Good on the Swiss for implementing laws to respect the dignity of life. There are some immutable truths but keeping people alive just because you can irrespective of their reasonable prospects for a reasonable quality of life. Good on the Swiss and the Dutch for formulating legislation governing euthanasia. In Australia doctors who shorten terminal patients lives run the risk of prosecution from hospitals, distraught relatives, meddling relatives and friends and busybodies. These same busybodies won't actually look after or care for those terminal patients left in limbo here on earth.

A further comment on mister Cook's agenda.

This posting is part and parcel of the campaign of right wing "catholics" and their fellow "right" thinkers against, "relativism",postmodernism, feminism, and green politics altogether.

The usual suspects that are accused of questioning, challenging, and hence undermining the patriarchal power imperatives of the Western Imperial project.

The "sin" of postmodernism being that it (quite righty) questions all grand meta-narratives. Pointing out that such meta-narratives are essentially totalitarian in their impulse.

And of course in mister Cooks case, the power and "authority" of the "catholic" magisterium.

This is the theme that mister Cook's blog promotes. And of the people that approvingly log into his blog. And of the various outfits that his blog has links to, either directly or indirectly

The Da Vinci Code deconstruction of this article by the OLO 'Opinionators' was a great read, but, despite his alleged Opus Dei links and support for the "patriarchal power imperatives of the Western Imperial project" and suspect "grand meta-narrative" I think I can accept the argument that sees the contradiction of a society that is happy to despatch inconvenient human lives (pre-cradle to pre-grave) whilst worrying about the fulfilment of a gold fish or a flower, as a major concern.

The ever apparent brutality of life is devoid of meaning when suffering is not seen as having some level of value. No one likes to suffer, and most do not deliberately make others suffer, but there are times when suffering is unavoidable.

Drawing the line on when and how to 'give up life' is always going to be a vexed question, but, I don't think my goldfish is going to be around long enough to develop a solution either.

Value adding to society through one's death via a 'Soylent Green' solution is obviously the only responsible thing to do...you could even use it as fish food!

I stand by everything that I said. I have not read the DaVinci Code nor similar rubbish about "secret bloodlines". Nor have I seen the film.

My foundation source from which I made my critiques are much more profound than that, and the author knows exactly what he is communicating, and has fully described the consequences of such benighted attitudes and their power seeking meta-narratives.

Meanwhile this essay sums up the sado-masochistic "culture" of Opus Dei quite well, and its associations with right wing politics. The unspeakably dreadful politics described on my Valenzuela postings re Hilary Clinton today.

1. http://matthewfox.org/sys-tmpl/htmlpage7

Plus I quite like the well researched assessment of the rottenness of the church described in The Criminal History of the Papacy by Tony Bushby. I read the excerpts in Nexus.

Only Men and Women of pleasure KNOW the Truth.
Who is not Light Itself
performs the murder of everything
while we eat.
To now there is only the perfect refusal of love.
Therefore, true religion must return to Light!
The heart must be permitted to achieve a universal feeling-ecstasy!

Such pleasure filled men and women find de-LIGHT in everything, beginning with bodily existence, because while we alive in human form there is only bodily existence (whatever the body is altogether). And they freely and boundlessly bless ALL beings.

They are entirely moral but not at all moralistic, and are in fact broken in and at the heart by the unspeakable suffering of this world.

Suffering which is ALWAYS magnified by the grim-faced self-divided, self-flagellating, pleasureless sex-paranoid "moralists" described in the above reference.

They do not cooperate with the organised forces of death and Empire (Roman or USA) and their attempts to "conquer" the world and achieve "victory".

Victory over what?

The "sin" that they find in their underwear, which in their self-division, they then project on to the world stage.