Bethlehem, Palestinian Christians and all that ...

An very informative and thought-provoking article from The Washington Post at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/12/23/evangelicals-side-with-israel-thats-hurting-palestinian-christians/?postshare=1071482743329708&tid=ss_tw-bottom&utm_term=.f67076664c1f

Some interesting quotes and points

• "Bethlehem is the most heavily Christian city in Palestine. Its Arab Christian mayor, Vera Baboun, describes her hometown the “capital of Christmas” and says that between Bethlehem proper and the surrounding Bethlehem governate, there are upward of 38,000 Christian residents. "
• "One of the greatest challenges that IDC is working to tackle is the perception that the Middle East is void of religious minorities,” said Philippe Nassif, executive director of In Defense of Christians a U.S.-based organization dedicated to raising awareness of the challenges facing Middle East Christians. Nassif, who is of partial Arab Christian descent, told me that while some mainline Protestant congregations have begun to recognize and advocate for Palestinians in recent years, American evangelicals display little such awareness."
  "According to a 2013 Pew Research survey, more than 80 percent of evangelical Christians in America believe that God gave the land of Israel for Jewish people; just 40 percent of American Jews believe the same."
• "Fundamentally, however, American Christians have misunderstood one of the core complexities of the Israel-Palestine conflict: that it isn’t simply a confrontation between Muslims and Jews. Christians, too, are caught up in the strife, but typically overlooked."

/jkk

What Causes Suffering?

(from Ken Wilber's writings)

I thought this was a very thoughtful piece. It shows Buddhist influence.

"What causes suffering is the grasping and desiring of the separate self, and what ends it is the meditative path that transcends self and desire. The point is that suffering is inherent in the knot or contraction known as self, and the only way to end suffering is to end the self. It's not that after enlightenment, or after spiritual practice in general, you no longer feel pain or anguish or fear or hurt. You do. It's simply that they no longer threaten your existence, and so they cease to be problematic. You are no longer identified with them, dramatizing them, energizing them, threatened by them. On the one hand there is no longer any fragmented self to threaten, and on the other, the big Self can't be threatened since, being the All, there is nothing outside of it that could harm it. A profound relaxing and uncoiling occurs in the heart."
-Ken Wilber

The Pocket Ken Wilber, p. 157.
Original Source: CW 5: Grace and Grit, 103-104.

/jkk. Originally from 2017-12-07