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On Humans and Divine

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Message Mark Sashine
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Ikramov was killed in the Stalin’s purges. Chabibulla survived. There is no more communism though in Uzbekistan and Ibragimbeck (or someone like him) had returned. Go figure.

 

  1. By the will of Buddha.

 

This story was told in the same book (by Kamil Ikramov) by Ivan Sanjiev, a survivor of the Gulag and formerly an activist in the Young Communists movement in Kalmukia, USSR. In 1930s he was given a special task by his superiors to plant a small golden statue of Buddha in the last open Buddhist Temple they had. There was only one monk there, the ‘gelung’. Ivan entered the Temple openly and the monk was very happy to see him. He said, ‘Come in, come in. All people worship Buddha but not all of them know that.’ Ivan hid the golden statue under the rug and then returned with armed people to arrest the gelung for hiding the gold from the people. When the monk saw the statue he figured out what happened but said nothing, only looked sadly at Ivan and preyed. The Temple was closed. In time Ivan himself was arrested and sent to Gulag for 25 years. Once there he was wandering through the polar tundra and met a man. That man was that gelung. They looked at each other and the gelung spit at him.

- By the will of Buddha,- stated Ivan, ‘we both ended in the same place.’

 

  1. My friend, the Catholic.

 

I have a friend who is a devout Catholic. He is a fierce pro-lifer and considers abortion a source of all sins. He also promotes the idea that Catholicism is the perfect system for the everyday life. Once he organized a group of teenagers to demonstrate in front of the Planned Parenthood clinics. To his dismay the local Catholic bishop not only did not support him but told the kids to stop that foolishness and better hit the books. My friend was so upset that he wrote a letter to Pope about it.

-You realize, I said to him, ’that if we had a fully Catholic system here that bishop could have sent you to jail for that?’

 

In another case my friend was very upset when he found out that in one penitentiary when religious inmates conducted seminars on their religions the atheists demanded that too.

- They should not have seminars, he said, ‘Atheism is not a religion.’

- Does it matter? People, inmates will have the same occupation. Let it go.

- No, that’s not right, Atheists cannot have it.

 

So according to my friend those unfortunate atheists might as well rot alone in their cells. There is one very good verse by the Russian poet Mandelshtam perfectly attributed to this situation:

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The writer is 67 years old, semi- retired engineer, PhD, PE. I write fiction on a regular basis and I am also 10 years on OEN.

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