.

Dear Squeers,

.

You wrote:

"Dear Banjo,
you're as elusive as ever; not sure where you stand?"

As often, Squeers, I both sympathise and agree with you.

Experience has taught me that life is not only evolutive but also immensely complex. I do my best to follow the facts as and when they become known.

Certitudes, I have none, beliefs and opinions, few.

The acute awareness of my ignorance obliges me to be modest in expressing any ideas and intuitions I might have on whatever subject.

I hope that answers your question.

.

Squeers,
I just presented an alternative view to yours, standard or not. Toynbee in the quote I gave does not directly contradict the facts you mention - he says the subordination is a “relapse”, higher religions will “be bound to strive to keep themselves disengaged” - only the sweeping generalisations: Toynbee or not, there are many examples where a religion was in opposition - not symbiosis - to the political system, e.g. the Communist world I grew up in, or many other examples from history where this or that religion was “striving to keep itself disengaged from subordination” to the political system.

I read carefully the paragraph, where you criticise intitutions as such, religion as such, Christianity, the (Catholic?) Church, and perhaps other things that are in this or that way related to each other but not the same thing. Somehow it reminds me of the Marxist/Marx-Leninist criticism of the Catholic Church, Christianity and religion in one go, although there are arguments (for and) against the Catholic Church, that do not apply to Christianity as such, arguments (for and) against Christianity that do not apply to other religions, etc.

I certainly think there is more to what you wrote than to what I have been taught by my Marx-Leninist teachers, only I found it hard to extract separate arguments and insights from that tangle of semi-related assertions.(ctd)

(ctd)
>>Western capitalist culture is spiritually and materially untenable<<
Maybe this old Marxist maxim is right, maybe not. However, if you claim that the house I have been living in is “untenable”, and I shall agree with your criticism, I might concede that it needs repairs, but will not let you knock it down unless you can convince me that what you want to build instead is realistic and will be at least as livable as this one. Lenin did that but he could not convince the inhabitants that their new house was more livable than the one he knocked down, not to mention the other house in the neighbourhood that underwent only gradual, and often incomplete, reparations.

Now it seems to some of us that the demolition work is being applied also to this other house - what remains of the West, its cultural identity and spiritual roots - without anybody being sure what is going to replace it, whether this post-Christian, post-spiritual West (or the globalised world built on this new West) will be more viable than the one being destroyed. (Whether in this demolition act the religious fundamentalists are a reaction to militant atheists or vice versa is here a chicken-and-egg question.)

I know only that I am too old to live to see this demolition completed, or to experience (suffer?) the new - “despiritualised“, if that is what the outcome will be - brave new world to replace it.

Dear Banjo,
that sounds very much like my own position.

Dear George,
I don't want to appear dogmatic and believe in exceptions as much as rules. Will give a considered response to your post as soon as I can.

.

Dear Runner,

.

You wrote:

"and yet George Bush had the intelligence to understand that an unborn baby is a person unlike many others who use pseudo science to deny the very obvious in order to appease their seared consciences".

George W. Bush during his six years as governor of Texas presided over 152 executions, more than any other governor in the recent history of the United States.

It was reported that in some cases lawyers were under the influence of cocaine during the trial, or were drunk or asleep. One court dismissed a complaint about a lawyer who slept through a trial with the comment that courts are not "obligated to either constantly monitor trial counsel's wakefulness or endeavor to wake counsel should he fall asleep."

According to a report published by The Chicago Tribune in June 2000, in one-third of the cases, the lawyer who represented the death penalty defendant at trial or on appeal had been or was later disbarred or otherwise sanctioned. In 40 cases the lawyers presented no evidence at all or only one witness at the sentencing phase of the trial.

In 29 cases, the prosecution used testimony from a psychiatrist who - based on a hypothetical question about the defendant's past - predicted he would commit future violence. Most of those psychiatrists testified without having examined the defendant: a practice condemned professionally as unethical.

Other witnesses included one who was temporarily released from a psychiatric ward to testify, a pathologist who had admitted faking autopsies and a judge who had been reprimanded for lying about his credentials.

Asked about the Tribune study, Governor Bush said, "We've adequately answered innocence or guilt" in every case. The defendants, he said, "had full access to a fair trial."

.

.

Dear Runner, (continued)

.

Prior to legalization, as many as 5,000 American women died annually as a direct result of unsafe abortions. Today, abortion is one of the most commonly performed clinical procedures in the United States, and the current death rate from abortion at all stages of gestations is 0.6 per 100,000 procedures. This is 11 times safer than carrying a pregnancy to term.

According to the WHO, of the 46 million abortions occurring worldwide each year, 20 million take place in countries where abortion is prohibited by law.

In countries where abortion remains unsafe it is a leading cause of maternal mortality, accounting for 78,000 of the 600,000 annual pregnancy-related deaths worldwide.

Approximately 219 women die worldwide each day from an unsafe abortion.

Six months after abortion was legalized in Guyana in 1995, admissions for septic and incomplete abortion dropped by 41%. Previously, septic abortion had been the third largest, and incomplete abortion the eighth largest, cause of admissions to the country's public hospitals. One year after Romania legalized abortion in 1990, its abortion-related mortality rate fell from 142 to 47 deaths per 100,000 live births. These are examples of the positive impact legalizing abortion has on women's health.

Pregnancy and childbirth comport major risks for our female partners. The opinions which weigh most heavily in the balance are those which entail risk of life and death for those who express them.

That is neither your case nor mine, Runner.

.