Today’s quote comes from Siddhartha Gautama (circa fifth and/or sixth century B.C.E.)–the historical Buddha and de facto progenitor of the Buddhist religions. This is it:
Conquer the angry man by love.
Conquer the ill-natured man by goodness.
Conquer the miser with generosity.
Conquer the liar with truth.
The boundaries between religion and government rarely have seen the level of threat they face during this election season. Candidates on both sides of the aisle have used religion inappropriately as a political tool, and now, the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) has once again launched its election-year attack on religious freedom by encouraging clergy to violate the safeguards that have protected religion in America for generations.
The ADF is asking clergy to endorse candidates from the pulpit and purposefully violate their tax-exempt status in order to force court cases that could endanger the very foundations of religious freedom. This is a very real threat to religious freedom given the current Supreme Court’s willingness to set aside precedent in favor of weakening the separation of religion and government. The Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in Hein v. Freedom from Religion Foundation, in which the court eroded taxpayers’ ability to sue over government spending that violates the separation of church and state, should serve as an indicator of the Court’s direction not just on clergy endorsements, but also on many other issues at the heart of religious freedom.
Interfaith Alliance is calling on clergy to stand up for religious freedom by signing a pledge to uphold certain standards during the election season. We ask clergy to pledge:
- To educate members of our congregation about how our faith relates to issues of the day.
- To refrain from endorsing any candidate, either explicitly or implicitly, in or on behalf of our house of worship.
- To prevent partisan speech from candidates or their surrogates, as well as the distribution of partisan materials, in our house of worship.
- To resist using or soliciting the resources of our house of worship for the exclusive benefit of any candidate or party.
- To respect candidates whose religious beliefs are different from my own, and stand against the use of religion to divide our communities.
- To encourage members of our congregation to take an active role in civic life, including casting informed votes.
If you’re a member of the clergy, take the pledge at http://www.interfaithalliance.org/clergypledge/.
The online retreat will include:
PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
Pema Chödrön’s three-day retreat in California is sold out—but you can still attend online, wherever you happen to be. And enrolling in the online version gives you access to additional materials that enable you to revisit the retreat whenever you need a refresher.
The “Smile at Fear” retreat is a rare opportunity to practice and study with Pema in real time, as she teaches wisdom learned from her own teacher, Chögyam Trungpa. Using his book of the same title, she shows how to approach the things that scare us in a radically different way than we’re accustomed to, and in doing so to discover how astonishingly insignificant fear really is—and how surprisingly simple it is to access the heart of fearlessness. These are Buddhist teachings and practices that can become resources for a lifetime.
The retreat will begin on Friday, October 15, at 7pm PST and end on Sunday, October 17, at 5pm PST. Click here for the full schedule.
One sign-up per e-mail address. For more information, call (617) 424-0030 or e-mail eventsupport@shambhala.com.
System Requirements
Find out more at http://shop.shambhala.com/smile-at-fear.
Patheos, the super-cool religion/spirituality site, has just launched a new online book club and they have selected Deepak Chopra’s biography Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment for examination. You can participate and find free e-book downloads here. Join the conversation, folks!
