Reflections From a Murky Pond

The “Golden Rule” states that one should do unto others as he would like them to do unto him. This may be the best piece of evidence for a universal absolute moral code. Just about every religion in existence exhorts their followers to practice this simple ideal. A few examples are listed below:

Buddhism (500 BCE)

Hurt not others in ways you yourself would find hurtful.

— Udana-Varga, 5, 18

Christianity (50 CE)

Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them, for this is the law and the prophets.

— Matthew 7:12

Confucianism (600 BCE)

Surely it is the maxim of loving-kindness: Do not unto other that you would not have them do unto you.

— Analects, 15, 23

Islam (622 CE)

No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself.

— Imam An-Nawawi’s 40 Hadiths, 13

Hinduism (1500 BCE)

This is the turn of duty; do naught unto others which could cause you pain if done to you.

— Mahabharata, 5, 1517

Judaism (1800 BCE)

What is harmful to you, do not to your fellow men. That is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary.

— Talmud, Shabbat, 312

Taoism (300 BCE)

Regard your neighbor’s gain as your own gain and your neighbor’s loss as your own loss.

— T’sai Shang Kan Ying P’ien

Zoroastrianism (600 BCE)

That nature alone is good which refrains from doing unto another whatsoever is not good for itself.

— Didistan-i-dinik, 94, 5

If this stricture were limited to only the Abrahamic faiths – and possibly Zoroastrianism – I would write it off as nothing of note. Each of those faiths builds upon its predecessor. The Golden Rule is not so limited however. Even religions and philosophies with little or connection or exposure to the Abrahamic faiths include essentially the same stricture.

While this alone is not proof, it seems to be enough evidence to support postulating a universal absolute morality.

I believe that just about everyone in America knows of MLK’s “I Have A Dream” speech – even if very few in America actually know much of the text of that famous address of August 28, 1963. Few though remember a later and much more controversial speech by Dr. King though.

On April 8, 1967 – a year to the day before his assassination – Rev. Martin Luther King gave this speech, entitled Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, at the Riverside Church in New York.

MLK: Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence

I believe that Aaron McGruder is one of those few who knows of this speech. In episode 9, The Return Of The King, of his animated series Boondocks McGruder shows a alive and well Rev. King protesting the US’ response to 911 and being branded a “Hate American Traitor” by the media for doing so. This is almost exactly what really happened in ’67.

If you would like to read the full text of King’s Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence, it’s posted after the break.

Read the rest of this entry »

I came across this post on WordPress’ Tag Surfer and it really set me off on a rant. The blog’s owner apparently dislikes dissenting opinions and deleted my comment, so I’ll quote him verbatim below and add my commentary.

Mental Illness in America II

December 14, 2007 by nightbird16

Just a week ago, Richard Dawkins, a distraught and mentally ill teenager in Colorado, shot eight shoppers. Sunday morning, another young mentally disturbed young man, Matthew Murrey’, shot five members of a missionary training center and church, also in Colorado. Although a few years older than Richard, Matthew exhibited the same symptoms of an isolated, depressed and failure-plagued young person: relationship problems with parental figures, isolated from possible friends his own age, feeling a failure and abused, and at last hearing voices in his mind, he struck out at a christian community he felt had rejected and let him down.

His parents chose to take him out of the public school to home school him in a strict Christian fashion, which he resented because it deprived him of opportunities to make friends. He felt unable to “live up to the strict behaviorial standards set for him by his parents and fundamentalist theology and that plunged him into a deep and suicidal depression. His parents put him on medication to control the depression, but that apparently didn’t help. He sought aid from church and missionaries, and they too failed to heal his panic and suffering.

Finally, he armed himself with an assault rifle, handguns and 1000 rounds of ammunition and went to take revenge on a Christian community which he could not join and could not escape.

Guns and mental illness is a fatal combination, but parents and church must share responsibility for what happened. Without support and effective counseling, many teens fall by the wayside in America. And the story looks dreadfully similar: isolation, failure, unrelenting pressure and control leads to tragedy again and again. When something goes wrong, parents blame “the wrong crowd.” The church blames evil values. Politicians blame evil children.

I blame a sick society that devours its own children.

Yes, Nightbird16, America suffers from a sick society. That sickness is manifest in the people that put on their oh-so-comfortable blinders and claim any sort of evil or selfishness as an illness. Evil exists! Selfishness, Evil’s bastard spawn exists! They don’t magically go away because people mislabel them as some sort of illness, or blame them on society.

Dawkins and Murrey were a pair of selfish, self-centered losers who wanted to die in a blaze of fame and supposed “glory” – nothing more. They weren’t mentally ill; they were evil, selfish and useless. Do their parents share the blame for that? Yes, they raised a pair of misborn freaks who turned to evil. Does society share them for that? Only insofar as it doesn’t have an effective means of culling such human trash before they can harm others.

It’s is decades past time for America to start forcing people to be responsible for their own choices and their own actions. It is decades past time to stop excusing the criminal and evil behavior of individuals because we’re too cowardly to look evil in the face and pull the trigger.

I blame it on a sick society who’s too afraid to face evil.

With the growing number of Indian medical professionals insinuated into the US healthcare industry I believe its vital to the health and safety of our people to further evaluate whether or not Indian medical schools are providing the appropriate medical training – both in technical skills and in medical ethics. See below:

MUMBAI, Oct 12 (Reuters) – An Indian couple has been charged with murder of one of their sons after they tried to transfuse his blood into his elder brother to make him smarter, a newspaper reported on Friday.

The Indian Express newspaper said the couple were both doctors and the mother had a dream in which a guru advised blood transfusion to make their elder son do better at his studies.

Police said the couple initially claimed the 11-year-old boy was killed in an attack on the family, but later the father confessed.

“If there were any outside attackers they would not have attacked using surgical instruments,” police official Hanif Quereshi was quoted as saying by the daily. The father has been remanded in police custody and the mother is receiving psychiatric treatment after attempting suicide.

Their elder son in fighting for life in a hospital in the western town of Rohtak.

Alright, let’s start with what happened to performing a Type & Screen before transfusing blood between patients? Type & Screen procedures confirm both that blood types of donor and recipient match and that no conflicting antigens are found in the patients’ blood serum. This is a very basic medical procedure that every Western doctor would automatically have performed.

Let’s move on to who in the 21st century would believe that a blood transfusion would improve the recipient’s intellect? The very idea of performing such ill informed medical experiments on anyone boggles my mind. Performing them on children goes beyond the realm of crass stupidity and into the realms previously reserved for Dr. Mengele.

Finally, who would do such a thing because they or their spouse had a dream where a guru told them to do so? Were these two insane criminals examples of Indian doctors or examples of Indian witchdoctors?

If this is a sample of what a pair of supposedly trained and licensed Indian physicians are capable of doing, I think it’s definitely past time for the US to carefully review the credentials, skills and ethics of every Indian trained doctor currently practicing within our borders.

Most of us in Western cultures are familiar with the Seven Deadly Sins: Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, and Pride. These Cardinal Vices were enumerated by the early Christian church as a way to educate and instruct followers concerning man’s tendency to sin. I believe we must add an eighth Deadly Sin to that list – Guiltism.

Guiltism:

Guiltism is a mindset or belief system that espouses that an individual or group is inherently “evil” because they are possessed of some innate benefit that they did not earn and must be ashamed of. At guiltism’s core is the mandate that since someone or some group has privilege, they must pay reparations to all others who do not possess that privilege. Failure to pay without complaint absolves all others who harm the privileged person or group from some or all responsibility for their actions.

This is an insidious and pernicious belief structure. Guiltism it is on both the idea of collective guilt, which is guilt attributed to someone who has some sort of relationship – familial or societal – with someone else who perpetrated some transgression, and upon the idea any privilege automatically incurs an individual or group the burden of guilt and the need to offer both apology and recompense to diverse strangers.

Guiltism is an extremely damaging “sin”, possibly worse than the original seven combined. It corrupts the Seven Contrary Virtues: chastity, abstinence, liberality, diligence, patience, kindness, and humility.

• Guiltism corrupts Chastity by causing a beautiful person to hate their own bodies – an unearned privilege, which detracts from successful integration of sexuality within the person and thus the inner unity of a human person in his or her bodily and spiritual being.

• Guiltism denies Abstinence because the virtue of abstinence is intended to be a conscious act, freely chosen to enhance life, and guiltism twists this into repressive self-denial.

• Guiltism counters Liberality by denying any act of charity. Guiltism would claim that any charitable act was actually nothing more than rendering partial payment due.

• Guiltism perverts Diligence. Diligence requires that a human being freely to direct himself to conform to the good promised by God and attested by moral conscience. Guiltism both adds a goad, which precludes the person’s freedom of action and supplants the purpose of a vocation to divine beatitude with the assuagement of guilt and reduction of personal tribulation.

• Guiltism defies Patience by forcing a person to defy the existence of a divine plan and divine wisdom in favor of acting at their own pace to correct perceived injustices.

• Guiltism refuses Kindness by making all good acts towards others who carry this burden of adopted guilt an exacerbation of their condition, and any good act to the less privileged being recompense as opposed to kindness.

• Guiltism contravenes Humility by causing a person to aggrandize themselves and their self perception of their power and influence. To carry guilt implies the belief that one had the power to enact either harm or good.

Guiltism is by far the most deadly and corruptive of “sins.” It’s corrosive effects upon the human soul are unequaled in Man.