| Ahimsa: The Moral of the Mahabharata Epic |
| by Glenn W. Geelhoed, MD, ISP Secretary and Director of International Medical Education, George Washington University Medical Center. Ahimsa is a value that is highest among the virtues for the devotees of the Mahabharata, the inspirational source for a quarter of the globe, the Asian Hindu and Indonesian Islamic populations. The non-infliction of suffering and the attempt to relieve it should stand for an early and classic case of panetics, still testified to today by a large portion of the earthÂ’s peoples. |
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| Church Power |
| This excerpt by Ralph G.H. Siu from volume II of the Panetics Trilogy observes that whether the key source of religious oppression is "aboriginal human neophobia" or not, the fact is that religion is a widely available vehicle of power. It is as potent vehicle for church leaders as politics is for national leaders. The vocabularies, doctrines, and rites vary, but the underlying urge to dominate remains the common thrust. When the thirst for power for the sake of power becomes overweening, church leaders can become as cold and as terrifying inflicters of human suffering as most other persons of power. History is filled with examples of consecrated atrocities. Siu recites some examples and reflects on current issues. |
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| Religion and Economic Behavior |
| By Professor Sven Lundstedt, Professor of Public Policy and Management, The Ohio State University and Affiliate Scientist, Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratories. The author surveys analyses of the links between religion and capitalism and economic behavior in general. He then quotes Carl Jung's comment that "The extraverted tendency of the West and the introverted tendency of the East have one important purpose in common: both make desperate efforts to conquer the mere naturalness of life. It is the assertion of mind over matter, the opus contra naturam, a symptom of the youthfulness of man, still delighting in the use of the most powerful weapon ever devised by nature: the conscious mind. The afternoon of humanity, in the distant future, may yet evolve a different ideal. In time, conquest will cease to be the dream." Lundstedt then observes that "while we naturally seek to discover and to rediscover the many positive aspects of religion and economic behavior, it is difficult to mistake the overwhelming negative significance of some of the connections between religion, economic behavior and the infliction of human suffering." |
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