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Our world saw many economic crises. Between 1820 and 1929 alone, 13 crises seriously rocked the global economy. The financial crisis that began in the US economy in August 2007 and that later spread to all western economies turned into a major global economic crisis. At first, people thought it’d end very quickly, but over a six-year period, several countries went to the brink of bankruptcy. Our modern-day crisis is termed the “Great Recession”, and the world is literally in a state of helplessness. One shocking and disastrous result has been that there has been a sharp rise in the number of suicides in the wake of this recession. In the USA, for example, according to RT.com, they quoted the Centers for Disease Control as saying, “Suicide rates from 1999 to 2010 ‘increased significantly’ across all four geographic areas and in 39 states. The state of Wyoming recorded the highest increase in suicides with a 78.8 percent jump (31.1 per 100,000), whilst even the sunny state of Hawaii saw a 61.2 percent increase (21.9 per 100,000)”.
Many nations at the brink of ruin seek technical solutions such as printing paper money to ease the tidal wave of economic sufferings they face; yet, they’re unable to resolve them. The crisis continues, despite countries’ direct interventions. For example, the Bush administration recommended a 700 billion USD (23.22 trillion Roubles. 744 billion CAD. 768 billion AUD. 516 billion Euros. 428 billion UK Pounds) financial rescue package. The subsequent legislation gave the government wide authority to assume responsibility for those debts that financial institutions couldn’t repay. Many called it the largest financial rescue plan since the Great Depression of 1929. Clearly, neoliberal economic orthodoxy shaped today’s world and this opened the door to excessive greed, which leaves no room for spirituality. In such a system, the individual or economic unit/entity looks out for themselves, acting selfishly. People in this system live in a constant state of fear; they feel that they can’t trust anyone, knowing that others are just as selfish as they are.
This materialistic state of mind where everyone fights over resources, puts them in deep trouble, with them being none the wiser. It sets up a vicious circle of selfishness, fear, and greed, and in such an environment, positive creative abilities don’t fully bloom. Generosity, humanity, and spirituality suffer, as people can’t feed their soul with peace. Being depressed and in a state of fear all the time takes its toll. Feelings of love and gentleness toward others wither, whilst loneliness and negative feelings toward others rise. People are taught and deluded into thinking that living this way is the only option, and they think that they will be wealthier or be happier living this lifestyle, but in reality, they couldn’t be more wrong. When one starts acting in this way, the world starts striking back, as if taking revenge for not living love. Financial problems or health problems, losing one’s job or losing one’s family; things just start to go downhill and it might look like one could never get out from under that mess, hence, the rise in the number of suicides. People become further depressed, their health more compromised, so, the things they own will lose all meaning.
An attitude of survival of the fittest develops between people; animosity grows, fuelling hatred toward others. Deep fear of losing their investments, their cash savings, and livelihood drives people to horde assets, limiting the supply and speed of money circulating in the economy. This is one of the main reasons behind the stagnation. This view of crushing others, as people care for themselves alone, leads to a decrease in the amount of circulating currency. They don’t even consider acting selflessly, as they believe that the most important thing is their own interests, and making sacrifices would mean they’d lose or be viewed as weak. In order to end this tragedy in society, we must do away with the hatred that people feel for one another. Forgiveness, love, and compassion, derived from sound morality, needs to rise.
Spiritual and moral collapse leads to an appalling collapse of supply when people don’t live according to ethical principles. We no longer see the high levels of production we used to… aesthetics and arts suffer; in our time, we don’t find artists of the same calibre as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, or Raphael. We no longer produce famous composers such as Beethoven, Bach, or Chopin. Even scientists have lost the urge to make new discoveries; they content themselves with doing minor research around existing discoveries. They’re unable to make impressive discoveries. The economic crisis is like a bottomless pit. Beauty and prosperity can only appear with better morality and social ethics freeing us from selfishness and egoism. The awaited regeneration in the markets will come when we restore a spirit of coöperation, and the result would be wealth the like of which no one has ever seen before.
30 November 2013
Ece Koc
Arab News
http://www.arabnews.com/news/485686
Editor’s Note:
Let’s keep it simple. The Republican Party believes in Social Darwinism, NOT Christianity. It bows down before Almighty Mammon. That’s the long and the short of it… if you vote Republican, you vote for an ideology condemned by most responsible Christian leaders. Oh, you say that Evangelicals praise it to the skies? Ponder this… Evangelicals aren’t really Christians. Go to any of their services and you’ll see that it lacks any resemblance to a liturgy or a mass. In short, it ain’t Christian. If it doesn’t look Christian, if it doesn’t sound Christian, it isn’t Christian, and that’s that. The Eucharist is the centre of all true Christian liturgy… and if it’s missing on an ordinary Sunday, then, Christianity is missing, too.
Reflect on that, if you would…
BMD
US States Mulling Over Bringing Back Electric Chairs, Firing Squads, Gas Chambers
Tags: Capital punishment, Christian ethics, Consistent life ethic, death penalty, electric chair, ethical orientation, ethics, firing squad, Gas chamber, hanging, legal affairs, Lethal injection, Missouri Attorney General, moral dilemma, moral stance, moral theology, morality, morals, political commentary, politics, United States, University of Missouri–St. Louis, USA, Wyoming
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Reportedly, a handful of American states are mulling over the revival of such gruesome capital punishments as firing squads, gas chambers, and electrocutions, in what may today be considered a step back for the American justice system. Lawmakers in some states that haven’t abolished death penalty… and there are 32 of them… say that depleted stocks of lethal drugs and doubts about their effectiveness, which recently led to some high-profile court disputes, might be enough for them to switch to time-tested ways of ending the lives of death row inmates. Ages ago, most American states abandoned electrocutions, hangings, and the like in a bid to make death sentences more palatable to the public and to judges who were afraid to pass cruel or unusual punishments violating the US Constitution. The lethal injection alternative was first used in American prisons in the 1980s to at least limit the time of suffering, if not totally eliminate it. However, now, some state officials say that lethal drugs are prone to complications and are increasingly hard to get. This comes after many European pharma companies refused to sell their drugs to American prisons, for fear they might be used to put prisoners to death.
Missouri Representative Rick Brattin {he’s a Republican, a Baptist, and an NRA member… no wonder he’s a bloodthirsty SOB: editor}, an advocate of firing squads, said, “This isn’t an attempt to time-warp back into the 1850s or the Wild, Wild West or anything like that. It’s just that I foresee a problem, and I’m trying to come up with a solution that’ll be the most humane yet most economical for our state”. Meanwhile, the Missouri Attorney General proposed to rebuild the state’s gas chamber, whilst a Wyoming lawmaker offered a bill earlier this month that’d allow the firing squad. The state threw out its three-drug lethal injection procedure after it could no longer get the drugs. Underneath it all lies the idea that some convicts simply don’t deserve mercy. For instance, Michael Campbell, assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Missouri-St Louis, accused state lawmakers of trying to tap into a populist thought that those who do terrible things deserve to have terrible things happen to them. Recent instances of lethal-injection executions only added to the dispute around the best way to end a prisoner’s life. Only last week, Ohio inmate Dennis McGuire spent the last 26 minutes of his life gasping for air on a gurney after receiving a new drug combination.
29 January 2014
Voice of Russia World Service
http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_01_29/US-states-mull-bringing-back-electric-chairs-firing-squads-gas-chambers-8274/
Editor’s Note:
The Church is anti-death penalty… always has been, always will be. In tsarist Russia, the death penalty was rare in comparison to the “civilised” West, the main exception being traitors and insurrectionists. In fact, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich, one of the toughest and most stern tsars, routinely pardoned all death sentences, except for crimes against the state. What a comparison to godless bloody filth like Rick Perry! Aleksandr was a man of unfeigned piety, who was faithful to his wife, fought no foreign wars, who allowed no one to diss Russia (once, he bent an iron poker in his bare hands, threw it at the feet of the Habsburg ambassador, saying, “That’s what we’ll do to your army if you mobilise!”)… and he hid a bottle of brandy in his boot… what’s not to like? Compare Aleksandr to soulless hangmen like Rick Perry and all the other death-penalty-loving sectarians like him. I know whom I favour… and I’m not alone. By the way… if any Orthodox priest says that he’s in favour of the death penalty, he’s standing in opposition to our Russian Orthodox history and to the personal stance of His Holiness… I just thought that you’d like to know that…
If you want to be Pro-Life, you have to be anti-death penalty, or you’re a godless lying hypocrite. That’s the standard of the late Cardinal Bernardin… that’s the seamless garment teaching, which is the only Consistent Life position out there. If you favour killing cons, if you support warmongering in foreign parts, if you support predatory greedster crapitalism cutting lives short through HMO death panels, you’re not Pro-Life, and that’s that. It doesn’t matter how many placards that you wave, how often you march, or how much you shout… if you’re pro-death in its widest meaning (including supporting the Republican policies that have led to America being the Prison House of the Nations), you’re not Pro-Life… yes, Virginia, one thing DOES affect the other…
Let’s end with a snippet from Orwell‘s A Hanging (he’d been in the Imperial Police in British India):
Reflect on the above when you read the rightwing rants of some of the konvertsy… they’re not only un-Orthodox to the bone, they’re inhumane and indecent. Just sayin’…
BMD