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| Tibetan Archer 1938 wikimedia |
Growing up in Western Christian culture, I'm very familiar with the incentives and disincentives offered by the Gods of Emotional Appeal. You will feel "joy" if you are righteous, or at least "satisfaction". We are promised sorrow and pain if we sin, or the sins are depicted surrounded with imagery of sadness in the Christian media.
I'm a silent Believer. I remain religious, or spiritual, since the "born again" experience I had in Arkansas as a pot-smoking teenager. But from the beginning, it was not an "us vs. them" experience... I was also changed positively (enlightened) by the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao, and refined my beliefs Buddhism. Buddhist writers described "spiritual materialism" to describe the economy of emotions. But the quiet, non-evangelical Believer, accomplishes much. It is the deeds, the karma of her life, which measure the Christian Sage above the greedy, the exploiting, or spiritually wretched.
Ethics. This blog is about Ethical Environmentalism. What the truth is, is important. But Ethics without a belief are as useless as Ethics with wrong "knowledge". Our time on earth is about choosing aims, aiming, and meeting those aims. We can't aim and shoot a bow without both gravity and light. Faith and truth.
