#religion and belief
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By Pico Iyer
[Mr. Iyer is the author, most recently, of “The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise.”]
One day in my 20s, several decades ago, I got on a plane in New York City and flew across the world. It was dark when I arrived in Bali, but when I awoke the next day, a young man with a beautiful smile brought me fresh mango and strong tea to enjoy on the terrace of my bungalow. All around, playing amid bright flowers, were little girls with the faces of angels. Within hours, midwinter gloom had been transformed, as if by magic, into tropical sunshine. I was paying two dollars a night for a cottage of my own with a golden beach 45 seconds away, down a fragrant, palm-shaded lane.
I was in Eden, I decided. When night fell, however, I began to hear the clangorous and dissonant sound of gamelan orchestras, eerie, on every side of me. I saw boys with beautiful smiles stabbing themselves with daggers in a ritual dance that re-enacts a legendary battle between black magic and white. The little girls with angel faces were performing their dances while in a trance. Eden, I began to recall, is the place where it’s death to know too much.
All along the dusty streets were masks on sale, in front of dusty shacks. Smiling gods, grinning demons, mythical birds that glared at me so intently I had to hurry past. Finally I came upon a mask of an owl, red and yellow and green, that looked like the perfect thing to take home, an innocuous memento of the enchanted island. As soon as I got back to my apartment on East 20th Street, I put the mask on the wall — and within seconds I had to tear it down and put it away where I’d never see it again. There was a power to the object that reminded me that I couldn’t begin to understand the charged forces all around me on the island. Even what looked to be a child’s plaything was effectively a “No Trespassing” sign.
As a constant traveler for 49 years now, I sometimes feel I’ve been zigzagging from one “paradise” to the next. From Tahiti to Tibet, from the Seychelles to Antarctica, I’ve found tourist posters conspiring with travelers’ hopes to present every place as a kind of Eden. Yet often it’s our very notions of paradise that intensify divisions. In Sri Lanka I’d realized that the island has so often been taken to be Arcadia — Arabs saw it as “contiguous with the Garden of Eden,” and an Italian papal legate announced that the waters of paradise could be there — that the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British and millions of us tourists have all scrambled to grab a piece of it.
In Jerusalem, like every other visitor, I’d been vividly reminded that the city of faith has always been a city of conflict. Not just between the three great monotheisms whose sacred spaces stand only a few hundred yards from one another, but within each one of the faiths. I’m not Muslim or Christian or Jewish, but I’ve seldom encountered a more moving and magnetic site. Day after day I find myself drawn, regardless of my plans, back to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Yet within that soul-shaking building, where Christ is said to have been buried, the six Christian orders that share space go after one another with brooms if one of them so much as steps across another’s territory.
In Kashmir, I’d sat on a houseboat in the sun — nothing to be heard but the sound of kingfishers’ wings above a lotus pond — as locals in little boats paddled past, offering aromatic spices and exquisitely carved small boxes. I was truly in Heaven — so long as I forgot that, minutes across the water, army roadblocks and encampments spoke for the more than half a million soldiers trying to maintain peace in a bitterly contested territory claimed for more than 70 years now by both India and Pakistan. In Ladakh, the kind of pristine Himalayan region that might have inspired the notion of Shangri-La, I discovered more peace and beauty than I dared to dream of — along with local kids who reminded me that the real paradise was that place called California.
Besides, if I really did come upon a calm and self-contained Eden, what would it have to gain from me? I, like any visitor, could only be the serpent in the garden.
One day I found myself standing amid the floating bodies and unceasing roar of the River Ganges in Varanasi, the holy city of Hinduism. Flames to both the north and the south were reducing dead bodies to ash around the clock. The narrow lanes behind me were almost impassable with families rushing corpses along on stretchers to be committed to the water or the fires. Naked ascetics, smeared in ash, were expressing their contempt for simple notions of right and wrong by living in graveyards and drinking from skulls. The holy waters the faithful were gratefully imbibing contained hundreds of times the maximum level of coliform bacteria the World Health Organization has deemed safe for drinking.
As I surveyed the chaos, I heard someone call my name. It was an American monk I know who would soon be appointed by the Dalai Lama to be the abbot of a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in southern India. When I turned around to greet him, I noticed he could scarcely contain his delight.
“Isn’t it glorious?” I recall him saying. Here was the whole human pageant, vital and human and irreducible. I, though entirely of Hindu blood, was perplexed, unsettled by the confusion; he, from a very different tradition — I’d last bumped into him hurrying along Fifth Avenue — could see that this was none other than the only life we had. All our paradise, our only hopes, had to be uncovered here, in the midst of real life — and in the face of death.
Glorious? Well, it may take me a while to advance to that level of clearsightedness. But if paradise is anywhere, I was coming to see, it couldn’t be anywhere but where I stood.
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"But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for that one sinner that needed it the most?"
Mark Twain
#mark twain#twain#quotes#life#religionandlife#religion#god#evil#Life thoughts#thought provoking#religion and belief#religion and politics#life quotes#quoteoftheday#thought for the day#lifematters#loveeveryone#god loves everyone#chasinggods#bekind
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#religion and belief#Inside Dreams Blog#dreams#dreaming#dreamology#dreamwork#dream therapy#dream analysis#dream meanings#dream interpretation#sleep#the science of dreams
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Remember all who have suffered based primarily on their faith.
The observance provides an opportunity to remember all who have suffered based primarily on their faith, and an opportunity to “renew our resolve to stamp out the hate speech that fuels these terrible acts of intolerance.”
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Feel free to elaborate on which religion in the tags if you answer yes.
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We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.
#polls#incognito polls#anonymous#tumblr polls#tumblr users#questions#religion#belief#religious trauma#miscellaneous polls
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if you don’t stand with palestinian people literally just leave my blog. you can be israeli and you can be jewish and still recognise that palestinian people, not to mention that millions of those people are kids, are being killed and have been attacked for literally just living in their own country. the israeli defense minister is cutting off food, water, electricity to attack palestinians in gaza and calling them ‘human animals.’ they aren’t even treated as people anymore, yet half of them are innocent kids.
it’s like only a select few people care about palestinians and the rest of the world think of them as all being islamic extremists and terrorists for just living in their own country. it’s fucking disgusting how the world has turned a blind eye to innocent palestinians for decades.
if you want someone to blame, turn your heads to the people who allowed israel to take over palestine. to the israel government and hamas who are allowing innocent people, both israelis and palestinians alike, to be killed.
#palestine#i’m genuinely so sick of this world#i’m tired of muslims all being lumped in with the extremists who are acting in the name of God when their beliefs are completely against#what our religion teaches#and most of all#i’m tired of this all being about religion when it’s about people who want power and land and innocent people to die for their own selfish#wants
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Eassie Pictish Symbol Stone, Eassie, Scotland
#pict#Pictish#pictish art#pictish stones#cross slab#early belief#early living#early religion#Scotland#outdoors#landscape#stonework#symbols#archaeology#relic#knotwork#stone carving
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The audacity of religious people to come up with the most unhinged, outlandish, harmful possible beliefs and then claim that everyone should 'respect their beliefs.'
#this isn't even about that one christian clown orbiting radblr (except re havinf u hinged outlandish and harmful beliefs)#what is it about religion that makes religious people so utterly insufferable?#anti-religion#atheism
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🐊🦩
#dofuwani#sir crocodile#donquixote doflamingo#monkey d. luffy#okay inside joke but if one of my b0bad1n followers likes dofuwani. These two idiots are reading a certain tin can helmets fanfic (?)#because im old and do I still rp with my gf and sometimes I draw the scenes and we were joking about ...so what its doffy reading?#“well dear hes reading this book about a knight in his personal exploration about religion. sexuality. beliefs. concepts of love. family...”#my gf inmediate response: HES READING[...] Gf again: of course he's not reading it completely for the story he's reading for the sexy parts#hatta art#my art
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"Respect other people's spiritual beliefs" is for things like how many gods there are, or whether Jesus always existed with the Father or was begotten five minutes before creation started or was just some guy who got really popular, or whether the divine is immanent or transcendent or both.
"Respect other people's spiritual beliefs" is not for shit like "I believe all the religions I don't like were actually created by an evil conspiracy trying to suppress the truth of my spirituality, which must be spread across the world to save us all from the evil conspiracy." That's just straight-up bigotry and conspiracism. That shit gets people killed.
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Promoting and protecting the rights of persons belonging to religious minorities
By proclaiming an International Day Commemorating the Victims of Acts of Violence Based on Religion or Belief, the General Assembly recalled that States have the primary responsibility to promote and protect human rights, including the human rights of persons belonging to religious minorities, including their right to exercise their religion or belief freely.
#International Day Commemorating the Victims of Acts of Violence Based on Religion or Belief#22 August#religious minorities#religious communities#religion and belief#religiousbasedviolencevictimsday#religious violence
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We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.
#polls#incognito polls#anonymous#tumblr polls#tumblr users#questions#polls about people#submitted dec 6#religion#faith#beliefs#religious beliefs
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