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| Articles: Love Thy Neighbour, Dammit! |
Posted by
gothvail on Monday, March 25, 2002 - 04:01 AM PST
This morning in Archaeology of the Body, we had a lecture about forensic pathology. The gentleman who gave it had spent a few months in Kosovo a couple years back. The lecture wasn't very relevant to what I am planning to do with my life, but the slides certainly hit home.
His job as a forensic pathologist had been to help unearth bodies for identification and to collect evidence for the ongoing war crimes tribunal. Well, as you can imagine most of the slides were pretty gruesome, since many of the bodies had been buried for less than a year at the time, some of them in body bags.
The slides showed that many of these bodies had been buried bound and gagged, riddled with bullet wounds, and usually with at least one shot to the head at close range. These were not soldiers slain in glorious battle. These were victims of government sanctioned murder. Few have any identifying marks, so few will ever be returned to their families.
There is no glory in what has been done there. Only racism and loved ones who will never come home. I cannot even begin to understand the mentality behind such acts of senseless violence.
We are supposed to be spreading the message of "love thy neighbour". I don't care if you're Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Pagan, Atheist or anything else. The message remains the same. One person, devoting every waking hour of his or her life to spreading this message will never reach enough people with it. But that's no reason not to try.
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| Love Thy Neighbour, Dammit! | Login/Create an account | 30 Comments |
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Re: Love Thy Neighbour, Dammit!
by Comedian (comedian@callatg.com)
on Mar 25, 2002 - 01:20 PM
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If my crusty old brain serves me still, I believe it was Ghenghis Khan who ordered that once the troops were done raping the bodies of the dead(often 6 men to a single corpse, gouging new holes with knives as needed), the corpses were to be stacked on top of eachother and covered with mud and shaped to build barracks for the soldiers to sleep in over night.
On of the later trends in World War II was for the wives of high-ranking German POW camp operators to order the skins of certain POWS who had excellent tattoo work done. Often the skin would be removed, tanned, and framed for the wives to put in thier homes. Later, as the trend caught on, a few instances of the wives using the skins for lampshades(thought impractical, because of the stench) came forward after the war.
"Isn't Life Pretty?" -- Ernest Hemingway, shortly before comitting suicide
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Re: Love Thy Neighbour, Dammit!
by Cashmere (-)
on Mar 25, 2002 - 02:35 PM
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There is no justification for robbing the life of another being, but it happens everywhere. It will not change: it only becomes more publicized. How many people have heard of Pol Pott (spelling). If my memory serves me correctly, he had 1.7 million people murdered in his reign in Cambodia. They couldn't bury all the bones, so they made churches out of them.
It cannot even be called "racism" because these acts were not done in hate: they were to prove a point, or because they weren't even viewed as people in the first place. You cannot even blame the people who did the actual killing: they were told by commanders to get rid of baggage. They are not people, and therefore expendable.
There is no glory in any type of murder. Have you seen any type of "glorious" battle? My uncle ( a nurse for the army during the Vietnam war) had nightmares of people dragging themselves into his tent with their legs nearly severed from traps by their own soldiers. And he was not allowed to help the Vietnamese women and children who were raped and mutilated by American troops. Regardless of what was done, the majority of these women and children died at the hands of these people. He remembered these things until the day he died (as a result of contracting hepatitus in that same war).
As far as spreading the message of "love thy neighbor": it's a good idea, but completely unatainable. Forcing people to love is just as bad as forcing people to hate, and ultimately might have the same result. People are not by nature peaceful. Acceptance that this happens is required, even though approval is not needed.
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Re: Love Thy Neighbour, Dammit!
by darclight (an_impression_of_sound@yahoo.com)
on Mar 25, 2002 - 06:45 PM
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sadly it seems that one's love is always bound to be another's hate. so many things factor into this dichotomy that it's virtually impossible to avoid: culture, religion, distance, language, education, age, class, environment, race, sex...the list goes on forever.
people, whether they intend it or not, are too closed minded to care about anything external to a very small circle of thought. for example, anyone who commutes to work knows the average driver would as soon run over a pedestrian in a crosswalk just to be the first yahoo to reach the next red light. getting to work thirty seconds faster is FAR more important than the poor fuck (...lest we forget fellow human being) in the road.
really, seemingly more so than anything else, it just comes down to ignorance. ignorance has nothing to do with intelligence or education; any harvard graduate can be equally as ignorant as any millworker. rather, ignorance is the refusal of any individual or mass of individuals to work to "see" beyond their own narrow viewpoint. i am ignorant; you are ignorant. we will kill eachother eventually because of this fact.
as far as genocide is concerned...it has happened so frequently with such magnitude all over the globe in the past century (and every century likely) that i almost wonder if it is some manifestation of human nature...a la freud's death drive perhaps on a massive scale?
humanity cannot escape war. war is death. death is death.
i find it pathetic that in an age such as now, when we are on the verge of such "intellectual" and "technological" advances as deep space exploration, biotechnology, cloning, you name it, we are again being hurled into a religious war. a RELIGIOUS war of all things!!!??? i simply can't fucking believe it...genocide and religion always walk hand in hand. to me, religion is the bane of human existence (that and politics...sorry to offend anyone). perhaps more so with religion than anything else do love and hate exist entwined.
but i have said enough. i can't seem to stop once started on this subject. mark my words though: we will kill ourselves be it war or environmental strangulation.
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Re: Love Thy Neighbour, Dammit!
by VladII (vladII@seznam.cz)
on Mar 26, 2002 - 01:32 AM
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Eli , Eli , lama sabachtani.
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Re: Love Thy Neighbour, Dammit!
by Dolorosa on Mar 26, 2002 - 06:23 AM
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No freaking comment...
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I wish we did
by Arthegarn on Mar 27, 2002 - 02:24 AM
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I don’t agree that we are supposed to spread the “love thy neighbour” message. Perhaps you and me are, because of our religious background, but not everyone. And that’s the problem. Jews are definitely not supposed to, the Old Testament is filled with proof of that: they are the People of God, the Covenant was made with them. Their clear orders are NOT to make pacts, amends or anything of the like. That’s why there are so many problems in Israel: all they know and care about is that God Hirself gave them that land, and told them not to share it. Muslims are more complicated, but it’s like they are to love their neighbor if the neighbor is a Muslim or at least a Man from the Book who accepts the primordial rule of Muslim religion. And many so-called Christians lose perspective and think their neighbor is only the guy next door who shares with him his culture, religion, ethnia, etc; and that all the rest are “contaminators”. I pity them, because many of them think they are doing what’s correct. In truth I tell you that in the Judgement, when their eyes are opened, they will be the ones who’ll make the biggest crying
My, do I sound like the Bible sometimes...
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Re: Love Thy Neighbour, Dammit!
by callei (plyn@plynlymon.com)
on Mar 27, 2002 - 10:57 AM
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two things about the 'spreading the love thy neighbor' thing....
One most of us just do it, we dont go preaching it hypocritically. People who say "we must save money" usually dont have a large savings account, in fact they are more likely in major debt. If they were saving money, they would be wondering when to spend it, concerned abou thier rate of return, or something like that.
and Most of the world isnt christian, nor does it fall into that catagory of faith, so most of the world ISNT supposed to preach the message of some small splinter faith.
ok make it three things...
It is definatleyyour place to talk about other christians behaving badly and breaking with thier faith. After all those bodies were christians who had been murdered by other christians. and i am sorry that you had to see such awful things. Some deaths are ugly and leave a taint that haunts the lands and the people that they touch.
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Re: Love Thy Neighbour, Dammit!
by Schizo on Mar 31, 2002 - 12:01 PM
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My thoughts:
Those who know how to really love are already doing it.
Those who don't will only end up hating and hurting under the name of love.
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Re: Love Thy Neighbour, Dammit!
by nocta on Apr 04, 2002 - 12:45 AM
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Violence is necessary sometimes. It's not pretty, but it's true. Unfortunately, it's used more often than it should be.
Why should we need a religion to tell us to love each other or treat each other as we would like to be treated or any of the other common sense things that religions teach? I'm not a member of any religion, but I do see the merit in a few teachings. Don't overlook a good concept just because it's presented by Christianity or anything else you don't necessarily like. If there is a good idea, you can make it a part of you and never mind where it might have come from.
I think that in order to permanently fix problems like violence, we need to start with the children. If we teach our kids non-violent coping skills (among other things), they will be less likely to wage war on each other when they grow up and run countries.
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