Interfaith Group

I attended a lecture in international business management held by a Professor at my alma mater. This is a Prof who I tangled with, and truthfully embarassed many times, when I was there. We remained friends.


The lecturer gave a long talk about how third world economies were stalling and especially in SE Asia.


I had just spent 20 years there was fluent in Thai, spoke some Malay and could read and write in Thai as well.


I had been an international civil servant in 4 countries and opened up a company that had 400 employees in Thailand.


The lecturer had stayed in a Holiday Inn the night before.


I sat quietly and then the Professor introduced me and asked me what I thought of the question, he would regret it as he had so many many times a few decades before.


I said that the professor was 100% correct and completely wrong at the same time.


I then explained that my problem was that in accepting the metric of a country was. If you are going to use that as the only building block then yes, fine her numbers are correct.


If however you understand economic interaction as crossing borders the same way climate does then, no it doesn't.


My point was that while the large concentrated urban areas were stagnating the interriors were opening up and millions of miles of borders that were closed for hundreds of centuries were opening up.


I explained that the interior part of China would soon have, for the first time ever, a road access to the sea.


It wasn't going East through China, but South through Burma and Thailand. Roughly 100 million people would be entereing the international market for production and consumption.


These geographical borders were the key to understanding new areas.


My point is that religious terms like "Christian" "Muslim" "Jew" and so on tell very little about somebody, like countries are not good boundaries for looking at economics.


Is this person man or woman, literate or not?, are they afraid or reassured, rural or urban, loved or alone? These are much more meaningful questions to know about someone than their religion, which in most cases involve some degree of social pressure for them to acceede to the label. (BTW 'Muslims' more than any other group of people I have ever met have been the most frequent to come out and say "please don't judge me by the term Muslim".


I tell people who ask that I am a Buddhist but that is simply a kindness to allow them to put me into box so we can continue.


Buddhists don't have an initiation ritual, attendance or tithing. Being a Buddhist simply means that you are on the road to Dharma (truth).


I would put myself on that road but I would say that a lot of folks are way ahead of me and some of them call themselves Christians, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Humanist, even a few Marxists (but alas I never have found a Troskyite ahead of me, but its possible).