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Thoughts in remembrance of 911

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IainB:
At the risk of digressing and following a red whale...
That would have been strange if you saw an actual swastika on the side of a buddhist temple.  The swastika itself is an aberration- a reversed symbol from the one actually used, so the symbol should have been a reversed swastika, i.e. the original symbol...
-wraith808 (September 21, 2011, 09:34 AM)
--- End quote ---
Apparently not as strange as one might think:
I could always have been mistaken, of cour, but it certainly looked like a Nazi-style swastika to me at any rate. So, just for the record so that I could check up on my facts, I took a picture of it with my trusty Asahi Pentax SE mounted with a 900mm telephoto lens (sadly all now obsolete). The wat (temple) which had the huge swastika on its walls was a couple of kilometres away across a valley from the wat where I was standing in Changwat Suppanburi. When I had the photo developed, I checked up on it in the Enc. Britannica, and yes, it was the "bad" Nazi swastika, so my ignorance was reduced at that point. This was in 2001, so the photo would be in hardcopy form only, and it is in storage with my stuff 800 kilometres from where I am now living. If I get a chance to, I shall get the photo and scan it. This might be just what I needed to motivate me to scan all my old photos anyway, as I now have a scanner that can scan perfectly from negatives as well.

In any event, my wife (who is a Thai Buddhist) told me at the time that it was common to see swastikas in wats, most usually in Chinese quarters in Bangkok. She said it come in both orientations ("left" or "right"), and certainly you can see pictures of this on the internet if you google it - e.g., The Swastika Symbol in Buddhism
It's quite interesting actually. I had not done this before now. Just go to google.com and type "Buddhism and swastika" into the search field.

I did this after reading @tomos' comment:
well, the name swastika, is used for the original symbol and the nazi version [edit] am I nit-picking :-[ [/edit]

BTW I've seen swastikas (original) incorporated within Christian crosses, in medieval Irish Christian stone crosses, and tombstones. (Presumably it was also used elsewhere in Europe by Christians).
More info (wikipedia) [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika]Swastika
-tomos (September 21, 2011, 10:00 AM)
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IainB:
Spoiler
Found at: ]http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2011/12/high-fashion.html
- who linked to it here:
From: http://iowntheworld.com/blog/?p=111054

God bless you, every one.
--- End quote ---

Renegade:
Found at: ]http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2011/12/high-fashion.html
- who linked to it here:
From: http://iowntheworld.com/blog/?p=111054

God bless you, every one.
--- End quote ---
-IainB (December 26, 2011, 03:46 AM)
--- End quote ---


Interesting.

It's really no more distasteful than a lot of things though.

e.g. Here are some similarly distasteful images:

Distasteful, though mainstream
This is a standard - targets with someone that you want to kill on them. No surprises here:

Thoughts in remembrance of 911

Imagine replacing Osama with Steve Jobs here:

Thoughts in remembrance of 911





Back to buddy's shirt... Now, if it had "Never forget" in bold letters on it, you could easily sell that shirt in the US. Because then it would be paying homage as opposed to whatever it is now.

nosh:
Really reaching here... where's the harm?

The pic's taken in southern India. The guy's probably a menial laborer working in the Gulf where he picked up the shirt. He would probably be dumb enough to wear it in Manhattan if someone told him it was OK. I wouldn't think too much about it, God knows he doesn't. :)

IainB:
@Renegade:
I'm sorry, I don't quite follow.
I think, from what you commented, that I may have been a tad too obscure.

In the story of "A Christmas Carol" written by Charles Dickens in 1843, there is a character called "Tiny Tim" (Timothy Cratchit) - a little crippled lad, who says:
"God bless us every one."
--- End quote ---
- which he offers as a blessing at Christmas dinner. (This in an impoverished family that would have been too poor to even afford to buy the food for the dinner, had not the story unfolded as it did.)

I am not sure whether you know this, but why Christmas (Christ mass) is celebrated is that it is the anniversary of the birth of Jesus Christ, who was a very special person - a prophet of God - in the eyes of Christians and the later Muslims.
The Christian belief is that Christ died as a vicarious sacrifice so that all of mankind's sins could be forgiven - throughout time, before, then, and in in the future - so that when we die our spirits can go before God, who will see and judge our worthiness to enter Heaven only on the good that we have done. The salvation of all was/is thus achieved - whether we want or expect it is irrelevant.

It is believed that, in this way, Christ's death was a sort of trade - that was the vicarious sacrifice - where the spilling of his blood was on our behalf, and brought about the birth of the New Man, as distinct from Adam. All men are believed to be descended from Adam (per Old Testament), and to have inherited his original sin. But Christ's death changed that. His death was a time to mourn, but also to rejoice in the new life (we live anew in and because of Christ) and in the forgiveness of sin that he had ensured for mankind.

When I saw the picture of the man in the 9-11 shirt, I was reminded of the estimated 3,000 approx. deaths in 911. I'm not sure whether that number includes the people killed on all four flights, but it does include some terrorists, apparently. It was not just the dead, but their surviving families that came to my mind. Families whose Christmas dinner tables may well have some empty seats in memory of their loved ones.
So, I took Tiny Tim's words, and changed them a bit:

I wrote:
God bless you, every one.
--- End quote ---
- instead of:
"God bless us every one."
--- End quote ---

And by that "YOU", I was embracing the dead of 911 - the innocent victims and their murderers - and all their families, and all the people who mourned the losses, and all the people who rejoiced in the losses (like the man in the shirt presumably may have done).
Because Christmas is a time for joy and forgiving. As Christ said "Forgive thine enemies."
I don't think that Christ would have intended for us to to hate a person or a group of people all down through time because of a dreadful crime committed over 2,000 years ago, or 65 years ago, or just 10 years ago.
I do think that he would have expected us to ask God to forgive the murderers though, just as he reputedly said on his crucifixion:
Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
--- End quote ---
(It's ignorance, again.)

I was, therefore, making a prayer - and decidedly not making a sartorial comment or vouchsafing an opinion.
I am sorry if it offended you.

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