Men excluded from Montreal neonatal clinic to accommodate religious sensibilities

From CBC news:

A Montreal community health clinic has come under fire for excluding men from their neonatal classes to accommodate the sensibilities of Muslim, Sihk and Hindu women.

ADQ Leader Mario Dumont said the prohibition exceeds the limits of common sense. He said it's unreasonable that a Quebec taxpayer is barred from joining his pregnant girlfriend at a health clinic because his presence would offend others.

The article doesn't make it clear how the "sensibilities of Muslim, Sikh and Hindu women" are accommodated by the exclusion of men. Is it because they're non-relatives?

I also find it interesting that the paraphrase of Dumont uses the word "girlfriend" rather than "wife" (or, more inclusively, "wife or girlfriend"). Does no one in Montreal (presumably outside of the Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu communities) get married any more? And is it the presence of unmarried couples (who have obviously had sexual intercourse) that is offensive to religious sensibilities?

And I wonder if it's really the sensibilities of the Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu women that are being accommodated, rather than those of their husbands. (Or should I have written "husbands or boyfriends"?)

Religious and cultural accommodations in light of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms no longer makes sense, Dumont said ahead of a weekend convention of l'Action democratique du Quebec.

He pointed as well to a suggestion by Montreal police that female officers call male colleagues to avoid offending male Hasidic Jews.

And will police completely leave anarchists alone in order to avoid offending their sensibilities?

"We are completely moving to misusing the Charter and that is starting to worry me."

Dumont said it's not racist for a majority of citizens to defend their own values. [...]

That a "it's not racist" defense is needed at all shows just how confused Western societies and politicians are about the distinction between race on the one hand and beliefs and culture (in particular, religion) on the other.

The article has mentioned nothing about race. Now it may very well happen that the majority of the "Muslim, Sikh and Hindu women" at the clinic are of East Indian/South Asian descent, but that's completely beside the point. If the complainants had been white, the response should have been just the same. It's unfair to the other women in the clinic to exclude their husbands or boyfriends on the basis of not offending the religious sensibilities of some of the participants.

People should not be afraid to criticize culture or religion in a free society. Racism is wrong because a person neither chooses his genetics nor is he able to change it. (Some belief systems, such as Tibetan Buddhism, hold that certain people can influence the circumstances of their births, but even then such people are rare exceptions.) However, culture and religion are matters of choice (assuming that one does not believe in strong predestinarianism). A person can always in principle choose to hold values and beliefs contrary to those with which he was raised, even if his society or other circumstances might make it difficult in practice.

Because religion involves choice, it doesn't belong to the same category of things as race, but should rather be classed with other systems of belief such as Capitalism, Communism, Nazism, geocentrism, etc. And in a free society, all systems of belief must be open to critical scrutiny. Irrational or outdated beliefs and practises should not get a free pass merely because they are part of a culture or religion.

南無阿彌陀佛

Madonna adopts Malawi orphan

So, pop star Madonna has adopted a Malawi orphan. I wonder if she will be asked to remove any crucifixes from her home?

From MSNBC:

The singer, who plans to visit Africa in October, credits her faith in Kabbalah with shifting her priorities.

“One of the main precepts of Kabbalah is that we’re put on this Earth to help people,” she says. “And your job is to figure out how you can help, and what it is that you can do.”

An orphan care center, being built with a goal of feeding and educating about 1,000 children a day, will have programs based on Spirituality for Kids, Kabbalah’s children’s program, according to the magazine.

Meanwhile, religious leaders in Italy have criticized Madonna for wearing a crown of thorns and singing while hanging from a mirrored cross during her “Confessions” world tour concerts. She is scheduled to perform Sunday in Rome.

It seems that adopting a Third World orphan is the latest fad among celebrities. Not everyone is thrilled with this trend. From The Sydney Morning Herald:

Madonna was pilloried with accusations of fast-tracking the adoption by donating money to a Malawian orphanage, though reports suggested the Ritchies had been planning the addition to their family for some months.

Prospective parents in Australia said that while the adoption process was long in this country, the system of comprehensive checks was generally welcome and was in the interests of the children.

They also said incidences of queue jumping by financial means were unfair on those waiting to adopt who were following due process.

For Trevor and Melanie Rees, Madonna has joined Angelina Jolie as persona non grata in their Cessnock home.

"They are two celebrities we don't have in our house," said Mrs Rees, a teacher. She and her husband have been waiting to adopt an African baby for more than five years.

Mr Rees, 31, a boilermaker, said: "We've boycotted their music and movies because they are throwing our struggles in our faces. It's an absolute joke.

"I think it's terrific that celebrities are taking the same avenues that we're taking and drawing attention to the plight of these kids.

"It's just not fair that they can take shortcuts or pay extra money or say they're going to build this or do that."

The attention that celebrities bring to a cause is often a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it's important for the plight of orphans in the Third World to receive media attention. On the other hand, celebrities often have their own agendas and the issues often get distorted when they are involved.

南無阿彌陀佛

The Buddha in Hinduism and Hindu gods in Buddhism

In a previous post, I wrote about how lawmakers in Gujarat have defined Buddhism into a sect of Hinduism. This is not an unusual view among Hindus, many of whom see the Buddha as a Hindu reformer rather than as the founder of a distinct creed. The religions and philosophies indigenous to India have traditionally been classified into two categories: those that accept the authority of the Vedas (called âstik [आस्तिक]), and those that reject it (called nâstik [नास्तिक]). According to this scheme, Buddhism is a nâstik — but nevertheless Hindu — philosophy.

Naturally, many Buddhists disagree with the classification of Buddhism as a sect of Hinduism and consider Buddhism to be a separate religion. A part of the problem stems from the rather ambiguous definition of the word "Hindu". The religious beliefs and practices that were prevalent in India in the Buddha's time are not quite the same as those of Hindus today. There are certainly many continuities, but Hinduism has also been shaped since the Buddha's time by interactions with, and responses to challenges posed by, first Buddhism itself, and later, Islam, Christianity, Communism, and many other religions and philosophies. To draw an analogy, Jesus Christ was a Jew, but no modern form of Judaism resembles the Hellenized Judaism practised in the Roman Empire during Jesus' time. Both Judaism and Christianity have evolved since then, and though Christianity had its beginnings as a Jewish sect, it would be strange today to call Christianity a branch of Judaism or to say that Christians are Jews. Similarly, it is jarring to Buddhists to hear Buddhism being referred to as "a part of Hinduism".

However, the analogy cannot be taken too far. Whereas Judaism has ignored Jesus (or rejected him, if one takes the Christian point of view), Hinduism has assimilated the Buddha into its pantheon by identifying him an avatar of the god Vishnu. This identification was probably done at a relatively late date, since some lists of Vishnu's avatars have Balarama instead of the Buddha. It seems that the Buddha was added to the list of Vishnu's avatars in northern India, where Buddhism was popular, but this did not take place in the south. (I have met Hindus from south India who did not include the Buddha in the list of Vishnu avatars.)

The inclusion of the Buddha as one of Vishnu's avatars is something of a backhanded compliment. According to certain Hindu texts, Vishnu incarnated himself as the Buddha in order to mislead demons and miscreants into rejecting the Vedas, thereby damning themselves. Furthermore, Kalki [कल्कि], the future avatar of Vishnu, is supposed to vanquish the Buddhists when he appears. These stories were probably composed at a time when the Hindu clerics felt threatened by the popularity of Buddhism and sought to undermine it. Needless to say, Buddhists do not accept their authenticity. (I had alluded to the Hindu belief that the Buddha is an avatar of Vishnu in this previous post about plans to make a movie based on the life of the Buddha.)

Buddhism, like Hinduism, is assimilative when it comes to other religions. Whenever Buddhism was introduced into a region, it typically did not eliminate the local gods but rather absorbed them into its pantheon. Thus, Buddhist temples in India and in South East Asian countries heavily influenced by Indian culture typically have shrines dedicated to the Hindu gods. However, these gods have been subjugated to Buddhism. In Buddhist mythology, it is Vishnu who is subservient to the Buddha, rather than the other way around. In the Himalayas and in East Asia, the staggering complexity of the Mahayana pantheon is due to Buddhism's absorption of the mythologies of the cultures it encountered as it traversed the Silk Road from India to China (and on to Korean and Japan). Many of these cultures no longer exist, and the only testament that they once existed is the inclusion of their names or those of their deities in the long lists of beings who paid homage to the Buddha in some sutra or the other.

An example of a Buddhist story about a Hindu god which Hindus would probably find insulting is this tale, from "The Iconography of Nepalese Buddhism" by Min Bahadur Shakya, explaining the origin of the "Hariharihariharivahan Lokeshvara" image:

One day while [Takshaka] was leisurely sun basking in a nearby river, a hungry Garuda saw him there. He alighted down and tried to devour Takshaka. Since Takshaka was the king of Nagas, he had great strength. They began to engage in a ferocious battle. He soon began to drag Garuda into river and intended to kill him. Garuda, finding himself about to be killed, invoked his protector Vishnu who came there immediately to save him. As Vishnu was about to cut off the head of Takshaka with his Sudarsanacakra, i.e., whirling disc, Takshaka, realizing his upcoming defeat, prayed for Avalokiteshvara for his protection. Avalokiteshvara arrived there instantly flying over his lion vehicle. Vishnu was ashamed to find Avalokiteshvara, Lord of compassion in front of him and instantly bowed before him throwing away his Sudrashan Chakra and paid homage.

Thereafter Takshaka and Garuda too retreated from the battle and joined to the worship of Avalokiteshvara. After that Vishnu offered himself to Avalokiteshvara to be his vehicle. In the mean time, the lion also offered himself to be the vehicle of Garuda, in turn. Nagaraja Takshaka also offered to be the vehicle of the lion. Thus this composite image of Avalokiteshvara on Vishnu, and on Garuda, then on the lion, all then on Takshaka. The original image of this unique Lokeshvara is at Changu Narayan, a hill above Sodhani Tirtha, near Bhaktapur.

Religious competition must have been especially fierce in Nepal!

In all fairness, Hindus and Buddhists typically respect each others' deities and religious figures. When religions interact, a certain amount of syncretism naturally occurs, as each side tries to interpret the other's beliefs within its own framework. Over time, this may result in the assimilation and absorption of some aspects of one religion by the other. Occasionally, however, people try to play games of religious one-upsmanship, resulting in the Buddha becoming an avatar of Vishnu and Vishnu becoming the mount of Avalokiteśvara Bodhisattva.

南無阿彌陀佛