The Unclad Soul

Here is some Buddha wisdom that speaks to me: “Few are they who cross to the further shore. Most merely run up and down the bank.” How restrained, how meager our experience of life often is. We settle in to comfortable limits and hold on to what we've always thought and believed and done. We walk the old territory up and down the mundane spaces of our days and miss so much. I’m guilty. Most of us are. Huge swaths of our modern society seem locked in some circumscribed routine of thought and action. Where are the social revolutionaries of the past? Where are the political and religious trouble makers, the heroes and heroines who stir up the status quo and arouse change that improves life for all of us? I want to be one of them. Robert Kennedy convinced his president brother that school segregation was intolerable. He fought union corruption and the mafia influence. “We will not stand by or be aloof,” he said in a speech to the University of Georgia Law Scho...

On a recent Moyers and Company broadcast journalist and host Bill Moyers showed a clip of Republican Congressman Paul Broun stating that because he is a Christian he has thrown aside all of his training as a physician and scientist and believes only what the Bible tells him about evolution, climate change and global warming. Here is the brief segment: BILL MOYERS: Right now, two powerful belief systems have converged to counter facts staring us right in the face. Just as the number of Americans who question the science of evolution has gone up, so too has the number who deny that global warming is happening, and that human activity is causing it. This, at a time when the global scientific community is more certain than ever that you and I, and everyone else, are helping to turn up the heat and seal our fate. And here’s the scary political reality: on both fronts, evolution and climate change, radical right Republicans have made denial a litmus test. You can see it embodied i...