world. The white British population are certainly not the indigenous people of the British Isles. They are the descendants of immigrants who arrived on boats.

Carmel Market visit photos

Carmel Market

This June has been one of the rainiest on record (they said since 1957). One day during the week we had thundershowers intermittently for most of the day, combined with temperatures that were quite cool for this time of year.

On Friday I took advantage of a trip of D to Modi’in, to come along and then catch a train to Tel Aviv, where I spent a couple of hours walking around and taking pictures. I visited the Carmel Market, where I used to buy the weekly groceries for the yoga centre when I first came to Tel Aviv. The market has changed a lot – it seems that nowadays it’s more lucrative to sell bags, clothes and jewelry than vegetables and fruit.

On the trip I at first didn’t find many good photos, and a couple of the ones that were good I decided not to publish. Later, when I reviewed them again, I found things that I liked. Sometimes, cropping an image produced something nice.

I am gradually working out what I consider to be an invasion of privacy. The dry legalities are clear: it’s fine to publish photos of persons in public places as long as there is no profit motive. But, in a world where cameras are ubiquitous, sometimes it still feels wrong to be yet another character there to threaten someone’s privacy. It does not give a good feeling.

But actually, the technique I am using makes it unlikely that I would ever come into confrontation with anyone. I’m only half-aware of the subjects that I am photographing, myself, and usually am not directly looking at them, so it’s as if the camera has a mind of its own, and only later do I discover what it has captured. Also, with the camera slung around my neck, I look like the archetypal tourist – the perfect alibi. Finally, I am not publishing the results in any mainstream social media.

Photos

Faces Places

A 2017 doco by Agnès Varda and JR. It’s full of charm, imagination and humour.

“L’Air de Rien”

Mainly to improve my French, I started to listen to some French podcasts. One of the first that I came upon was “L’air de rien” . It’s on a variety of subjects. After listening to a few episodes on my walks, I also came across his blog www.eiffair.fr Both the podcast and the blog are really interesting, and he is very helpful in referencing other bloggers and youtubers. This evening I’ve been reading his posts on photography, and following the links to Ted Forbes, Dimitri Lazardeux and Joe Cornish.

Links blog

The village of ‘Ein Samiya is no more Heartbreaking testimony and photos by David Shulman

Detention without trial

What goes around comes around: till now “administrative detention” (first adopted by the British under “emergency” regulations at the end of the Mandate period) has been used mainly against Palestinians.

Far-right Pushes Bill Granting Ben-Gvir Powers to Put Israelis in Detention Without Trial

Far-right Israeli lawmakers are advancing a bill that would allow National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir to put any Israeli citizen in detention without trial, Channel 12 News reported on Sunday.

The proposal would allow police to limit the freedom of movement and employment of the suspect, enforces bans on internet use, and constraints on their communications. It would also allow police to place Israelis under house arrest for up to six months under “maintaining public order,” and let judges use inadmissible evidence.

According to leaked pages from the bill, the main criteria would be if Ben-Gvir “is convinced that there is a near certain possibility of real harm to public security.” The orders will then require approval from Israel’s police commissioner and either the attorney general’s office or state prosecutor.

The bill, sponsored by National Security Committee chairman Tzvika Foghel, is expected to be fast tracked through the Knesset, meaning it will bypass the need for a legal opinion from the attorney general. Ben-Gvir had previously ordered the police to seek the approval of Israel’s Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara in order to expand the use of administrative detentions.

Poverty-stricken women and girls are being tricked and abducted in West Bengal

“‘I trusted him’: human trafficking surges in cyclone-hit east India”

US State Department Immediately Should Impose Leahy Law Sanctions on Israeli Unit Responsible for Killing Palestinian-American Omar Assad

The army white-washed the case; ruled that no one is responsible for the death of a 78 year old man who had been bound and ganged during an army incursion into his own village.

The Book of Arkovia

It may well be just a combination of poor editing and poor translation that makes me feel that this book I bought on the beachfront is unreadable. Although I’m in favour of everything indie, traditional publishers try to make sure that what reaches our eyes has some integrity, either by refusing to publish something, or by making sure that if they do decide to take a risk with it, it is properly edited.

I don’t doubt that there’s a grain of a good story hiding in this novel, but what’s there makes me shudder and cringe, and then I feel too lazy to go on reading it. Too bad.

The Web of Meaning, by Jeremy Lent

Instead, started to read this.

Introduction to the Web of Meaning (article)
Living into an Ecological Civilisation (invidious link)

Links

Alan Rusbridger (former editor of the Guardian): “Ten years ago, Edward Snowden warned us about state spying. Spare a thought for him, and worry about the future” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/06/edward-snowden-state-spying-guardian-alan-rusbridger

Even now the British government, in hastily revising the laws around official secrecy, is trying to ensure that any editor who behaved as I did 10 years ago would face up to 14 years in prison. Lamentably, the Labour party is not joining a cross-party coalition that would allow whistleblowers and journalists the right to mount a public interest defence.

Operation Chastise – Wikipedia

The times were different, but the present conflict was not the first in which a dam was targeted. In this earlier attack on six German dams, some 1,600 civilians were killed by the flooding (a thousand of them labourers, mainly Soviet, enslaved by Germany). Movies present this as an act of bravery and genius, rather than as a war crime.

The Ukrainians are blaming Russia for the attack on the Khakhovka dam and calling it “ecocide”. But a similar accusation could be leveled at Ukraine, if the “Discord Leaks” report appearing in the Washington Post is correct, according to which Ukraine was responsible for the attack on the Nordsream II pipeline last year.

Street names; Dorab; Ashtravakra Gita

Street names

The current issue in the village is street names. We never decided on any. There are house numbers, and that’s all we need for most issues.

But sometimes there are companies that demand actual street names. Recently there was a supermarket chain suggested to make me a member of their loyalty club, but I couldn’t sign up because their website demanded a street name, which it checked against a national database, so I couldn’t make something up.

Then there are large foundations, such as those connected to the US Government, whose SAM.gov system depends upon NATO’s N-CAGE for address verification. And N-CAGE too demands a street name for our association. Without a street name, no registration. I wonder how they deal with Japan, which doesn’t use street names hardly at all, even in large cities like Tokyo?

Astavakra Gita

Translator’s preface to the Ashtavakra Gita (Bart Marshall)

In Vietnam when I was twenty-one a hand grenade or mortar round–the circumstances made it difficult to determine which–blew me into a clear and brilliant blackness. For the next thirty-seven years that glimpse of infinite emptiness, so intimate, so familiar, kept me looking almost obsessively in esoteric books and far corners for an explanation of myself. Then, “suddenly,” the veil, as they say, was lifted.

A few months after that occurrence, as my interest in reading began to slowly return, I found myself drawn mainly to the sayings and writings of old masters. What did Buddha have to say? What did Christ? Lao Tsu? Patanjali? I wanted to read them with new eyes.

Oddly, in those thirty-seven years of seeking, I had never read the Ashtavakra Gita, and indeed was barely aware of its existence. Then recently, as I sat at the bedside of a dying friend and teacher, another friend placed it in my hands. I opened it and was astonished. Here, in one concise volume, was all that needed to be said.

Dorab Framji

I learned yesterday of the death of Dorab Framji of Tiruvannamalai at the age of 92. A Parsi (Zoroastrian) from Bombay, he was one of the few living disciples of the advaitic sage Sri Ramana Maharshi (who left the world in 1950).

Dorab accompanied his father on visits to see Ramana as a child. He moved to Tiru permanently when he grew older. His home was five minutes walk from the ashram, just next to the Osbornes.

He had the reputation of being gruff and grumpy to strangers but was exceedingly kind to friends. I was privileged to stay with him for a month in 2019 and, in retrospect, am sorry that I did not take up the invitation to spend more time with him. (Maybe I should have stayed till he himself would throw me out, and not run off to visit Madurai and Kerala?)

His moving story is told in the ashram newsletter, Saranagathi.

Links

“Better to die there”: Palestinians mourn Ein Samiya Eviction

Palestinian toddler hit by Israeli army gunfire dies

Fixing a leak

Around lunchtime, Regina called from the village office to ask if I’d tried to do anything about that leak that she’d told me about a week or two ago. “It shows 20 cubic meters for yesterday”, she said “haval – that’ll cost you a lot of money!”

The meters are connected to the water company’s computers through the internet and Regina gets an alert if somebody’s meter is reporting a leak.

Well, I did look around the last time she called but couldn’t find anything. I had thought it was maybe a one-time thing.

But 20 cubic meters of water – and who knows how much previously, sounds like we are going to receive a phenomenal water bill!

I started my detective work first by pruning all the bushes that were preventing me from viewing the water meter, and then indeed, I saw the little cog wheel inside whizzing around like crazy, indicating a heavy flow, while all the taps were closed.

I circumambulated the property several times, turning off faucets here and there, but could discover nothing. So I decided to call the plumber – yes, he could come tomorrow morning. Fine. He suggested in the meantime I close off the water except when we need it.

Then, trying one more time to turn off one of the outdoor faucets leading into the house, it snapped completely. It was all rusty. Huge flow of water. I had to turn off everything immediately, further down the line.

Broken tap

Next thing was to go and buy some parts, which I did. Came home. Decided it was easier to make an emergency temporary repair that would provide water to half of the house. Did that.

But then something else happened. I saw a patch of muddy ground. Along where a plastic pipe runs underground parallel to the patio. Started to dig. Yes! The plastic pipe was cracked. That was a comparatively easy fix, though by now it was evening.

I cleared up, then showered my muddy self. Unfortunately it was a cold shower because I’d forgotten to open the hot water pipe. But it still felt great.

So tomorrow Samir, the plumber, will come and fix the broken tap and maybe some other rusty pipes.

Samir’s a great guy, from the Palestinian part of Jerusalem. He lists himself as Samir Ezra, which at first I didn’t understand – because Samir is an Arab name, while Ezra is a Jewish name.

But the Ezra in the name is for Ezra Nawi, the Jewish plumber he was partnered with. Nawi, besides being a plumber, was one of Israel’s best known peace activists and human rights defenders, a colourful, wonderfully controversial character. There’s a ream of information on Wikipedia, that reads like a chronicle of this country’s human rights movement, with people like Uri Avneri, Amira Hass, Noam Chomsky, David Shulman all crossing paths with or intervening on behalf of Ezra Nawi at some point.

Even the front runner for the Irish presidency had to drop out of the race as a result of an intervention on behalf of Ezra Nawi.

Samir partnered with Ezra in the plumbing business, but unlike Ezra, who was known to charge exorbitant fees in order to fund his peace work, Samir’s prices are very reasonable. Last time he came, he asked me to pay whatever I like – but I hadn’t a clue what it ought to be. It took about 20 minutes for him to make up his mind, while squinting and scratching his head.

Links

What Stops Millions of Americans From Going Green: Their Landlords

A good citizen; hamsin; musical performance

airport shuttle bus, view from window of the airport

Being a good citizen

Being a good citizen of the 21st century requires knowledge and awareness so that we can make good decisions on an individual level, about what products to buy, what to do and what not to do.

On the other hand, our individual solutions have very little effect, compared to those of the big companies and climate criminals. What Greta Thunberg points out in her book is that despite the relative insignificance of small individual decisions, when they join together to form a mass movement, such as a mass boycott, they count for more – so we need to be public about them.

But being public about anything reminds me of past instances of moral hypocrisy. So, when someone tells me they are flying to Prague or Paris for three days for a “short getaway”, it’s hard for me to say I’m not sure that’s the right thing to do during a climate crisis. And I can’t say I’m going to set a good example by flying less, or not at all, because that’s not something I can be sure I’ll do, in a country where the only way to reach Europe or the rest of Asia is by flying. So I keep quiet and don’t say anything, which means again, that whatever I do has virtually no effect.

Ein Kerem, showing Brasserie restaurant, Mary's Well.

Hamsin

The hamsin is supposed to let up by this evening or tomorrow. It’s currently 41°C outside. A hamsin is actually a kind of sirocco, which Bedouin colourfully describe as issuing from the mouth of hell. Yesterday afternoon, we were sitting on the balcony of La Brasserie by Mary’s Well in Ein Kerem when a sudden blast of wind surged up the valley, felling huge, stone-mounting umbrellas, which in turn gave one of the diners a nasty blow to the head and toppled her to the floor. She was OK. The restaurant owner apologized profusely and offered the couple a meal on the house. He said he’d been there for 11 years and this was the first time it had ever happened.

Screenshot from SoundCloud page of Marwan Halabi

Musical performance, Marwan Halabi

On Thursday evening Magdalena organized a musical performance at her photo studio in a nearby village. There was only room for about 20 people but we all squeezed in, to hear Marwan Halabi, a young Druze singer-songwriter with a sublime, amazing voice. Accompanying himself, just with a guitar, he sang some of his own compositions; some were traditional sufi songs, and one or two Egyptian. Most were in classical or spoken Arabic, with a couple in Hebrew. He can be found on Spotify and SoundCloud – I include a SoundCloud link because that’s the service I usually prefer – worth a listen!

Links

16 year-old girl murdered in Delhi street; no one even bothered to call the police

There were so many people when the murder took place, but no one helped the girl. Even if they would have shouted, maybe the girl could have survived”

Tags: music thoughts