The wise man built his house upon the Rock,
The wise man built his house upon the Rock,
The wise man built his house upon the Rock,
And the rains came tumbling down.

The rains came down and the floods came up,
The rains came down and the floods came up,
The rains came down and the floods came up,
But the house on the Rock stood firm.

The foolish man built his house upon the sand,
The foolish man built his house upon the sand,
The foolish man built his house upon the sand,
And the rains came tumbling down.

The rains came down and the floods came up,
The rains came down and the floods came up,
The rains came down and the floods came up,
And the house on the sand fell flat.

The wise man felt smug about the foolish man’s plight,
The wise man felt smug about the foolish man’s plight,
The wise man felt smug about the foolish man’s plight,
So he learned the meaning of schadenfreude.

The prices came down and the interest came up,
The prices came down and the interest came up,
The prices came down and the interest came up,
And he cut off his nose to spite his face.

I was not raised in a particularly religious household. I had a father who was born a Muslim but became an atheist, grandparents who were non-practicing Methodists and Baptists, and a mother who was skeptical of organized religion, even as she was the kindest, most spiritual person I’ve ever known. She was the one who taught me as a child to love, and to understand, and to do unto others as I would want done.

I didn’t become a Christian until many years later, when I moved to the South Side of Chicago after college. It happened not because of indoctrination or a sudden revelation, but because I spent month after month working with church folks who simply wanted to help neighbors who were down on their luck—no matter what they looked like, or where they came from, or who they prayed to. It was on those streets, in those neighborhoods, that I first heard God’s spirit beckon me. It was there that I felt called to a higher purpose—His purpose.

Raised by non-religious parents, Mr. Obama came later in life to follow a God of compassionate service. I want to take this chance to point out that freethinking parents can do well by their children. I appreciate that Obama was able to separate religiosity and spirituality.

While I doubt that I will ever again follow any god, even as benevolent as Mr. Obama’s seems to be, I too want to work together to better the situation of all those who share this world with me.

Most people imagine that slavery died in the 19th century. Since 1817, more than a dozen international conventions have been signed banning the slave trade. Yet, today there are more slaves than at any time in human history.&ellips;

Save for the fact that he is male, Gonoo Lal Kol typifies the average slave of our modern age. (At his request, I have changed his first name.) Like a vast majority of the world’s slaves, Gonoo is in debt bondage in South Asia. In his case, in an Indian quarry. Like most slaves, Gonoo is illiterate and unaware of the Indian laws that ban his bondage and provide for sanctions against his master. His story, told to me in more than a dozen conversations inside his 4-foot-high stone and grass hutch, represents the other side of the “Indian Miracle.”

Gonoo lives in Lohagara Dhal, a forgotten corner of Uttar Pradesh, a north Indian state that contains 8 percent of the world’s poor. I met him one evening in December 2005 as he walked with two dozen other laborers in tattered and filthy clothes. Behind them was the quarry. In that pit, Gonoo, a member of the historically outcast Kol tribe, worked with his family 14 hours a day. His tools were simple, a rough-hewn hammer and an iron pike. His hands were covered in calluses, his fingertips worn away.

Gonoo’s master is a tall, stout, surly contractor named Ramesh Garg. Garg is one of the wealthiest men in Shankargarh, the nearest sizable town, founded under the British Raj but now run by nearly 600 quarry contractors. He makes his money by enslaving entire families forced to work for no pay beyond alcohol, grain, and bare subsistence expenses. Their only use for Garg is to turn rock into silica sand, for colored glass, or gravel, for roads or ballast. Slavery scholar Kevin Bales estimates that a slave in the 19th-century American South had to work 20 years to recoup his or her purchase price. Gonoo and the other slaves earn a profit for Garg in two years.

Every single man, woman, and child in Lohagara Dhal is a slave. But, in theory at least, Garg neither bought nor owns them. They are working off debts, which, for many, started at less than $10. But interest accrues at over 100 percent annually here. Most of the debts span at least two generations, though they have no legal standing under modern Indian law. They are a fiction that Garg constructs through fraud and maintains through violence. The seed of Gonoo’s slavery, for instance, was a loan of 62 cents. In 1958, his grandfather borrowed that amount from the owner of a farm where he worked. Three generations and three slavemasters later, Gonoo’s family remains in bondage.

Don’t get the wrong impression that slavery is just a Third World problem: according to the article, 17,500 new slaves enter America every year.

(via kottke.org)

It was interesting to observe my feelings as I did this form of compassion meditation. I observed whom I sincerely wished well (those I perceived to be less fortunate/attractive/talented than I), whom I actually wished the opposite of well (those I perceived to be more fortunate/attractive/talented than I), and whom I wished well in a rather distracted, artificial way (attractive women).

The most enlightening to me were the vast majority to whom I was indifferent. Most people didn’t elicit feelings in me one way or the other.

Life and health seem so fragile.

Well, I think above all things I acknowledge luck. And I mean, if you think of that torrent of sperm out there…

And — and ours was lucky to fall where it did. That’s for starters. You can’t pick your own parents, but you may be lucky enough to have parents that give you the gift of induction and deduction and certain intelligence, certain way you look. I mean, it’s all — So I — I’ve been very lucky. And I — I try to acknowledge that by giving back something to those to whom luck has been brutal.

He seems like he would have been a good person to talk to.

(via The Situationist)

Update: I’m not the only one to be struck by a je ne sais quoi about Newman. Roger Ebert seems equally perplexed and admiring. I want to call him an Existential Man for no particularly good reason (or even a clear understanding of what it means).

By the way, this is my 400^th post. Yay me!

Jesus answered and said unto them, Verily I say unto you, If ye have faith, and doubt not, … if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; it shall be done. And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive. (Matthew 21:21–22)

For with God nothing shall be impossible. (Luke 1:37)

If nothing is impossible for God, why can’t he seem to muster the same benevolence as my child? Have adult believers learned to be less compassionate in their prayers in order to cover for God’s lack of compassion?

Some may excuse God’s absence by saying that I shouldn’t expect answers exactly when I want them, that they arrive in the Lord’s own time. That’s not good enough some times. If I’m on the verge of forever losing my faith in God, then getting back to me tomorrow isn’t soon enough.

Others may say that God sometimes answers prayers negatively. Answering “no” or offering only silence to the plaintive question “Are you there?” shows either a twisted sense of humor or a heartless disinterest.

Maybe God is trying to teach us something we might wonder. That might be reasonable when someone just wants to know that someone is watching out for them, but when a child on the brink of starvation in Africa cries out to God for food, or a sex slave loses all hope of escape from the endless rapes that have become her life, my heart tells me that no amount of learning can justify such gratuitous suffering. God will strike a man dead for violating the sanctity of the Ark of the Covenant with a well intentioned touch (2 Samuel 6:6–7), but he won’t lift a finger to protect the holiness in the heart of innocent children? I ask you to judge which is holier and more deserving of protection.

Wo to the God who offends these little ones (Matthew 18:6). May a millstone be hung from his neck, and may he drown in the depths of the sea.

If God wanted to teach me to have compassion, then his plans have gone slightly awry. Not only has my compassion for suffering increased, my hatred for any deity who would put us through such torture has caught flame. It has shown me that whether or not God exists, he can’t be bothered to help us. We are all we’ve got no matter how we answer to ourselves the question of whether God lives. In our darkest hours, we can only look to each other.

If I die and unexpectedly meet God, I’ll have a choice word or three for him, spit in his eye, and cheerfully go to Hell where all the compassionate folk take up residence far from that insufferable tyrant.

(music videos via mind on fire)