Are they broke? I mean, they’re all ancient. Can Mick Jagger still give Jumping Jack Flash the … treatment?
But any time is a good time for listening to some of those old songs.
It was 10-years ago today that Terri Schiavo died in a Florida hospice center, trapped in eternal, insensate darkness and blissfully unaware of the controversy that surrounded her during 15-years of extraordinary medical care and equally extraordinary legal wrangling.
The facts are too well-known and documented to rehearse. I remark it today for the reason that it was the controversy that brought home to me how malicious, dishonest and painfully stupid the Evangelical Right actually is, and how debased the Republican Party had become under its influence.
Focus on the Family, then an important evangelical ministry, insisted for years upon referring to the Schiavos as ‘estranged,’ as though they couldn’t agree on some important family issue. In fact, Terri Schiavo’s brain had died and been reabsorbed into her body; literally, her cerebrum was gone. She could not receive and process sensory information, she could not form thoughts; the only part of her brain which remained was the oldest, lowest part, that portion which automatically handles gross motor processes, such as the heart and lungs. They were not estranged. In every meaningful sense of the word, she had ceased to exist.
And, today, the lies roll on.
In short, Terri’s cognitive disability rendered her vulnerable to judicial homicide by those who reject God as Creator of all things and seek to undo the Judeo-Christian underpinning of America. This horrific triumph of judicial tyranny emboldened the Godless, who have only become more brazen and overt in their efforts in the decade since.
Yet the more disturbing aspect of Terri’s death is the overwhelming acquiescence among, and approval of, the God-fearing. Countless self-professed Christians yawned a “ho-hum” and even applauded openly, or in secret, the killing of an innocent, defenseless, disabled woman who was not suffering from a terminal illness.
Less vigorously but with equal dishonesty, Baptist Press casts the story much the same way:
“By the time I had read volumes of court transcripts, sat in court and listened to Michael Schiavo’s attorney, heard Schiavo speak at press conferences, and read excerpts of the attorney’s book representing his worldview, the coverage strategy I employed seemed elementary to me,” Hannigan wrote.
“My convictions led me to a conscientious approach to reporting that made me wary of seeking to promote views which openly condoned adultery and euthanasia. Simply put, I would not actively seek to give ink to Michael Schiavo’s distorted views of love and fidelity — and would not knowingly engage in unfruitful interviews with Schiavo’s attorney, whose pro-euthanasia views had been clearly established,” Hannigan wrote.
The scrupulous journos at Baptist Press evidence no discomfort with that quote, either.
Years after his wife’s collapse, and the declaration by numerous physicians that she was in a ‘persistent vegetative state,’ Michael Schiavo entered into a relationship with another woman, who bore two children. Adultery? Perhaps in the eyes of the law, and the church, but certainly not in any sense that a thinking adult will accept as valid; his wife was irrevocably gone.
But, then, it’s a way better story if he’s a prolific adulterer who arranged the murder of his disabled wife — so that’s how the malicious and dishonest freaks of the Evangelical Right will continue to tell the story. It’s a sad index into how disturbed they really are.
Years ago I was heavily involved in politics. I soon grew weary of it all. We will fail at legislating many moral issues in the absence of an agreed upon standard of living. Besides, Christians are already looked at suspiciously since the church did not rise up against slavery and racism until more recent times. We failed miserably and our culture knows it.
Absolutely true, so far as it goes, but incomplete — and suggests something that isn’t true.
The churches certainly did fail to rise up against slavery and similar race evils, but that is not merely what they did; they affirmatively supported those evils, and found support for them in the Bible. It is not the case, as the remark suggests, that they merely stayed silent (as out of moral cowardice, for instance; they were the Dark Side, and the KKK was a chiefly Methodist and Baptist enterprise).
This is exactly what is playing-out in Indiana right now. Fortunately, it appears that ordinary human decency is going to prevail — against the churches, again.
I think, therefore I am.
The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.
In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn, than to contemplate.
Common sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world, for each one thinks he is so well-endowed with it that even those who are hardest to satisfy in all other matters are not in the habit of desiring more of it than they already have.
The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt.
I hope that posterity will judge me kindly, not only as to the things which I have explained, but also to those which I have intentionally omitted so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovery.
I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.
It is only prudent never to place complete confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived.
So blind is the curiosity by which mortals are possessed, that they often conduct their minds along unexplored routes, having no reason to hope for success, but merely being willing to risk the experiment of finding whether the truth they seek lies there.
With me, everything turns into mathematics.
“But to live without philosophizing is in truth the same as keeping the eyes closed without attempting to open them; and the pleasure of seeing all that sight discloses is not to be compared with the satisfaction afforded by the discoveries of philosophy.”
Yet although the senses sometimes deceive us about objects that are very small or distant, that doesn’t apply to my belief that I am here, sitting by the fire, wearing a winter dressing-gown, holding this piece of paper in my hands, and so on. It seems to be quite impossible to doubt beliefs like these, which come from the senses.
So I shall suppose that some malicious, powerful, cunning demon has done all he can to deceive me—rather than this being done by God, who is supremely good and the source of truth. I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely dreams that the demon has contrived as traps for my judgment.
The word ‘invent’ points to what is wrong with relying on my imagination in this matter: if I used imagination to show that I was something or other, that would be mere invention, mere story-telling; for imagining is simply contemplating the shape or image of a bodily thing.
But the chief ground of my satisfaction with this method, was the assurance I had of thereby exercising my reason in all matters, if not with absolute perfection, at least with the greatest attainable by me: besides, I was conscious that by its use my mind was becoming gradually habituated to clearer and more distinct conceptions of its objects; and I hoped also, from not having restricted this method to any particular matter, to apply it to the difficulties of the other sciences, with not less success than to those of algebra.
Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
II: Criticism of Morality§260 “To will“ is to will an object. But “object”, as an idea, involves a valuation. Whence do valuations originate? Is a permanent norm, “pleasant or painful”, their basis?
But in an incalculable number of cases we first of all make a thing painful, by investing it with a valuation.
The compass of moral valuations: they play a part in almost every mental impression. To us the world is coloured by them.
We have imagined the purpose and value of all things: owing to this we possess an enormous fund of latent power but the study of comparative values teaches us that values which were actually opposed to each other have been held in high esteem and that there have been many tables of laws (they could not, therefore, have been worth anything per se).
The analysis of individual tables of laws revealed the fact that they were framed (often very badly) as the conditions of existence for limited groups of people, to ensure their maintenance.
Upon examining modern men, we found that there are a large number of very different values to hand and that they no longer contain any creative power; the fundamental principle: “the condition of existence” is now quite divorced from the moral values. It is much more superfluous and not nearly so painful. It becomes an arbitrary matter. Chaos.
Who creates the goal which stands above mankind and above the individual? Formerly morality was a preservative measure: but nobody wants to preserve any longer, there is nothing to preserve. Thus we are reduced to an experimental morality each must postulate a goal for himself.
