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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (16379)	6/10/2001 8:52:21 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

No. Would you? Not at all. That's why I posted it -- to see whether anybody here DIDN'T think it was so far out in left field as to be, well, in another county. If McVeigh gets to go to heaven, there's something quite pointless about the whole heaven/hell construct. Well, I can imagine winding up in heaven despite one bad act, but not under these circumstances. He doesn't seem to have any sense of the magnitude of what he did, of the human cost of destroying 168 people each one of whom probably averaged four or five people to whom their loss will be a life-changing experience. My approach toward human life pendulums between two extremes. On the one side I have an almost fanatical reverence for life, so I can't justify any of the madness that goes on in the world, can't contemplate that there is ever any good to come out of war, out of the violence in the middle east, see it all as madness. On the other hand, life is so tenuous, and death so certain, that there is a fatalism about it, that the concept of bombing cities into ruin, of jihad, just seems on a par with the fact that in any given moment any life can be snuffed out from so many causes. This is the side of me that reads murder mysteries without any sense at all that the may be something wrong with the casual infliction of so many deaths, even if fictional. (After all, Jane Austen didn't need to kill people off to write stunningly compelling books!) There's a temptation to put McVeigh in a class by himself. But then, he probably killed fewer people than a single raid on Germany in WW II, and certainly nothing compared to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.