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Progressive News & Views (since 1982)
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I am an animal rights activist, and I have come to the inescapable
conclusion that evil represents the true character of our species.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Hank Roth" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, March 22, 2006 6:03 AM
Subject: [pnews-views] Re: [pnews-news] Insane Behavior of Religious
Fanatics
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> Progressive News & Views (since 1982)
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>
> Perhaps it isn't religion that is at fault here but it is even more
> insidious than that?
>
> Dr. James Mulick. You are a psychologist. And you study ethics and human
> behavior. What would E. Wilson say of this?
>
> I watched the movie, Troy on HBO this weekend. I had seen it before but
> HBO ran one of those free weekends so I felt compelled to watch it again.
> I was almost mesmerized by the raw intensity of constant war and power
> of men to enslave and to simply do bad things to each other.
>
> I was impressed as I had been the first time I watched the movie (when I
> viewed it on DVD) with Brad Pitt's fight scenes. He had all the moves;
> which were impressive, though likely a director's invention.
>
> I suspect the wining was more about brute force than carefully crafted
> fighting and dance like moves that went into it but it certainly was
> graceful. But I didn't watch the movie for that. I watched because I am
> always intrigued by the mass slaughter which ran on, scene after scene and
> my thoughts drifted to Ghengis Khan, the Crusades, the way the Brits
> fought in formations, the terrible slaughter of our own civil war - and
> other wars - and WWI and WWII and all those battles we see reinacted in
> movies and some reinactments for entertainment and to memorialize the
> past. Why do we memorialize/celebrate battles this way?
>
> The massacres of Indians and by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, Pol Pot and the
> Killing Fields, and on and on.
>
> And as blood thirsty as they were we still kill more from a distance now
> with our bombs (and for years afterward from our depleted uranium) and
> missiles and that family of 11 killed in November by U.S. troops and other
> families and so-called "insurgents" killed by American soldiers. Religion
> is certainly a "method" which provides some of the drive for
> murder and sometimes even sacrifice because without it the sacrifice
> would be contrary to our nature which is to preserve ourselves.
>
> But religion is not the only thing that drives Homo sapiens to
> indiscriminately murder. It is power and ego, but it must also be our
> nature.
>
> As a species we have been the most successful - if success is a measure of
> how we have increased in numbers and how much life we have destroyed in
> the process - and we have inhabited every place on this planet.
>
> We have attained the power to finally undo everything and in the process
> take the rest of life with us - unless man's nature is subdued. I don't
> think it will ever be subdued because it drives us to reproduce and use
> other life, even our own species, to do it.
>
> Religion, I said is merely a method. But it is ALSO every bit part of
> man's nature to have religion -- and the killing is every bit part of
> man's nature for the reasons I have briefly enumerated. They are one and
> the same in most respects.
>
> While our closest relatives, chimpanzees also kill indiscriminately (even
> for fun it seems, if the conclusions from observing them are correct) and
> they have the same nature -- to overpower, subdue, use, kill. I have to
> wonder where is the altruism, the empathy and how much apart of human
> nature is it to care? If it is unnatural to care then we are in more
> trouble than this is an exercise in discussing and wondering about it.
>
> Hank
>
>
> On Tue, 21 Mar 2006, Charles Stegiel wrote:
>
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>> / o o \
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>> http://pnews.org/
>> Progressive News & Views (since 1982)
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>> 250,000 Nagaski bomb equivalents have been dropped on
>> Iraq in the form of DU munitions. We are continuing
>> the war with other weapons as well. Insane behavior
>> or simply secular normalacy? After Abu Gharib one
>> must suggest that there are many intelligence
>> operations overt and covert and their only purpose is
>> to escalate war fanaticism.
>> The only hope for Mid-East peace is to end the state
>> of war. Peace is posible, but not when it is in the
>> interest of war mongers in Washington D.C. to continue war.
>>
>> Charles Stegiel
>> Commercial/Residential Financing
>> FCF: 680 8th Street #255
>> SF, CA. 94103
>> 415-863-2200 Ext 23
>
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