Letters to the Editor

• Interesting corollary...

  [Read the article: Notes on "A Tragic Legacy"]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  Glenn, I draw your attention to M. Scott Peck's four stages of spiritual growth. Bush corresponds precisely to Peck's first two stages.

  As such, he is a very dangerous man to be in charge of anything.

  Think of Stage 1 as Bush before he found Jesus and gave up the booze, and Stage 2 as Bush is today.

  ************

  STAGE I:

  Chaotic, Antisocial. Frequently pretenders; they pretend they are loving and pious, covering up their lack of principles. Although they may pretend to be loving (and think of themselves that way), their relationships with their fellow human beings are all essentially manipulative and self-serving.

  They really don't give a hoot about anyone else. I call the stage chaotic because these people are basically unprincipled. Being unprincipled, there is nothing that governs them except their own will. And since the will from moment to moment can go this way or that, there is a lack of integrity to their being.

  They often end up, therefore in jails or find themselves in another form of social difficulty. Some, however, may be quite disciplined in the services of expediency and their own ambition and so may rise in positions of considerable prestige and power, even to become presidents or influential preachers.

  STAGE II:

  Formal, Institutional, Fundamental. Beginning the work of submitting themselves to principle-the law, but they do not yet understand the spirit of the law, consequently they are legalistic, parochial, and dogmatic.

  They are threatened by anyone who thinks differently from them, as they have the "truth," and so regard it as their responsibility to convert or save the other 90 or 99 percent of humanity who are not "true believers."

  They are religious for clear cut answers, with the security of a big daddy God and organization, to escape their fear of living in the mystery of life, the mystery of uncertainty in the ever moving and expanding unknown. Instead they choose the formulations, the stagnation of prescribed methods and doctrines that spell out life and attempt to escape fear. Yet these theological reasonings simply cover over fear, hide fear and do not transcend it in spite of with acceptance in expanding movement.

  All those outside of Stage II are perceived to be as Stage I, as they do not understand Stage III and Stage IV. Those who do fall, reverting from Stage II to Stage I are called "backsliders."

  There is a Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, Benny Hinn, Pat Robertson, mentality (one-sided thinking - ignorance that produces hostility) in every religion, the one-sidedness, in every ideology.

  Christianity cannot be condemned as responsible for the fundamentalists who claim to represent such. One just has to look at Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King, Jr. to see the opposite of such thinking. You can find the Falwell in Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Jainism, Mohammedism and of course Christianity.

  That is the narrow one-sided exclusiveness that limits insight to one set of rules and one objective truth, under the literal logic or rationialism, that fails to apprehend the unseen intuitive essence of existence and ignorantly labels outsiders as misled sinners, while surrounding themselves with interior neurotic and finite walls of security and certainty.

  All is safe in this illusion, but all is not just, nor fair, and does not transcend prejudice that surpasses tribal identity, an identity that must be scrapped in order to bring higher consciousness of planetary cultural peace and love based on principle with intuitive insight.

  There is also a Bin Laden (evil intolerance) in every religious culture and teaching, in every social, political and cultural view. Islam cannot be condemned as responsible for the extreme fundamentalists who incorporate harm and war.

  One just has to look at the other side within Islam, to the Sufi of compassion and peace, that of Bawa Muhaiyaddeen or Hazrat Inayat Khan. Yet the evil of extreme fundamentalism resides in all facets of society, those who would kill and destroy, torture and humiliate, all in the name of their theological and ideological views.

  They are of course the extreme fundamentalists, yet all forms of fundamentalism, both moderate to extreme, Stage II mentality, fails integration with non-acceptance, that of one-dimensional perception. And yet, in each of these same cultures, although the minority, there exists communal and mystical persons, Stage IV persons, those transmitting inclusiveness and compassion, who transcend all divisiveness in oneness.

  --M. Scott Peck

  Permalink Friday, June 22, 2007 07:30 AM

• uses of the past

  [Read the article: Nagasaki and Hiroshima: Worse than Stalin?]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  Putin has to make Stalin's mass-murder look modest. He's basing much of what he's doing on a Stalinist model...and the day may come, nay, WILL come, when Putin, or a successor, will have to institute purges as savage as Stalin's were. Full State control of everything almost requires such purges from time to time.

  So, he's building the foundation for that now.

  And does he think for one second that Stalin would NOT have used nukes on anyone and everyone? If he'd had them to use, and there would have been no consequences..as was the case when we used them? If so, Putin's dreaming. But, of course, Putin knows full well the only thing that stopped Stalin from using nukes was the fact that we had them too.

  Putin is nothing more than a cheap dictator. He makes Stalin look like FDR.. FDR with a murderous streak, that is..

  Permalink Saturday, June 23, 2007 08:52 AM