Addictions and addicts are still largely perceived by sober society as being products of weak willpower and/or moral crime. At the same time, pharmaceutical corporations have intentionally pushed their own very addictive and profitable opiate resulting in immense suffering and overdose death numbers — indeed the actual moral crime! — and got off relatively lightly and only through civil litigation.
ALONG with human intelligence comes the proportionate reprehensible potential for evil behavior, including malice for malice’s sake. While animals, including pet cats, can react violently, it is typically due to reactive distrust/dislike or necessity/sustenance. But leave it to humans to commit a spiteful act, if only because we can. With our four-legged friends there definitely is a beautiful absence of that undesirable distinctly human trait.
I've long felt that, as much as many people may try, humans are not capable of true empathy. Rather, the best we can do to cerebrally experience the suffering of others is by relating somewhat to them via our own similar experiences/pain. Oh, how much the world would be better if only we all literally/fully shared the pains — and joys, for that matter — of everyone else without exception. … The fictional account below is my reflection on that.
ALONG with human intelligence comes the proportionate reprehensible potential for evil behavior, including malice for malice’s sake. While animals, including pet cats, can react violently, it is typically due to reactive distrust/dislike or necessity/sustenance. But leave it to humans to commit a spiteful act, if only because we can. With our four-legged friends there definitely is a beautiful absence of that undesirable distinctly human trait.
Many people find Trump to be the very unstable, vengefully angry and self-centered/-serving type willing to take the world for a most brutal spin, perhaps even for the sake of him making it into the historical-’greatness’ books. If anything, he’s evidence of a great evil being unleashed onto a largely powerless world.
AFTER having created everything, God spent the seventh day resting with His cat Simone.
I posted an essay on Reddit a few years ago or so [a fairly close copy of which I’ve included below], and it promptly got deleted.
In 1972, I — a five-year-old boy with undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder and high sensitivity, thus not always easy with whom to deal — was granted the honor of hanging out with my three older siblings, all of whom were accompanied by their own similarly aged friends. I was about two years the junior of the youngest of my siblings, who was herself the next youngest amongst the entire group.
Jake was a bad example of how any man should behave, especially towards his wife (or significant other). Instead of being a good husband, he continuously berated his wife, Kate — a devout Pentecostal Christian — even occasionally while in the presence of visitors, such as my mother (who was Kate’s longtime friend) and I. The two of us were of Catholic upbringing, though I wasn’t much of a ‘believer’ in that nor any other religion.
I read a shocking article, headlined “‘Grave Sexual Abuse’: When the Word Rape Doesn’t Apply To Boys” [by Zahara Dawoodbhoy, 21 Sep 2020], about a South Asian nation/culture in which men have been raping boys with impunity.
With news-stories’ human subjects’ race and culture dictatingquantity of media coverage of even the poorest of souls,a renowned newsman formulated a startling equationjustly implicating collective humanity’s news-consuming callousness- “A hundred Pakistanis going off a mountain in a busmake less of a story than three Englishmen drowning in the Thames.”.According to this unjust news-media mentality reasonably deducedfive hundred prolongedly-war-weary Middle Eastern Arabs getting blownto bits in the same day perhaps should take up even less space and airtime..So readily learned is the tiny token short story buried in the bottomright-hand corner of the newspaper’s last page, the so brief accountinvolving a long-lasting war about which there’s virtually absolutelynothing civil; therefor caught in the warring web are civilians mostunfortunate, most weak, the very most in need of peace and civility..And it’s naught but business as usual in the damned nationswhere such severe suffering almost entirely dominates thefractured structured daily routine of civilian slaughter(plus that of the odd well-armed henchman) mostly by meansof bomb blasts from incendiary explosive devices, rock-fire fragmentsand shell shock readily shared with freshly shredded shrapnel woundsresulting from smart bombs often launched for thestupidest of reasons into crowded markets and grade schools. ….Hence where humane consideration and conduct were unquestionablydue post haste came only few allocated seconds of sound bite — a half minuteif news-media were with extra space or time to spare — and one or twoprinted paragraphs on page twenty-three of Section C. Such newsconsumed in the stable fully developed, fully ‘civilized’ Western worldby heads slowly shaking at the barbarity of ‘those people’ in thatwar-torn strife which has forced tens of thousands of civilians to post-hastegather what’s left of their shattered lives and limbs and flee. ….Thus comes the imminent point at which such meager measurecouple-column-inches coverage reflects the civil Western readers’accumulating apathy towards such dime-a-dozen disaster zonesof the globe, all accompanied by a large yawn; then thesaid readers subconsciously perceive even greater human-life devaluationfrom the miniscule hundreds-dead-yet-again coverage.The immoral consideration of ‘quality of life’..Consequentially continues the self-perpetuation of the token-two-column-inch(non)coverage as the coldly calculated worth of such common mass slaughter,ergo those many-score violently lost human lives are somehow worthso much the less than, say, three Englishmen drowning in the Thames. Perhapshad they all been cases of the once-persecuted suddenly persecutingor the once-weak wreaking havoc upon their neighboring indigenousminorities — perhaps then there’d be far more compassionate, moral coverage..The human mind is said to be worth much more than the sum of thehuman body’s parts, though that psyche may somehow seem to be oflesser value if all that’s left are bomb-blast dismembered body parts.
The following story is a fictional account of where we’re supposed to go when we die. It was inspired by a radio-broadcast sermon I listened to back in 1987, titled “A Bird’s Eye View of Hell,” that was given by a renowned (though now deceased) moderately conservative preacher. As far as conventional theological concepts are concerned regarding comeuppance or the like in the hereafter for corporeal misdeeds, I don’t recall such punishment, let alone hellfire, mentioned during the sermon. Perhaps the following hypothetical version of Hell — and it’s one that’s very rarely held — is based upon a fairly revolutionary idea of victims who have crossed-over not perceiving or feeling any relevance of or personal need for such or any post-death penance to be suffered by their corporeal-realm perpetrators. Another notable theological alternative to a traditional Hell is held by some members of Church of Latter Day Saints, who believe that hellfire is actually applied in the form of burning guilt.
Sadly and atrociously, human beings can actually be seen and treated as though they are disposable and, by extension, their suffering and death are somehow less worthy of external [i.e. our] concern, sometimes even by otherwise democratic and relatively civilized nations.
In regard to the ‘thanks’ in Thanksgiving Day, I'd be quite willing/happy to consistently sincerely thank God with every meal, if everyone on Earth — and not just a portion of the planet’s populace — had enough clean, safe drinking water and nutritional food to maintain a normal, healthy daily life. And I genuinely would be pray-fully ‘thankful’ if every couple’s child would survive their serious illness rather than just a small portion of such sick children.
To fully clarify my perspective on the most sensitive and likely greatest human institution, prayer and theism, I believe in God—though a genderless God (to whom I still refer as Him to avoid terminological hassle) and one not at all necessarily confined to an absolute Biblical sense—and that prayer can and sometimes does work. Either way, it certainly cannot hurt, as long as a believer/practitioner continues to live within reason and responsibly (e.g. to not do something foolish like, as a good example, pray to God for self-healing and then allow your health’s status to remain with unconditional reliance in that theistic prayer.
“Pardon (noun): the action of forgiving or being forgiven for an error or offense … A remission of the legal consequence of an offense or conviction … ” (The New Oxford Dictionary of English)
“WHY are you here? … What do you want from us? … Where are you from? … Are you of human origin? … In God’s name, I demand that you identify yourself and your nature! …”
THE Hale-Bopp comet had been of closest proximity to Earth on March 22, 1997, and consisted of a variety of elements: ice, rock, carbonatious crondites, methane, as well as organic chemicals such as ethanol, carbon and silicates. However, Hale-Bopp’s run passed Earth apparently had been of greater substance than that perceived by hundreds of millions of Earth folk. Indeed, at its closest point to Earth while passing our way, our planet was engulfed by the contents of the comet’s three, potent tails — one of which consisted of ions, the second of dust and the third of a thin tail of sodium atoms.
THE Hale-Bopp comet had been of closest proximity to Earth on March 22, 1997, and consisted of a variety of elements: ice, rock, carbonatious crondites, methane, as well as organic chemicals such as ethanol, carbon and silicates. However, Hale-Bopp’s run passed Earth apparently had been of greater substance than that perceived by hundreds of millions of Earth folk. Indeed, at its closest point to Earth while passing our way, our planet was engulfed by the contents of the comet’s three, potent tails — one of which consisted of ions, the second of dust and the third of a thin tail of sodium atoms.
THE Hale-Bopp comet had been of closest proximity to Earth on March 22, 1997, and consisted of a variety of elements: ice, rock, carbonatious crondites, methane, as well as organic chemicals such as ethanol, carbon and silicates. However, Hale-Bopp’s run passed Earth apparently had been of greater substance than that perceived by hundreds of millions of Earth folk. Indeed, at its closest point to Earth while passing our way, our planet was engulfed by the contents of the comet’s three, potent tails — one of which consisted of ions, the second of dust and the third of a thin tail of sodium atoms.
