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Friday, February 27, 2004

Went to a great talk by Karen Armstrong at the university today. Lots of interesting talk about religion and religious behaviour. One thing I thought was really interesting was a brief bit about the first noble truth of Budism, "life is suffering". As she put it, this is not meant to mean that one should spend one's life feeling glum and depressed. Rather, it points out that one should ackowledge one's suffering, as only through ackowledging your own suffering can you appreciate and be compassionate towards the suffering of others.

Another part particularly struck me when she said that religion is not about having a set of beliefs, but rather about changing what one does to change oneself. An interesting note was that the major commonality between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam was the emphasis on compassion. One can easily point to passages of each religion's holy text which are contradictory and nasty, but this misses the over-riding point of each text, which is a message of compassion and love.

There is so much interesting and good in the world - the media barely captures a fraction of the interesting experiences one can have simply by listening to different speakers at a place like a university. I hope I continue to be open to such experiences; it's one reason why I don't want to leave a university environment.
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