So, I listened to an old Cat Stevens (born Steven Demetre Georgiou) song this morning (Wild World) and it made me think, wonder, and otherwise let my mind wander. You see, I had read something earlier in the morning about the Scopes Monkey trial, and wished, not for the first time, that I could have been there for at least that part of the trial when the taciturn agnostic lawyer Clarence Darrow examined politician/moralist William Jennings Bryan on his interpretation of the Bible. Anyway, that came about because of the idea of Cat Stevens, having converted to Islam in 1977 and the subsequent controversy about whether he condoned the fatwa against author Salman Rushdie for his portrayal of the temptation of the prophet Mohammed in his book The Satanic Verses. There was always a sense of spirituality in his music, but Yusuf Islam, as he is known now, has since denied he supported vigilantism or joined the call for Rushdies death, but it got me thinking about beliefs, faith, and the whole gamut of motivations for why we do what we do. I dont have the answers of course, but find it all a puzzle that is worth pursuing. Is believing enough, or should it be a motivation to live our lives according to the sense of right and wrong as individuals within a collective, or is going along with the consensus of the collective enough? For myself, I think that caring should be first, and trying to understand is more of a priority than merely marching along with the madding crowd, even though I consider myself independent in political viewpoint. Ah, well, that was what I thought about today, among other things :)
Posted on: Thu, 07 Nov 2013 23:54:34 +0000
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