Is it possible to see Angels on earth? I believe it is — no matter what your faith or systems of beliefs hold — and I’ll tell you why. After John Cardinal O’Connor died of brain cancer in New York City in 2000, Janna and I found ourselves outside Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. We saw a snaking line of mourners outside the beautiful and towering French Gothic church at Madison and 50th-51st.
Continue reading → Seeing Angels in Saint Patricks Cathedral
As medicine begins to move forward faster than our shared ability to comprehend the implications and dangers of science moderating morality, we are left alone to fend for our private values precisely as they are being publicly challenged by the preferences and prejudices a brave new round of Eugenics embodying the embryo stage of reproduction in a new movement I call “Proactive Natural Selection.”
Continue reading → Embryo Eugenics: Proactive Natural Selection
Young people look up to other young people. Unfortunately, many of the role models young people choose to use to model are not worthy of imitation or the attention. If you ever needed proof of why young people should not look up to celebrities and imitate their morality and their behavior in the classic Aristotlean way of learning and mimicry, please read actress Lindsay Lohan’s incoherent — and frankly, illiterate — public sympathy card to genius film director Robert Altman’s family she released on Tuesday to see the sad, living proof, of a Long Island public education and the perils of false celebrity.
Is it an amoral quagmire or a moral quagmire to assassinate charismatic madmen who happen to lead a nation threatening the security and well-being of other nations?
Few would argue now that assassinating Hitler and Mussolini before they brought a second World War upon the earth would have been a bad thing.
Continue reading → Amoral Quagmire: Assassinating Charismatic Madmen
I overheard a conversation the other day. The quick manipulation of morality to stretch doing the right thing was miserably revealing. One guy asked another if he were driving a car and a dog ran into the street and he hit the dog and broke its leg, would he stop to find the owner or help the dog?
HIV and AIDS are infections that still plague the face of the earth even though there are drug treatment therapies that can buy time for those infected.
Without medical intervention and treatment the average incubation period for HIV is 9-10 years and death after a full-blown AIDS diagnosis is still only 9.2 months.
People and their deaths are not best understood on timelines and statistical averages. The value in the human component of living is in remembering those who have suffered and fallen before you.
To live is to remember.
I remember in the mid-to-late 1980’s how this unnamed “Gay disease” we now know as HIV/AIDS was eating people alive. It was a frightening time because no one really knew in a shared, universal societal understanding, how HIV was being transmitted or how AIDS was being contracted.
There were rumors in the mainstream community you could get AIDS — no one really understood the HIV component until years later — by sitting on a toilet seat or by someone sneezing on you or by just shaking hands with an infected person.
Continue reading → To Live is to Remember: A Brief History of AIDS
How many hours of your awake time is spent either looking at a computer screen or at a television? Five hours? Six hours? 12 hours? More? In a recent article, Own Your Words, I said this in the comments:
I think those in the future who choose to study us after we are dead will be amazed at how much free time we had when the world was crumbling all around us and we did nothing to heal it in time. They will discover were only interested in peering into LCDs and CRTs to ignore the fire engulfing us on all sides. It will be a sad day of reckoning for memories when they realize on our behalf that we never really lived at all.
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