Friday 19th of April 2024
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death after death...

ezekiel 37 -1-10 zombies

A funny image is doing the rounds of emails and Facebook. I remember my mum often telling me that rich and poor alike, we end up in the same hole when we die. Dead. I think she meant that rich or poor, we die "equal". 

The image is a neat summation of this.


rich/poor

But not quite accurate.
People with enough sociopathy in their hubris got pyramid built by slaves to channel their embalmed bodies towards their god-sun. Tomb raiders did not care much about the bodies rotting in wherever secret chambers, they were just interested in the gold and other precious objects accompanying this voyage of the dead. Even "historians" called Egyptologues got onto the act of looting and a lot of artefacts ended up in London British Museum or in "private" collections. 

In some countries, while people live in thatched huts and what we would describe as poor tropical conditions, the people bury their dead in magnificent mausoleums. 

So we have to give this to ourselves: our imagination is powerful. Especially when death is concerned. Old dogs just die with a whisper. We make a fuss, mostly because we know we're next on the list. 

I will continue here with a bible "prophet" who was commanded by god to go and preach to a deserted valley of dry bones. As the prophet does prophetise, the bones assemble, sinew and muscle rebuild and the dead live again. Miracle !... We are not told how these new reborn dead people, called zombies in other cultures, managed to survive and what happened to them thereafter. Possible they were killed-off again by the really alive population nearby as they got shit-scared of the moribunds. Makes great scary movies. I think this tall story told by Ezekiel was like a small scale rehearsal of the big final game called Armageddon. Good scary bullshit. Hang on to your seat...

The way we deal with our dead is a sore point for some fundamentalist Christians who prefer burial to cremation, because of course, this re-assemblage of zombie decay is more difficult with ashes. Burnt bodies makes god's work at the final resurrection so much harder. 

And burial was the option chosen for Christ, though not under a couple of tons of soil as we do. Christ was placed in a cave locked with a "big" rock. Easier to remove a rock than shovel two tons of dirt. This neat trick led the early Christians and others to place the dead in catacombs. Catacombs were like Christ burial site, except bigger, deeper with more tunnels and stacked shelving due to the great number of dead. These catacombs would have been smelly places and possibly crawling with rats...
We think too much.

Charles "Chuck" Wendell Colson apparently said: "... our world-view determines how we live. And even how we treat our dead"... 

Great words that illustrate how we bomb the shit out of the people we don't like — and we let them bury their dead in mass graves: shows how they're not civilised. We create mass cemeteries when we have too many dead to deal with, but not mass graves. We are civilised...
Colson was the fellow involved up to his neck into the Watergate affair. He became a born again Christian in 1973 during his seven months stint in prison. Prison can make you think. Colson created "Prison Fellowship", providing religious support to incarcerated people and their families. Good one.

Colson also redeemed himself by founding BreakPoint — a Christian worldview programme on radio, weekdays. Presently, the Christians who took over at BreakPoint are miffed that Christians are turning to cremation. Cremation and its rituals are going back to paganism, they say. 

The main problem as I see it here is that cremation denies the worms the purpose of their existence — eating flesh. But being reduced to ashes in a jiffy with cremation is like a short cut to "dust to dust". That people choose to bury the bio-degradable urns with a seedling of an elm tree, can be far too close to nature for these Christians. For them, we need to become slow release fertiliser with a cross on top to mark the spot... 

The other thing we often forget is that, our own internal bacterial fauna, which is mostly useful when we are alive, is the first item to turn against our defenceless dead body. I could go into details here but you know what I mean. 
So here we are, dealing with our dead in various fashion. In New Orleans, they bury the dead above ground, just in case floods bring back what we don't want to see. 

Nearly nine years ago, Chuck Colson told BreakPoint listeners about a company in Virginia that "for as little as $4500," would place your loved one's ashes in a "bio-degradable urn" and bury these ashes alongside a tree.

What made the company's offering more than just another expensive burial plot was what happened afterwards. The ad said, "As the urn decomposes, you 'will become one' with your 'personal' tree."

As Chuck noted at the time, "since up to 15 family members can be 'become one' with a particular tree, the concept of a 'family tree' will take on a whole new meaning."

While the idea appealed to a certain post-Christian, Gaia-worshipping sensibility, $4,500 was a lot of money. So a company trying to raise money on Kickstarter is now offering to do it for less than $500.

Here  when we are dealing with anything, including the dead, it has something to do with cash... Burial in a plot is expensive and there are of course insurance companies pitching for a small part of your weekly earnings so that placing you into the ground will be at their "expense". Of course they bet that you would have paid the price of a plot three times over before you die.

For some poor people, dying in the street is an option. For others, euthanasia should be legalised.
Gus Leonisky
Your local undertaker.

 

in the maple leaf country...

Legislation on euthanasia in Canada distinguishes between passive euthanasia (withholding or withdrawing of life-preserving procedures including water and food) and active euthanasia (intentionally killing a person to relieve pain). Whereas passive euthanasia is legal in Canada, active euthanasia was previously prohibited under the criminal code as a form of culpable homicide.[1] The prohibition on voluntary euthanasia was overturned in a February 2015 decision by the Supreme Court (Carter v Canada (AG), which ruled that adults with grievous and irremediable medical conditions are entitled to physician assisted suicide. The ruling was stayed by the court, and will not take effect until June 6th, 2016 so as to allow time for the government to amend the criminal code.[2]

Laws on assisted suicide[edit]

Suicide has not been a crime in Canada since 1972. Physician-assisted suicide has been legal in the Province of Quebec, where it is referred to as “medical aid in dying”, since June 5, 2014.[3] It will also become legal in the entire country in 2016 after new legislation is passed in Parliament as required by a 2015 Supreme Court of Canada decision.[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_in_Canada

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The Canadian government led by Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has introduced legislation to permit voluntary euthanasia for Canadians suffering from serious medical conditions. Under the proposed new law, people who wish to died will be able legally to have an assisted death using drugs provided by their physicians, and administered by those physicians, by family members or by themselves.

 

 

The legislation would apply only to adults who are mentally competent, who have a serious, terminal condition and who are “suffering intolerably and for whom death is reasonably foreseeable.” Each case would have to be assessed by two independent doctors; if the doctors objected to participating in euthanasia, they would nonetheless be obliged to refer their patients to another doctor who did not.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/assisted-suicide-canada-proposes-law-allowing-voluntary-euthanasia-for-suffers-of-serious-medical-a6984866.html

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After taking part in Andrew Denton's Better Off Dead podcast, former prime minister Bob Hawke has added his voice to calls for voluntary euthanasia to be legalised. He spoke to RN Breakfast about why it hasn't happened already and his own fears.

Bob Hawke tries to exercise his brain each day with cryptic crosswords and sudokus, but if he were to 'lose his marbles' he would want Blanche d'Alpuget to be able to 'end things' with the help of their GP.

The former prime minister recently appeared on Andrew Denton's pro-euthanasia Better Off Dead podcast.

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/bob-hawke-urges-australian-politicians-to-legalise-euthanasia/7323470

 

reveling in triumphalist vanity...

 

A more sober, responsible American exceptionalism would resist the delusion of national innocence and instead cultivate habits of self-examination, recognize the nation’s failures to live up to its ideals, and make its peace, in the fashion of Reinhold Niebuhr, with a world of moral ambiguity and irony. Instead of reveling in triumphalist vanity, open exceptionalism would acknowledge the dark moments in America’s past and not long for a “golden age” that never existed. And it would no longer misapply the biblical “dominion mandate” by exploiting the land but instead care for it, as good stewards of God’s creation should.

In short: “America is not God’s chosen nation; it does not exist in some specially privileged position with God. And whatever God’s sovereign plan is for America in his overall program for human history, no man, no woman, no child can know it because God has not spoken it.”

Amen to that. This is the kind of epistemic humility that would guard believer and unbeliever alike against chosen-nation hubris. If Wilsey had stopped there, I would be celebrating this book as an important departure for American evangelicals and a welcome tool to help them begin a long-overdue reassessment of America and their place in it as citizens.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/civil-religion-or-christianity/

The main part here, in short, is that the US has a grand plan to destroy Russia, enslave Europe and pay its dues to the Saudis for "their" help in the process. As well the US wants to contain the Chinese as a cheap product supplier — products made to the glorious US specifications. In order to do all this, the US run a massive defence bill and has asked countries such as Australia to increase their defence spending. Our Turnbull is obliging, increasing defence spending to a higher proportion of GDP, while destroying the CSIRO research and public school funding. We shall see how Scott Mo manages this May budget. If it's in the same line as the Mid Year account, it will be painful.
Africa has been contained by the US with the war on Libya and by letting the terrorist organisations such as Al shabab run riot in other countries, with a bit of lip service by bombing the terrorists from time to time. The US, secretly gleefully, cannot see Africa rising from these cinders. India could be the "imponderable" in this equation but, with the historical caste system strongly in place, It won't rise above a certain level of mediocrity and bickering. Democracy won't happen. The US multinationals will keep countries such as India in servile debt. 
Pakistan and Afghanistan are self-contained oddities with conflicts simmering just right. Religion in America is just an oddity that is being managed to justify the defence spending and the hubris of greatness, in "freedom".

 

final exit...

Assisted suicide is illegal in most countries around the world and was banned in Australia until the state of Victoria became the first to legalise the practice last year.

But that legislation, which takes effect from June 2019, only applies to terminally ill patients of sound mind and a life expectancy of less than six months.

Other states in Australia have debated euthanasia in the past, but the proposals have always been defeated, mostly recently in New South Wales state last year.

Exit International, which is helping Goodall make the trip, said it was unjust that one of Australia’s “oldest and most prominent citizens should be forced to travel to the other side of the world to die with dignity”.

“A peaceful, dignified death is the entitlement of all who want it. And a person should not be forced to leave home to achieve it,” it said on its website Monday.

The group has launched a GoFundMe campaign to get plane tickets for Goodall and his helper upgraded to business class from economy and has so far raised more than A$17,000 ($13,000).

Goodall, an honorary research associate at Perth’s Edith Cowan University, made international headlines in 2016 when he was declared unfit to be on campus.

After an uproar and support from scientists globally, the decision was reversed.

He has produced dozens of research papers and until recently continued to review and edit for different ecology journals.

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/apr/30/david-goodall-aus...

 

Read from top.

in the "god-chosen" country...

Thousands of people have taken to the streets of the Israeli capital in protest against the so-called nation-state bill, which, they say, would enable ethnic segregation. The controversial bill also drew criticism from US Jews.

Demonstrators marched through the streets of Tel Aviv chanting: “Full equality and no less,” “Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies" and "The nation bill is a disaster," according to witnesses. 

"The Nation-State Law would turn racism, discrimination, and segregation into an inescapable part of our lives. More than that – racism and discrimination are becoming desired and central in the State of Israel. The Nation-State Law will bring exclusion and damage to minorities to terrifying levels we have never seen before. Our stance is clear: all citizens –all– are equal,” the organizers of the rally stated, as cited by the Jerusalem Post.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/433132-american-israel-racist-bill-protest/