Tag: Lord Sacks

Lord Sacks, Prof. Dawkins, Archbishop Tutu and the Dalai Lama

Introspection 709731

Just a quick one today – a link to two fantastic videos:

  1. Yesterday the BBC broadcast the best program I have ever seen about the science-religion relationship, following Lord Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, talking to three non-believing scientists: Baroness Greenfield, Prof. Al-Khalili and Prof. Dawkins. I have to say that I fully agree with Lord Sack’s view, which in fact is pretty much what I got to in an earlier post. The most impressive thing to me was how he and Richard Dawkins arrived at consensus precisely about the need for rational, good-willed people to work together regardless of their religious or areligious views. I am now officially a huge fan of Lord Sacks (see also my post on one of his blog posts on how hatred and liberty cannot coexist).

    If you are in the UK, you can see the program on iPlayer here and I’ll look for a source accessible from outside the UK later.

    To whet your apetite in the meantime, here are just a couple of quotes:

    “Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.” Lord Sacks
    “There’s nothing quite as frightening as someone who knows they are ‘right’.” Michael Faraday (quoted by Baroness Greenfield)
    “For me religion at its best involves asking questions and challenging conventional assumptions.” Lord Sacks
    “The answer to bad religion is good religion, not no religion.” Lord Sacks

  2. A while ago Archbishop Tutu and the Dalai Lama had a chat via the Google+ ‘hangout’ videoconferencing feature. It is somewhat lengthy, but a joy to watch two friends having a great time. One of the gems was:

    Desmond Tutu: “Do you have an army?”
    Dalai Lama: “Yes, at the spiritual level! No weapons, but wisdom!”

Enjoy! 🙂

Hatred and liberty cannot coexist

Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks pic 3 Copy

I have been following Lord Sacks, the chief rabbi of the Commonwealth, for a while on Twitter and have greatly enjoyed his writings ever since. Today’s post on his website is no exception and is well worth reading in full. Kicking off with a great quote by Martin Luther King:

Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness …

he then goes on to discuss one of the instructions Moses gives to his people: “Do not hate an Egyptian, because you were a stranger in his land.” (Deuteronomy 23: 8). Lord Sacks emphasizes how counter-intuitive a law this is, given the exploitation and slavery the Israelites suffered at the hands of the Egyptians, instead of a spell of hospitality that the quote may suggest. His key point though is that hatred makes us slaves of the past and allows for past wrongs to persist in us even after they occurred. This does not mean that injustice ought to be forgotten, but only that its remembrance is to serve the purpose of prevention rather than retaliation. The key paragraph from Lord Sacks’s exegesis to me is the following though:

Hatred and liberty cannot coexist. A free people does not hate its former enemies; if it does, it is not yet ready for freedom. To create a non-persecuting society out of people who have been persecuted, you have to break the chains of the past; rob memory of its sting; sublimate pain into constructive energy and the determination to build a different future.

In many ways this is similar also to what St. Augustine, whose feast it is today, said:

“[He] he shall neither hate the man because of his vice, nor love the vice because of the man, but hate the vice and love the man. For the vice being cursed, all that ought to be loved, and nothing that ought to be hated, will remain.” (The City of God, 14:6)

Here Lord Sacks’ words can be read as saying that a fault’s or wrongdoing’s ‘cure’ needs to be accelerated and that those who have been wronged can take the first step. Maybe hatred is not a feeling I have myself, but there are certainly past events that have hurt or saddened me and I will strive to apply Lord Sacks’s advice to my attitude to them.