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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rick Julian who wrote (25884)	11/9/1998 5:38:00 PM
From: James R. Barrett	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

>>"Is there any rhyme or reason to existence?"<< Absolutely not, and anyone who thinks there is, is absolutely nuts. Jim

To: Rick Julian who wrote (25884)	11/11/1998 9:17:00 AM
From: Sidney Reilly	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

Rick, <<I would imagine you don't respect Christianity because it requires surrender of believers' wills to their God. I believe in individual existential responsibility and you consider me cruel. >> Christianity is a belief system that places compassion foremost in our thinking. God said He desires compassion and not sacrifice. Unfortunately many Christians are as dumb after conversion as they were before. The result is Christianity today is terribly misunderstood. Your words to E must be like a whip on a raw soul. You don't understand the suffering being talked about. God does not want any to suffer and He certainly does not put suffering on people. Jesus said "Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart; and you shall find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy, and My load is light." He also said this to the religious leaders when He was on earth, He would say it again to many of the religious leaders today. "Woe to you scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites, because you travel about on sea and land to make one convert; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourself." We have to find the real Jesus amid all the confusion.

To: Rick Julian who wrote (25884)	11/12/1998 8:55:00 PM
From: E	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

<<You described a scenario, you asked my opinion, I gave my opinion, you are insulted by my opinion.>> Rick, I am not insulted by your opinion. Truly. It does not define me, so I could not feel insulted by it. It doesn't define other sufferers of tragedy, or signify anything about their "responsibility" for their misfortunes, either. This opinion of yours only defines you. It only signifies something about you, Rick. No supernatural leaps of faith are require to see this manifest fact. In Tuesday's New York Times there is a front page article headlined "New Bangladesh Disaster: Wells That Pump Poison." I thought of you as I read it. I thought how comforting it must be, and how comfortable, for you to feel as you do regarding the "individual existential responsibility" of the multitudes of Bangladeshis who are suffering and dying from arsenic poisoning. Frankly, the impression you give me is that you decide what to "believe" according to what notional construct gives you a serene feeling inside while you are engaged in musing upon it. But when the concrete reality of gratuitous human suffering is put alongside mystical Cloud-Cuckoo-land conjectures about their causes, the horrid implications of such attributions of "individual existential responsibility" become clear. I think I will quote, or paste if I can find it in the NYT archives, some of the human detail about the situation which so many Bangladeshis have either a) had happen to them through random, undeserved, unearned, gratuitous, tragic bad luck, or b) been existentially responsible for, as individuals. This is an imposition on the readers of this thread, I know. Skip my next post/s unless your heart is strengthened by the conviction that the described sufferings are God-sanctioned-- that these people have gotten what they, somehow, on a celestial level, deserve.

To: Rick Julian who wrote (25884)	11/12/1998 9:03:00 PM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

From the New York Times, November 10, 1998, excerpts: DEATH BY ARSENIC: A special report.; New Bangladesh Disaster: Wells That Pump Poison By BARRY BEARAK This fall, the young mother found out that her own slow dying was nothing unusual, that tens of thousands of Bangladeshi villagers were suffering the same ghastly decay, with their skin spotted like spoiled fruit and warts and sores covering their hands and feet. Bangladesh is in the midst of what some experts say could be the biggest mass poisoning in history. Dangerous levels of arsenic have been found in the ground water, entering millions of people sip by sip as they drink from a vast system of tube wells. Most of these hand-operated pumps are 10 to 20 years old, about the same period it takes the arsenic to do its lethal work, killing with one of several cancers.... Doctors and aid workers told Pinjira Begum, 25, of this calamity as they explained to her how seriously ill she was. But news that her misery had a huge amount of company was no consolation to a mother of three with her 4-month-old daughter, Juthi, in her arms. Too many other indignities were rushing into her life. Her husband had decided that she was no longer of use to him. ''She was pretty once, but now she is too thin and smells bad and is uglier by the day,'' he said. On Oct. 21, using a man's traditional right in these Islamic hinterlands, Masud Rahman, 25, took a second wife. Now, as Pinjira's fevered body seems to melt in the bed, her husband sleeps a few feet away with a new bride.... Babar N. Kabir, a World Bank hydrologist who is assessing the problem, believes that he is being conservative when he estimates that 18 million people are now poisoning themselves....

To: Rick Julian who wrote (25884)	11/12/1998 9:13:00 PM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

...'in a bizarre turn of events, tube wells have been secretly poisoning villagers.'' [they were originally built with the best of intentions by the government and aid groups to supply safe drinking water.-- E.]... ''If this were the United States, they'd call out the National Guard and get everyone bottled water,'' said Willard R. Chappell, a physicist who is one of the world's leading experts on arsenic contamination. ''But Bangladesh doesn't have the resources.'' ...Bangladesh has a per capita income of $266.... The arsenic's slow creep affects people differently, with some family members showing signs of the poisoning while others do not. Pinjira Begum's husband seems fine, though their 10-year-old daughter already has telltale spotting across her chest. Some doctors suggest that nutrition may be a critical factor in who gets sick, but many villagers are inclined to attribute such things to the will of Allah or their own superstitions. There are those who believe that a poisoned well is a sign that a snake has been struck during the digging.. ...