A Reminder

This is a very religious week. In the Jewish faith, this week has seen the Passover celebration marking the occasion when the Hebrew slaves were visited, and spared by, the Angel of Death. Christians celebrate the resurrection of Christ with Easter. Those without organized religious beliefs, or who practice worship of nature for example, celebrate the rebirth of the world with the infancy of spring.

The news has not been particularly secular in recent days, either. A large-scale rehashing of the Catholic Church's "Molest-o-gate" scandal has seen an upswing in all the major news outlets in the US and abroad. Several key members of an apocalyptic Christian fundamentalist militia group has also got people talking. So you have the good aspects of faith (mentioned in paragraph 1) and the bad, and it is crucial to remember both.

Here's what I believe-- not in a religious sense, but in a personal sense. All human beings get the chance to live a just life and cause some good in the world around us. To me, that belief seems like a pretty good candidate for my personal "meaning of life," and I strongly encourage everyone alive to find their own. But no power in the physical universe-- or the spiritual universe-- gives a human being the right to take the life of another. Or to cause harm to another. Now, "causing harm is often accidental"-- harsh words that come out the wrong way, for example-- but to deliberately plan it is inexcusable, even if you don't follow through with your plan. To participate in an action that you know will harm another human being (i.e., child molestation), but resorting to "higher principles" to defend your motive, or insisting that you mean no harm after-the-fact, is bad enough. But when you take the life of another human being, you relinquish your chance to live a just life and do good. No ifs, no ands, no buts.

I have absolutely no sympathy for child molesters, cop killers, rapists, murderers, slavers, and others of the same ilk. The same holds true (and this is particularly important in light of recent events) for those who further victimize victims of natural and unnatural disasters.

Unfortunately, I still have an unshaken faith in the goodness of human nature. But that's really starting to get tested. Let this be a wakeup call to the world, and let this time of year serve as the ideal backdrop.


On a much lighter note-- if you've never seen the cheesy, classic 1956 epic masterpiece The Ten Commandments, I encourage you to help keep a decades-old tradition alive. Saturday night at 8 pm Pacific, ABC will air the 220-minute extravaganza in its entirety (with the exception of the nonessential snippets-- overture, intermission, exit music, and director Cecil B. DeMille's memorable but labored on-screen introduction). So unless you have your own copy, or access to somebody else's, I strongly recommend the Passover tradition (regardless of your personal religious identification). The special effects may look ridiculous now, but they remain magnificent as a representation of Old Hollywood ingenuity, when the term "personal computer" was decades in the future. In spite of the goofy sanctimony and aforementioned cheese, the last movie that even came close to having this amount of class was Return of the King.