‘Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives , you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us, where they lie side by side in this country of ours….You, the mothers who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears. Yours sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well.’

It is hard to imagine another country’s leader writing this of those 56,000 soldiers killed invading his country and being repelled at the cost of 68,000 Turkish lives. I think it has something important to tell us about forgiveness.

And an historical note: Gallipoli is just across the strait known in the ancient world as the Hellespont and today the Bosporus from the site of Ancient Troy made immortal in Homer’s Illiad, The battle there was most likely fought over access to the straits as Gallipoli was, not over Helen….

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallipoli_Campaign

Kemal Ataturk:

http://www.upworthy.com/an-interviewer-asked-a-muslim-leader-about-the-murder-of-a-british-soldier-heres-how-he-answered?c=ufb1

A. They can be hired into a job that pays $70,000 a year, while their colleagues are hired into jobs that pay on average $60,000 or

B. They can be hired into a job that pays $80,000 a year, while their colleagues on average are hired into jobs that pay $90,000 a year

Apparently the majority of the students in this experiment pick option A,  although this costs them $10,000 a year in lost income. This means they are essentially positional thinkers, and care more about their pay relative to others rather than in absolute terms. Which I find hard to relate to, because personally, mostly I care about my real interests, my absolute interests, not my relative standing to others, and so I would opt for B. But then I guess there are situations where I might opt differently, where the amount of money difference was minimal and I thought there were wider implications. Maybe the business school students thought being ahead of the pack might build their later reputation? What would you do?

Then, when you have answered that let me ask a different question. Supposing you could choose after you graduate from business school, as if you were one of the above students and had this choice. Either:

A. You can live a healthy life until the age of 70, and then die, while your fellow students live an equally healthy life until 60 and then die. Or

B. You can live a healthy life until the age of 80 and then die, while your fellow students live until 90 and then die.

Which would you pick? Situational framing may be significant in positional versus real interests thinking? Comments welcome. And if you think about it, this choice may have some major ramifications for how you live life.

But at the anniversary of the opening of the Normandy Campaign, I also remember Operation Bagration that took place at the same time between 22 June and 19th August 1944, on the German’s Eastern Front and cleared the Nazis out of what is now Belorussia at the cost of over 200,000 Russian/Soviet and their allies’ soldiers killed. It is for their sake, not politics that I remind people of this.

We focus on our own losses but we should also remember these catastrophic losses for Russian families, who during the whole of World War 2  from 1941-45 lost 8.7 million military casualties and 17.9 million civilians,  or a total of 26.6 million, though some say the losses were more like 40 million in total.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bagration

50,000 German Prisoners of War marched through Moscow after Operation Bagration:

1. The tendency to collect information before making a decision
2. The tendency to seek various points of view before coming to a conclusion,
3. The disposition to think extensively about a problem before responding,
4. The tendency to calibrate the degree of strength of one’s opinions to the degree of evidence available,
5. The tendency to think about future consequences before taking action,
6. The tendency to explicitly weight pluses and minuses of a situation before making a decision,
7.  The tendency to seek nuance and avoid absolutism.’

Keith rightly in my view thinks these qualities trump IQ as predictors of the ability to operate in the world. And I think they apply strongly to good conflict handling. I would only add the ability to use disciplined thought processes and to always seek contrary evidence to your most dearly held beliefs or theories.

For more about Keith who is one of the seminal thinkers around see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Stanovich

Well I think the Pope is recognizing in this acceptance that the core of Christianity, and indeed of Catholicism, indeed of Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, is the Golden Rule: to treat others as you would be treated, to treat yourself and others with compassion. I was fortunate to meet a Catholic Seminarian at a wedding last week, who told me when we discussed the Sermon on the Mount, that to him it was the distilled core of the Bible and the essence of Christianity, which is something I have always thought but didn’t know it was how others thought. In so far as I doubt, the Sermon on the Mount is not part of that doubt.

Being an atheist is fine, as long as you do good, Pope Francis said Wednesday, rocking the minds of less tolerant Catholics.

In his homily at the morning Mass in Rome, the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics urged the faithfuls to broaden their horizon, following a principle Jesus taught his disciples. Citing the Gospel of Mark, he described how upset the disciples were at the news that someone outside their group was doing good.

“They complained: If he is not one of us, he cannot do good. If he is not of our party, he cannot do good,” Francis said.

“This was wrong,” he added, according to a report from Vatican Radio.

VIDEO: Where the Catholic Church Stands on Science

Labeling the disciples as “a little intolerant,” closed off by the idea that “those who do not have the truth, cannot do good,” Francis remarked the importance of the “doing good” commandment. The principle, he said, unites all humanity, beyond religions and ideologies, creating a “culture of encounter” which is at the basis of peace.

Narrow and self centered attitudes should be banned, as everyone doing good, including atheists, can be redeemed by Jesus, Francis said.

“Just do good and we’ll find a meeting point,” the pope said, referring to a hypothetical conversation in which someone told a priest: “But I don’t believe. I’m an atheist.”

PHOTOS: Pope Francis’ First Mass

Francis’s reaching out to atheists is not a completely new move. A dialogue with non believers was sought in 1964 by Pope Paul VI. In his debut encyclical Ecclesiam Suams, Paul conceded that some atheists were undoubtedly inspired by “great-hearted dreams of justice and progress.”

Adding to a number of unconventional speeches and gestures, Pope Francis’ words have sounded almost revolutionary as they are in striking contrast with the radical views of his predecessor Benedict XVI, who often described atheism as a terrible threat, harshingly attacking what he called “aggressive secularism.”

In a much criticized speech during his first papal visit to Britain in 2010, Benedict even appeared to tie atheism with the crimes of the Nazi, by stating that the “Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society” had resulted in the Holocaust.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/23/imams-auschwitz-muslim-nazi-holocaust_n_3326547.html#slide=2489372

Muslim leaders from across the globe paid tribute Holocaust victims this week during a visit to Auschwitz, the former Nazi concentration camp, where they prayed at the Wall of Death for those who were killed by genocide and suffered under violent anti-Semitism.

The imams, who hailed from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bosnia, Palestine, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey and the United States, performed Islamic prayers while facing Mecca as part of a Holocaust awareness visit organized in part by the International Religious Freedom office of the U.S. State Department.

“What can you say? You’re speechless. What you have seen is beyond human imagination,” Imam Mohamed Magid, President of the U.S.-based Islamic Society of North America, told Agence France-Presse.

“Whether in Europe today or in the Muslim world, my call to humanity: End racism for God’s sake, end anti-Semitism for God’s sake, end Islamophobia for God’s sake, end sexism for God’s sake… Enough is enough,” said Magid, who leads the All Dulles Area Muslim Society in Northern Virginia.

The visit, which runs through Friday, is scheduled to include a tour of Warsaw’s new Museum of the History of Polish Jews, a kosher dinner with Polish Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich, and a meeting with the Polish Righteous Among the Nations, according to JTA. The group of imams, which includes Muzammil H. Siddiqi, president of the Fiqh Council of North America and the former president of the Islamic Society of North America, is also scheduled to meet with Muslim, Jewish and Catholic leaders in Poland.

“We thank [the imams] for their willingness to come. Our task is to encourage proper understanding between our faiths in ways that stress our common humanity,” said Rabbi Jack Bemporad, who is the Executive Director of the New Jersey-based Center for Interreligious Understanding and is leading the visit. “Understanding our particular histories will help us better understand each other so that we can unite in combatting prejudice against all religions.”

“I think that the imams that came here having very little knowlege in many cases of the Shoah are now convinced that any kind of Holocaust denial or Holocaust revisionism is simply out of the question,” Bemporad said.

Ahmet Muharrem Atlig, a Turkish Muslim and former imam, said that despite being educated in “much informaiton about Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Holocaust,” the visit was a “turning point” for him.

“As soon as possible, I will bring my family here … I will organize Turkish imams and muftis to go to Holocaust sites. My people don’t know what happened here. It’s not an agenda. It’s a reality. This is not Jewish heritage, it’s world heritage. Jewish people were mostly affected but the lessons are global,” Atlig said.

This week’s visit is not the first time Muslim leaders have visited Auschwitz. In 2010, eight American imams took part in a similar trip.

“The U.S. imams told us that their trip was transformative and they shared their experiences with their American Muslim communities. We thought a trip with an international group of imams and religious leaders to be of vital importance,” said Catholic University of America law professor Marshall Breger, an Orthodox Jew and former Reagan White House liaison to the Jewish community who helped organized both trips.

“Increasing compassion and preserving man’s humanity starts with unveiling falsehoods that shore up bigotry. Unfortunately, one of those is Holocaust denial. Muslims and millions of others also suffered and Holocaust denial denies them, too, not just Jews who perished,” Breger said.

Susan Barne

There is something called Cognitive Dissonance in which when faced with something that challenges our core beliefs we actually convert contrary data into supporting data. The concept originated when a professor studied an end of the world group who had a specific time and date for a global flood. They really believed in it and gave away their possessions and waited as the minutes ticked away. When it didn’t happen, they said they had received a message from God that they had saved the world by being so good. All of us suffer from this cognitive dissonance to some extent.I think this has significant lessons for current politics.

The real problem is that conservatives world view across the board is so threatened by the pace and type of change that they are in cognitive dissonance across their whole belief system and so will not make any deals or compromises. Climate change data: proof of a liberal media conspiracy, global financial collapse: proof that the Community Relations Act caused it, school massacres: not enough guns. Wherever you look conservatives (unlike the ones I grew up with) have walled off their ideology from testing, from contrary data.

And of course the worst of them all was Alan Greenspan, an Ayn Rand free market fanatic who ignored all the warning signs under the rubric the free market knows best. Liberals do this in my experience to a lesser extent, and it is not across the whole belief system in the same way. I think there is a profound asymmetry in conservative and liberal moral foundations around realism and openness to contrary data. It may be conservative ties that bind blind as per Jon Haidt, but today I think it goes deeper and we have a form of conservative Taliban like fundamentalism that blocks conservatives contributed to solving our societal problems because they cannot admit them in a reality based way.