For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways
I get a weekly email from the OnLine Journal. Very good stuff ...
The OnLine Journal - Opinion - Mortality versus morality
On the Christian in the White House:
"Contradictory images are common TV fare, but watching global leaders who make war on Iraq act gravely concerned while gazing at the dead body of a pope who stood against their murderous action was only one of the mind boggling contrasts visible during our most recent death festival.
The pope's body was dragged out to the world and featured in a nearly endless orgy of world leader hypocrisy, contrasted with the real grief of sincere believers who found some comfort in this public production. But before that we had another, far more ghoulish spectacle."
On the Levite as opposed to the Good Samritan:
"The sad story of a woman in a vegetative state for years, and brain dead by any test of science or reason, but whose loved ones fought bitterly over whose right was supreme in controlling her living death, was played out before millions.
This private tragedy became a public circus, with media geeks crawling all over themselves at a place supposedly dedicated to death with dignity. A hospice was put under assault by commercial and political forces which wouldn't know dignity unless it wore a price tag.
Serial killers in government boldly stood up for the rights of the living dead, as many of them do for the fetus. Their worship of life before consciousness begins or after it ends and their contempt for much of conscious life in between those states, highlights the dementia of their political religion."
On the Mote and the Beam:
"While warped concern for one life became a ghoulish spectacle, actual birth and death continued, unabated, and in the usual numbers. The U.S. murder rate, for instance, didn't decline, and killers didn't stop in order to watch the hit reality show of perverted entertainment.
More important, social war crimes endured, with a vengeance. The long term business venture of the war on terror continued, returning short term profits to its misery merchants, who thrive on the commodification of chaos.
And the longer term problems of global warming, and a new fear called "peak oil," were adding to problems mostly hidden from general public awareness, so that public spectacles could cloud consciousness from anything but individual, celebrity death, so their energy could remain focused on the consumption of irrelevance."
On Proseprity Theology:
"That consumption fetish plays a major role in maintaining the image of a thriving culture, even though it consumes far more than symbolic money while it creates impossible debt.
The wanton waste of a system based on endless production of cheap, often useless goods, for sale at value levels which are almost all totally artificial, has created a serious problem for humanity.
Critical resource concerns now occupy the minds of even those who profess belief in the system, and are beginning to make them wonder at what is going on. But their wonder should be our fear, and that fear should motivate our action.
Hundreds of years of a capital dominated market system have brought not only terrible problems that threaten our future, but possibilities for their solution that can bring about a far better tomorrow.
Instead of reducing the labor time needed to produce the means of material social survival, private capital has increased the needed labor time to produce the means of immaterial, individual survival.
Instead of freeing people from needless work, it has created needless work that enslaves people. If we don't turn that around and save ourselves, and our natural environment as well, real despair looms on the horizon. If we do not produce democratic changes in our political economy that bring about a totally different reality, we will not be able to stop the criminal waste that could bring our downfall as a civilization."
On the Creation, Evolution, Intelligent Design and Survival of the Toughest at the expense of the Weakest:
"The rising of the poor global south is a hopeful sign, but if the rich global north, and its majorities of indebted, upscale servants, does not rise with that south, we face a bleak future, with failing nature contributing to the increasing signs of a failing political economy.
In the long view, not only individuals, but societies are born, and eventually die. While we have gained a little control over individual mortality, it will take an awakened collective morality to help us prolong life for humanity.
But only by democratically ridding ourselves of the empire of immorality that makes a spectacle of individual death, to keep us unaware of the dangerous possibility of collective death.
Societies not busy being born, are busy dying. Which end of that spectrum are we experiencing? Don't let someone else decide."
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